The Works

I came home to a city I did not know.

I had left New Westminster in May a Southern town on a river, with a cathedral going up in its scaffolding and the dealers’ pens visible across the water from the wharf on a clear morning. I came back to it at the end of September, by the night train from Baltimore, and got down at the station at six in the morning into a crowd of soldiers so thick that I could not see the platform under them, and walked up through the town to the widow’s house below Charter Hill through streets that were full of soldiers too, and wagons, and guns going by with their teams at a walk, and men digging. Everywhere I looked there were men digging. The public buildings on the Axis had been taken for hospitals and their railings were hung with washing. There were tents along the Axis below Parliament House and tents on the slopes of the Rise below Government House, and a regiment drilling on the green in front of Columbia Palace, which had no King in it and now had a sentry at every door. And across the river, on the heights above the Virginia shore, where there had been woods and fields and the white front of the Lees’ house on its bluff, there was a long raw line of yellow earth, running along the crest as far as I could see in both directions, with the smoke of cooking fires going up behind it.

Anne was at the widow’s, back from her father’s. She had been watching for me from the front window since five, she said, because she knew I would come by the first train and would not think to send word, and she was quite right. She held on to me in the hall for a long time without saying anything, which was not like her. Then she said that I was brown, and thin, and that she supposed London had fed its visitors on Admiralty charts, and I knew she had heard that from my mother, at our wedding, and was giving it back to me on purpose, and I was more glad to be home than I can say.

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I reported to the Chief Engineer the next morning, and he sent me across the river to the Colonel.

The Colonel had been given the engineering and the fortification of the capital in the spring, as I have said, and he had held it since, and he was to hold it for the rest of the war. It was a colonel’s work and it kept him out of the field, and he never said one word in my hearing about whether he minded. When I came to him he had been at it for five months. He had begun, his officers told me, with nothing: a capital a hundred miles from Richmond, across a river from a Province in rebellion, with no works round it at all. By the time I came back from England he had a ring of works round it on both banks of the river, forts and batteries joined by lines of trenches and rifle pits, eight or nine miles from end to end on each side, and he was still building, and he did not stop building until the capital was the most heavily defended place in America and very possibly in the world.

The heaviest of it was on the Virginia side, on the heights, where any attack from Richmond would have to come. That was where he had his headquarters that autumn, in a farmhouse a mile from Arlington along the crest, and that was where I found him on the Monday morning, standing outside the farmhouse door with a cup of coffee in one hand and a sheet of drawings in the other, looking down at the river.

He looked at me for a moment, and then he said, “Mr Ashton. You drew this river three times, I believe.”

I said that I had.

He said, “Then you had better come and help me defend it,” and handed me the drawings, which were mine, the third set, the one the department had not lost, with his own notes all over it in pencil; and that was the whole of my welcome home and the whole of my orders, and I have never had better of either.

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I rode the lines with him that autumn, most days, from October to the end of the year.

He rode them every day of the war, and the capital came to know his horse better than it knew most of its generals. The horse was a grey, a big strong animal with a black mane and tail, very fast at a walk, which is the pace that matters on a line of works, because a horse that walks fast covers twelve miles of trenches in a morning and a horse that walks slowly covers eight. The Colonel called him Traveller. I never knew whether he had named him or bought him named, and I did not ask, because it was the kind of question that he closed with a pleasant remark. He rode him from one end of the Virginia line to the other in the mornings, and crossed the river by the bridge at noon and rode the Maryland line in the afternoons, and I rode behind him on a hired horse from the quartermaster’s lines that was neither fast nor slow nor anything else, and carried the drawings.

I learned more about my trade in those three months than I had learned in the seven years before them. He knew that ground as I have never known any ground, before or since. He had surveyed it as a young officer in the Chief Engineer’s office in the ‘thirties, the whole river from the falls to the Chesapeake, and he had forgotten nothing; he knew where every ravine ran and where every spring came out of the hillside and which slope would hold a gun platform in the wet and which would slide; and he had a way of looking at a piece of ground for a long time without saying anything, and then pointing to a place on it with his riding crop and saying, “There, I think,” and being right. I asked him once how he chose. He said that he asked himself where he would come from if he were the other side, and then put a fort there, and that it was not very difficult, and that the difficult part was getting it built before the other side asked itself the same question.

The works went up with a speed I would not have believed if I had not seen it. There were regiments of infantry digging, whole regiments, with picks and shovels, for twelve hours a day, and cursing the Colonel by name for every hour of it, and a great many hired labourers, Irish and German, from the cities, and a great many others whom I shall come to in a moment. The forts were earth, faced with timber and sods, with ditches and abatis in front of them and magazines sunk into their hearts, and the lines between them were trenches with parapets, and the guns came down from the foundries in the north by every train and were dragged up the slopes by teams of twenty horses. The Colonel saw everything. He would stop on a parapet and look along a trench for a long time and then say to the officer in charge, very courteously, that he thought the traverse would be better a little to the left, and the traverse would be moved before he came back the next day, and he would look at it and nod and ride on. He never raised his voice. He never needed to. I think that the men who dug the Capital Works were more afraid of that nod than of anything the rebels ever did to them.

I want to tell Your Majesty what the Colonel was like that autumn, because I have read since that he was cold, and that the war meant nothing to him but a problem in engineering, and that he built the works round the capital as he would have built them round any city, for any government, without caring what was inside. I do not think that is true. I rode behind him for three months and I never once heard him say what he thought of the war, or of the rebellion, or of the ministry, or of slavery, or of Virginia, and I do not believe anybody ever did. But I watched his face, sometimes, when we stood on the parapet of the big fort on the crest below Arlington and looked across the river at the city: at the Axis running up from the water to Charter Hill, and Parliament House at the top of it, and Columbia Palace at the far end with its sentries, and the tents and the smoke and the hospitals. And I do not think that a man who did not care what was inside would have looked at it so long, or so carefully, or said so little.

His house was behind the lines, on its bluff, within a mile of where we stood, and his wife was not in it; I did not know where she was that autumn and I did not ask. Once, riding back along the crest at dusk, we came out of a stretch of trench at a place where the whole front of the house could be seen across a ravine, white in the half-light, with its great columns, and the Colonel reined Traveller in and sat looking at it for perhaps a minute, and did not say anything. Then he said, “Mr Ashton, I think that ravine wants a battery,” and rode on. There was a battery in it within the month.

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I said that I would come to the others who worked on the lines.

There were men digging on the Virginia heights that autumn who had not been hired and had not enlisted. They had come in. They had come in from the farms in the counties beyond the lines, from Fairfax and Prince William and farther, at night, one or two at a time, sometimes whole families together, walking across the fields towards the campfires on the crest because the campfires were the Crown’s and they had heard that the Crown’s soldiers were fighting the men who owned them. Some of them had been sent by their owners with the owners’ wagons, to haul for the rebel army, and had driven the wagons the wrong way. Nobody had planned for them. There was no order about them. The officers commanding the forts did whatever they thought best, and most of them thought it best to set them to digging, and to feed them, and not to ask any questions.

But some of them were claimed. I saw it happen once, in November, at the fort on the crest, and I am going to tell Your Majesty about it as plainly as I can, because I did nothing, and I have promised to set down the things I did nothing about.

A man came in on a Thursday night, about my age, with a woman and a little boy. He had walked from a farm near Fairfax Court House, and he went to work on the ditch the next morning with a shovel he had been given, and worked as well as any man on it; I saw him, because I was there with the drawings, and I remember thinking that he dug like a man who had dug a great deal. On the Saturday a gentleman rode into the lines from the Fairfax road with a servant and a paper. The paper said that he was a loyal subject of the Crown, which he was; he had taken the oath before a magistrate in Alexandria and had the certificate, and his farm lay inside our lines; and it said that the man and the woman and the boy were his property, which in the law of Virginia they were. He asked for them back. The colonel commanding the fort, who was an Ohio man and did not like it, sent to the general commanding on that bank to ask what he should do, and the general sent back word that the law was the law, and that the Army was not at war with loyal men’s property, and that if the gentleman’s title was good he was to have them.

His title was good. They were given back to him at the gate of the fort, in front of the men who had been digging beside them, and the gentleman thanked the colonel very civilly, and the servant tied the man’s hands, not roughly, with a piece of cord, and they walked away down the Fairfax road, the gentleman riding and the three of them walking, and the boy looked back over his shoulder at the fort until they were out of sight. Nobody said anything. The men at the ditch went back to digging. The colonel went into his hut. I went on along the parapet with the drawings, to where the Colonel was waiting for me, and he asked me what the business at the gate had been, and I told him, and he looked at me for a moment and said nothing at all, and then turned back to the traverse he had been looking at.

I did not know, that day, what the Colonel thought. I do not know now. I know what I thought, and it was that the gentleman from Fairfax had a better title to the man at the ditch than I had to Daniel, because his county was behind our lines and mine was not, and that if Daniel had walked across the fields to the fires on the crest that night instead of the man from Fairfax, and I had come up to the gate with my paper, the colonel from Ohio would have had to give him to me. I thought that very clearly, standing on the parapet. And I did not think anything else, because I did not let myself, and the next day I was busy with a magazine.

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The election came late in the autumn.

It was the only general election of the whole war, and it very nearly did not happen. I did not know that then. It was said afterwards that there were men about the ministry and men about Government House who wished it put off until the rebellion was over, on the ground that the five polities could not vote and that an election held without them would be held over their empty chairs; and that the Governor-General had had the instrument drawn up to put it off, and had looked at it, and had refused to sign it, on his own judgement, without asking anybody. I have since seen the words that are said to have been his reason, and they seem to me the best sentence written by anybody in America in that whole year, the Colonel’s letter to the Examiner not excepted: that a government which cannot be dismissed during an emergency is not a government conducting an emergency but a government that has used one. Mr Everett was a very old-fashioned man and a very great orator, and he gave that reason privately, to nobody but the men who had brought him the instrument, and it was enough.

It was the first election held under Mr Pell’s Act. The Parliament that had passed it was dissolved at last, and when the new one was chosen the forty-one boroughs on the schedule did not choose anybody, exactly as the schedule provided; St Mary’s City was not among the places that returned a member, and its twenty-two electors voted in the county with everybody else. The Prime Minister had asked the Colonel, in the summer, whether the Army could protect the polling in the border districts if the election went ahead, because there were places in Maryland and in the loyal half of Virginia where the men who were against the war were very numerous and very angry, and there were places where the men who were for it were not much better; and the Colonel had told him that it could. So when it came, there were companies sent out from the works to the polling places in the districts that the ministry was worried about, with orders that were read to every officer twice: that they were there to keep the peace and nothing else; that no voter was to be hindered or questioned or so much as looked at; that no soldier was to go within fifty yards of the place where the votes were taken unless he was sent for; and that any officer who allowed his men to influence a vote by so much as a word would be broken.

I was given a company of a Pennsylvania regiment from the works, and sent down into Southern Maryland, to the court-house at Leonardtown in St Mary’s County.

I do not think it was an accident. I think the Colonel knew whose county it was. I did not ask him.

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Leonardtown is a small place on a creek above the Potomac, with a court-house and a church and a tavern and some brick houses round a square, and on the morning of the poll the square was full. There were farmers in from all over the county, and gentlemen in from the river plantations, and most of the gentlemen were against the war and did not care who knew it, and some of them wore the colours of the rebellion in their hatbands, and looked at my company in the lane behind the tavern as men look at a dog that is known to bite. My men stood in the lane all day and did nothing, as they had been told, and were very bored, and I walked up and down at the end of the lane where I could see the court-house steps and did nothing either. There was a great deal of shouting in the square, and some pushing, and once a fight, between two farmers who had been neighbours all their lives, which the sheriff stopped without any help from me. Nobody was kept from voting. I made sure of that, as far as a man can make sure of anything from the end of a lane. I watched every man go up the steps, and I watched every man come down.

In the afternoon Mr Pell came up the steps with his daughter on his arm.

He had not been well since the spring, and he walked slowly, with a stick. The gentlemen in the square knew him, of course, every one of them; he had sat for the borough at the bottom of the creek for nineteen years, and his own committee had taken the seat away, and he had told them it would, and he had voted with the ministry in April, and they knew that too. Some of them took off their hats to him. More of them did not. One of them, a big red-faced man in a planter’s coat with a rebel cockade in his hat, said something to him as he passed that I did not hear and Anne did, and she turned her head and looked at the man, once, and the man stopped saying it.

Mr Pell went up the steps into the court-house and voted, as a private elector of St Mary’s County, for the first time in his life; he had always before been the man who was voted for, by twenty-two people. He came out again in a few minutes and stood on the top step for a moment with his hat in his hand, looking at the square, and then he saw me at the end of the lane, and raised his stick to me, very slightly, and came down the steps and across to where I stood.

He said, “Well, Captain. You see I did it.” I asked him what it had been like. He thought about it, and said that it had been very quick, and that it was a curious thing, after nineteen years, to be one of the many instead of one of the few, and that he found he liked it better. He said, “It is the only thing about the Act that I did not foresee. I had calculated everything else.” And then he said, looking past me at the river, “They will tell you that we held this election over empty chairs, Captain. So we did. But we held it. A good many people in this square hoped we would not dare.”

The ministry was returned, when the votes were counted, with a larger majority than it had before. I went back to the works with my Pennsylvanians the next morning, and nobody had been hurt at Leonardtown, and nobody had been hindered, and their colonel said that it was the dullest day his men had ever spent and that he was very much obliged to me for it.

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It was in November that I first heard the song.

I was on the Maryland line, at the end of a long day, riding back towards the bridge in the dark behind the Colonel, and we passed a camp of one of the Massachusetts regiments, where the men were sitting round their fires after supper, and they were singing. It was a tune I knew, an old camp-meeting tune that the Methodists in our county used to sing at their meetings by the river in the summer, about brothers meeting on the shore. But the words were not the Methodists’. The words were about John Brown. They said that John Brown’s body lay a-mouldering in the grave, and that his soul went marching on; and then the whole camp came in together on the refrain, glory, glory, hallelujah, a thousand men, so loud that Traveller put his ears back.

I reined in. I could not help it. The Colonel rode on a little way and then stopped too, and waited for me, and did not say anything.

I sat on my hired horse in the dark at the edge of the Massachusetts camp and listened to a thousand men singing that John Brown was dead and mouldering in his grave; and I thought of the casemate at Fort Warren, and the grey light coming through the slit in the wall from the sea, and the old man at his table finishing his line before he looked up, and his laugh like a door shutting. He was not mouldering. He was writing letters. I had seen him in May. He had turned sixty-one, and his beard was long and white, and the sea was coming through the granite, and he had asked me whether I owned them still. And here were a thousand men who were going to fight a war against the men who had wanted to hang him, singing that he was dead, because it made a better song.

I heard it a great deal after that. Every regiment in the works was singing it by Christmas, and they made up verses to it, a new one every week, some of them about the rebel leaders and what would be done to them, which I will not repeat to Your Majesty, and some of them better than the old ones, and a lady from Boston who was visiting the camps that winter wrote new words to it altogether, I have heard, which were printed and sung in the churches. And later on the Black regiments sang it, when there were Black regiments, and sang it in a way that I cannot describe and will not try to, and that was not the way the Massachusetts men sang it that night by the fire. But I always heard the first one. I have never been able to hear that song, in any version, without thinking that the man it was about was alive, four hundred miles to the north, in a damp room with a stove, and that he had very likely heard it himself through the slit in his wall, sung by the garrison on the parade, and had finished the line he was writing before he listened.

I said something to the Colonel about it, riding on, when we had passed the camp. I said that it was a strange thing, to sing that a man was dead who was alive. The Colonel was silent for a while, and then he said, “It is a song, Mr Ashton. It is not a report.” And he rode on to the bridge.

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I did not go home for Christmas that year. Marlfield was sixty miles down the river, on the other side of the lines, in a county where my brother was an officer of the rebellion and my name was not spoken, and I could not have gone if I had wished to, and I did not let myself wish it. Anne and I kept Christmas at the widow’s, with two members of the new Commons who had come up early for the session and had nowhere else to go, and the widow’s own family from Norfolk, who had got through the lines somehow with a ham. We drank the health of the King. Everybody drank it, at every table in the capital, that Christmas; and I suppose they drank it at every table in Charles Town and in Richmond and at Marlfield too.

On New Year’s Day, which in 1862 fell on a Wednesday, the bond I had signed at my mother’s desk the January before ran out.

I thought about it that morning, at the window of our room, looking down the hill at the river and the works on the heights beyond it. For the first time since he was twenty there was no paper anywhere in the world with my name on it that said where Daniel was to be that year. Nobody had renewed it. I could not; I was on the wrong side of the river, and the bank in Fredericksburg would not have taken my letter, and Mr Coakley, if he was still at the ironworks, was making shot for the rebellion. My mother could not, in law; he was mine and not hers. I suppose that the Province had arrangements for such cases, and that somebody at the works or at Marlfield had simply gone on as before, and that he was at the hammer that morning as he had been the morning before, under nobody’s paper at all. I do not know. I did not know anything about him that winter, where he was or what he was doing or what he thought, and I did not try to find out.

I set it down because it was the last New Year’s Day on which I owned him without having to think about it. By the next one he had decided the matter himself, without asking me, and he had done it by walking.

But that is the spring, and I must go on in order.