Geography

The first telegram came into the Chief Engineer’s office a little after eleven on the morning of Friday the twelfth of April, and it said that the batteries round the harbour at Charles Town, in South Carolina, had opened fire on Fort Sumter at half past four that morning, and were still firing.

I was at my table when the clerk brought it in, and the Chief Engineer read it standing, and then read it aloud to the room, because there were six of us in it and he did not see the point of reading it six times. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the oldest of us, a captain who had been on the frontier forts for twenty years and had a son at the Point, said, “Well, there it is,” and went back to his drawing, and after a while so did the rest of us, because that is what one does; but I could not draw. I sat with the pen in my hand and looked at the river approaches below the capital, which I had finished long since and was correcting, and saw instead a pentagon of brick on a shoal at the mouth of a harbour, fifty feet high, with the sea on every side of it, and the shot coming in against the faces of it out of the dark.

I had laid some of that brick, Sir. I do not mean with my own hands; I mean that for two years of my youth I had stood on the scaffolding of Fort Sumter with a level and a plumb line and a gang of masons, most of them hired men belonging to owners in the town, and had seen the walls go up course by course and had signed for every course that went up while I was there. I knew how thick they were. I knew where they were thick and where they were thin, and which face had been left unfinished for want of money, and where the embrasures of the upper tier had been bricked up to wait for guns that had never been sent. I knew which of the batteries round the harbour could bear on which faces, because it had been my business to know it, and I knew that the men who had placed those batteries knew it too, because some of them had been my friends in the town, and had dined with me, and had asked me about the fort in the most natural way in the world, and I had told them, because the fort was the Crown’s and they were the Crown’s subjects and there was no reason on earth not to.

I sat at my table all that day and listened to the telegrams come in. The garrison was firing back. The barracks were burning. The flag was down and then it was up again. I am not going to tell Your Majesty the story of the fort’s last day, because I was not there and the men who were there have told it differently, and I have learned to distrust every account of a fight given by anybody who was not in it, including my own accounts of fights I was in. I will only say what I thought, which was a foolish thing, and which I have never told anybody. I thought that the walls on the gorge side were the ones they would breach, because that face had been finished last and in a hurry, and that if the masonry failed there it would be my masonry, or as near as made no difference. I thought about that all day while men were being killed, or were not being killed, on the strength of it, and I am ashamed of it now, and I set it down because I said at the beginning that I would.

What I ought to have thought about, and did not until much later, was the thing the telegrams did not say and everybody in the room understood. The men who were firing on the fort were firing on it in Your Majesty’s name. They had said so. They had said so in every resolution of every assembly all winter: that they were loyal to the Crown and resisting only its ministers, and that the fort in the harbour belonged to the King and not to Mr Lincoln. So that on the twelfth of April a garrison of the King’s soldiers, in a fort of the King’s, in a harbour of the King’s, flying the King’s flag, was shelled for a day and a half by gunners who believed themselves to be the King’s loyal subjects. I do not know how to make that sound less strange than it was. I have tried for five years.

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On the Monday the Prime Minister went down to the Commons.

There had been a great deal of talk over the Sunday about what he would do. Some men said that he would proclaim the southern polities in rebellion and call out the militia of the rest; that the Governor-General would sign whatever was put in front of him, as he always did; and that the thing would be done by the evening. Some said that he would do nothing at all, as he had done nothing all winter, and let South Carolina have its fort. I heard both opinions from members of the Commons at the widow’s table, where Anne and I had taken the two front rooms when we married. I did not have an opinion of my own. I did not think it was my business to have one.

Anne had a ticket for the Speaker’s gallery, through her father, and she took me with her, and we sat in the third row and looked down on the House. It was very full, fuller than I had ever seen it, every bench crowded and members standing at the bar and behind the chair; and here and there among them sat a member I knew to be from the south, very still, with his arms folded, who did not cheer anything that afternoon and did not speak. I noticed them, as one notices a missing tooth.

Mr Lincoln was not a man I had ever heard speak before, though I had seen him often enough in the streets, a long ungainly man in a black coat that did not fit him, walking very fast with his head down as though he were counting the paving stones. He did not speak long. He said that the bombardment of a garrison of the Crown, in a fort of the Crown’s, in a harbour of the Crown’s, was an act of levying war against the Crown, whatever the men who did it chose to call themselves; that the ministry did not propose to call it anything else; and that it had come to the House to ask for the means to suppress it. He said that he would not proclaim anything. He said that the ministry could have done a great deal on its own authority and did not intend to do any of it, because the constitution under which it held office was the constitution it was being asked to defend, and it did not mean to defend it by going round it. And he said, somewhere in the middle, almost in passing, the sentence that was in every newspaper in the Union by the end of the week, and that I have since seen printed under his portrait: that a rebellion may occupy a courthouse, but it does not thereby repeal the constitution.

The House gave him what he asked for. I do not remember the figures of the division, though Anne did, and does, and could tell Your Majesty the name of every member who voted against. I remember that her father voted with the ministry, in one of the last divisions he would ever vote in, and came up to the gallery afterwards and found us, and sat down beside his daughter, and took her hand, and did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, “Well. That is the last of it.” I asked him what he meant. He said that he had sat in the Commons for nineteen years, and that he had always believed that every question that came before it, however bitter, could be settled in it by talking, and that he had just watched the first question come before it that could not, and that he was glad he would be gone at the dissolution, because he did not think he would be any use in the House that came after.

He was wrong about that, I think. But he was out of it at the dissolution, as he had always said he would be, and he went home to St Mary’s County, and I do not think he has been back to the capital since, except once.

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I come now to the Colonel’s week. I was a part of it only in the smallest way, but I was in the room for some of it, and I have never read an account of it that was written by anybody who was.

Your Majesty will know the outline, because the outline has been printed a great many times. Colonel Lee was then the most celebrated officer in the Army, and a Virginian from the half of Virginia that went over, and in the week after Sumter he was offered two commands. Richmond offered him the command of the forces of the Province of Virginia, which had not yet gone over but was plainly going. And the Prime Minister, in person, offered him the command of the armies of the Crown. He refused both, and he refused them in the same week.

I heard of the first offer from Philip Lightfoot, who wrote to me from Richmond on the Tuesday, in high spirits, to say that Virginia’s convention was sitting with its doors shut and that everybody knew what it would do, and that the Colonel was to be asked to command, and that I should come home at once, because there would be a place for a man who knew the southern forts. He said that he had taken a commission himself, in the Province’s service, and that he was glad of it, and that he would see me soon. I did not answer the letter. I meant to, and I did not.

The Richmond Examiner printed the offer on the Tuesday, as though it had already been accepted, and printed beside it a leading article which said that the Colonel was a traitor to his Province for not having accepted it already. I read it in the Chief Engineer’s office on the Wednesday morning, where a copy had come up on the early train, and the room passed it from hand to hand without saying anything, and the captain with the son at the Point put it in the stove. The Colonel wrote to the paper once, that same day. He did not show the letter to anybody before he sent it, so far as I know, and the Examiner printed it beside the offer at the end of the week, I think in the expectation that it would finish him. It was the refusal. I can give Your Majesty the whole of it, because it was short, and because I cut it out of the paper and have it still, in the box with the other things:

You describe me as a traitor to Virginia, and I will not quarrel with the description, since it is plain that one of us must be a traitor to something. I have sworn an oath to the Crown and not to a Province. A soldier who treats an oath as conditional on geography has not understood what he swore, and I would rather be despised in Richmond for keeping it than admired there for breaking it.

I have read that letter, Sir, I suppose a thousand times. I read it first standing in the Chief Engineer’s office with the newspaper in my hands, and I had to put the newspaper down, because my hands were not steady. It was not that it told me anything I did not know. I had said the same thing myself to Philip Lightfoot over his wine in Richmond, worse. It was that he had said it in print, under his name, in the newspaper that every gentleman in Virginia read at breakfast, and had not said one word more than he needed to, and had not said one word about what he thought of any of it. He did not say that the rebellion was wrong. He did not say that the ministry was right. He did not say anything about slavery, or about the Union, or about what he believed. He said what he had sworn, and that he would keep it, and that it would cost him, and that he would pay. It was the coldest thing I had ever read, and it was the only thing anybody had said all that spring that I could stand on.

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The second offer was made in the Prime Minister’s house, on the Wednesday, in the evening, after the letter to Richmond had gone, and there were no witnesses but the two of them. I know only what came after it.

On the Thursday morning the Colonel came into the Chief Engineer’s office at about nine, in uniform, which I had not seen him wear in the capital before; it had come back from Texas, I suppose, or he had had another made. He spoke to the Chief Engineer for a quarter of an hour behind the door. Then he came out and looked round the room and saw me, and said, “Mr Ashton. You made a fair copy for me once. I should be obliged if you would make another,” and the Chief Engineer gave him the use of his own table, and he sat down at it and wrote out his draft, and gave it to me, and I sat at the end of the same table and copied it in my best hand, which was a good deal better than his.

It was the letter to the Prime Minister. I am going to give it to Your Majesty entire, because it has been printed in part and misquoted in whole, and I copied it, and I know what it says:

I am sensible of the honour you have done me and I must decline it. This war will be won by a commander who is willing to accept a rate of loss that would destroy the reputation of any man who accepted it, and who will not stop in winter. I am not that man. I know it, and I would be found out in a season at a cost the country cannot afford. Ulysses Grant is that man. He is junior to me and to many others, and he should have the command.

When I had finished copying it I gave it back to him, and he read it through, and signed it, and dated it at New Westminster, and folded it. I asked him, because I was twenty-nine and could not help it, who Ulysses Grant was. I had never heard the name. Nobody in the room had heard it; I saw the captain with the son at the Point look up at it and look down again. The Colonel said that he had been an officer of infantry, and had left the Army some years before, and was now, he believed, a clerk in a leather store at a town called Galena, in Illinois. I asked him how he knew of him. He said, pleasantly, “You will hear of him, Mr Ashton,” and put the letter in his pocket, and that closed the subject, as it always did.

I have never known how he knew. I have asked other men since, men who served with both of them and men who wrote about them, and nobody can tell me, and General Grant, when I once had occasion to put it to him directly, said only that he had no idea either, and had always meant to ask. It is one of the silences in this account that I cannot explain to Your Majesty, because I do not understand it myself. I set it down as it was. A colonel who had been offered the command of the armies of the Crown gave it away, in his own hand, to a clerk in a leather store whom nobody had heard of, because he believed the clerk would accept a rate of loss that he could not; and the Prime Minister took his advice, and before the year was out the clerk commanded the armies; and the Colonel never told anybody how he knew.

He went out of the office with the letter in his pocket and walked down the hill to Charter Road in the rain. He did not resign his commission. A great many officers did that spring, a third of the officers in the Army as I heard it reckoned, some of them going over to the Provinces and some of them simply going home; but he did not, and I do not think it ever occurred to him to. He asked for nothing. He was given, in the end, the engineering and the fortification of the capital, which was a colonel’s work and kept him out of the field, and he did it for the rest of the war and never once said that he would have preferred something else.

That was the Colonel’s week. At the end of it he was a traitor in Richmond and a puzzle in New Westminster, and he had refused the two greatest commands in America and been thanked for neither. His wife agreed with him, and was cut by every family she knew in Richmond for it, and bore it, as far as I could ever see, without the smallest difficulty. His sons served the Crown, all three. His cousins went the other way, and his nephew, and they did not write to him again. And Major Jackson, my brother’s old professor, who was by then Colonel Jackson of the Province’s forces, never spoke to him again in his life. Lieutenant Stuart stayed. He said that he stayed because the Colonel did, and that if the Colonel had gone he would have gone too, and that he was very glad not to have had to find out.

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The letters from home came on the Saturday, both by the same post.

Edmund’s was long, and written fast, and I could hear his voice in every line of it. Virginia’s convention had voted. The Province had gone over, or most of it had; the counties beyond the mountains had not, and were talking of meeting by themselves, and Edmund said that they were traitors and would be dealt with. The company had been called to Richmond and was going on Tuesday, and he was its captain now, the old captain having retired, and they had been given a place in a regiment of the Province’s forces, and he hoped very much that they would be sent to the valley, where Colonel Jackson was. He said that everybody in the county was asking after me. He said that he knew I would come, that the Province needed engineers more than it needed anything, that there would be a commission for me at Richmond as soon as I asked for it, at any rank I liked, and that Philip Lightfoot had said so too. He said that he knew what I would say about my oath, and that he understood it, and that I must understand in my turn that the oath had been to the King and that Virginia had not broken with the King, only with his ministers, and that nobody would hold it against me if I came now; but that if I did not come now, they would. He said, “Come home, Harry. We need you, and so does Mother, and so does Marlfield.” He signed himself my loving brother.

My mother’s letter was a single sheet.

I am going to give Your Majesty the substance of it and not the words, because the words are hers, and she is living, and I do not think I have the right. She said that Edmund had gone to Richmond with the company, and that she had sewn the flag for it herself, with the help of the women from the quarters, and that it had been blessed in the church. She said that my father would have known what to do, and that she found she did not, except that she knew where her sons belonged, and that it was at home. She said that the people at Marlfield were well, and that Rachel sent her duty. And she said that if I was not coming home, she would rather I did not write to tell her so.

I did not write.

I have tried for five years to decide whether that was obedience or cowardice, and I have decided that it was both, as most things are that a son does to a mother in a war. I did not go home, and I did not write to say that I was not going, and she did not write again. Marlfield went over with the county and the Province, and with it, in the eyes of the law of Virginia, went everything at Marlfield that was mine: the house and the land and the twenty-six people on it and at the works. I was, from that week, a man whose property lay in a rebel polity, which is a phrase I did not know then and have come to know very well, because there is a provision in a statute that uses it, and I shall come to that provision in its place.

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There is one more thing I must set down about that spring, because I did not think of it at the time and have thought of it a great deal since.

The bond I had signed in January, renewing Daniel’s hire for 1861, ran until the next New Year’s Day. The works below Fredericksburg were in the Province of Virginia, and in the week that the Province went over, the works went over with it, and by the summer, I was told, they were casting shot for the Province’s guns. Daniel was at the hammer there, at a hundred and fifty pounds the year, payable to me at the bank in Fredericksburg, which was now in a polity at war with the Crown whose commission I held. The money did not come. I did not expect it to. But the bond stood. I had let him for the year, to men who were now making shot to fire at the men I served with, and I had signed my name to it at my mother’s desk in January without a thought in my head, and there was nothing whatever that I could do about it from New Westminster, and I did nothing.

I do not offer that to Your Majesty as a confession. I do not think it is one. I offer it because I have come to think that it was the plainest truth about where I stood in the spring of 1861, plainer than my oath and plainer than the Colonel’s letter. I had kept my oath. I had stayed. I had my hands, as I thought, quite clean. And a man I owned was hammering iron for the rebellion, on my account, under a paper with my name on it, and I had not once thought about him in the whole of that week, until the money did not come.

At the end of April I was made a captain, because there were suddenly a great many vacancies. In the middle of May I was sent for and told that I was going to London.