Terms

Sir,

I am told that nothing written reaches Your Majesty except in another man’s voice, and so I have tried to write this to be heard. If the gentleman who reads it to you comes to a sentence that will not go easily into the air, I ask him to read it as it stands. I would rather be read badly than summarised.

My name is Henry Ashton. I hold Your Majesty’s commission as a major in the Corps of Engineers of the Royal American Army, and I have held one or another of your commissions since I was twenty-two. I was born in 1832 at Marlfield, on the Rappahannock, in the county of King George, in the Province of Virginia, which is the half of Virginia that went into rebellion in 1861. I did not go with it. That is most of what anybody in King George knows about me now, and it is the reason my mother has not written to me since the spring of that year.

I am not asking for anything. I know what became of the first paper that came to Your Majesty from the men at Charles Town in South Carolina asking for something, because I was in London when it came and in London when it went back, and I do not mean to be so foolish. This is an account and not a petition. A soldier who has been given an order reports on what came of it, and I was given one, in a manner of speaking, by the oath I took at twenty-two, which was to Your Majesty and to the Charter and not to King George County or to the Province of Virginia. I have kept it. Colonel Lee, as he was then, put the same thing better than I can in the spring of 1861, and was called a traitor for it in the Richmond papers, and I was called the same in a smaller way at home. It seems to me that a man who has kept an oath ought to be allowed to tell the person he kept it to what the keeping was like. I do not think anybody else has told you.

Your Majesty spoke to me once, at St James’s, in June 1861. It was one sentence and it was not about America. I have thought about it a good deal in five years, and I shall come to it in its place.

I should say what I know of the rest of Your Majesty’s part, so that it is plain I am not reproaching you. I am told that you said nothing about the rebellion, in public or in private, for as long as it lasted. I have heard that silence explained by men who understand the constitution better than I do, a Governor-General among them, and I believe them when they say it was the most useful thing done by anybody in the whole of the war. But I was in the places where the silence was felt, which were not the places where it was explained, and I think you should know what it was like there. That is all this is.

When I was a cadet at West Point we were taught the Charter by a professor who was fond of a phrase for what the Charter does not say about slavery. He called it the founding’s honest silence, and he meant it kindly: a thing left unsaid so that the Union could be made at all. I have had cause since then to think about how many silences there are, and whose they were, and which of them were honest. I have not finished thinking about it. I may not have finished by the time this is sent.

I begin at Harpers Ferry, because that is where I first saw what was coming and did not know that I had seen it.

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On Monday the seventeenth of October, 1859, I was a first lieutenant of twenty-seven in the Chief Engineer’s office at New Westminster, drawing the river approaches below the capital for the third time in two years, because the first two drawings had been lost in the department and the river had not moved in the meantime. At a little after two o’clock Lieutenant Stuart came up the stairs two at a time and put his head round the door.

We had been in the same class at the Point. He had been called Beauty there, because he was not, and he had the habit, which nobody ever cured him of, of arriving in a room as though he had been sent for by the room. He was in the capital on leave, trying to sell the department a hook for carrying a sabre that he had invented on the plains, and the department had been keeping him waiting for a week. He said that there was a rising at Harpers Ferry, that the armoury and the arsenal had been seized in the night by a band of men who were either abolitionists or Irishmen, depending on which telegram you read, that the trains were stopped and the wires were down beyond Monocacy, and that the ministry had sent for Colonel Lee. He had fetched the Colonel from Arlington himself. The Colonel was downstairs with the Chief Engineer, and the Colonel wanted me.

I asked him why. He said he had no idea, and that I had better bring a coat.

Colonel Lee was standing at the Chief Engineer’s window in a dark civilian suit, because he had come straight from the house and his uniform was in Texas with his regiment. He had been on leave for two years settling his father-in-law’s estate, and I think it had worn him more than the frontier had; he was grey at the temples and very still. He had been Superintendent at the Point when I was a cadet, and I had been, I suppose, one of the cadets he did not need to remember, which is the kind he remembered best. He said, “Mr Ashton. I understand the department drew the new waterworks at the armoury.” I said that it had, in ‘fifty-four, and that I had drawn half of them. He said, “Then you know the yard. Bring the plans. We are going up this afternoon and we shall be out all night.”

That was the whole of my instruction, and it was the whole of my qualification. I have sometimes wished that Your Majesty’s army chose its men for the gravest occasions by some method more dignified than knowing where the drawings are kept, but I have never known it to use another.

The marines had gone up already from the navy yard, ninety of them under a lieutenant, by a train that left at half past one. We went by the afternoon train for Baltimore as far as the junction at Relay, and waited there in the dusk for an engine, and went on up the river in the dark. The Colonel had the telegrams in his pocket and read them through twice, and then put them away and did not take them out again. The first of them spoke of seven hundred insurgents, and the last of perhaps twenty. Stuart had served in Kansas, and he said that if it was twenty and they were abolitionists and they had taken an arsenal, then it was very likely Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, who had been killing people out there in the name of the Lord since ‘fifty-six. The Colonel said that we should see who it was in the morning. He said it pleasantly, and it closed the subject, and I noticed, not for the first time, that he could close a subject with a pleasant remark more firmly than most men can with a shout.

I asked him, somewhere above Point of Rocks, under whose orders we were going. He said that the ministry had ordered it under the statute, that the department had given him the command, and that Government House had been told. “Told,” he said again, as though the word had a particular shape and he wished me to notice it. I did notice it. I did not understand it until a good deal later, when I had seen the Crown’s representative assent to a great many things and give his opinion of none of them, and understood that the Crown in America is something that is told, and keeps what it is told, and does not act unless there is nothing else left to act. I mention it because it is the first time I remember thinking about Your Majesty’s office as anything but a portrait in a hall, and it was in a railway carriage in the dark, beside a man in a civilian suit who did not want to talk.

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We came into Harpers Ferry a little before eleven, on foot across the railway bridge from the Maryland side, because the train would go no farther.

I had been there twice before, on the department’s business, and both times I had thought it the most beautiful place in the Union to have put a factory. The two rivers come down out of the mountains and meet under the town, the Potomac from the north and the Shenandoah from the south, and the town climbs up the point between them in streets so steep that the houses stand on one another’s shoulders. Maryland Heights stands over it on one side and Loudoun Heights on the other, and the armoury lies along the Potomac at the bottom, where the water could be made to work.

That night the beauty was not much in evidence. The town was full of men, and most of them were drunk. They had been coming in all day from the county and from Maryland, militia companies and men with fowling-pieces and men with nothing but a grievance, and they had spent the afternoon firing at the armoury from the windows and the hillside and drinking what the taverns had. Somebody was still firing when we came off the bridge, a long way off and at nothing in particular. There was a body in the river below the bridge, lying on the rocks at the edge of the current with the water going over its legs. A man told us that it was one of the raiders, who had been taken alive in the afternoon and brought out on to the bridge by a crowd and shot, and that it had been lying there since. He told us as though it were a piece of local news, which I suppose it was. In the street beyond the arsenal there was another, a Black man, whom somebody had shot through the neck in the forenoon and nobody had moved; the hogs had been at him. I learned later that his name was Dangerfield Newby, and that he had come to Harpers Ferry because his wife and children were held in Virginia and his attempts to buy them had failed. I did not know any of that when I stepped round him. I record it because I stepped round him, and so did the Colonel, and so did Stuart, and none of us said anything, and that was the first silence in this account. There are a good many more.

The townspeople told us the rest as we went. The raiders had come in on the Sunday night, a score of them or fewer, and had taken the watchmen and the armoury and the arsenal and the rifle works on the island in the Shenandoah, and had sent parties out into the county to bring in slaveholders as hostages and to tell their people that they were free. They had stopped the night train from the west and then let it go on, which was how the country had been warned. A free Black man named Heyward Shepherd, who was the baggage master at the station, had walked out on to the bridge in the dark to see why the train was held and had been shot, and had died the next day. The mayor, Mr Beckham, had been shot in the afternoon, looking round the corner of the water station, and that was what had brought the crowd out on to the bridge with the prisoner. The raiders at the rifle works had been driven out into the river, and most of them killed in it. What was left of them, with the principal hostages, had gone into the engine house in the armoury yard, and had been there since the middle of the afternoon, and had shot from it at anybody who came near.

The marines had arrived an hour before us and were drawn up inside the armoury gate, in the dark, very quiet, with the town making its noise around them. The Colonel went to them first. He told their lieutenant that he had the command, and that there would be no attack until daylight, because there were hostages in the building and he would not have them killed by his own men in the dark. Then he sent word through the town that the firing was to stop, and it more or less did. Then he sent for the officers of the county companies.

They came, three or four of them, in a variety of uniforms, and the Colonel offered them the honour of going in first. It was their county, he said, and their town, and it was proper that the first place should be theirs if they wished it. The senior of them thanked him and said that his men had wives and children at home, and that he would not ask them to go against a building full of armed men when there were others present who were paid for that kind of work. The others agreed with him. The Colonel said that he quite understood. I have thought since about how much he put into those three words and how little of it anybody could have quoted against him, and I have tried to learn the trick, and I have not.

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He gave me the yard then. He said, “Mr Ashton, I want to know what those doors will stand,” and he gave me Stuart for company and a marine sergeant with a dark lantern that we were not to open.

The engine house is a small square building of brick, a single storey high, with a slate roof and a little cupola on the ridge for the bell. It stands just inside the armoury gate, with the yard in front of it, and in the daytime it houses the armoury’s two fire-engines and a room at one end for the watchmen. I knew it from the plans: about thirty-five feet by twenty-four, the walls a brick and a half thick, the front pierced by three arched doorways, two of them large, with heavy double doors of oak for the engines, and the third smaller, into the watch room. I had drawn the culvert under the yard in front of it, and I knew where the fall of the ground was, and I could have walked to it blindfold, which is roughly what we did.

We came up to it along the wall of the next building and lay on the cinders about fifteen yards off. The raiders had knocked holes through the brick on either side of the doors to fire from, and there was a little lamplight inside, coming out at the holes and round the edges of the doors, so that the building looked as though it had been badly made out of light and was letting it through at the joints. We could hear them. There was a man somewhere at the back of it who was groaning, a long low sound that stopped and began again, and I learned in the morning that it was one of Brown’s sons, who had been shot in the afternoon and died in the night, on the floor of the engine house, with his father beside him. There was somebody else praying, or talking to himself in the cadence of prayer. And there was a voice that I took to be Brown’s, an old man’s voice, very level, which came and went near the doors as though he were walking up and down, and once said distinctly, “Quiet now. Quiet.” I do not know to whom.

The doors were the thing I had come for, and they were not what I expected. They were not barred. They had been drawn shut and roped from the inside, with enough slack left in the ropes for them to be pushed open a few inches, so that the men inside could fire through the gap and close it again; and the engines, I supposed, had been run up behind them. I lay there and thought about it, and I thought that a door held like that would spring. A man swinging a sledge at it would drive it in an inch against the slack, and it would come back at him, and he could go on swinging at it until he dropped. What it would not stand was a heavy blow low down, at the bottom panel, where the oak was thinnest and the ropes held it least, from something long enough to be swung by several men together.

We went back, and I told the Colonel so. He listened without moving, as he always listened, and then he said, “Then we shall want something heavier than a hammer,” and asked the marine lieutenant whether there was a ladder in the yard. There was, a long one, by the wall of the machine shop. That was the whole of my contribution to the taking of John Brown. I have been proud of it and ashamed of being proud of it ever since, in about equal measure, and I have never been able to settle which of the two is the more foolish.

Then the Colonel sat down at a table in the paymaster’s office, by a lamp, and wrote out the terms.

I stood at his shoulder while he did it, and I can give Your Majesty the substance, because I made the fair copy. He wrote that Colonel Lee, commanding the forces sent by the ministry to suppress the rising at this place, demanded the surrender of the persons in the armoury buildings; that if they would peaceably surrender themselves and give up the property they had taken, they would be kept in safety and delivered to the civil authorities; that it was impossible for them to escape, the armoury being surrounded on every side; and that if he were compelled to take them by force he could not answer for their safety. Then he read it through and gave it to Stuart and told him how it was to be done. Stuart was to go forward under a flag and read it, and was to accept no conditions whatever, because there were none to be had. If Brown would come out, well and good. If he would not, Stuart was to step aside and wave his cap, and the marines would go in.

Stuart said, “And if he wants to argue?”

“Then you will let him argue,” the Colonel said, “for exactly as long as it takes you to understand that he means no.” And he blotted the paper and went out to look at the sky.

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It came up grey, with the mist lying on the rivers, and as the light grew it showed the people. They were everywhere. They were on the hillside above the town and on the roofs and in the windows and along the railway embankment, two thousand of them at the least, come in from three counties to see the end of it, and they were quiet now, as a crowd is quiet when it has paid for its seat. The marines were drawn up in the yard in two parties, one on either side of the engine house, out of the line of the loopholes, with a dozen men by the ladder and three with sledges. The Colonel stood on a little rise of ground by the gate, forty feet off, with his hands behind his back. I stood a little behind him, because nobody had told me where else to stand.

At about seven Stuart walked out across the yard with a white handkerchief tied to a stick and stood in front of the right-hand door. It opened a hand’s breadth. I could see the muzzle of a carbine in the gap, and above it part of a face, and Stuart told us afterwards that he knew the face as soon as he saw it, because he had seen it in Kansas, under a hat, telling a company of cavalry that it was doing the Lord’s work. He read the terms. Then they talked.

They talked for a long time. I could not hear the words, only the sound of the two voices, Stuart’s quick and courteous and Brown’s slow, and Stuart told us afterwards what had passed. Brown would come out, but on terms. He would be allowed to take his men and his prisoners across the bridge into Maryland, and there he would let the prisoners go, and after that the soldiers might follow him if they pleased and he would take his chance. He made it sound reasonable. He made it sound, Stuart said, like a business proposition between two men who understood one another. Stuart told him that he had no authority to grant any terms at all except the ones he had read. Brown told him again what his terms were. Stuart told him again that there were none.

Then a voice called out from inside, behind Brown, a gentleman’s voice, quite loud and quite steady: “Never mind us. Fire!” I learned afterwards that it was Mr Lewis Washington’s, who was the most valuable of Brown’s hostages and knew it, a gentleman of the Washington family whose name I need not explain to Your Majesty. Beside me the Colonel said, very quietly, “That is the old blood,” and it was the only remark I heard him make all morning that was not an order.

Stuart stepped back from the door, and stepped aside, and lifted his cap off his head and waved it.

It was over in about three minutes, and I can tell it in fewer. The men with the sledges went at the right-hand door and it did exactly what I had said it would do: it sprang, and gave, and came back at them, and they swung and swung, and the people on the hillside made a long noise like a sigh. Then the lieutenant called for the ladder, and the twelve men ran it up and swung it, and swung it again, and at the second blow the bottom of the door went in with a sound like a tree splitting and left a ragged hole about the size of a man stooping. The lieutenant went through it first, with nothing in his hand but his sword, which was a light dress sword because he had come away from the navy yard without his other; and the marines went after him one at a time, stooping, the way a man goes into a low cellar. There were shots inside. One of the marines was hit as he came through the hole and fell across it, and the men behind him lifted him off it and went over him. Somebody inside shouted. Then there was the sound that bayonets make in a small room, which I had not heard before and have heard a good deal since, and which I will not try to describe to Your Majesty, because I could not do it truthfully in any language that ought to be read aloud. Then the doors were unroped from inside and swung open, and it was daylight in the engine house, and it was done.

They brought out the dead first. There were two of the raiders killed in the assault, very young men, and the son who had died in the night, and another son who was not dead but was dying, and who lived until the next day. The marine who had fallen across the hole was dead. Then they brought out Brown. He was carried out by two marines and laid on the grass in front of the building, and the crowd on the hillside pressed down towards the gate and the marines held them back. He had been cut about the head with the lieutenant’s sword, which had bent in the doing of it, and stabbed with a bayonet, and his hair and his beard were full of blood, and his eyes were open. I was perhaps ten feet from him. He was fifty-nine years old, and he looked much older and also, in some way I cannot account for, much younger, like a man who has been let off a heavy duty and has not yet remembered that he will be punished for leaving it.

Then the hostages came out, blinking. There were ten or eleven of them, gentlemen of the county and men from the armoury, and they came out into the yard in their dirty clothes and stood about in the light as people do after a funeral, not knowing whether they are allowed to go home. Mr Washington did not come out with them. He sent word that he would come out when he had found his gloves, and in a little while he came, gloved, and walked across the yard to the Colonel and thanked him, and asked for the return of a sword that had been General Washington’s, which Brown had taken from his house on the Sunday night and had been wearing. It was found and given back to him.

There were three or four Black men among them who had been brought in from the farms with their masters. I have never known what they were doing in the engine house: whether they had come with the raiders willingly, or been brought, or had chosen to stay with the men who owned them because it was the safer of two dangers. Nobody asked them, then. They came out with the others and stood a little apart from them, and in a quarter of an hour they had been claimed, and they went home with the men who had been held as hostages beside them, walking a few paces behind. Nobody remarked on it. I did not remark on it. I have since read a good deal of testimony about what the enslaved men of that county did and did not do on those two nights, all of it given afterwards to men who had every reason to want one answer or the other, and I do not believe any of it is to be trusted, and I do not believe I am entitled to an opinion. I saw them walk home. That is all I know.

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They carried Brown into the paymaster’s office and laid him on a pallet on the floor, and a surgeon came and dressed his head. By the middle of the day the room was full: gentlemen who had come up on the morning train from the capital and from Richmond, members of the Commons among them, and the men from the newspapers with their notebooks, and officers, and anybody else who could get past the marine at the door. They questioned him for hours. The Colonel was there for some of it. He told Brown, before it began, that if the visitors distressed him he had only to say so and the room would be cleared, and Brown thanked him and said that he was glad to be heard. I think he was. I think it was the thing he had wanted most, more than the arsenal and more than the mountains, and I think the Colonel understood that and gave it to him anyway, because it was proper to give a wounded prisoner the choice.

I stood by the door for most of the afternoon, because nobody had told me to go anywhere else. He answered everything. He said that he had come to free the slaves and for no other purpose, and that he had meant no harm to any man except the men who held other men, and to them only if they stood in the way. He said he was sorry for the people who had been killed who had had nothing to do with it, and he named the baggage master. He would not name the men who had given him money. He said, to the whole room and to nobody in it, that we had better all of us prepare ourselves, all of us in the slaveholding polities, for a settlement of this question, because it was coming sooner than we thought, and it would not be settled by Parliament. He said it without any heat at all, as a surveyor tells you where the water will stand when the river rises, and some of the gentlemen in the room laughed, and some of them wrote it down.

Late in the afternoon, when the room had thinned, he turned his head on the pallet and looked at me, and asked me where I was from. I suppose it was my voice; I had said something to the marine at the door. I told him the Rappahannock, King George County. He asked whether I owned slaves.

I said that I did.

He did not say anything else to me. He looked at me for perhaps a second longer, without any expression that I could read, and then turned his head back and answered a question somebody else had asked him about Kansas. I stood by the door for another hour, and then the Colonel sent for me.

I want to be exact about this, Sir, because I have been inexact about it in my own mind for seven years. It was the first time in my life that anybody had asked me that question, because in Virginia nobody needs to. I had owned twenty-six people since my father died in 1857, and one of them, Daniel, had been born in the same month as I was and had taught me to swim, and was at that moment, I suppose, at the ironworks below Fredericksburg, hired out at my profit. I had never once said aloud that I owned him. I had never needed to. I said it to John Brown on the floor of the paymaster’s office without stopping to think, and I have come to believe that this is the way every one of us said it, when we said it at all.

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There was trouble that evening over the prisoner. A great many of the gentlemen from Richmond, and the county people with them, took it for granted that Brown would go to the courthouse at Charles Town, eight miles off, and be tried there under Virginia law and hanged there, in Virginia, by Virginians, and they said so. But the arsenal was the Crown’s, and the armoury, and the marines, and the ministry had already decided that the prosecution was to be federal, and in the evening a marshal came up on the train with the papers, and the Colonel handed Brown over to him, wounded as he was, in the presence of witnesses. The crowd at the station did not like it. A man shouted that they would have him for Charles Town whatever New Westminster said, and there was a good deal of pressing about on the platform, and the Colonel had the marines clear it, without unnecessary roughness and without any delay. I remember that he never raised his voice. I remember too that the Province of Virginia did not forgive the ministry for it, then or afterwards, and that it was the first of a great many things Richmond did not forgive.

I have thought often since about what would have happened if the Colonel had let them have him. He would have been tried in the courthouse at Charles Town, under Virginia law, and he would have been hanged in a field outside it in the winter, and a great many things would have been simpler. I do not know whether they would have been better. I do know that two years later Charles Town became the capital of the loyal half of Virginia, and that I have stood in that courthouse since on Your Majesty’s business, and have looked at the room where he was not tried.

He is at Fort Warren still, as I write.

The Colonel wrote his report that night, at the same table in the paymaster’s office, and I made the fair copy of that too. It gave the hour of our arrival and the dispositions of the night, the terms offered and refused, the time of the assault and its duration, the numbers on either side, the names of the dead so far as they were known, the condition of the prisoners and the property recovered. It said nothing whatever about what any of it meant. When I had finished copying it I said, because I was twenty-seven and tired, that it seemed a great deal to have happened for so short a document. He said, “It is a report, Mr Ashton. It is not a sermon. There will be plenty of those.” He signed it, and sanded it, and that was all he ever said to me about Harpers Ferry, then or afterwards, except once, on the train going down the next morning, when he looked away from the window and said, “You did well with the doors.” Then he looked back at the river.

I have tried to write this account as he taught me to write a report, and I have failed, and I ask Your Majesty’s pardon for it. A report says what happened. This one will say what happened and something more, because I have found that I cannot tell you about the war without telling you about the things nobody said in it, and I cannot tell you about those without saying them.

Lieutenant Stuart waved his cap to the marines that morning, and they went in, and four years later he was killed at the head of General Grant’s cavalry, a long way south of Harpers Ferry, in Your Majesty’s service. He said, on the train going down, that the old man would hang whatever the ministry decided, because Virginia would see to it one way or another. He was wrong about that, as it turned out. He was wrong about very few things, and he was the best company in the Army, and I have not written his name since he was killed until this morning, and I find that I have had to stop.

I will go on, Sir, in order.