The River Road

The war came to the river at home in April, while I was on Tybee, and it had been there five weeks before I understood what that meant.

I learned how it had come when I got back to the capital at the end of May, and I will give it to Your Majesty as I learned it. The army that had lain all winter in front of the capital, in the mud beyond the Colonel’s works, had marched south as soon as the roads would bear it, through country that the rebels gave up with very little fighting, and had come out in the third week of April on the hills above Falmouth, on the north bank of the Rappahannock, looking across the river at Fredericksburg. The rebels in the town had burned the bridges behind them, the road bridge and the railway bridge both, and gone back south towards Richmond. The army had crossed after them on a bridge of boats and held the town, and was holding it still, and meant, so the newspapers said, to go on.

Fredericksburg is twenty miles from Marlfield by the Northern Neck road. I had been born and brought up twenty miles from where the Crown’s army now stood, and I had been on a steamer and in a sand battery and riding along the creeks of St Helena while it got there, and it had not once crossed my mind.

The Colonel had a letter waiting for me. The general commanding on the Rappahannock wanted the railway bridge at Fredericksburg rebuilt, because the railway from the landing at Aquia was the way everything his army ate came to it, and he could not go on towards Richmond until he could get his trains across the river. He had asked the department for an engineer who knew the river, and the department had told him that it had one, born on it, who was at that moment on a steamer coming north from the Sea Islands. The Colonel gave me the letter at the farmhouse door. He said, “It is your river, I think, Mr Ashton,” and I said that it was; and he looked at me for a moment longer than the remark required, and said nothing more. I have wondered since how much he knew. I have concluded that he knew exactly as much as I had ever told him, which was nothing, and had worked out the rest.

I went down on Monday the twenty-sixth, by the steamer to Aquia and the cars from there, on a railway that the army had rebuilt in a fortnight over trestles of green timber that swayed when the train went across them, and I got down at Falmouth in the afternoon.

---

The first thing I saw at Falmouth was the people.

They were everywhere. They were on the wharf at Aquia when the steamer came in, unloading it, and along the railway, cutting timber; and at Falmouth they were in the old tobacco warehouses along the river, and in tents behind the warehouses, and in shelters of brush and boards on the hillside, more of them than I could count, and more coming in every night. They had come from every farm and plantation within a long night’s walk of the river: from Stafford and King George on our side of it, and from Spotsylvania and Caroline on the other, crossing in skiffs, and on rafts made of fence rails and doors, and some of them, I was told, swimming, in April, in the cold, with their children on their backs.

The army had stopped giving people back by then. Nobody had forbidden it yet, and I dare say that a loyal owner who came with his paper might still have found a colonel somewhere who would oblige him; but I did not hear of one at Falmouth that summer, and I think that if one had come there, the colonel’s own men would have made it very hard for him. The army put the people to work, on the wharf and the railway and the roads, with the teams and in the cook-houses and the hospitals, and paid them when there was money and fed them when there was food, and called them contrabands, and did not know what else to call them, any more than the army on the Sea Islands had known.

I went up to look at the river.

The piers of the old railway bridge were still standing in it, stone, burned off at the top where the timber had been, with the charred ends of the beams sticking out of them like the stumps of teeth. My work was to put trestles on those piers and a deck on the trestles strong enough for a locomotive, in as short a time as it could be done; and it was done, in the end, in a little under three weeks, by a regiment of Maine men who had been lumbermen before the war and could do things with an axe that I had not known could be done, and by two hundred of the people from the warehouses, who cut and hauled the timber and drove the piles, and by the army’s forge, which made the iron.

The forge was in a shed at the bottom of Falmouth, by the mill race, and I went down to it on the second morning to see about the bolts.

---

I heard him before I saw him.

There were three anvils going in the shed, with the doors open for the heat, and I was perhaps twenty yards off, crossing the yard, when I heard the one I knew. I do not know how to make Your Majesty understand that. A man who has grown up on a place with a forge on it knows every hand at the anvil by his stroke, as he knows everybody in the house by their step on the stair; and I had heard that stroke from the shed behind the stables at Marlfield whenever I was at home, in the years before he went to the works. I had not heard it for nearly ten years. I knew it at twenty yards, through two other hammers and the noise of the mill race, before I had thought anything at all; and I stopped in the middle of the yard and stood there, and a teamster behind me with a wagon of charcoal told me to get out of the road.

He was at the farthest anvil, with his back half to the door, drawing out a bar. I think he had seen me crossing the yard. He finished the heat. He did not hurry it, and he did not draw it out to make me wait; he finished it exactly as he would have finished it if I had not been there, and laid the bolt in the trough, where it hissed, and put the hammer down across the anvil, and turned round. He was in his shirt and a leather apron, and his arms were black to the elbow, and he looked older than I remembered, and I suppose I did too. We had both turned thirty that March.

He said, “Mr Henry.”

He said it exactly as he had said it in the hall at Marlfield, when he asked me about the Ferry: with the same small pause after it, and the same look, as though he were checking a column of figures. And then he waited.

I said, “Daniel.” I could not think of anything else. Then I asked after his health, because it was what I had always asked, and he said that he was well; and he did not ask after mine. It was the first time in our lives that he had not.

I asked him how he came to be there.

He told me in very few words, and I will put them down in very few. Mr Coakley had sent him home on the second day of January, because there was no bond, and the works could not keep a man that nobody had signed for. So he had been at Marlfield since, at the forge on the place, where he had been at eighteen. In April the army came to Falmouth, and the news of it came down the river road to Marlfield the next day, as all news came, by ways that I had grown up among and never once noticed; and the night after the news came, he walked. He went up the river road, keeping off it where there were houses, twenty miles, and came into the pickets above Falmouth a little before it was light.

I asked who had come with him.

He said, “Some.”

He did not tell me how many, or who, and I did not ask again. I knew every name there was at Marlfield. I had them on a paper in the box with my commissions, with their ages and their values, as my father’s executors had set them down; and I understood, standing in the door of that shed, that Daniel was not going to give me a single one of them, and why.

Then I asked about his mother.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered, longer than he had looked at me when I came in. Then he said, “She’s not at Marlfield, Mr Henry.”

I asked him where she was. He did not answer, and after a moment I understood that he was not going to, and why not; and I understood it more slowly than I should have, which I record against myself. Rachel was mine in the law of Virginia exactly as he was, and he was not going to tell the man who owned her where she could be found. I said near the beginning of this account that she kept my mother’s kitchen until the spring of 1862, so far as I know. That is the whole of what I know. The man who knows the rest has never told me, and I have never asked him again, and I have come to think that he was right.

Then I said a thing that I am ashamed of, because I could not bear the silence in that shed and it was the first thing that came into my head. I asked him whether the army paid him.

He said, “They pay me.” And then, after a moment, “Into my hand.”

I worked it out afterwards, from the quartermaster’s book, because I could not help it. It was rather less than Mr Coakley had paid my father, and then me, for him, at the bank in Fredericksburg, every year since he was twenty. But it was paid to him.

Then he said, “I’m not going back, Mr Henry.”

It was not a question. I want to be exact about that, because a good deal turns on it. He did not ask me whether he might stay, or whether I would claim him, or what I meant to do. He told me what he was going to do, as he had told my father, when he was a boy, where the mistake was in the forge accounts; and then he waited, not for my leave, but to see what I would say.

I said, “No.”

I have thought a great deal since about what I meant by that word, and I believe that I meant only that I agreed with him about what was going to happen. That is not the same thing as giving a man leave. He had not asked for leave, and I did not give it. He looked at me a moment longer. Then he turned back to the forge and took the next bar out of the fire, and I stood in the door of the shed and listened to him draw it out, the stroke I had known at twenty yards; and then I went back up the hill to the bridge, and told a sergeant of the Maine men what we needed in the way of bolts, and the sergeant went down and got them.

---

I did not claim him. I should like Your Majesty to think the better of me for that, but I have promised to be exact, and the exact truth is that it was not a thing I decided. It did not cross my mind in the shed. When it crossed my mind that night, in my tent, I found that I was not asking myself whether it would be right, but whether any colonel at Falmouth would do it for me, and that I was relieved to think that none would; and I lay awake a long time over the difference between those two questions.

And I did not do the other thing either.

It was in my power, so far as I understood the law. It would have taken a lawyer and a sheet of paper and a magistrate, and perhaps a month, and there were lawyers enough in the capital, and magistrates, and I had the month. I did not do it that summer, or that year, or the year after; and in the end the Parliament did it, for him and for everybody, and paid me for it, and I shall come to that in its place. I have tried very hard to find my reason, so that I can give it to Your Majesty, and the best I have been able to find is this. To free him on paper I should have had to write down, on paper, in my own hand, that I owned him. I had never said it anywhere in my life except once, to a wounded man on the floor of a paymaster’s office, who did not reply. I do not offer that as an excuse. I do not think it is a good enough reason for anything. I think it is simply the truth.

I could have ridden to Marlfield that summer. It was twenty miles, and there were cavalry patrols on the Northern Neck road every week, and any of them would have taken me. I did not go. My mother had asked me not to write to her if I was not coming home, and I did not know whether a captain of the Crown’s engineers riding up to her door with a troop of horse behind him would count as coming home or as the other thing, and I did not try to find out. Edmund, I learned afterwards, was in the valley that spring with Jackson, as he had hoped to be. I did not know it then. I did not know anything about any of them, and I had arranged matters, without quite meaning to, so that I need not.

The bridge was finished in the middle of June. The first train went over it on Saturday the fourteenth with the general commanding on the footplate, and it bore, and he shook my hand, and I went home to the capital and told Anne about Daniel that night, in our room at the widow’s.

She listened to all of it without saying anything, as she had watched me sign the bond at my mother’s desk. When I had finished she asked me what I had said to him. I told her that he had said he was not going back, and that I had said no.

She said, “Did you tell him he was free?”

I said that he had not asked me to.

She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, “No. I don’t suppose he did,” and went on brushing her hair; and I understood, after a while, that she had not been agreeing with me.

---

The Enrolment Act came on in the Commons at the end of June, and I heard the last night of it from the gallery, on a ticket from one of the two members who had kept Christmas with us at the widow’s, a lawyer from Ohio, who said that I ought to see what the war looked like from inside the House and that it would cure me of envying anybody in it.

I should explain the Act, since it is the reason for most of what follows. The armies wanted more men than the volunteers would give them. The Act compelled service, by ballot, from every man of an age to give it in every loyal polity; but it permitted a man whose name was drawn to discharge the obligation by finding a substitute, or by paying a fee to the Crown in commutation, and everybody in America understood from the morning the bill was printed what that meant. It meant that a man with money need not go, and a man without it must. The Prime Minister had made it a question of confidence. If it failed, the ministry fell, in the middle of the war, with the army on the Rappahannock and the British papers still talking of recognition, and the places of the five polities’ members empty.

The speeches against it came from his own side, most of them. That was the thing I had not expected. I had supposed that a war ministry’s enemies would sit opposite it; and the opposition did its part, but the men who spoke against the Act that night with the most force, and were listened to in a silence I could feel in the gallery, were the ministry’s own: members for the mill towns of New England and the cities of the north-east, who said that the fee was the price of a rich man’s son, and that the poor men of their cities knew it and would not forget it. One of them, an old man from Pennsylvania, said that he would vote for the Act because the country needed the men, and that he would go home afterwards and tell the men who had elected him that he had voted to sell their sons at a price their employers could afford, and that he did not know what they would do. I have thought of that speech often since. He did know. He was telling the House.

Mr Lincoln spoke last. I had heard him only once before, from the same gallery, in the April of the rebellion, asking the House for the means. He was very tall, and his voice was higher than a stranger would have expected, and plain, and he did not once raise it. He did not defend the fee as just. He did not pretend that it was anything other than what his own members said it was. He said that a conscription without it would not pass the House at all, and that the armies must have a conscription, and that he had counted. Then he sat down, and the House divided, and the ministry survived by twenty-odd votes; and I walked home down Charter Hill at two in the morning thinking that I had heard a man tell the truth and win by it, and not knowing whether that was a good thing to have heard or a bad one.

The Prime Minister had asked the Colonel about the Act. I know that because the Colonel told me so, in one sentence, when I asked him what he thought of it: he said that the Prime Minister had asked him the same question, and that he had answered the Prime Minister. He did not tell me what he had answered, and I did not ask him twice.

---

The ballot was drawn in July, and in the third week of July the cities rose.

I was not there. I give Your Majesty what I read, and what I was told by officers who were, and I distrust it as I distrust every account of anything given by anybody who was not in it; but I have read too much of it, from too many sides, to think that the substance is wrong. It began in the industrial cities of the north-east on the day the names were drawn, as a revolt against the fee, by men whose names had come out of the wheel and who could not have paid the fee if it had been a tenth of what it was. Within a day it had become something else. The mobs turned on the Black neighbourhoods of those cities, and on Black men at their work, and on the churches and schools and lodges that the Black people of those cities had built, and on any white man or woman who hid them. People were killed in the street. They were beaten to death on the pavements, in cities that had sent regiments to the war, by men who said that they would not be made to die for the sake of people they would not call their equals. Orphanages were burned, and churches. At one of the orphanages, I was told, the children were got out by the back as the mob came in at the front. It went on for days.

I want to set down the thing I could not understand then and understand only a little better now. The men in those streets had a real grievance. They were being sent to a war under a law that let richer men stay at home, and they knew it, and their own members had said so in the House a month before, and the Prime Minister had not denied it. And they took that grievance, which was against the men who could pay the fee, and carried it in a day to the doors of the people in their cities who could not have paid it if it had been a penny, and who had less to do with the Act than anybody in America, and killed them. I have heard it explained since in a great many ways. None of the explanations has made it any less what it was.

The ministry put it down with troops, and there were not enough troops in the cities, so they were taken from the field, by rail and by steamer, regiments at a time, from wherever they could be spared and from a good many places where they could not. The Maine men who had built my bridge were among them, and a great many more from the Rappahannock, taken north in the last days of July to stand in the streets of the cities with their bayonets fixed. With its regiments gone, the army on the Rappahannock could not hold the river, and it did not go on towards Richmond; and in the first week of August it gave the river up and came back north, and burned the bridges behind it. The railway bridge at Fredericksburg had carried trains for seven weeks. I was told that it burned very well, being green timber dried by a Virginia summer.

The people came north with the army. Nobody needed to tell them what would happen to them if they stayed. They came on the steamers from Aquia, as many as the steamers would take, and on foot up the roads behind the wagons; and by the middle of August the camps round the capital, which had been full since the winter, were full past anything that anybody had prepared for, which was nothing.

---

In August, too, the thing that had been argued over in the Commons and the Cabinet since the autumn was done, and Black men were taken into the Crown’s service.

I do not think the riots did it, or not by themselves. I think the arithmetic did it. The army had lost a season’s regiments to the cities, and there were thousands of men in the camps round the capital who had walked there out of slavery and were asking to fight. The objections were the ones Your Majesty would expect, and they were made openly, in the House and in every mess I sat in: that white soldiers would not serve beside them; that the loyal slaveholding polities would be lost; that a man who had been property could not be armed without a precedent that nobody could ever take back; and that they would not fight. The last of those was disposed of soon enough, and I shall come to it.

The Colonel had written to the ministry on it, in July, and I made the fair copy. It argued that the Union could not afford to refuse soldiers, and it argued nothing else; the Colonel said so himself when he gave me the draft, that it was a question of numbers, and only of numbers. It also said things about the soldiers it proposed to take, about what they were and what could be expected of them, which I copied without stopping, because they were things that every officer I knew would have said, and which I will not repeat to Your Majesty, because I find, four years later, that I cannot say them in a voice that is to be read aloud. I am not sure that is to my credit. It may only be that I have learned which things not to say.

At the end of the second week of August the department sent me to look at one of the camps, because a surgeon had written that it was killing people and the department wished to know whether an engineer agreed. It was on low ground by the river at the east end of the town, on a flat that the spring tides covered, and its wells were downhill of its latrines, and there were some thousands of people in it, in tents and in sheds and under nothing, and the children were already sick with the summer fluxes. I wrote that the camp should be moved to higher ground before the autumn fevers, and that it should be drained, and how; and I sent the report to the department, and the department thanked me for it, and the camp was not moved. I shall come to that too.

I looked for Daniel while I was there. I did not find him, and I asked, and a woman at the gate who was cooking for a mess of men from the Rappahannock told me that the smith from King George had gone with the others to the recruiting office on the first morning it opened, and had not come back, because they had kept him.

I saw him once more that month, on the Saturday before the battle, from the road along the river. There was a company of the new regiment drilling on a field by the water, without arms, because there were none yet to give them, and he was in the front rank, in the Crown’s coat, which was too short in the sleeve for him. He was doing the drill better than the men on either side of him, as he had done everything better than the boys on either side of him all his life. He did not look at the road. I do not know whether he saw me. A soldier in the ranks keeps his eyes to the front, and I have never decided whether that was all it was, and it is not the kind of thing I have ever asked him.

Nobody asked me. I want to set that down exactly. A man I owned under the law of the Province of Virginia had walked twenty miles up the river road in the dark, and had come north with the army, and had gone to the recruiting office on the first morning it opened and put on the Crown’s coat and sworn the oath I had sworn, to the same King; and the Crown had taken him without asking whose he was, and nobody, so far as I could ever discover, needed to. In the King’s service he was a private soldier, and nobody’s. In the law of Virginia, which had not changed because Virginia had gone to war, he was mine. I have thought a great deal about which of those two was the truth, and I have come to think that they both were, that summer, and that this was exactly what was wrong.