But England? To travel across the sea and attempt to penetrate a market and deal with men we knew nothing about? That seemed foolish to me.
Not to Father. He would empty the warehouse and sail over with it. The tariffs were down. American fleeces could compete with the best in the world now, he insisted. John Bull had only to see it before his eyes and have a knowing man like Father explain to him the fine conditions under which those fleeces had been grown and make the necessary guarantees for future delivery, and the fellow would snap it up. Everyone knew that our free Ohio and Pennsylvania sheepmen could out-produce the poor, beaten-down Scots and Irish, once the market was opened to them. The only reason no one had done it before this was that the individual sheepman was incapable of delivering the required quantity of wool, and the devious American buyers had colluded and done everything they could to discourage and sabotage cooperatives like ours. “This is the solution!” he exclaimed, happy now, excited again, sailing before a fresh breeze, well out of his doldrums of a few minutes earlier.
It was almost too much to keep up with, these switches and turns, descents and ascents of feeling and intention. Jason was happy enough, and looked it, pursing his lips in an anticipatory smile of returning to the arms of his bride and the comfort of their home in Ohio. And John was well-pleased, for he had come to feel like a proper businessman down there in Springfield and had moved into more or less permanent quarters with his wife, Wealthy. And Lyman could not have been in the slightest discouraged by the prospect of becoming foreman of the farm, with his wife, Susan, with Mary and Ruth and a hard-working brood of boys and girls to help him.
I wondered how Mary regarded the Old Man’s decision: relief, I supposed, for his decision to call off the war against slavery for a spell but dread and anxiety as well, for his forthcoming absence from her side as autumn and winter came on.
But the one, perhaps the only one, who felt deflated by these new plans, surely, was I, Owen Brown, he who barely three months before had wanted nothing so much as to return from the wilderness of these mountains to the bustling river town of Springfield. Something had altered my feelings in those intervening months. The work with Father and the others on the Underground Railroad, to be sure, those excitements and risks and the sense of being engaged wholly in a moral enterprise — they had changed me. But something more lasting than that had eliminated my earlier longing to leave this place, a thing that had grown out of our life as a family settled on a farm in these mountains.
For as long as I could remember, we had as a family been unified and empowered by the single great Idea. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, we had been fragmented and split off from one another — with Father charging about the countryside and traveling back and forth on his various missions; with strangers black and white coming into our household and departing as quickly as we became familiar with them; with half a household here and another half there; with plans and fantasies simultaneously multiplying and disintegrating, as circumstances shifted subtly or got dramatically altered by forces invisible and beyond our control; with the very shape and number of our family constantly changing from one season to the next, as a new child was born every year, year after year, 1834, ’35, ’36, ’37, all the way to ’48, and the terrible, sad deaths of children coming between those births, until we barely knew the names, birth dates, and death dates of our brothers and sisters. For every new child that arrived, there seemed to be one recently departed, due to the ague, to dysentery, to consumption, to calamitous accidental scalding, from the first Fred, back when I was but six years old, to the first Sarah, and Charles, Peter, and Austin, who all went in that horrific winter of ’43, to little Amelia in ’46, and most recently, in Springfield, the baby Ellen. Now, after all that, there had come a small but significant measure of stability here among these Negro and white farmers in these mountains, and for the first time in my life I felt I stood at the center of things.
I had not expected that. I had not in fact known that such a feeling was even possible or that, once experienced, it would seem, not merely desireable, but necessary. But it was here in North Elba and nowhere else that the whirl of the one great Idea seemed for me to slow and even to cease hurtling me from one place and set of feelings and loyalties to another. It was here that I felt like a normal son and brother in a normal family, farming our rough acres of northern land, tending our livestock, and aiding our neighbors. I had even begun to imagine, on seeing my sister Ruth grow attracted to Henry Thompson, my own possibilities for finding a wife here, building a house, raising my own herd of sheep, fathering my own children. And, alongside my Negro and white neighbors alike, continuing to do my bit of the Lord’s and Father’s work.
For the Old Man, of course, this was not enough. It was not nearly enough; it was in fact a sin, to be making a home and in addition doing merely our bit of the Lord’s work. We had to be doing all of it; and all our work had to be the Lord’s. Making a home had to be incidental. Or else we were doing Satan’s work.
Thus we Browns were once again shifting our mode of contention against those who would oppose us, and shifting our base of operations as well. We would head south to Springfield and thence to London, England, from where, Father said, we might well briefly cross over to the Continent and there make an on-site study of Napoleon’s military campaigns in the Lowlands. Upon the sale of our wool, we would return freed at last of debt, so as to devote ourselves completely, once and for all, to the proper business of waging war against slavery.
“Then shall all the world see the fruits of our discipline, of our principled savagery, and of our strategic intelligence,” Father declared to us that last night in North Elba. Then might the war properly commence. This valley would be our base camp, our headquarters, as we moved down the Appalachians. Modeling our tactics and our principles on the tactics and principles that brought about the great achievements of Toussaint, Spartacus, and Nat Turner, we would liberate the South — plantation by plantation, town by town, county by county, state by state — until we had at last broken the back of the beast.
So, yes, he had his plan, even then. And little by little he had made it known to us. He had maps and texts to support his theories, and he would draw them out in the evenings to illustrate them to us and demonstrate their feasibility. Also, he was no doubt practicing for the time when he would have to place his plan before the gaze of more skeptical audiences than his wife and children and the Negro members of his household, audiences made up of people like Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, men whose support he personally would depend upon and whose support his plan was in fact premised on.
To bed, then: the child Sarah, asleep on Father’s lap, carried to her bed by sister Ruth; the lads Watson, Salmon, and Oliver grumpily climbing to the loft, to await the arrival of their elder brothers. And we did follow along shortly after, with Lyman Epps, who surely would have preferred to be sleeping in a private chamber in his own bed with his wife, but who must live like a Shaker now, celibate and communal. And Ruth and Susan Epps to the chamber where the females slept, where the little girls, Annie and Sarah, were slumbering already.
Leaving Father and Mary alone downstairs in their bed near the parlor fireplace, where the Old Man, I knew, in his enthusiasm for this new turn of events, and conscious of the oncoming prolonged absence from his wife and home, would be reaching towards her in the darkness, doing the Lord’s work, being fruitful, multiplying. While Great-Grandfather Brown’s clock ticked loudly from the fireplace mantel.