BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS
Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Cloudsplitter is a novel of the American Civil War from the beginning seeds that took root and divided the nation, murdered thousands of dedicated and determined zealots, and smolders on to his very day.
This revelation reveals the closed-mindedness and mass mob mentality that can be sold anything, even a war.
EXCERPTS:
The motives of the pro-slavers for coming out to Kansas were no less mixed than those of us Free-Soilers: like us, they had come for land, for pecuniary advancement, and to wage war over slavery, usually in that order. And, to be truthful, their wild, violent, racialist, and pro-slavery rhetoric was no more incendiary than ours. The difference between the two sides was that, whereas their rhetoric was Satan’s, ours was the Lord’s. They shrieked at us from Satan’s camp, and we trumpeted back from the Lord’s. That is how Father saw it. We were not superior to the pro-slavers by virtue of our intrinsic morality or our intelligence or our farming and animal husbandry skills or our weapons or even our courage, he daily preached to us. No, we were made superior solely by virtue of Him whom we had chosen to follow. The stinking darkness of institutionalized slavery had made the Southerners into a foul and corrupt people. It had stolen their souls and had made them followers of Satan. For centuries, they had resided in a permanently darkened pit, and thus, to them, the world was a dimmed, low, pestilential place. We, however, when we gazed onto the world, we stood as if on a peak bathed in the bright light of freedom, which enabled us to see the true nature of man, and therefore, simply by following our own true nature, we were able to follow the Lord God Almighty.
Liberate all the white and black children of the Lord from the obscene stink and corruption of slavery. Simply, if we would defeat Satan, we must first defeat his most heinous invention, which was American Negro slavery.
Belief in that higher law required us to dedicate our lives to the overthrow of chattel slavery and racialism.
Father stamped his feet and grew nearly apoplectic with rage against the regulars, as he did against the President of the United States, the Democrats, and even the Republicans, against the abolitionists back East who were now and then reluctant to send him money and arms, against the timidity of the Free-Soil authorities in Lawrence and Topeka, and, always, against the pro-slavers, the Missourians, the Border Ruffians, the drunken Southern Negro-hating squatters down along the Pottawatomie River who were threatening in their newspapers and meetings to wipe the Yankees, and especially us Browns, off the face of the earth.
They were a staggering, loutish bunch of poor, ignorant, landless Southerners, men who bragged that they had come over to Kansas to help themselves first, by seizing abolitionists’ land-claims, and the South second, by killing as many Yankee nigger-lovers as they could find.
They have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.”
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