Held Over

Henry Ashton. Charles Town in South Carolina, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 19 October 1863.

In the chamber at Charles Town, on a dais, stood a chair that was never occupied. It represented the Crown's representative in the American States, an office the rebellion created, defined and deliberately left empty, on the ground that only the King could fill it and the King had not yet been asked.

The Universal Register: The American Civil War

The rebellion did not end, Sir. I want to be exact about that, because I have heard it said since that it ended on this day or that, at this place or another, with a signature, and it did not. There was nothing to sign. It had never been allowed to be a thing that could sign anything, and so it could not make an end; it could only stop. And in the autumn of 1863, over a few weeks, in a great many places at once, it stopped.

I saw a little of the stopping, in South Carolina, in October. I will tell Your Majesty that little, and then I will tell you about the chair.

We crossed the river out of Georgia in the last week of September, on my bridge, and marched north through the low country towards Charles Town in South Carolina, through rice fields and pine woods and swamps, and across more rivers than I can count; and for the first time since Atlanta there were no people following the column in thousands, because they did not need to follow it. The country was coming apart in front of us. The plantations we passed had been left, many of them, by their owners as well as by their people, and stood empty with their doors open; and the rebel regiments that should have been in front of us were not there, or were there and did not fight, or were there and came out to meet us under a white flag.

The terms came down from the General by sea, in the first week of October, so that every commander in every army of the Crown would give the same ones; and the man who brought them to our column was Parker.

I had not seen him since the river forts. He came up from the coast on a borrowed horse, with a despatch case, and I knew him at a quarter of a mile, by his size and by the way he sat, which was like a man sitting at a desk. He knew me too. He got down and shook my hand and said that he had heard I was a major now, and that he hoped it had not spoiled me, and I said that I did not think it had had time. That evening he sat in my tent, because he said that it was quieter than the general’s, and showed me the terms. He had drafted them. The General had told him what he wanted, in a sentence, as the General did, and Parker had written them out, and the General had read them once and signed them and changed nothing.

I give Your Majesty the substance, as I gave you the substance of the despatch at the river forts, because the words are the General’s and not mine. The officers and men of any rebel formation that surrendered were to give their parole, every man of them, not to take up arms again, and then to go home. The officers were to keep their side-arms and their personal baggage. Any man who claimed a horse as his own private property was to keep it, on his word alone, without any proof required of him, because a man going home to a farm in October needs a horse to plough with in the spring. And no man who kept his parole was to be disturbed by the federal authority for anything he had done as a soldier.

I read it twice, as I had read the despatch at the river forts twice over his shoulder. Then I said that it seemed to me generous. Parker said that it was meant to be. I said that the last clause seemed to me the one that mattered. He said that it was. He said, “It binds the army, Major. It does not bind anybody else.” I asked him what he meant. He said that it meant what it said, and no more; that a soldier could promise that soldiers would not trouble a man for what he had done as a soldier, and that this was all a soldier could promise; and that what the law officers of the Crown might do about the men who had governed the rebellion, and some of the men who had served it, was not in the terms, because it was not the General’s to put there. He said that he had told the General so, and that the General had said that he knew.

He was right, as Your Majesty knows. I shall come to that in its place.

A brigade of South Carolina troops surrendered to our column on the ninth of October, in a field beside a church on the road to Charles Town, and I watched it done.

They came out of the pine woods at the far side of the field in the middle of the morning, in column, with their colours cased and their arms at the slope, perhaps eleven hundred men, which was less than half of what a brigade should have been; and they halted in the field and turned into line, facing ours, and grounded their arms, and stood. They were thin. I have seen thin men in this war, in the camps and in the hospitals and in the column on the march, but I had not seen soldiers in the field so thin, nor so ragged, with so many of them barefoot in October. Their general rode forward and gave up his sword to ours, and ours gave it back to him, by the terms, and then the provost marshal’s clerks set up their tables at the edge of the field and the men came up to them one at a time and gave their names and their companies and signed the parole, or made their mark, and went back to the line.

The horses took longest. A great many of the officers and some of the men came up and claimed a horse as private property, and the clerk asked each of them, by the terms, whether the horse was his, and each of them said that it was, and the clerk wrote it down, and that was all. I watched one young lieutenant come up leading a horse that was very obviously not his, a big bay carriage horse with a gentleman’s brand on its shoulder, and say that it was his, and look at the clerk; and the clerk looked at the brand, and at the lieutenant, and wrote it down. Parker was standing beside me. He said, “On his word alone, Major,” and did not say anything else.

Then they went home. They did not march away. They simply went, in the afternoon, by companies and then by twos and threes, down the roads in every direction out of the field, towards wherever home was and whatever was left of it, with their paroles in their pockets and the officers with their swords at their sides, and by evening the field was empty except for the stacked muskets, and our men going along them counting.

It was like that everywhere that month, I was told. Formations surrendered where they stood, column by column, polity by polity, to whatever force of the Crown was nearest, on the General’s terms, which were Parker’s words. And the government at Charles Town, which had made the war and was now in the column’s road, did not surrender at all. It went away.

The Lord Protector and his ministers had left Charles Town in the first week of October, when they heard that the column had crossed out of Georgia, and the assembly of the American States had not sat since September; and when our advance guard came into the town on the fifteenth there was nobody there to give it up except the town’s own mayor and council, who gave it up, as the councils at Atlanta and Savannah had done. Where the Lord Protector had gone, nobody in the town would say, and I think nobody knew. He was taken afterwards, as most of them were taken in the following months, and I shall come to him too.

A brigade marched in and garrisoned the town, and the mayor and the council went on governing it, and the magistrates went on sitting, and the police went on walking the streets, under the garrison’s eye. There was no general put over them and no court of soldiers, and the town’s own law ran in it as before, so far as it ran anywhere. I had expected something else, and I think the town had too.

I came in on the Saturday, the seventeenth, by boat across the harbour, because I had asked to come by water. I wanted to see the harbour first, and the fort.

I will not keep Your Majesty long at Sumter. I went out to it on the Sunday morning in a boat with four men, across the harbour, past the batteries on the islands that my friends in the town had sited, and that had fired on it, to the shoal at the harbour mouth where the fort stands on its island of rubble; and I landed at the wharf and walked in at the sally port and stood on the parade.

It was where the war had begun, two years and a half before, when the rebel batteries on the islands fired on it for a day and a half and the garrison gave it up. The rebels had held it since. They had not mended it much. The scars of their shot of April 1861 were still on the walls, on the faces turned to the batteries, a great many of them, and on one face of the gorge wall, near the angle, I found the courses I had laid in the summer of 1856, with a young man’s care, under a mason who drank. Some of their shot had struck there. The brick had held. I put my hand on it, as I had put my hand on the breach at Pulaski, and it was cool, and sound, and I stood there for a while with my hand on it and did not think anything that I can put down.

The Crown’s flag was up on the staff. Somebody had put it up on the Friday. Nobody had made any ceremony about it, the sergeant at the wharf told me; they had simply run it up, because there was a staff and it was empty.

On the Monday, the nineteenth, I went to the chamber.

It was a hall on one of the principal streets of the town, which they had fitted up for the purpose when they came, and the garrison had put a sentry on the door, who let me in because I was an officer and did not ask me why. Inside there was an old man sweeping the vestibule, who had been the doorkeeper of the assembly and had stayed, because nobody had told him not to and it was the only work he had. He put down his broom when he saw my coat. I asked him whether I might see the chamber. He looked at me for some time, and then he said that he supposed I might, since there was nobody left to say otherwise, and he took me in.

It was a large room, high, with tall windows down both sides, and the October light came in through them on to rows of benches facing one another across a floor, as in a House of Parliament, and a gallery at the back, and a clerks’ table in the middle of the floor with its ink-stands still on it; and at the far end of the room there was a dais of three steps, carpeted in red, and on the dais, under a canopy of red cloth with a gold fringe, a chair.

It was a great chair, of dark carved wood, very high in the back, with arms carved like the paws of lions, and a crown carved on the top of the back, and a seat of red velvet. It had been made for the room, the doorkeeper told me, in Charles Town, by the best cabinet-maker in the town, in the spring of 1861, and it had stood on the dais from the first sitting of the assembly to the last. It was the chair of the King’s representative in the American States. The instrument of government had provided for the office in detail, he said: what the representative might assent to, and whom he might commission, and when he might dissolve the assembly, and in what words. It had provided everything except a man. The chair was kept for the man the King would name, when the King was asked.

I said that I had seen the King asked. I said that I had been in London in 1861 when their petition came, asking him to name a representative to that chair, and in London when it went back, with its seals unbroken, and a note with it that said no such document could be received.

The old man said, “Then he wasn’t asked, sir.” He said it quite simply, as a doorkeeper states a rule of the house. He said that a petition the King had not received had not asked the King anything, in form; and that the assembly had always held that it would ask him again, in form, in a way that he could receive, when the time was right; and that the chair was waiting for that. He said that there had been a motion to ask him again, in the spring, and that it had been put off, and then the summer had come, and then the column.

He told me that every sitting had opened with an address to the chair, by the presiding officer, standing, with the whole assembly standing, and the chair empty. He told me the words of it. He had heard them some hundreds of times and he knew them by heart, and he said them to me in the empty room, in his old man’s voice, with his hand on the back of the last bench. I am not going to give Your Majesty the words. They were addressed to you. They were not addressed to me, and I do not think that I have the right to carry them, any more than I had the right to carry the petition, which I did not carry.

No man had ever sat in the chair. Not even, he said, to try it.

And at the foot of the dais, on a long table covered with green baize, there were the bills.

The doorkeeper showed me them. They were the bills that the assembly had passed in two years and a half, which would have needed the assent of the King’s representative to become law, if there had been a representative to give it; and since there was not, they had been held over, every one, against the day when there would be, and laid on the table at the foot of the dais, in the order in which they had been passed, each with its docket, tied in bundles with red tape. There were a great many of them. The pile was longer than the table, and had been carried on to a second table beside it.

I read some of the dockets, standing there. I had expected, I think, the laws of a rebellion: laws for armies and taxes and conscription, and for the defence of slavery, which their instrument had protected in so many words. Those were there, some of them. But most of them were not. Most of them were the ordinary business of a people: a bill to incorporate a railway company between two towns I knew; a bill for the relief of the widow of a man killed in an accident at a powder mill; a bill to regulate the inspection of rice; a bill to provide for the poor of a parish whose church had burned; a bill to change the name of a street; a bill to authorise a county to build a bridge. They had been debated, and voted on, and passed, and engrossed, and docketed, and tied up in tape, and laid at the foot of an empty chair to wait for a man who was never going to come and sit in it and say yes. And while they waited, nothing that was in them had happened. The railway had not been incorporated. The widow had not been relieved. The bridge had not been built.

I stood at that table a long time. I thought of the packet in Philip Lightfoot’s hands in my lodging in London, with its seals unbroken, and of the note beside it under the lamp. I thought of Philip telling me in Richmond, before any of it, that if the King said nothing, his saying nothing would tell us something. I thought of the places of the five polities’ members in the Commons at home, which had been empty since 1861, and which nobody addressed. And I thought of Your Majesty, whom I had seen three times, and who had spoken one sentence to me, about the paces from a door; and I understood, standing in front of that chair, what the old man in the vestibule had understood for two years and a half, and had swept round every morning. Every man who came into that room walked past it. Every man who came into that room knew, from the chair, without anybody saying it, that the King had not answered.

That was your silence, Sir. I do not know whether it was yours in the sense of having been chosen by you, and I do not suppose I ever shall. But I saw what it did, at Charles Town, in that room, and I think you should know. It did not do it by saying anything. It did it by leaving a chair empty that they had made for you to fill, in a room where they had to look at it every day, until they could not bear to look at it any longer; and it did it, at the end, by leaving a pile of bills about bridges and widows and the inspection of rice on a table, unsigned, while the men who had passed them went home.

I did not touch the bills. I did not go up the steps of the dais. I thanked the doorkeeper, and gave him some money, which he took, and went out past the sentry into the street.

I learned that week from a newspaper that came in by sea that the Colonel had been promoted General, at the end of the war, and made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Charter. I have called him the Colonel all through this account, Sir, and I find that I cannot stop now. He would not mind. He never minded what anybody called him, so long as the traverse was where it ought to be.

There was a letter from him in the same mail. It was short. It said that I was to come home, and that the department had no further need of me in the south, and that he did; and that there was to be a dedication at Gettysburg in November, of the ground where the dead of July were being buried, and that the department wished an officer of engineers who had served in the war to be present among the officers of the Army there, and that he had named me. It did not say why, and I did not ask him, when I saw him, and he did not say.

I sailed for the capital on the second of November, from the wharf at Charles Town, past Sumter with the Crown’s flag on it, and out over the bar into the open sea. My company stayed with the garrison. My first sergeant came down to the wharf to see me off, and shook my hand, and said that it had been a privilege, and that he still did not think much of the smell. I stood at the rail and watched the town go down behind us, and the fort, and the low line of the islands, until there was nothing to see but the sea. I did not look for the hall where the chair was. I could not have seen it from the water. But I knew where it was, and I knew that the chair was in it, on its dais, under its canopy, with nobody in it; and I believe that it is there still.