Blackjacks

Blackjacks is the country residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America. It stands on a rise in Logan County, outside Guthrie, the capital of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, roughly a thousand miles from New Westminster.

It is a plain house on a single section of ordinary country, and the Realm has repeatedly declined to make it anything else. Its importance is not architectural and never has been. It comes from the distance, which is great enough that going there is a decision rather than a habit, and from the consequence of that distance: Blackjacks is where American premiers do the small number of things that require several uninterrupted days and cannot be done in the capital.

The house takes its name from the country rather than the country from the house. The belt of blackjack and post oak running through central Oklahoma is called the blackjacks by the people who live in it, and the homestead was named for its trees decades before a Prime Minister slept there. Blackjack oak is scrubby, crooked and worthless as timber. The Realm’s head of government keeps a country house named after bad firewood, which is a fact the Realm mentions more often than it needs to.

The place

The section

Blackjacks is one section, six hundred and forty acres, which is the unit the country was surveyed in and the amount a claimant could hope to hold. The land is rolling rather than flat, cut by draws, with the oak belt running across the northern third and open grass and cultivated ground to the south. It is not distinguished country. Nothing about the section would attract attention if the house on it were not what it is.

The rise the house stands on is modest and it is the highest ground for some miles, which in that country is enough to see weather coming a long way off. Visitors consistently remark on the sky and on the wind, which blows almost continuously and which the house was built to sit in rather than to shelter from.

The house

The house was built in the 1890s by Amos Ballard, who had made the run of 1889 as a young man and had done moderately well afterwards in cattle, land and a feed business in Guthrie. It is a two-storey frame house on a sandstone foundation, with a deep porch running along three sides, a plain hipped roof and twelve rooms of no particular distinction. It was a prosperous man’s house and not a rich one, and it was built by somebody who intended to live in it rather than to be seen in it.

Very little has been done to it since. Plumbing, wiring, heating and a kitchen have been renewed as they failed. The rooms are the rooms Ballard built. Successive ministries have declined proposals to extend the house, and the refusals have been made on the same ground each time: that a plain house is the only kind that suits the purpose, and that a premier who wanted grandeur could have it in the capital and does not.

The outbuildings

The working buildings are original or near it. There is a barn, stock pens and a set of sheds along the section road, all of them still used, because the land is still farmed.

Two additions have been made in a century. A row of guest cottages was built to house delegations, since the house itself sleeps a Prime Minister and a small party and nothing more, and the alternative was putting foreign ministers in Guthrie hotels. And a low conference building stands behind the house, added in the middle of the last century, containing one large room, several small ones and nothing else. It is deliberately unlovely. Its purpose was to let twenty people sit around a table without turning the dining room into a chamber, and it is where most of what Blackjacks is known for has actually happened.

Getting there

A Prime Minister flies. The Royal American Air Force carries the premier to Will Rogers World Airport at Oklahoma City, and the remaining thirty miles are done by road. There is no airstrip on the place and no proposal to build one has survived a Parliament.

This is the whole of what makes Blackjacks a different institution from a house near the capital. The journey takes most of a day at each end. It cannot be done for a weekend and returned from on the Tuesday. A Prime Minister does not slip out to Blackjacks. A Prime Minister goes, and the Realm notices.

The land

The country house of the Realm’s head of government stands on ground that was taken, and the Register states this plainly because the alternative is to describe a farm and omit how it became one.

The runs

Logan County was opened to non-Native settlement in the land run of 22 April 1889, when the district was thrown open at a signal and claimed in a single afternoon by people who had assembled on its borders to race for it. Guthrie went from empty prairie to a town of several thousand between noon and nightfall. Amos Ballard was one of the claimants, and the section Blackjacks stands on is the section he claimed that day.

The run was lawful. It was lawful because the land had first been separated from the Nations that held it, through a sequence of cessions, purchases and pressures conducted under the forms that Article XIV of the Charter requires and in conditions that made the forms a poor description of what was happening. The Charter forbids any general taking and requires lawful compact for every dealing in Native land. What it obtained here, as elsewhere, was a paper trail rather than a restraint.

Title

The specific title is straightforward and that is itself worth saying. Blackjacks was claimed in the run, on ground that had been ceded before the run was made. It sits inside the cession map rather than inside any Nation’s territory, and the distinction matters in this State, because the communal territory of the Nations was never broken into individual holdings at all: the commission sent to allot it in the 1890s was refused and reported against its own instructions. There is accordingly no allotment here to have passed the section out of Native hands, and the litigation the cessions still generate is about the cessions themselves.

The distinction matters to the lawyers and not much to the history. The section was available to be claimed in 1889 because of what had been done before 1889, and a clean chain of title from the moment of the run does not describe the transaction that made the run possible.

What the Nations say

The Nations have taken no position on Blackjacks.

There is no claim against the section, no protest at its use, and no ceremony attached to it. The House of Nations at Muskogee, the treaty chamber of the State’s tricameral legislature, has never made it a subject, and asked about it, its members have generally observed that a hundred and sixty acres of oak scrub under a federal roof is not where the argument is. The argument is over allotted land, restricted title, trust assets and the federal obligations attached to them, and Blackjacks is not part of it.

The Register records the silence rather than reading anything into it. It is not an endorsement, and treating it as one would be a use of the Nations’ restraint that they have not authorised.

How it came to the Realm

Amos Ballard died in 1924 with no surviving children, and left the section, the house and everything on it to the Realm by will, for the use of the First Lord of the Treasury.

His reasons are not recorded in any form that survives. What is known is the state of the office he left it to. A Prime Minister in 1924 had a salary, no pension, no official residence outside the capital and nothing at all on leaving office, and several had left it poor. The Realm’s later statutory pension for former premiers was not created until the 1950s and was created because Harry S. Truman went home to a house he did not own. A man who had watched premiers retire with less than he had may have thought a house was a useful thing to leave one, and that is the explanation the Realm has settled on for want of a better.

The bequest carried no conditions of any kind. It did not require the house to be preserved, or used, or opened, or kept as a farm. It did not forbid selling it. The absence has proved more awkward than conditions would have been, because it left the Realm to decide for itself what the place was for, and the Realm took the better part of thirty years to work it out.

Parliament accepted the gift in 1925 with visible uncertainty about what it had been given. For its first two decades Blackjacks was used occasionally and without pattern, as a house a premier might go to if he happened to want one. What it is now, it became under Truman.

What Blackjacks is for

The distance

Everything about how the house is used follows from where it is.

A residence forty miles from the capital is a place a head of government sleeps when the week has been long. A residence a thousand miles away is not, and cannot be made into one. The journey consumes most of a day at each end, it requires an aircraft of the Royal American Air Force, and it is visible: the flight is known, the departure is reported, and the press has been reading premiers’ movements to Guthrie for eighty years.

The consequence is that Blackjacks is never used casually. What it is used for is the small class of things that need several consecutive days, physical distance from the departments and the lobby, and the certainty that nobody in the room can withdraw to their office for the afternoon.

The Blackjacks talks

Coalition is uncommon in the Realm and difficult when it happens. A six-party Commons under a mixed-member system ought to produce coalitions constantly and does not, and the arrangements that have been made were made with effort.

Three were negotiated at Blackjacks. Truman’s Labour and Liberal Federal Democratic coalition of 1945 was settled there in the weeks after his commission, and it is the founding instance: when Americans say the Blackjacks talks without further explanation, they mean 1945. John F. Kennedy’s coalition with the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Conservative and Crown Union was assembled there. And Ana Valdez’s coalition of 2025 to 2028 with the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens was agreed there over four days in November 2025, six weeks after Thomas Markham died in office.

The phrase has since outrun the fact. The Blackjacks talks is now an ordinary term for any negotiation of that character, and it is used of several that took place in New Westminster hotels and one that was conducted entirely by telephone. Coalition agreements are not published in full in the Realm, which means the phrase often carries more precision than the public record can support.

Cabinet, and foreign visits

Cabinet meets at Blackjacks occasionally, most often before a session or a budget, on the principle that a Cabinet which cannot disperse to its departments argues differently. These are working meetings and not retreats, and ministers who have attended tend to describe them as long.

Foreign heads of government are received there when informality is the object rather than the protocol. The Realm has found, more than once, that a plain house in oak scrub does more for a difficult relationship than a state dinner does. The most consequential such visit was by Napoleon VI, Emperor of the French, in a period when the Realm and France were rebuilding a relationship that two wars had made almost impossible. That an American premier and a Bonaparte discussed it on a porch in Oklahoma is the kind of detail the Realm’s diplomatic historians enjoy more than the diplomats did.

The decision to go

By long habit Blackjacks is also where a Prime Minister goes to take a decision that cannot be taken in the capital, and the Realm has learned to read the departure.

Richard Nixon went to Blackjacks in the summer of 1974 and decided there to resign, which he did on 9 August, the only Prime Minister to have done so. Al Gore went in the aftermath of the ministry’s collapse over the failure that had preceded May Day, and reached the same conclusion.

Because the pattern is known, an unexplained flight to Guthrie is now itself a political event, reported as such and sometimes undertaken for that reason. At least two premiers are thought to have gone in order to be seen going. The Realm’s political journalists treat the house as an instrument as much as a place, which is not what a bequest of six hundred and forty acres was expected to become.

Truman and the atomic decision

The gravest use ever made of Blackjacks was in the summer of 1945, and it is the reason Harry S. Truman is the premier the house is most associated with.

Truman had been commissioned in April, on Roosevelt’s death, having been deliberately excluded from the atomic project by the man he succeeded. He received his first substantive briefing immediately, and he did what he did with every large question: he required the alternatives to be put in writing. A demonstration, continued blockade, modification of the surrender terms, invasion. Each was written up. None was costless and the papers said so.

He took them to Blackjacks.

What the house provided was the thing it has always provided, which is the absence of everybody. There were no advisers in the next room, no department to be walked to, no possibility of an unscheduled meeting, and nothing to do with the evening. Truman read the recommendations of the men who had written them a thousand miles from any of them, and returned to the capital having decided.

The authorisation for Hiroshima was explicit and his own. Nagasaki was not left to a continuing military permission: when it was proposed after the first attack had not produced surrender, he convened a separate civilian review and authorised the second use as a distinct decision. That separation, which established that each use required political responsibility rather than standing authority, is the part of the record the Realm’s constitutional writers regard as most important.

Truman later publicly regretted and apologised for the attacks. The apology entered his reputation without settling anything, and the arguments continue.

The house therefore carries an association its donor could not have imagined and its keepers do not advertise. The room Truman worked in is shown to the public on open days and is not marked. Successive managers have declined to put anything on the door, on the view, expressed by more than one of them, that a plaque would make a monument out of a decision the Realm has never agreed how to remember.

The King’s visit

The Crown has been to Blackjacks once.

Ernest V visited during his reign, and the visit was not a state occasion. He came at the Prime Minister’s invitation, stayed at the house rather than being received at it, walked the section, and sat on the porch in the evening with the premier and the resident manager’s family. There was no address, no ceremony and almost no press.

Constitutionally it was odd, and the oddity was noticed at the time. The monarch has no business at the private working retreat of the head of government, whose whole constitutional standing is that he is answerable to the Commons and not to the Crown, and a sovereign who made a habit of visiting would be doing something the Realm would have to stop. Nobody argued that on the day. The visit is remembered warmly, it is the single most reproduced story about the house, and the photograph taken of the two men on the porch steps is the image most Americans have of Blackjacks.

It has not been repeated, and the Realm understands that the non-repetition is the point. A Crown that visits once has made a gesture. A Crown that visits regularly has established a relationship, and the relationship it would establish is one the constitution does not provide for.

Keeping the place

The manager

Blackjacks is run by a resident manager, who lives on the section with their family, farms the land, keeps the buildings and employs what help the work requires. The post is not a political appointment and has changed hands rarely. Managers have generally been local people who understood the ground before they understood the office, and more than one has served across a dozen ministries and half a dozen parties.

The relationship between the manager and the premiers is a recognisable feature of the institution rather than an incidental one. A Prime Minister who arrives at Blackjacks is a guest in a working household, is fed by it, and is one of the very few people in the Realm’s public life who cannot easily be deferred to there. Several premiers have said in retirement that the manager’s family were the only people who treated them normally during their years in office, which is a remark about the office as much as about the family.

The land

The section is still farmed. Cattle graze the rougher ground and the southern quarter is cropped, some of it worked directly and some let to neighbouring farmers on ordinary terms.

This is why the upkeep has never become a political question. The place substantially pays for itself. The farm income offsets the running cost, the house is small, the staff are few, and the accounts are unremarkable enough that the Public Accounts Committee has looked at them perhaps four times in a century and found nothing worth reporting. Proposals to sell Blackjacks and buy something nearer the capital have been made in most generations and have failed on the same two grounds each time: that the distance is the asset, and that the Realm would be selling a gift.

Security

Security at Blackjacks is a fence, a gate and a small detail, and it is the most visible security around any American officeholder, which is a low bar.

The security settlement built after 2006 applies here as it applies elsewhere in the Realm, which is to say that it is real, it is behind the counter, and a visitor to the section road sees close to what a visitor in 1990 saw. There is no perimeter in the military sense and no proposal to build one has survived, on the argument that a thousand miles of open country cannot be sealed and that pretending otherwise would cost a great deal to achieve nothing.

The public

The grounds and the ground floor of the house are open on set days through the year, when no Prime Minister is in residence. Visitor numbers are modest. Most of those who come are Oklahomans, school parties from Guthrie and Oklahoma City, and a steady trickle of people with an interest in the premiership.

There is no museum and no interpretation to speak of. The rooms are furnished as a working house is furnished, the manager or a member of the family shows people round, and the tour takes twenty minutes. The Realm has repeatedly declined to make more of it.

Guthrie and the State

Guthrie is a small city that was the territorial capital, remained the State capital under the Oklahoma-Sequoyah Compromise as neutral ground between the settler and Native halves of the polity, and has been shaped ever since by holding an office it is too small to dominate.

Blackjacks fits that pattern rather than disturbing it. The State takes an unsentimental view of the house: it brings a certain amount of trade, it puts Guthrie in the national news four or five times a decade, and it confers no particular influence. Oklahoma-Sequoyah’s own ministers have occasionally observed that a federal premier’s presence thirty miles from the capital has never once helped the State get anything it wanted from New Westminster.

Locally the house is regarded with something between ownership and indifference. It is not a landmark and it is not resented. The section road carries farm traffic. The people who live along it have grown used to the occasional aircraft over Oklahoma City and the occasional week of unfamiliar cars, and the general local view of the whole arrangement is that the Realm could have chosen worse and could certainly have chosen showier.

Chronology

22 April 1889. The land run opens Logan County. Amos Ballard claims the section on which the house now stands.

1890s. Ballard builds the house.

1924. Ballard dies without surviving children and leaves the section, the house and its contents to the Realm by will, for the use of the First Lord of the Treasury. No conditions are attached.

1925. Parliament accepts the bequest.

1925 to 1945. The house is used occasionally and without settled purpose.

Summer 1945. Truman takes the written recommendations on the atomic weapon to Blackjacks and returns to the capital having decided.

1945. The Labour and Liberal Federal Democratic coalition is negotiated at the house. It becomes the founding instance of the Blackjacks talks.

Mid twentieth century. The conference building is added.

1974. Nixon decides at Blackjacks to resign, and does so on 9 August.

Reign of Ernest V. The King visits, the only occasion on which the Crown has been to the house. The visit is not repeated.

2006. The house is used in the weeks following the May Day Bombings.

2007. Gore decides at Blackjacks to go.

November 2025. Valdez’s coalition with the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens is agreed there over four days, six weeks after Markham’s death in office.

✎ Editor's Note · Why a house is worth an article

Blackjacks is the first building in the Register to be treated on its own, ahead of both Charter House and Government House, and the reason is that it is the one that has a history rather than a description.

An official residence in a capital is furniture. It is where the officeholder lives because the office is there. A residence a thousand miles away is a decision that has to be justified every time it is used, and the justifications accumulate into an institution: the distance selects for a particular kind of business, the business produces a particular kind of memory, and the memory turns a farmhouse into the place where coalitions are made and premiers decide to go.

The article is also the natural home for a fact the Prime Minister article could only gesture at. The Realm’s most consequential single decision was taken by a man sitting alone in an ordinary room on a section of oak scrub, because he had asked for the alternatives in writing and wanted to be somewhere nobody could interrupt him reading them. That is worth more than a clause.

Trivia

  • In-Universe The Realm's head of government keeps a country house named after bad firewood. Blackjack oak is scrubby, crooked and worthless as timber, and the belt of it running through central Oklahoma is called the blackjacks by the people who live there. The homestead took the name from the country decades before a Prime Minister slept in it, which is the same way Charter House took its name from Charter Road rather than the other way about.
  • In-Universe The bequest of 1924 carried no conditions at all. Amos Ballard did not require the house to be preserved, used, opened or farmed, and did not forbid selling it. The absence proved more awkward than conditions would have been, because it left the Realm to work out for itself what the place was for, and the Realm took the better part of thirty years to do it.
  • In-Universe The distance is the institution. A residence forty miles from the capital is somewhere a premier sleeps when the week has been long; a residence a thousand miles away cannot be made into one. The journey takes most of a day at each end and the flight is reported, so a Prime Minister does not slip out to Blackjacks but goes, visibly. That is why the house is used only for things needing several consecutive days and the certainty that nobody in the room can withdraw to their department.
  • In-Universe Truman took the written recommendations on the atomic weapon to Blackjacks in the summer of 1945 and returned having decided. What the house supplied was the absence of everybody: no advisers next door, no department to walk to, nothing to do with the evening. The room he worked in is shown on open days and carries no plaque, successive managers having taken the view that a marker would make a monument out of a decision the Realm has never agreed how to remember.
  • In-Universe Ernest V is the only monarch to have visited, and the fact that it was not repeated is understood to be the point. A Crown that visits the head of government's private retreat once has made a gesture; a Crown that visits regularly has established a relationship the constitution does not provide for. The photograph of the King and the Prime Minister on the porch steps is the image most Americans have of the house.
  • In-Universe An unexplained flight to Guthrie is now itself a political event. Nixon decided at Blackjacks in 1974 to resign, and Gore reached the same conclusion there after the May Day ministry collapsed, so the Realm's journalists read a departure as a signal. At least two premiers are thought to have gone in order to be seen going, which makes the house an instrument as well as a place.
  • In-Universe The phrase has outrun the fact. The Blackjacks talks properly means the 1945 negotiation that produced Truman's Labour and Liberal Federal Democratic coalition, and Kennedy's coalition and Valdez's 2025 arrangement were also settled there. It is now used of any negotiation of that character, including several conducted in New Westminster hotels and one done entirely by telephone.
  • In-Universe Blackjacks substantially pays for itself. The section is still farmed, with cattle on the rough ground and crops to the south, and the farm income offsets the running cost of a small house with few staff. Proposals to sell it and buy something nearer the capital have been made in most generations and have failed on the same two grounds each time: that the distance is the asset, and that the Realm would be selling a gift.
  • In-Universe The section was claimed in the run of 22 April 1889 rather than allotted, so its chain of title is clean from that afternoon onward and says nothing whatever about how the land became available to be claimed. The Nations have taken no position on the house, there is no claim against it, and the Register records that silence without reading anything into it.
  • Real-World The Realm's arrangement inverts the two our own history produced. A British premier's country house sits forty miles from the capital and is used most weekends; an American president's mountain retreat is a short flight and a secure military installation. Blackjacks is neither. It is a working farm a thousand miles out, reached by an ordinary airport and a public road, with a fence for security, and the inconvenience is the entire reason it does what it does.

See also

Categories

Land & Landscape · Institutions · The Premiership · Oklahoma-Sequoyah · Official Residences