Assent

Mr Pell came to the capital in December, to hear it pass.

I have told Your Majesty that after the April of 1861 he never came back to the capital but once. This was the once. He came up from St Mary’s County on the boat, with Anne, who had gone down to fetch him, because he would not be fetched by anybody else; and he walked up Charter Hill from the wharf with his stick, very slowly, stopping every fifty yards, and would not take a cab, because he said that he had walked up that hill to the House every morning for nineteen years and did not mean to ride up it now. Anne had a ticket for the Speaker’s gallery for him and one for herself, and the member from Ohio had found one for me, and we sat in the third row, the three of us, where Anne and I had sat on the day the Prime Minister asked the House for the means.

It was the second time since the rebellion began that the ministry had made a measure a question of confidence. Everybody knew that it would pass. The commissioners had finished their counting in the autumn, county by county, and the arithmetic was done, and the Lords had let it be known that they would not try to wreck a measure that paid; and so the Commons debated it for two days as a thing already decided, and the speeches were made for the record and for the newspapers and for the men who would read them in the loyal polities that held slaves and would have to go home to their counties afterwards. The places of the five polities’ members were empty, as they had been since 1861. I looked at them a good deal. Mr Pell did not look at them at all.

The Prime Minister spoke on the second day. I will give Your Majesty the substance, as I have given you the substance of nearly everything else he said in my hearing, because I cannot give you the words. He did not say that the Measure was useful, though it was; he said that everybody in the House knew it was useful, and that this was not the reason to pass it. He said that it was right. He said that the Union had been fought for, at a cost that every member could count in his own county, and that if it came out of the war unchanged, holding men as property as it had before, its survival would mean nothing that anybody ought to have died for. He said it in the same high plain voice, without raising it, and sat down, and the House was quiet for some time before the next member rose. I have been told since that it is the most quoted thing he ever said in the Commons. I believe it. I heard it, and I can tell you what it meant, and I could not tell you one sentence of it as he said it, any more than at Gettysburg, and I have stopped being ashamed of that.

The House divided in the evening. The ministry carried it. I will not give Your Majesty the figures, though Anne could.

Mr Pell sat through the whole of the division with his hands on his stick and his eyes shut. When the tellers came up to the table and the numbers were read, he opened them, and listened, and then he said, to nobody in particular, in the voice in which he had told me at Leonardtown that he had calculated everything else, “That is the price of the vote. I said it would be.” And then he said to Anne that he would like to go back to the hotel, and she took him down. He went home to St Mary’s County two days later, on the boat, with Anne. He has not been to the capital since. I do not think he will come again.

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The Measure went up to the Lords, and the Lords passed it, having got what they wanted for passing it, which was that every loyal owner in America should be paid; and on the last day of December it was waiting, engrossed and signed by the clerks of both Houses, for the Crown.

I want to tell Your Majesty what the capital did that night, because nobody who was not there will tell you.

On the Saturday night, the last night of 1864, every Black church in the capital kept a watch. I do not know who first proposed it, and I do not think anybody proposed it; I think it was simply done, as the walking had been done, by everybody at once. The churches had been full of a Saturday night before; they were full that night past anything I had seen, with the people from the old streets east of Charter Hill who had been free since before the war, and the people from the neighbourhoods that had grown out of the camps, who had walked there, and the soldiers of the Black regiments in the District, in their coats; and they stood, because there was no room to sit, and waited for midnight.

Anne and I went to one of them. Anne had been going to it, I learned that night, on Sunday mornings, for a year, without telling me, because she had been nursing in the hospital where some of its people worked and they had asked her. I stood at the back, by the door, in a greatcoat, a white officer among a great many people who were not white and were not officers, and nobody asked me what I was doing there, and I did not know.

I am not going to tell Your Majesty what happened at midnight. I have said, in this account, that I will not try to describe how the Black regiments sang a certain song, and I will not try to describe this either; I could not do it truthfully, and it was not mine. I will tell you only that a little before midnight the minister asked everybody in the church to kneel, and they did, all of them, where they stood, so that the whole church went down at once like a field of grain going down under the wind; and that I was the only person in it still standing, by the door, and that I did not know what to do; and that after a moment I knelt too. And I will tell you that when the clock struck nobody said anything at all for the whole of the twelve strokes, and that I have never in my life heard so many people be so silent, and that I have been in a good many silences in this account.

Daniel was there. I saw him when we stood up, across the church, in his sergeant’s coat, with a woman beside him whom I did not know, who had her hand through his arm. He saw me. He looked at me across the church for a moment, over all those heads, as he had looked at me across the shed at Falmouth; and then he turned to the woman and said something, and she looked at me too, and then they both turned back to the minister. I did not go to him afterwards. I did not ask anybody who she was. I have not asked him since.

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On the Sunday morning the people walked up to the Rise.

They came up from the churches and the streets in the cold, after the morning service, thousands of them, and stood on the slope of the Rise below Government House and along the edge of the Axis, in their Sunday clothes, with the frost on the grass; and the King’s Guards stood along the railings, very correct and quite unnecessary, because nobody pushed and nobody shouted and nobody did anything but stand there and wait. Government House is not a palace, Sir, as Your Majesty may not know. It is a large plain house of brick, of three storeys, with sash windows and a slate roof and no portico to speak of, and it stands on the Rise off the Axis, looking down on it; and on that Sunday the whole of the Black population of the capital, as near as I could judge, was standing below it on the frozen grass, looking up.

I stood among them, with Anne. I had been in Government House before, twice, on the Colonel’s business, and I knew the room where it would be done: a plain room on the ground floor at the back, looking into the garden, with a table, and chairs against the walls, and a portrait of Washington, and nothing else. It looks like a dining room that has had the table cleared. Nearly everything that the Crown does in America, it does in that room. I could not see it from the Rise. Nobody could. We stood on the grass in front of the house and looked at the windows of the rooms that were not the room, and waited.

The Measure had been carried up from the Axis at ten, in a leather case, by a clerk of the House, with the Home Secretary walking beside him; and at a little before noon the door of Government House opened and the Governor-General’s secretary came out on to the step.

He did not make a speech. I do not think he had been told to, and I do not think he could have. He stood on the step and said, in a voice that carried better than he can have expected in the cold, that His Excellency had given the Crown’s assent to the Emancipation Measure, and that it was the law. Then he stood there, as though he did not know what to do next.

And then Mr Everett came out behind him.

He came very slowly, on the arm of a servant, in a greatcoat, without a hat, and he was ill; anybody could see that he was ill, and I learned afterwards that he had been ill since before Christmas and had written in his own hand to ask whether the instrument could be brought forward, in case he was not able to give it. He stood on the step beside his secretary and looked down at the people on the Rise, all of them, for a long time. He did not say anything. He raised one hand, a little, and held it there for a moment, and let it fall. Then he turned and went in, and the door was shut.

I have been told since, by men who knew him, that he regarded that act as the gravest of his time in office, more than anything he had done in the war, and that he said so in private to everybody he trusted. He did not say so on the step. He did not give his opinion of it at all. He had given the Crown’s assent, as the Crown’s representative gives it to everything that comes to him from the Parliament on the advice of the ministry, and it was not his act, and he knew that it was not his act, and he did it, and went in. I have said at the beginning of this account 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 had seen it assent to a great many things by then, and give its opinion of none of them. I had never seen it look at the people the thing was done to, before it went in.

I will not describe the people on the Rise when the door shut, for the same reason that I would not describe the church. I will tell Your Majesty two things that I saw, because I saw them. An old woman near me, who had been standing all morning with a stick, sat down on the frozen grass, all at once, as if her legs had been taken away, and did not get up for a long time, and the people round her let her sit. And a man in front of me, a young man in a carter’s smock, took a folded paper out of his hat and looked at it, and then tore it in half, and then in half again, and let the pieces go on the wind down the slope of the Rise, and they went a long way. I do not know what the paper was. I thought I knew. I thought of the court at Leonardtown, and the young man at the rail with his paper that said he was free in Virginia, and I hoped that it was the same kind of paper, and that it had been for this young man what that one had not been for the other, and I hoped that the other was standing somewhere on that grass too, and I did not know, and I do not know now.

They keep it now in the churches. On the first of January this year, the first anniversary, every Black church in the capital kept it, by name, as Emancipation Day, with a watch on the night before and a service in the morning; and I am told they mean to keep it every year. Nobody else in the capital keeps it. The ministries were shut that day because it was New Year’s Day, not because of what it was. I went to the same church, with Anne, and stood at the back, and knelt when they knelt. Daniel was not there that year. I did not ask where he was.

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My claim was allowed in the third week of January.

The board of the Home department wrote to me in a clerk’s hand, on a printed form, that the claim of Major Henry Ashton, of the Corps of Engineers, under the provision for loyal subjects of the Crown whose property lay in a rebel polity, had been examined and allowed in respect of the persons named in the schedule annexed, less one; and that the sum allowed would be paid in the course of the year, at the Treasury, in the order in which claims were allowed. The one was an old man named Nathaniel. I had learned at Marlfield in September that he had died on his bench at the end of the quarters lane the winter before I made my claim, and I had written to the board in October to say so and to ask that his name be struck out, and they had struck it out. It was the only correction I made. I set it down because I made it, and because I find that I am glad I made it, and that I do not know whether that gladness does me any credit at all.

I will not give Your Majesty the sum. I have not given you the prices of the people at Pell’s, or of the ground at Arlington, and I will not give you this one. It was paid in May, at a counter at the Treasury, to my account at a bank in the capital, by a clerk who did not look up. It is there now. I have not touched it. I did not know, in May, what a man does with the money the Crown has paid him for a man he grew up with, and so I did not do anything, which Your Majesty will by now recognise as my habit.

Daniel was free on the first of January 1865, by statute, in every polity of the Union, without condition. He had been free since the night he walked up the river road in the April of 1862, in every way but the one I was paid for; and on that Sunday the law caught up with him, and with all of them, and I was paid for it.

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Mr Everett died on Sunday the fifteenth of January, a fortnight after the assent.

I heard the bells in the evening. All the bells of the capital, one after another, the Black churches with the rest, and in the morning the flag on Parliament House was at half-staff, and the flags on the ministries, and the Black churches had black cloth over their doors. I have heard it told in two ways where he was when he died, and I was in neither place, and I will not choose between them. I know that he had been ill on the step of Government House, and that the newspapers said he died of pneumonia, and that he was seventy. I thought of him in his dressing gown by the fire at Gettysburg, repeating my brother’s name once, as though he were writing it down somewhere behind his eyes, and I wondered how many names there had been behind his eyes at the end, and whether there was room for one more, and I hoped it had not been my brother’s that he died with.

For a month, then, there was no Governor-General. The Parliament had seen it coming, and had passed an Act in the first fortnight of January to provide for it, and Mr Everett had given his assent to that as well, from his bed; and under it the Crown in America was, for a month, three men at a table: the Chief Justice, and the Speaker of the Commons, who was Mr Danvers of Maryland, and the Lord Chancellor. They could sign what had to be signed and nothing else. They could appoint nobody and decide nothing. I saw them once, through a door, at Government House, sitting at the table in the plain room at the back, under the portrait of Washington, with a clerk, signing warrants, and they looked like three old men settling a parish account; and I understood that this was exactly what they were meant to look like, and that it was a great deal more difficult to arrange than it looked.

Mr Chase was sworn on Wednesday the fifteenth of February, in the same room, by the Chief Justice. The Colonel went to the reception afterwards, because he had been asked, and took me with him. It was civil and quiet. Mr Chase spoke to the Colonel for some minutes about the readmission of the polities, very seriously, and the Colonel listened to him, and said very little, as he always said very little, and at the end Mr Chase thanked him for his counsel, which he had not given. On the way home across the bridge the Colonel said, “He will be a different kind of Governor-General, Mr Ashton.” I asked whether that was a good thing. He thought about it for the length of the bridge. Then he said, “We shall find out,” and rode on.