The Schedule

I want to explain to Your Majesty why the war ended in 1863 and the slavery it was fought over ended in 1865, because I did not understand it myself until the summer I am about to describe, and I am not sure that anybody in London does.

The war ended when the rebellion stopped. The people in the rebel polities who had not already freed themselves by walking were freed by the army as it came, by military order, wherever it was; and that freedom was real where the army was, and nowhere else, and the army was not everywhere. In the loyal polities that held slaves, which were Maryland and Kentucky and a good many others, nobody was freed at all, because the army had no business there and the polities had no intention of doing it themselves. Everybody knew that it would have to be ended by the Parliament, for everybody, at once, and everybody knew that the Parliament would end it. But the Parliament would not end it until it knew what it would cost. The owners in the loyal polities had been loyal, and the Crown did not take a loyal man’s property without paying for it, and the Lords would not let any measure through that did not pay; and so, before the Parliament could free anybody, it had to know exactly what everybody was worth.

So the Crown counted them. It sent commissioners into every county of every loyal polity that held slaves, with forms, to set down every enslaved person in those polities by name, and to put a price on each one. It took two years. And for the whole of those two years the people being counted were slaves, in law, as they had been before the war, and could be bought and sold and claimed and given back, because the counting was not finished; and the Prime Minister defended it in the Commons, and never pretended that it was anything other than what it was. I heard him do it, once. He said that it was the price of a measure that would pass, and that he had counted.

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I spent the July of 1864 at Mr Pell’s farm in St Mary’s County, on leave, with Anne.

It was the first leave I had taken since the war began. The farm stands on the rise above the old town, looking down over the fields to the river, with the little brick church below where we were married and where Anne’s mother is buried; and Mr Pell sat on the porch most of that summer in a cane chair, with his stick across his knees, looking at the river. He was not well. He had not been well since the spring of 1861, and he was thinner than when I had seen him at Leonardtown, and he went to sleep in the afternoons in his chair; but his mind was as clear as it had ever been, and he read every newspaper that came down from Baltimore, all through, and did sums in the margins.

He owned nine people. I have told Your Majesty that, and that Anne had grown up among them. I had met them all, at our wedding and on the visits since, and I knew their faces and their names. I had not, I found that summer, known their whole names. Anne knew. She had always known. There was Isaac, who was sixty, and had the management of the farm under Mr Pell, and Hannah, his wife; and their son Ned and Ned’s wife Lucy and their two children, a boy of six and a girl who was not yet walking; and Moses, who was the carpenter and the smith and could mend anything; and a girl of sixteen called Betsey, who worked in the house; and old Sarah, who had nursed Anne when her mother died, and who was the only person on the place, Mr Pell included, of whom Anne was a little afraid. They had a surname, all of them except Moses and Sarah, which they used among themselves and which nobody else in the county used, and it was Jordan.

I had been coming to that farm for six years, and I had not known it.

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The commissioners came on the Monday, the eighteenth.

There were two of them, in a hired gig from Leonardtown, with a clerk riding behind on a mule with a tin box of forms; and they were very civil, and very tired, and they had been doing this in St Mary’s County for three weeks and had three more to go. One of them was a lawyer from Baltimore, a thin man in spectacles who did the writing. The other was the valuer, and he was a heavy, quiet man of about sixty, with a red face and very good boots; and Mr Pell knew him, and so, after a moment, did I, from the courthouse steps at Fredericksburg on a January morning in 1860. He had been in the business of valuing people for thirty years. That is to say that he had been a dealer. He was, Mr Pell told me afterwards, the best judge of the price of a man in the Province, which was why the Crown had employed him; and I suppose that if one is going to price every person in Maryland one wants a man who knows how.

They set up a table on the porch, with the forms, and the people were sent for from the fields.

I will tell Your Majesty what was on the form, because I read it over the lawyer’s shoulder. It had a line for each person, and columns: the name; the age; whether male or female; the occupation; the condition, which meant health and soundness; and the value, in pounds. At the foot there was a declaration for the owner to sign, that the persons named were his property in law and that he had been loyal throughout. It did not have a column for anything else. It was a very well drawn form. I have drawn a great many forms in my profession, and I could not have improved it.

They came up from the fields and stood in a line in the yard below the porch, in the sun, in their working clothes, with their hats in their hands: Isaac first, because he was the eldest man, and then the others, down to Lucy with the baby on her hip. And one at a time, as the lawyer called them, they came up the steps to the table, and stood in front of it, and the lawyer asked their age and their work, and wrote it down, and the valuer looked at them.

Mr Pell got up out of his chair when the first of them came up the steps, and stood, with his stick, at the end of the table, and he stood there until the last of them had gone down again, nearly two hours, in the heat. Anne told him to sit down twice. He did not. I understood after a while that he was not going to sit while they stood, and that this was the whole of what he could do, and that he knew it.

When Isaac came up, the valuer got out of his chair and came round the table to him, in the way, I suppose, that he had come round a great many tables, and put out his hand towards Isaac’s jaw. Mr Pell said, “No.” He did not raise his voice. He said, “You will not look in their mouths in my yard, sir. You may look at them, and you may ask them anything you like, and you may write down what you please. But you will not handle them.” The valuer looked at him for a moment, and then shrugged, and went back round the table, and sat down, and valued Isaac by eye; and I suppose that he was very nearly right, because he was the best in the Province.

When the lawyer asked Isaac his name, Isaac said, “Isaac.” Mr Pell said, “Isaac Jordan,” and the lawyer looked up. Mr Pell said that the man’s name was Isaac Jordan and that he would be obliged if it were entered so. The lawyer said, quite pleasantly, that the form had a column for the name and that he could write in it whatever Mr Pell wished. And he wrote it. And he wrote Hannah Jordan, and Ned Jordan, and Lucy Jordan, and the two children, Jordan; and for Moses and Sarah, who had no other name, he wrote what they gave him.

Old Sarah was the last but one. She came up the steps slowly, with Anne’s hand under her elbow, and stood in front of the table and gave her age, which she said was seventy-one or seventy-two, she did not rightly know which, and her work, which she said was looking after Miss Anne. The valuer looked at her for a very short time and said a figure to the lawyer, and the lawyer wrote it down. It was a small figure. She had heard it.

She said to the lawyer, “What’s that, sir? What you wrote?”

The lawyer told her, civilly, that it was what the Crown would pay Mr Pell for her, when she was free.

She thought about that. Then she asked him what the Crown would pay her.

The lawyer looked at the form, as though the answer might be on it. Then he said, “That is not on the form, aunty,” and called Lucy, who came up the steps with the baby; and Anne took Sarah down the steps and across the yard to the kitchen, and did not come back to the porch, and I did not see her again until supper, and she did not speak at supper.

When they had gone Mr Pell signed the declaration at the foot of the schedule, and the lawyer blotted it and put it in the tin box, and they drove away in their gig to the next farm. Mr Pell sat down in his chair. After a while he said, without looking at me, “It is a very good form, Major.” I said that it was. He said, “I have been looking at it for an hour, trying to see what is wrong with it, and there is nothing wrong with it at all. That is what is wrong with it.” Then he closed his eyes, and I thought he had gone to sleep, but he had not.

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On the Thursday I went with him to the court at Leonardtown.

He did not tell me why he was going. He had himself driven over in the trap, slowly, with me beside him, and we sat at the back of the courtroom in the same court-house whose steps I had watched from the end of the lane on the day of the election; and the business that morning was a case that half the county had come to hear, and I understood, when it was called, why he had brought me.

There was a man in the dock, if it can be called a dock; he stood at the rail below the bench, a young man, perhaps twenty-five, in a carter’s smock, very still. He had been a slave in King George County, on the Virginia shore, up the Potomac from where we sat, and when the army had come into the Northern Neck at the end of the war he had been freed by its order, as every enslaved person in a district the army held was freed; and he had a paper to say so, with a provost marshal’s signature on it, which he had carried folded in his hat since the winter. In the spring he had crossed the river in a boat to Maryland to work at the fisheries, because there was work there and none at home. And a man in St Mary’s County, a farmer, had seen him on the wharf, and had brought a claim to the court that he was his property: that he had bought him from his Virginia owner before the war, and that the bill of sale had been lost, but that he could bring witnesses to it, and did.

I do not know whether the claim was true. Nobody in that courtroom could have known, I think, and the law did not require anybody to know. The law of Maryland recognised the claim of any man who could make it good, and slavery was lawful in Maryland, and the man was in Maryland. His paper was read aloud by the clerk. The judge listened to it with great attention and then said, very carefully, so that it would be understood, that the paper was an order of the military authority in Virginia, and that it had whatever force the military authority had in Virginia, and that it had none in the Province of Maryland, where there was no military authority and the ordinary law ran; that the army was not a court, and this was a court, and the court must apply the law of Maryland as it stood; and that he had no discretion in the matter, and regretted it, and would say so if anybody wished to hear him say so. Then he allowed the claim.

The man at the rail said one thing. He held up his paper, which the clerk had given back to him, and said, “It says I’m free, sir.”

The judge said, “It says so in Virginia.” And the court rose.

I have told Your Majesty about the gate of the fort on the heights in the November of 1861, and the man from Fairfax who was given back to his owner because the law was the law and the army was not at war with loyal men’s property. That was the army. By 1864 the army did not give anybody back; the Parliament had forbidden it. So it was done instead by a court, in the ordinary way, under the ordinary law, by a judge who regretted it, the summer after the war in which the man had been freed was won. I did not know until that morning that it was being done. I have learned since that it was being done in every loyal polity that held slaves, all through those two years, and that nobody knows how many times.

Mr Pell did not say anything on the way home. At the gate of the farm, when the trap stopped, he said, “That is the price of my vote, Major. In the April of 1861. I calculated it, and I voted for it, and I would vote for it again. I wanted you to see it.” And he got down, with his stick, and went into the house.

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In August, when I was back in the capital, I made my own claim.

It was not like Mr Pell’s. The commissioners had counted the loyal polities, and Virginia had not been loyal, and the people at Marlfield had not been counted by anybody, because no owner in a rebel polity was to be paid for anything; that had been settled from the beginning, and I think rightly. But there was a provision, as I have told Your Majesty, for loyal subjects of the Crown whose property lay in a rebel polity: for men like the Colonel, and like me, who had stayed when our Provinces went, and whose property had gone with the Provinces. It had been written, I was told, with exactly such cases in mind. A man who came within it did not wait for a commissioner. He made his own application, to a board of the Home department, on its own form, with proof of his loyalty and a schedule of his property, sworn before a magistrate.

I had the schedule already. It was in the box with my commissions, on the paper my father’s executors had drawn up in 1857, with twenty-six names on it and their ages and their values; and on the evening of the twelfth of August I took it out of the box and sat down at the table in our rooms at the widow’s, with the board’s form in front of me, and copied it.

I had to bring it up to date, as well as I could, and I could not do it well. I had not been at Marlfield since the Christmas of 1860. I knew of two children born on the place since 1857, because I had been told of them at Christmas, and I added them; and I knew of one old man who had died, and I struck him out. I did not know anything else. I did not know who had walked to the lines in the April of 1862 with Daniel, or who had walked since, or who was alive. The form did not ask me. It asked for the persons I held in law, and in the law of Virginia I held all of them, wherever they were and whatever they had done, because nothing that had happened to any of them had happened in a court; and so I wrote them all down, one to a line, in my best hand, which is better than the Colonel’s.

I wrote Rachel. Aged fifty-two, I thought; cook. I did not know where she was. I did not know whether she was alive. I wrote her name and her age and her work, and the value my father’s executors had put on her, and went on to the next.

And I wrote Daniel.

I wrote: Daniel; aged thirty-two; smith. The column for the name was a narrow one, and the law of Virginia had only ever given him the one name, and that was the name I wrote. I sat with the pen over the line for some time, after I had written it. I knew his other name. I had heard it read aloud on the floor of the Commons. I did not write it. I could not have written it there, on that form, in that column, beside a value in pounds; I knew that much. And I could not leave the line empty either, because the form required it and because I wanted to be paid. So I left it as it was. Daniel, aged thirty-two, smith. They list names.

Then I filled in the declaration at the foot, that I had been loyal to the Crown throughout and that the persons named were my property in law; and the next morning I took it to a magistrate in the Axis, a tired old man in a room full of other men’s claims, and swore to it, and signed it in front of him.

I said earlier in this account that in the spring of 1862, standing in the door of a forge at Falmouth, I could not bring myself to free Daniel on paper, because to do it I should have had to write down, in my own hand, that I owned him, and I had never in my life done that. I have to tell Your Majesty now that I did it in the end. I wrote it down, in my own hand, in my best hand, and swore to it before a magistrate, and signed my name under it, on the thirteenth of August 1864. Not to free him. To be paid for him.

I kept a copy. It is in the box with the bond.