His reminiscences are triggered by the reception of an invitation from a Miss Mayo, assistant to Oswald Garrison Villard, then researching his book John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910).

While Owen initially chases her off he changes his mind and decides to write her a series of letters about his experiences fighting for the abolition of slavery with his father.

At a young age, while defying his father's demand that the children reflect on Sunday, Brown falls from the roof of the family home and breaks his arm, wounding himself and developing a permanent disability as a result.

When he is 24, shortly before the family moves to North Elba, Owen solicits a prostitute the same evening as his baby sister, Ellen, dies.

Pressured to stay he begins to help his father with surveying work and additionally developing their homestead as a way station on the Underground Railroad accompanied by two black residents of Timbuctoo: Lyman Epps and Eldon Fleete.

Epps and Fleete are eventually arrested on suspicion of having aided the Cannons and John Brown along with Owen and his two elder brothers forcibly rescue them from prison.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, his former home and the base of his failed business, he preaches at a black church urging parishioners to choose to form a militia to defend themselves and vowing to join them.

Owen then decides to defy his father and takes Fred to Kansas where his two older brothers, John Jr. and Jason, have settled for cheap land and to defend the abolitionist cause.

Before the raid he has a private meeting with his friend and ally Frederick Douglass who does not endorse his plan and fears it will fail as he does not believe white men will risk their lives to free black people.

Notable among them are: The narrative style employed by Banks is introspective and apologetic where each character's moral compass is seen as through the microscope of Owen Brown's telling; detailed and larger than life.

[citation needed] And yet the reader is goaded into sympathy with these characters by their sheer persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable daily travails - evoking the innocence of a new-born country.

Notable departures between historical fact and the fictionalized events in the books include: The novel was reviewed positively in a number of places: In 2011, The Guardian's Tom Cox selected Cloudsplitter as one of his "overlooked classics of American literature".