Casemate

I was sent to London because I knew where the water was.

I should explain that, because it sounds like a joke and was not one. The ministry had declared a blockade of the rebel coast in the first weeks after Sumter, and it had nothing to enforce it with. Your Majesty’s American navy in 1861 was a force for catching smugglers. It had a few good ships and a great many revenue cutters, and it had been built to stop men landing brandy in Maine without paying the duty, not to close the whole rebel coast from the Chesapeake to the Florida line, and Mobile Bay besides, with every inlet and sound on it known to every pilot who had ever run a cargo through it; and everybody in the capital knew that a blockade which could not be enforced was worse than none, because the neutral powers would not respect it and the rebels would laugh at it. So the ministry asked for help. It asked the only government in the world that had both the ships and a reason to lend them, which was Your Majesty’s government in London. I was not told what the request said. It went by another hand, in a sealed bag, to the Minister at the Court of St James’s. I was told only that if the request was granted the Admiralty in Whitehall would want to know where the channels ran on the southern coast, and how deep, and where the forts could reach and where they could not, and that I was the officer in the Engineer Department who knew it best, because I had spent three years on those forts and had drawn half the charts myself.

The Engineer Department was made a corps that spring, the Corps of Engineers, with a great deal of ceremony and a new badge, and I was made a captain in it, and given a brass-bound box of charts and a letter from the Chief Engineer and another from the Foreign Office with Mr Seward’s signature at the bottom, and told to take the Cunard packet from Boston on the twenty-second.

I said goodbye to Anne at the station in New Westminster on the sixteenth. She was going home to her father in St Mary’s County for the summer, because he had been ill since the end of the session and she did not like to leave him alone with the county as it was; Southern Maryland was very much for the other side that spring, and there had been trouble at the court-house at Leonardtown, and her father’s house had had its windows broken by people who knew how he had voted. She said that she was not afraid of St Mary’s County, and that I was to write every week, and that I was to tell her everything about London and nothing about the Admiralty, since she would only be asked about it by people who should not know. Then she said, “And you are to go and see the old man, Harry. At Fort Warren. You will be sorry if you do not.” I asked her why. She said, “Because you have been thinking about him for eighteen months and pretending you have not.” That is the kind of wife I had married, Sir. I did as I was told.

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The train went north through Baltimore, where there were soldiers on the platforms and soldiers at the crossings and a cannon on the hill above the harbour pointing at the town, which tells Your Majesty what the government thought of Baltimore that spring better than anything I could write. It was quiet when we came through. It had not been quiet in April, when the first regiments from the north had come through it on their way to the capital, and it was not going to be quiet again for some time. We went on through Philadelphia and New York, which were full of flags and recruiting posters and men in new uniforms learning to march in the parks, and came into Boston on the evening of the seventeenth, and I went to my hotel and asked the porter how a man got out to Fort Warren.

He looked at me for a moment, and then at my uniform, and said, “You’ll be wanting to see the old man, sir.” I said that I would. He said that a great many people did, and that most of them did not get past the commandant, and that the boat went from Long Wharf at nine.

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Fort Warren stands on George’s Island, at the mouth of Boston Harbour, seven miles out from the city, and it is the finest piece of granite masonry in America. I knew it from the plans before I ever saw it, as I had known the engine house; it had been building since the ‘thirties under the department’s direction and was not quite finished, as no fort of ours ever was, and I had once spent a winter in the drawing office copying the elevations of its bastions. It is a pentagon, like Sumter, but much bigger, and built of dressed granite from the quarries at Quincy instead of brick, with a dry ditch round it and a demilune on the seaward side and casemates for two hundred guns, of which perhaps forty were mounted. From the water it looks like what it is, a great low grey wall lying across the island with the sea all round it, and on that morning there was a mist on the harbour and the wall came out of it slowly as the boat came in, a little at a time, as though it were being drawn.

The commandant was a major of artillery, a Massachusetts man, short and civil and very tired of being asked for John Brown. He read my letters, the Chief Engineer’s and Mr Seward’s, and asked what my business was with the prisoner. I said that I had none; that I had been at Harpers Ferry with Colonel Lee and had been in the room when Brown was questioned, and that I was going abroad, and that I wished to see him. He looked at me for some time. Then he said that the rules allowed a visitor with an officer’s commission to see the prisoner for a quarter of an hour, in the presence of the officer of the guard, if the prisoner consented, and that he would send to ask. He said that the prisoner refused about half of those who asked. He said that the prisoner had refused a bishop the week before, and a judge, and that he had seen a Boston lady in black silk come away from the door in tears because the prisoner had told her, through the grating, that he did not require her sympathy, he required her to go home and free somebody.

The sergeant came back in ten minutes and said that the prisoner would see the officer from Virginia.

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I want to describe the place exactly, Sir, because I have read a great deal that has been written about Brown’s confinement, by people on both sides, and most of it has been written by people who never saw it, and has been either much worse or much better than the truth.

It was a casemate in the curtain wall on the landward side, one of a range that had been built for guns and fitted up as quarters for the garrison when the guns did not come. It was perhaps twenty feet deep and twelve wide, with an arched ceiling of brick springing from walls of granite, and at the inner end a door of oak with a grating in it, and at the outer end, where the gun would have been, an embrasure that had been bricked up to a narrow slit, so that a little grey light came through it from the sea. It was damp. Every casemate in every fort I have ever served in is damp, because the sea gets into the granite and the granite sweats it out again, and this one was damper than most, because it faced north. There was a stove, and a bed with a straw mattress and two army blankets, and a table and a chair, and a shelf with a Bible on it and some other books, and a pile of letters tied with tape. The floor had been swept. There was a smell of coal smoke and wet stone and lamp oil, which is the smell of every fort in America, and I have never been able to smell it since without thinking of that room.

He was sitting at the table, writing, when the sergeant opened the door, and he finished the line he was writing before he looked up. Then he stood. He stood very straight, as I remembered him standing at nothing, because he had been lying on the grass in front of the engine house the last time I saw him, and on a pallet on the floor of the paymaster’s office, and then at the bar of the court with his hands on the rail. I had not known he was so tall. His hair was nearly white and his beard had grown very long, down on to his chest, and was white too, and there was a scar across his forehead, running up into the hair, where the lieutenant’s sword had caught him. He had turned sixty-one the week before. He looked at me for a moment, and then he said, in the same level voice I had heard through the door of the engine house, “The Rappahannock. King George County.”

I said yes.

He said, “You own slaves.”

I said yes again. I had not expected him to remember. I do not know why I had not. A man who has asked one question of a stranger in the worst hours of his life, and has been given one answer, has very little else to do in a casemate for eighteen months but remember it.

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He asked me to sit, and gave me the chair, and sat on the bed himself, with the officer of the guard standing in the doorway behind me, and I told him why I had come, as near as I could, which was not very near, because I did not know. I said that I was going abroad. I said that I had been at the court in November and had heard him plead. I said, I think, that I had thought about him. He listened to all of it without any change in his face, as he had listened to the questions in the paymaster’s office, and when I had finished he said, “You came to see whether I was sorry.”

I said that I supposed I had.

He told me, then, in a quarter of an hour, more than I have ever heard him say in print. He said that he was sorry for the people who had been killed who had nothing to do with it: the baggage master, whom he named again, as he had named him at Harpers Ferry, and the mayor, and the marine. He said that he was sorry he had not gone on to the mountains on the Monday morning, while there was still time, and that he did not know why he had not, and had asked the Lord about it every day since and had not been answered. But he said that he was not sorry he had come. He said that he would come again, if the Lord let him out, which he did not expect, and that he would do it better. He said that he had not taken up arms against Virginia, or against the Crown, or against anybody, but against slavery, and that he did not renounce it, and would not, though they kept him in that room until the sea came through the wall. He said it without heat, as he had said everything, as a surveyor tells you where the water will stand.

Then he asked me about the war. He had the newspapers, and he knew about Sumter and about the vote at Richmond and about the regiments marching through Baltimore, and he asked me questions about all of it that were sharper than the questions I was used to being asked in the Chief Engineer’s office. He asked me what Mr Lincoln meant to do about the slaves. I said that the Prime Minister meant to suppress a rebellion. He said that he knew that; he had read the speech; it was a very good speech. He said that Mr Lincoln was the cleverest politician in America, and that his whole government was built, every plank of it, on the agreement of men who wished to save the Union with men who wished to save slavery inside it, and that it would go on being built that way until the war broke it, and that the war would break it, because the Lord had not let things come so far in order to leave them where they were. He said, “You will see. You are young enough. I am not.”

I said that I was a soldier, and that I did not know anything about what the Lord intended. He said that he had noticed that most soldiers did not, and that it did them credit, as soldiers.

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The officer of the guard said that the time was nearly up.

Brown looked at him, and then at me, and then he did a thing I had not expected. He laughed. It was not much of a laugh, a short dry sound like a door shutting, but it was a laugh, and the officer of the guard looked as surprised as I was. He said that he had been reading in the Boston paper that morning that the loyal men of the western counties of Virginia, the counties beyond the mountains that would not go with Richmond, had resolved to meet together and form a government of their own, a government for the King, and that they meant to sit at Charles Town.

He said, “Charles Town, in Jefferson County. Do you know it?”

I said that I did. I had been eight miles from it, at Harpers Ferry, when the crowd on the platform had shouted that they would have him for Charles Town whatever New Westminster said.

He said, “They would have tried me in that courthouse. They would have hanged me in a field outside it, in the winter, with the militia drawn up in a square and the gentlemen of the county watching from their carriages, and the Governor of Virginia would have come to see it done. I have thought about that field a great deal, in here. I had made my peace with it. I had written the letters I meant to write from it.” He looked at the slit in the wall where the light came in. “And now the gentlemen who wanted my neck have gone to Richmond to make war on the King, and the town they would have hanged me in is to be the capital of the men who stayed with him. And I am alive to read it in the newspaper.” He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “The Lord does not explain Himself, young man. But He is not without a sense of proportion.”

That is the remark, Sir, as near as I can give it. I wrote it down that evening at the hotel in Boston, and I have the paper, and I have not improved it. I do not know what he meant by it. I have thought sometimes that he meant it as a joke, and sometimes as a prophecy, and sometimes as a man in a damp room telling himself that the room had been worth it; and I think now that it was all three, and that he did not separate them, because he never separated anything.

Then the officer of the guard said that it was time, and I stood up, and Brown stood up too. He did not offer his hand, and I did not offer mine. At the door he said one more thing, and I will give it as he said it, because I have tried to forget it and have not managed to.

He said, “Do you own them still?”

I said that I did. In law I did; the law of Virginia had not changed because Virginia had gone to war.

He said, “Then you will be fighting for the King against the slaveholders, and holding slaves, in the same summer, in the same coat. That is the whole of Mr Lincoln’s case, young man, in one officer. I wish you well of it.” And he went back to his table and sat down and picked up his pen, and the sergeant shut the door.

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I went back to Boston in the afternoon boat and did not speak to anybody on it.

I have to be careful here not to make more of that visit than it was, because I know that it will be read aloud, and that a thing read aloud becomes larger than a thing read. He was a prisoner, and I was a visitor, and we talked for a quarter of an hour, and I left. He said some things that were true and some that were cruel, and some that were both, and I have not found it easy since to tell which were which. I did not think, that afternoon, that he was right about Mr Lincoln. I thought that he was an old man who had killed people for an idea and had been let off with his life by lawyers, and who had nothing to do in his casemate but be right about everything. I thought that I had kept my oath at some cost, and that it was easy for a man in a cell to sneer at what other men paid for theirs. I thought a good many things on that boat, most of them in my own favour, and some of them are still true.

But I knew, all the same, that he had asked me the only question about myself that anybody had asked me in eighteen months that I could not answer in the words of my oath; and that he had asked it twice; and that both times I had said yes and had not said anything else.

I sailed on the Wednesday, on the packet for Liverpool by way of Halifax, with the brass-bound box of charts in my cabin under my bunk and my orders sewn into the lining of my coat, as though there were anybody on board who would have known what to do with either. The passengers were mostly English, merchants and their wives going home, and they talked about the American quarrel at every meal as Englishmen talk about the weather in another man’s county, with interest and without the slightest anxiety, and asked me what I thought of it, and I told them that I was an engineer and thought about drains. At Halifax we took on the mails and a regiment’s worth of officers’ baggage, and a garrison chaplain who preached to us on the Sunday on the text of the prodigal son, and was very much admired for it by the English merchants, who took it to be about the rebels, and by the one Southern gentleman on board, who took it to be about the ministry.

On the eleventh day out I came up on deck before breakfast and saw the coast of Ireland, very green, with the rain going across it in grey sheets, and I stood at the rail and looked at it, and it came to me that it was the first time in my life that I had seen Your Majesty’s other realm; and that I was going to the place where the petition would come, though I did not yet know that there would be one; and that the old man in the casemate had been right about at least one thing, which was that I was young enough to see what came of it.

I did not know whether I wished to be.