Book Three: The Honest Silence Part Four: No Winter Characters
Chapter Sixteen
The Rate
Henry Ashton. New Westminster, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 1 December 1862.
The pay differential produced the most serious and most honourable mutiny of the war, when Black regiments refused their pay entirely rather than accept it at the lower rate, some of them for over a year, while their families went without. Parliament equalised the rate in 1863, retrospectively, after a campaign in which the regiments' own petitions were read aloud in the Commons. The ministry supported equalisation once it was plain the measure would pass and did not initiate it.
There was no winter that year either, and this time I knew what it meant.
The army that had followed the rebels into Maryland came back to the capital in October, and in November it went south again into Virginia, into the country between the capital and Richmond that it had marched over twice already, and it stayed there, in the mud, all winter, and fought. I will not try to give Your Majesty the fighting. I was not at it, and it had no names that anybody remembers; it was fought over the same rivers and the same crossroads as the year before, and the year before that, for the same farms and the same railway junctions, which changed hands and changed back. What I can give Your Majesty is what came back from it, because I was in the capital, and it all came back through the capital.
It came back sick. The camps in the Virginia mud were worse than any battle. The men lay in tents on wet ground in the rain for weeks together, and drank from streams that ran past the camps of the regiments upstream of them, and the typhoid went through them, and the dysentery, and in the cold the pneumonia; and they came back up the roads and the river in the ambulances and the hospital steamers by thousands, and filled the ministries on the Axis again, and the churches, and the warehouses on the wharf, and a great many of them died there who had never been under fire at all. I have seen it written since that the war killed more men by sickness than by battle, and I believe it. I believed it that winter, walking along the corridors on the Axis to the far ends where the fever cases were.
And the lists came in. They were printed in the newspapers within days, by name, by regiment, by county, and posted on boards outside the newspaper offices, and every town in the loyal polities that had raised a company read them with its heart in its mouth. A member asked the Prime Minister in the Commons whether they might not be held back a little, for the sake of the families, until they could be told more gently. He said no. He said that the families had a right to know what the war was costing, at the same moment as the ministry knew it, and that the ministry had no right to choose a gentler moment for them. I was not in the gallery for that; I read it, in the same newspaper as the lists.
The camp I had reported on in August was not moved.
The fevers came in the autumn, as the surgeon had said they would and as I had said they would, and they came first to the children. I went back in November, because I could not help it, and walked along the edge of it with the surgeon who had written to the department, a young man from Philadelphia with a face like an old man’s by then. He showed me his letter book. He had written to the department eleven times since August, for tents and blankets and medicines and food and for leave to move the camp to the higher ground I had marked, and he had his answers pinned into the book beside his letters; some of them said no, and some of them said that the matter was under consideration, and most of them had come back too late for the thing he had asked for to be of any use. I had thought, in August, that I had done my part by writing a report. I stood at the edge of the burying ground at the end of the camp, which had been an empty field in August, and counted the small graves in the first row, and stopped counting.
I do not know whose fault it was. The surgeon thought that he did, and named three departments and a great many clerks, and I dare say he was right about all of them. I will only say that my report was among the papers that had been read and considered and put away, and that it had been a good report, and that I had been satisfied with it.
In October the Colonel wrote a deed.
I should explain, because it touches what I have said about myself. When the Colonel’s father-in-law died, in the autumn of 1857, he had provided by his will that the people on his estates were to be freed within five years of his death; and the Colonel was his executor. He had used the whole of the five years. He had needed the people’s labour, I was told, to clear the debts on the estates, which were very great, and he had hired some of them out to other places to raise the money, as my father and I had hired out Daniel; and the will allowed him the time, and he took all of it. And in October of 1862, on the last day that the will allowed, he sat down at the table in the farmhouse on the crest, in the evening, by a lamp, and wrote the deed of manumission out in his own hand, and signed it.
He did not give it to me to copy. I was in the room, at the other end of the table, drawing; I saw him write it, and I saw what it was when he sanded it, because he turned it round to read it over and the lamp was on that side. He read it through twice. Then he folded it and put it in an envelope for the court and addressed it, and went back to the returns he had been reading before.
He did not free the people he owned himself, whom he had from his mother. The will did not touch them, and he did not, then or afterwards. I set that down beside what I have said of myself, because it belongs there; and I do not draw the conclusion from it, because I am in it, and a man cannot judge a comparison in which he is one of the two things compared. I only record that I watched him do, at the last lawful hour, exactly what the law required of him and not one thing more, and that I had not done even that much, because nothing required it of me, and that I went back to my drawing.
His daughter Annie died in the third week of October.
I had known her since she was a girl of thirteen, at the Superintendent’s house at the Point, when Custis took me there to dinner on Sundays and the younger girls were allowed to sit at the end of the table if they did not speak. She did not speak. She was the quietest of them, and the one who listened, and once, when her father asked the table a question about the trace of a fortification that none of the cadets could answer, she answered it, very low, and then went scarlet, and he looked at her down the length of the table with an expression I did not see on his face again until I saw it at Harpers Ferry, when Mr Washington called out from the engine house. She was twenty-three when she died. It was typhoid. Mrs Lee had taken the girls into the country for the summer, out of the fevers of the capital, and the fever had found them there.
The telegram came to the farmhouse in the afternoon. I was not there; I came in from the lines at dusk and found the orderly at the door, who told me. The Colonel was in the inner room with the door shut, and I did not go in, and nobody did, all that evening.
In the morning he came out at the usual hour, dressed as usual, and gave me a sheet of paper folded once, and asked me to take it to the telegraph office in the town myself and see it sent to General Grant. There had been a letter from the General the week before, about the works and the winter and the men he wanted from them, and it had been waiting on the table for an answer.
I read it, because a man who hands a message to a telegraph clerk must read it to him. It was one sentence. It said that his daughter had died, and that he could not attend to the business in hand. It did not say anything else.
I am not going to give Your Majesty the words. They were his, and they were written to one man, and I have no right to them; I was the means by which they went, and that is all. I will say only that in all the letters that passed between the Colonel and the General through the whole of the war, and I carried a good many of them and copied more, it is the only one I ever knew of in which he said that he could not do a thing; and that he said it in one sentence, and then rode the lines.
He rode them that morning, as on every other morning, at the usual hour. I rode behind him. He did not speak of it, then or ever, in my hearing. Once, on the crest, at the place where the whole front of his house could be seen across the ravine, he reined Traveller in, as he had done the autumn before, and sat looking at it for perhaps a minute, white in the October sun, with the battery I had put in the ravine below it. Then he rode on, at a walk, and I rode on behind him, and we went along the line to the northern fort and looked at the traverse I was rebuilding, and he said that it would do.
The regiment that had carried our powder up through the battle on the heights was set to digging on the works that winter, and the works were mine.
I mean that the Colonel had given me the northern end of the Virginia line to strengthen before the spring, and the department had given me the regiment to do it with, or as much of it as could be spared from the other fatigues, which were a great many. Fatigue duty fell on the Black regiments more than on any others, that winter and after. They had enlisted to fight, and they were set to digging, and they dug: ditches and traverses and magazines and rifle pits, in the frost and in the mud, from first light to dark, while the white regiments beside them drilled. I drew the work. Their officers set them to it. They did it as well as any men I had ever had on a work, and better than most, and I said so in my reports, and I do not know whether anybody read them.
Daniel was in the third company. I saw him most days, at a distance, in the ditch with a pick or on the parapet with a spade, and once or twice nearer, when I went down the line with the drawings and his company was where I needed to be. He called me sir, as the regulations required of a private soldier speaking to an officer. I found that I minded it more than I had ever minded “Mr Henry”, and I could not have said why. I think now that it was because “sir” was what every private in the Army called every officer, and it put me exactly where every other officer stood, and no nearer and no farther; and that I had never in my life been put exactly anywhere by Daniel, and did not know where to stand. I gave him no orders myself, in the whole of that winter. I gave them to his captain, who gave them to his sergeant, who gave them to him. I think we were both grateful to the captain and the sergeant.
The paymaster came to the regiment on Monday the first of December, at its camp in the District, below the town, and I was there, because I had gone over to settle the next week’s parties with its colonel.
The colonel was a young man from Massachusetts, of a family that had been against slavery since before he was born, who had been a captain in a white regiment and had asked for this one. He knew what was going to happen. He told me so, walking out to the parade with me, in a low voice, and he said that he had told the paymaster, and the paymaster had told the department, and the department had told the paymaster to pay the men at the rate in his warrant, and that was all.
I should explain the rate. The men of the Black regiments had been enlisted as soldiers of the King and sworn as soldiers of the King, and they were to be paid, it turned out when the warrants came, not as soldiers but at the rate of a labourer in the quartermaster’s employ, which was lower; and then the cost of their clothing was to be taken out of that, which was not done to the white regiments, so that a private of the third company, digging my ditch, was to be paid a good deal less than the private of the Pennsylvania regiment who stood in the fort above him watching him dig it. Nobody had explained why. Or rather, a great many people explained why, in the newspapers and in the House and in every mess I sat in, and the reasons changed every time one of them was answered, which is generally a sign that the reason given is not the reason.
The regiment was drawn up on the parade in companies, in the cold, under a white sky. The paymaster had a table set out in front of them with his box and his rolls and his clerk, and a guard. When he was ready, and had opened his box, the sergeants of the regiment came out of the ranks together, one from each company, and marched up to the table, and halted, and the senior of them saluted the paymaster and said, so that the whole parade could hear it, that the regiment would take the pay of a soldier of the King, or none.
The paymaster said that he had no authority to pay at any rate except the rate in his warrant.
The sergeant said that then the regiment would take none. He saluted again. The sergeants turned about together and marched back to their companies and took their places in the ranks, and the regiment stood there, in the cold, in silence, a thousand men, looking at the table; and the paymaster sat at it for some time, and then closed his box, and his clerk rolled up the rolls, and the guard formed up round them, and they went away.
Nobody had moved in the ranks. I was standing beside the colonel, at the side of the parade, and I looked along the third company while it was happening, and found Daniel in the second rank, with his eyes to the front, as a soldier’s eyes are required to be. He did not look at the table, or at the colonel, or at me. He did not need to. He had already decided, and so had every man on that parade, and they had decided it together, and I understood that the sergeant had not been speaking for them but with them.
The colonel said to me, very quietly, when it was over, “They will do this every time he comes.” I asked him how long they could hold out. He said that he did not know, and that it was not the men he was afraid for, and he looked past the parade at the camp behind it, where the regiment’s women and children were living, in the tents, in the cold, on whatever the men had brought with them and whatever the camp could find. Their families were in the camps. They went without. I am told that some of the regiments that refused their pay that winter refused it for more than a year, and that their families went without for all of it. This one refused it until the autumn.
The petitions began in the new year.
I do not know who first thought of it. I know that by February every Black regiment in the service had drawn one up, or had one drawn up for it, and had found a member to present it, and that the members who presented them did not do what is usually done with a petition, which is to hand it in formally at the close of the day’s business and see it put in the bag behind the chair, unread. They read them aloud. The House did not like it, and said so, and they went on doing it, night after night, at the close of business, one petition at a time, until the House was obliged to listen.
The member who presented the petition of the regiment that dug on my works was the lawyer from Ohio who had given me my ticket for the Enrolment Act. He told me on the Wednesday, at the widow’s, that he would read it on the Thursday, and asked whether I would like to hear it, and I said that I would; and on the Thursday, the twelfth of March, I sat in the gallery from four in the afternoon until a little after eleven, through a debate on the excise that I did not follow, waiting.
He rose at the close of business. The House was fuller than it usually was at that hour, because it knew by then what the members who rose at that hour were going to do. The Prime Minister was on the Treasury bench. He did not speak, then or later that night. He sat through the whole of it with his chin on his hand, listening, and I have never known what he was thinking.
The lawyer read the petition slowly, in a plain voice, and did not add anything to it. I wrote it down that night from memory, and I give Your Majesty the substance, because the words were the regiment’s and not mine. It said that the petitioners had enlisted in the King’s service as soldiers and had been sworn as soldiers, and had done a soldier’s duty, before the capital and on the works, and had done whatever else they had been told to do, which was chiefly to dig. It said that they had been offered the pay of labourers, and less than labourers by the price of their coats, and had refused it, and would go on refusing it, and would take the pay of soldiers of the King or none. It said that their wives and children were in the camps without bread, and that some of them had died there since the autumn, and it gave the number. It asked the House for nothing except that it should pay them as it paid the men who stood beside them. And it ended, as petitions end, by saying that the petitioners would ever pray.
Then he read the names. It had been signed on behalf of the men by the sergeants of the companies, one for each, and he read them out, slowly, as the custom is, with their companies; and the third of them was Daniel King.
He had been made a sergeant in February. I had not known that either.
I had not known that he had a surname.
I want to be exact about this, Sir, because it is the thing in this chapter that I least understand about myself. I had known him for thirty years. I had owned him for five, and my father for twenty-five before me, and I had a paper in a box with his name on it, and his age, and his value; and the name on the paper was Daniel, and nothing else, because that was all the name the law of Virginia had ever required him to have. I had never once wondered whether he would need another, or what it would be if he did, or who would choose it. He had chosen it himself, some time between the night he walked up the river road and the morning in March when it was read aloud on the floor of the Commons, and I had not known, and nobody had told me, and there was no reason in the world why anybody should.
King. I do not know why he chose it. I have thought about it a great deal since, and Your Majesty will see why, and I have never asked him. It may be that it was simply a name, as Ashton is simply a name; there are Kings in King George County, white and Black, and have been for a hundred years. It may be that it was not. I set it down, and I leave it, because it is his.
I do not know whether he wrote it on the petition himself or made his mark. The member did not say, and the petition is in the bag behind the chair, where it was put when he had finished reading it, and I have not asked to see it.
The House equalised the rate in the autumn.
The bill was brought in by a private member, not by the ministry. The department objected to it, in writing, at every stage. The ministry supported it at the end, when it was plain that it would pass, and not before; and it passed, and the rate of a Black soldier of the King was made the rate of a white one, from the day each man had enlisted, so that every man who had refused his pay was to be paid all of it, at the full rate, for the whole of the time he had refused it.
I was not in the gallery for that. I was in the south by then, with the war ending round me, and I read it in a newspaper three weeks old, by a fire, and read it twice. I learned afterwards that the regiment drew its pay that winter, all of it, at the full rate, back to the day each man had enlisted; and that some of the men whose pay it was had died since they had refused it, on the works or in the camps, and that their pay went to their widows, where there were widows who could be found. Where there were not, I do not know where it went.
I have thought, since, of the bank in Fredericksburg, and of the money that came to it year after year from Mr Coakley’s office, for the hire of a man named Daniel, and of where that went. I know exactly where it went. It went to me.