Book Three: The Honest Silence Part One: The Engine House Characters
Chapter Two
Hiring Day
Henry Ashton. New Westminster, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 14 November 1859.
There was no provincial conviction, no provincial execution order and no clemency decision by Virginia ministers or by its Governor. The Province pressed for a parallel proceeding and was refused, and the refusal was resented in Richmond for a generation. It is the reason the case is remembered as a national one, and the reason the punishment Virginia would have imposed was never available to anybody.
I went back to my drawings. I should like Your Majesty to understand that this is what most of a war is, and most of the time before one: a man goes back to his drawings. The river approaches below the capital were where I had left them, and the department wanted them by the new year, and for three weeks after Harpers Ferry I sat at the same table in the Chief Engineer’s office and drew the same soundings I had drawn twice before, while the whole of New Westminster talked about the old man in the District jail as though there were nothing else in the world to talk about. In a sense there was not.
I lodged that winter in a house on the slope below Charter Hill, kept by a widow from Norfolk who took members of the Commons in the session and officers out of it, and whose particular pride was that she had never in thirty years let a room to a Northern man. Members lodged four and five to a house in those days, sorted by polity and by party as naturally as birds sort themselves on a wire, and ours was a Virginian house. There were three members of the Commons at her table that November, two from the Tidewater and one from the Southside, and a clerk of the Province’s agent, and me. I was the only one of us who had been at Harpers Ferry, and I was asked about it at every meal, and I learned very quickly that what they wanted to hear was not what I had seen.
I ought to say something about the capital as it was then, because it is not the same city now, and Your Majesty has seen it only as an engraving. It was a Southern town. That is the plainest way I can put it. The great buildings on the Charter Axis were as grand as they are now, and the new cathedral was going up inside its scaffolding, and Government House stood where it stands on the Rise in its plain brick; but the life of the place, below the buildings, was the life of a town on the Potomac with Maryland on one side and Virginia on the other. Enslaved people worked the households and the hotels and the wharf, and some of them worked in the public buildings, carrying the coal for the committee rooms of the Commons. The trade in them had been abolished in the District some years before, and the dealers had moved across the river to Alexandria and gone on with it there, so that you could stand on the wharf at the foot of the Axis and see, on a clear morning, the pens on the other shore. I do not say that I looked. I say that you could have.
The ministry had decided, as I have said, that the prosecution was to be federal. It was the law officers who decided it, and not Government House and not the Prime Minister, whatever the Richmond papers said; I know this because I was told it by a man who was in the room, and because I watched for five years afterwards how the Crown’s people in America behave when the law has been given to someone else to carry, and they behave exactly as that man described. The Governor-General was told. Mr Everett had been in office a little over two months and had buried his wife that summer, and I do not suppose that anybody asked his opinion of John Brown, or that he offered it.
I was summoned as a witness. I had made the fair copy of the terms at the paymaster’s table, and the law officers wanted a man who could say what the terms had been and that they had been read at the door and refused, and the Colonel had sent them to me, because, he said, I had the paper and he had a great deal else to do. So I was given a summons with a seal on it, and on the morning of Monday the fourteenth of November I put on my best coat and went down to the court, and sat in a room at the back of it with the other witnesses for the Crown, and waited.
I waited for eleven days.
I came to know the witnesses’ room very well. It had a coal fire that smoked, and a window that looked on to a yard where the prisoners’ van was kept, and a long table with a green cloth on which some former witness had carved the word PATIENCE with a penknife, very neatly, in capitals. The marine lieutenant was there, with his bent sword in a case, because the law officers wished to show it. Two of the armoury clerks were there, and Mr Washington’s coachman, and a railway man from the Maryland side. Mr Washington himself was not there; he sent his deposition. We sat at the green table and read the newspapers, which reported the proceedings in the court beyond the wall in more detail than we could hear them, and once a day a clerk came in and told us that we should not be wanted that day, and we went home.
What was happening beyond the wall, for most of that time, was the choosing of the jury. Every man summoned had to be examined by himself, on what he had read and what he had said and what he believed, because there was nobody in the Union who had not read something and said something, and there were not many who did not believe something. I was told that the court went through more than a hundred of them. The papers in Richmond said that the court was packing the box with abolitionists. The papers in Boston said that it was packing it with slaveholders. I thought, sitting at the green table, that a court abused from both directions at once was very likely doing its work, and I have thought since that I was right about the court and wrong about how much that would matter.
There was also the business of the doctors. Before the proceedings could go further, the court required to be satisfied that the prisoner was capable of instructing his counsel, which was a real question, because he had been cut about the head and had lain for days in a condition that the surgeons did not like. Three physicians examined him in the jail. There was great pressure, from the ministry’s friends and from its enemies, to have the thing done quickly, and I was told that the physicians were made to understand it, and took their time. They found that he was capable. I have read since that some people supposed it to have been a finding of the other kind, a finding that he was mad, and that he was spared on that account. It was not. They found that he could understand what was being done to him and could tell his lawyers what he wanted, and nobody who had stood in the paymaster’s office at Harpers Ferry and heard him answer questions for an afternoon could have found anything else.
His wife came down from the north before the end. I saw her once, in the passage outside the witnesses’ room, a tall woman in black with a face like a closed door, walking between two officers of the court to the cells. She did not look at any of us. I knew who she was because the marine lieutenant stood up when she passed, and after a moment so did the rest of us, and she did not notice that either. I have read accounts since of what passed between them that day, written by people who were not there. I was not there either. I will only say that it was not a farewell, because there was nothing to be farewelled; nobody in that building expected him to die of what was being done to him, and I think she knew it, and I do not know whether that made it easier for her or harder.
On the morning of Friday the twenty-fifth the clerk came into the witnesses’ room and told us that we should not be wanted at all.
It had been settled in the night, or perhaps it had been settling for days, between the law officers and Brown’s counsel, and nobody told us how. He was to plead guilty to murder, and to armed insurrection against the Crown, and the charge of treason was to be withdrawn. That was the whole of it. The court would sentence him on the pleas. There would be no trial, and so no evidence, and so no need of a man to say what the terms had been at the engine house door.
I went into the court that afternoon and stood at the back to hear it done, because I had sat for eleven days on the other side of a wall from it and I wished to see the room. It was smaller than I had imagined, and very full. Brown was brought in on a litter at first and then helped to his feet, and stood at the bar with his head still bandaged, holding the rail with both hands. He looked smaller than he had looked on the grass at Harpers Ferry and very much more tired. When the charges were read he answered them in the same level voice I had heard through the engine house door, “Guilty,” and “Guilty,” and when he was asked whether he had anything to say before sentence he said that he had said it already, at Harpers Ferry, to anybody who would listen, and that he had nothing to add except that he had meant no harm to any man who did not stand in the way of what he had come to do. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life, without any term fixed, and the judge said that he was to be committed to the custody of the Crown at Fort Warren, in the harbour at Boston, and there was a noise in the court like a long breath let out, and it was over.
I have tried since to set down exactly what I felt, standing at the back of that room, and the nearest I can come is that I felt the way one feels when a bridge one has been afraid of is crossed without accident: relief, and under the relief a small suspicion that the bridge was never tested, and will have to be tested later by somebody else. I did not think about Charles Town that afternoon, or about Richmond. I thought about the boy on the rocks under the railway bridge with the water going over his legs, and about the baggage master, and about the marine who fell across the hole in the door, and I thought that not one of them would have been more dead or less dead if the old man had been hanged, and that this was either a very wise thought or a very foolish one, and I could not tell which. I still cannot.
He went north in the first week of December, by the night train, with a marshal and a guard of marines, and I am told that there were crowds at Baltimore and at Philadelphia and at New York, some to curse him and some to sing hymns at the windows of the carriage, and that he slept through most of them. By Christmas he was in his casemate at Fort Warren. He is there now.
Richmond did not take it quietly.
The Province had asked, from the first week, to try him itself, alongside the Crown’s proceeding: for the murders done on Virginian ground, under Virginian law, before a Virginian jury, in the courthouse at Charles Town where the county had wanted him from the beginning. The ministry refused. It said that there could not be two proceedings for one set of acts, and that the Crown’s took priority, because what had been done at Harpers Ferry had been done against the Crown’s arsenal and the Crown’s peace, and treason in America is an offence against the whole and not against any part of it. The Province’s agent in the capital, whose clerk sat at our table, carried the request to the law officers three times and was refused three times, the last time, he told us, by a man who did not get up from his chair.
At our table it was the only subject for a month. The member from the Southside, who was a kind man and a great reader of Scott’s novels, said that it was an insult to the Province that would not be forgotten in his lifetime. One of the Tidewater men, who was not kind, said that it was worse than an insult; it was a declaration. The ministry, he said, had taken a man who had come into Virginia to raise the slaves against their masters, a man who had killed Virginians in a Virginian town, and had kept him out of Virginia’s hands and then let him off with his life; and what was that, he asked the table, but sympathy, and what was sympathy but a promise of more? I said that it was not like that. I said that the treason charge had fallen away because Brown had pleaded to the others, and that once it had fallen away there was nothing left that could hang him, and that it had been a lawyers’ bargain and not a ministry’s opinion. The member from the Southside said that he was sure I believed it. The clerk said, very civilly, that the lawyers were the ministry’s lawyers. The man from the Tidewater said nothing at all and looked at me for some time, and after that he did not ask me about Harpers Ferry again.
I have since read the same reading of it in the speeches of a great many men who afterwards sat at Charles Town in South Carolina, and I have heard it from my own brother, and I have heard it from men in the ranks of the rebel army who had been told it in their churches. That the Crown had refused to hang John Brown was proof, they said, that New Westminster was in sympathy with him. It was nothing of the kind. It was the consequence of a plea, made in the night by lawyers, for reasons that had to do with the evidence and the jury and the length of a trial and nothing whatever to do with sympathy. But I learned that winter that the truth of the matter was no defence against the reading of it, and that a reading believed by enough men is a fact of a kind, and will be acted upon like one. I did not know then how far it would be acted upon. Very few of us did.
I went home for Christmas.
The way to Marlfield from the capital in those years was by the boat down the river as far as the landing below Mathias Point, if the boat was running, and from there by whatever could be hired; or by the railway to Fredericksburg and then twenty miles down the Northern Neck road, which in December is not a road but a theory. I went by the railway, because the boat was not running, and my brother met me at Fredericksburg with the gig, and we drove down through the short afternoon with the rugs over our knees and the river on our right hand, showing grey between the trees, and talked about the harvest and our neighbours’ debts, which is how two brothers in Virginia talk when there is something else they both mean to talk about later.
Edmund was three years younger than I. He had gone to the Military Institute at Lexington a few years after I went to the Point, because my father thought that one son in the Crown’s army was a family’s duty and two were an extravagance, and he had learned his drill there from a professor of natural philosophy named Major Jackson, a tall silent man who sucked lemons and was laughed at by the cadets and feared by them more than they would admit. Edmund admired him without reserve. He said that Major Jackson was the only man he had ever known who was entirely certain of what God wanted, and that it was a very restful quality in an instructor. Since Harpers Ferry he had been drilling the county company. Half the counties in Virginia had raised companies that autumn, or revived old ones, and ours had bought rifles by subscription from a house in Richmond and met on the green before the courthouse every Saturday, forty men in green jackets with buff facings, and Edmund was its first lieutenant and did the work, while its captain, who was sixty-one, did the speeches.
He asked me, when we were past the halfway house and it was dark, whether it was true that I had been at the engine house. I said that it was. He asked whether I had seen Brown taken. I said that I had. He was quiet for a while, with the reins in his hands, and then he said, “And now they have let him off,” and I began to explain about the plea, and he let me explain all the way to the next milestone, and then said, “Harry, it does not matter what the lawyers did. It matters what it means,” and I found that I had nothing to say to that, because I had heard it already at the widow’s table and had not had anything to say to it there.
Marlfield stands on a rise above the Rappahannock on the King George side, a brick house of my great-grandfather’s building, square and plain, with a portico that was added by my grandfather when he had more money than he afterwards had. Below it the lawn goes down to the river through a row of cedars, and behind it are the kitchen and the smokehouse and the stables, and beyond those, along the lane to the fields, the quarters. My mother was on the porch when we came up the drive, with a lamp, as she had been on the porch with a lamp every time I had come home since I was eighteen. She had been a widow for two years and a half. She kissed me and said that I was thin, and that she supposed the capital fed its officers on drawings, and took me in to the fire; and it was not until we were at supper that she said, in her ordinary voice, as though she were asking for the salt, “And they are not going to hang him.” I said that they were not. She said, “Well,” and talked about something else, and I did not know whether she was agreeing with me or with Edmund, and I have come to understand since that she was doing neither. She was letting the subject lie where it could be found again.
Christmas in the Northern Neck in those years was a long affair, beginning a week before the day and ending at the new year, and the whole county went visiting through it, house to house along the river, so that by the third day one had eaten the same ham at four tables and heard the same opinions at all of them. The opinion that winter was single and settled. New Westminster had spared John Brown because New Westminster agreed with him. The ministry was the abolitionists’ ministry; it had shown its hand; it had taken a man who had tried to raise the slaves against their masters in the middle of a slaveholding Province, and kept him from the Province’s justice, and given him his life. Everyone said it. Our neighbour at Woodlawn said it, who had been at the Point with my father; the rector said it, though more gently, in a sermon on the duty of vigilance; the old captain of the county company said it at the courthouse green on the Saturday, standing on a cart, to the forty men in their green jackets and a crowd of their wives and children and their people standing at the back. I listened to it all and said, when I was asked, that it had been a plea and that the law officers had made it, and after the third time of saying so I stopped being asked.
I want to set down plainly, Sir, because I think it matters for what came after, that none of these were wicked men. They were my neighbours, and most of them were kind to their families and honest in their dealings and brave, as it turned out, to a degree that cost them very dearly. They were not stupid either. They had simply decided, all of them together, what the thing meant, and having decided it they were not going to be argued out of it by an account of what the thing had been. I have seen the same since in other places and among other men, and among loyal men as much as rebels, and in myself. I do not think it is a Virginian failing. I think it is how men behave when they are frightened and do not wish to say so.
They were frightened. That was the thing nobody said at any of the four tables. The old man had come into Virginia with a score of followers and had expected the slaves to rise to him, and they had not; and every man at every table told me that they had not, and told me why, and told me that our people were loyal and contented and would never think of such a thing; and every one of those men had been out with the company on the Saturday with a new rifle, drilling against the thing that would never happen. I noticed it. I did not remark on it. I had come to a point, I think, at which I had begun to notice things and had not yet begun to say them, and it is the point at which most men stay.
Daniel came home on the evening of the twenty-third.
I should explain about Daniel, though I have said a little already, because Your Majesty will not have had occasion to understand how such things were arranged, and I find that I have never explained it to anybody, because nobody I knew ever needed it explained.
He was born at Marlfield in March of 1832, in the same month as I was, to a woman named Rachel who kept my mother’s kitchen and keeps it still, or kept it, so far as I know, until the spring of 1862. He and I were children together, as children were on a place like ours, which is to say that until we were ten or eleven there was very little difference that either of us could see, and then there was all the difference in the world, and neither of us remarked on the change, because it happened in the way the tide comes in, without anybody being able to say at what moment the sand was covered. He taught me to swim, the summer I was seven, off the landing below the cedars, by the simple method of standing in the river up to his chest and refusing to come out until I came in. He was the better swimmer of the two of us all our lives, and the better shot, and he could do sums in his head faster than I could do them on paper, which I did not like, and which my father, when he learned of it, liked even less, and put a stop to.
When we were eighteen I went north to the Point and Daniel went to the forge on the place, and when he was twenty my father hired him out to the ironworks below Fredericksburg, because a good forge hand was worth more there in a year than he could earn for us at Marlfield in three, and because, I think, my father had begun to find it uncomfortable to have him about the house. That is how it is done. The owner hires the man to the works for the year, from one New Year’s Day to the next, and the works pays the owner for him, and feeds and clothes him and has the doctor to him when he is ill, and at Christmas he comes home for the week, and at the new year he goes back, or goes somewhere else, as the owner decides. When my father died in the summer of 1857 he left Marlfield and its people to me, as the elder son, with my mother’s portion charged on it and a sum of money for Edmund, and since then it had been I who decided. I had renewed Daniel’s hire to the ironworks twice, by letter from the capital, at a hundred and forty pounds the year, and the ironworks had paid the money to the bank in Fredericksburg, and the bank had paid it to me. I had never once spoken to Daniel about it. I had never thought that there was anything to speak about.
He came up from the quarters to the house on the morning of the twenty-fourth, as the people did at Christmas, to be given his present, which my mother had always chosen and which that year was a coat. My mother gave it to him in the hall, with a word for each of them, and he thanked her, and then he turned to me and said, “Mr Henry. I hear you were at the Ferry.”
I said that I had been.
He asked whether it was so, what they were saying at the works, that the old man was not to hang. I said that it was. I told him about the plea, as I had told it at four tables, and he listened to it more attentively than anybody at any of the four tables had done, with his hat in his hands and his head a little on one side, the way he had listened to my father explaining the forge accounts when he was a boy and could see the mistake in them before my father had finished. When I had finished he said, “For life.”
I said yes, for life, at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbour.
He said, “That’s a long time in a fort.” And then he thanked my mother again for the coat and went back down the lane to the quarters, and I stood in the hall and did not know what he had meant, and I have thought about it in a good many places since, some of them a good deal worse than a fort, and I still do not know. It is possible that he meant nothing at all but what he said. It is possible that he meant that it was a long time, and that the old man had bought it for a score of lives and the hope of a great many more, and that the bargain had not come off. It is possible that he was thinking of something else entirely, which was his own life, and how long it was, and in what kind of place he was spending it. I did not ask him. In Virginia nobody needed to ask, and so nobody ever learned to.
New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday that year, and so the hiring was done on the Monday. I rode to Fredericksburg that morning with Edmund, who had business with the rifle merchant’s agent, and I went to the office of the ironworks on the river street and renewed Daniel’s hire for the year 1860.
I can tell Your Majesty exactly how it was done, because it was done in a quarter of an hour and I have remembered every minute of it. The agent was a Mr Coakley, a heavy, civil man with ink on his cuffs, who had the bond drawn up and waiting, as he did every year for every owner whose people were at the works; there were a dozen others in the outer office ahead of me, and a good many more at the courthouse steps across the street, where the hiring was done in public for those who had not arranged it privately, and where I could hear an auctioneer’s voice going on and on in the cold. Mr Coakley said that the works were very well satisfied with Daniel, that he was the best hand at the hammer they had, and that they would go to a hundred and fifty this year if I would sign for two. I said one year would do. He said that he would put down a hundred and fifty for the one, then, as a compliment to the family, and wrote it in. He asked whether there was anything I wished to stipulate about the man’s treatment, which was a question the form required him to ask, and I said no. I signed my name at the bottom of the bond, and he sanded it and blotted it and gave me a copy, and shook my hand, and wished me the compliments of the season, and I went out into the street, where Edmund was waiting with the horses, and the auctioneer across the way was still going on.
Daniel went back to the works the next morning in the new coat. I saw him go from the window of my room, walking up the lane with his bundle, and I raised my hand, and I do not think he saw it. Two days after that I went back to the capital and to the river approaches below it, and finished them, and the department did not lose that drawing, and as far as I know it has it still.
I had signed, that winter, a great many papers. I had made the fair copy of the terms at Harpers Ferry and the fair copy of the Colonel’s report, and I had been given a summons with a seal on it and had answered it, and I had signed the bond in Mr Coakley’s office. Of all of them, Sir, the bond is the only one that nobody has ever asked me about, and the only one of which I kept a copy. I have it still. It is in the box in which I keep my commissions, and I have taken it out to write this, and I find that it says, in Mr Coakley’s clear hand, that I let to hire to the proprietors of the works one negro man named Daniel, aged about twenty-seven, for the term of one year, and it gives the sum, and the conditions, and my name. It does not say anything else. It is a report, and not a sermon.
I will go on.