Patience

Henry Ashton. New Westminster, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 22 May 1865.

The technical answer is exact and is the one the courts and the law officers gave at the time. Treason was withdrawn from Brown's indictment in exchange for a plea of guilty to murder and armed insurrection, and once withdrawn it was gone; the offences he stood convicted of did not carry death. Treason was pressed against the rebel leadership, was proved, and did.

The Universal Register: Abraham Lincoln

The word was still on the table.

I had not been in the witnesses’ room of the federal court in the capital since the November of 1859, when I waited there for eleven days to prove the terms at Harpers Ferry and was never called; and I came into it on the morning of Monday the twenty-second of May, 1865, with a summons in my pocket from the law officers of the Crown, and it was the same room. The coal fire still smoked. The window still looked on to the yard where the prisoners’ van was kept. And on the long table with the green cloth, where some witness before my time had carved it with a penknife, very neatly, in capitals, the word was still there: PATIENCE.

I sat down at the table in front of it, and put my hand on it, and waited to be called to give evidence against Philip Lightfoot.

I should tell Your Majesty how the trials were done, because I have read since, in English newspapers, that they were done by soldiers, and they were not.

When the rebellion stopped, its leading men went home, most of them, and waited; and through the winter and the spring they were taken, one by one, at their homes, by the ordinary officers of the law, on warrants, and brought to the capital, and lodged in the ordinary gaol. They were indicted for treason, which is the levying of war against the Crown by men who owe it allegiance, and which is a crime at the common law and carried death, as it had carried death in every year since there had been a Crown; and they were tried for it in the federal courts, before the ordinary judges, by juries of twelve, in public, under the ordinary law. There was no special court. There was no commission of officers. There was no Act of the Parliament passed after the fact to make a crime of what had been done. The ministry was asked for all three, I was told, by men who were afraid of juries, and refused all three. The trials were slow and formal and very long, and the newspapers of every nation in Europe said that they were absurdly slow and absurdly formal, and printed every word of them; and the prisoners had counsel, instructed and paid, and some of the best lawyers in America stood up for them; and most of them were convicted. Several were acquitted, and a larger number were convicted of something less than treason, and some were convicted of treason itself.

Philip was taken at his house in Richmond in the February of 1864. He had gone home after the collapse, as all of them had, and had been reading law again, I was told, and waiting. He had held a commission in the Province’s forces from the April of 1861, and he had carried the petition of the American States to London in the summer of that year, as the agent of the men who had made it; and he was indicted for the levying of war, on both counts. I was summoned by the Crown to prove the second.

I was called at a little after eleven.

I had not seen him since the night in my lodging off the Strand when he brought the packet back and put it on my table under the lamp, nearly four years before. He was in the dock when I came into the court, and he looked up as I came in, and I saw that he had known I would be called and had been waiting to see my face when I was. He had grown thin, and grey at the temples, and he was in a plain black coat that had been a good coat once. He did not smile. He did not look away either. He looked at me as he had looked at me across the table in the coffee room of the Exchange Hotel at Richmond, on the night before I heard his Province fail to agree, as though we were about to begin an argument that we both enjoyed.

The Crown’s counsel took me through it. I told the court what I have told Your Majesty: that on the Saturday, the twenty-second of June 1861, the prisoner had called on me at my lodging in London, and had told me that he had come from Charles Town in South Carolina, by Wilmington and Nassau, with a petition adopted there by the assembly of the American States, with the Lord Protector’s authority, asking the King to acknowledge them as his loyal subjects and to name a representative to the chair that had been kept for him; that he had said that he was one of several gentlemen charged with getting it into the King’s hands; and that he had told me so openly, so that I should hear it from him and not from somebody else. I told the court that I had reported it to the Minister at the legation on the Monday morning. And I told them that on Monday the twelfth of August the prisoner had come to my lodging again with the packet, and had shown it to me.

The Crown’s counsel asked me to describe the packet. I described it. A cover of heavy cream-coloured paper, folded and sealed, with three seals of the American States in red wax; every one of them whole; dust on the wax; and on top of it, loose, a half-sheet of plain stationer’s paper, folded once, in a clerk’s hand, with no address, no date and no signature, which said: No such document can be received.

He asked me whether I was certain that the seals were whole. I said that I had looked at them under the lamp for a long time, and that there was not a crack in any of them, and that I was certain.

He thanked me and sat down. He had what he wanted. I had proved the agency, which was all the Crown had called me to prove, and I had proved it exactly.

Then the prisoner’s counsel stood up.

He was an old man from Baltimore, very courteous, with a soft voice, who had defended a great many people in his time and had the manner of a man who expected to be believed. He asked me whether the prisoner had concealed anything from me, on the twenty-second of June. I said that he had not. He asked me whether the prisoner had asked anything of me. I said that he had not; that he had told me he did not ask anything, and only wished me to know. He asked me how the prisoner had spoken of the King. I said that he had spoken of the King with respect, always, and that I had never heard him speak of the King otherwise in my life. He asked me what the prisoner had said to me when he brought the packet back.

I told him. I said that the prisoner had said that he would send it home; and that he had reminded me of a thing he had said to me at Richmond before the war, that if the King said nothing, his saying nothing would tell us something.

The old man was quiet for a moment. Then he asked me the question I had been waiting for since I sat down at the green table that morning. He asked me whether I knew who had returned the packet.

I said that I did not.

He asked me whether the prisoner knew.

I said that the prisoner had told me, on the night he brought it back, that none of the men through whose hands it had passed knew who had returned it, or whether anybody had seen it; and that I believed him, and believe him now.

He asked me whether anybody knew.

I said that I did not know whether anybody knew. I said that I had heard it said that it was the King’s own decision, and that it was the British ministry’s, and that it was a secretary’s, and that I had no means of knowing which, and would not guess. The judge looked at me over his spectacles for some time when I said that. Then he looked at the jury. Nobody said anything. And the old man thanked me, and sat down, and I was told that I might go.

I want to be exact with Your Majesty about this, because I have been asked since whether I meant to help him, and I did not. I meant to tell the court the truth, which was the only thing I had been summoned to do. I did not know, when I sat down at the green table that morning, that the truth was the thing that would help him. I think his counsel knew. I think Philip knew, when he looked at me across the court as I came in.

The jury was out for three hours and a half. It came back a little before five, and the foreman, who was a grocer, I was told, with a shop below Charter Hill, stood up and said, Not guilty, on both counts.

A jury gives no reasons. I do not know what those twelve men thought. I have heard it said that they thought a man who had carried a petition to his King could not be hanged for treason against him, whatever the law said, and I have heard it said that they thought the Crown had proved nothing that every man in America did not already know, and I have heard it said that they were tired, and wished to go home, and did not want to hang a man that afternoon. I think it may have been all three. I think it may have been the seals. I do not know.

He was released from the dock at once. I waited for him on the steps of the court, in the evening, and he came out with his old counsel and stood on the top step and looked at the street, as Mr Pell had stood on the top step of the court-house at Leonardtown on the day of the poll, with his hat in his hand, looking at the square. Then he saw me and came down. He put out his hand and I took it. He said, “You told them the truth, Harry.” I said that I had been summoned to. He said, “I know. That is why it worked.” He said that he was going home to Richmond in the morning, and that he did not know what he would do there, and that he supposed he would read law, since it was the only thing he had ever been good at that had not got him indicted. Then he said, “Do you think he ever saw it?” I said that I did not know. He said, “No. Nor do I,” and went away down the street with his old counsel, and I have not seen him since.

The Lord Protector was tried in the same court in the autumn.

He had been taken at his home in the spring of 1864, like the others, and he had been in the gaol in the capital since, and his trial was the last of the great ones, and the capital went to it as it had gone to the Commons for the Enrolment Act; the court was full every day, and the street outside was full, and the newspapers sent their best men. I went on two days, because I could not stay away, and stood at the back.

I had never seen him before, though he had sat in the Commons for years before the war, managing the southern interest there, while I drew harbours on the other side of the town. He was a tall man, thin and grey and very upright, past fifty, with a face that had been handsome and was now only severe, and he sat in the dock through all of it with his hands folded and his eyes on whoever was speaking, and he did not once, on the two days I saw, show anything at all. The newspapers that had spent two years laughing at his title stopped laughing in the first week. He was courteous to the judge, and courteous to the Crown’s counsel, and courteous to the witnesses against him, some of whom had been his ministers; and when the evidence was all in, and he was asked whether he had anything to say, he stood up and said it.

I will give Your Majesty the substance, because the words were his and I do not think I have the right to them. He said what Philip had said to me at Richmond, before any of it, and what the petition had said, and what the assemblies had said all that winter: that a polity’s duty of obedience ran to the Crown, and not to the ministry; that the Crown acted through ministers who held the confidence of the Commons; and that a ministry which had lost the moral capacity to govern a third of the Union had lost its claim to be the King’s ministry, and that the men who refused to obey it had been loyal to the King and not traitors to him. He said it quietly and clearly and at some length, and without any bitterness that I could hear, as a man restates a case he has argued for years and has never been answered on, to his own satisfaction; and I believe that he believed every word of it, and had believed it from the beginning, and believed it then, standing in the dock with the rope in front of him. I thought of the chair at Charles Town in South Carolina, on its dais, under its canopy, and the bills on the table, and the old man sweeping the vestibule. I do not know whether he thought of them. He did not mention them.

The jury convicted him in an afternoon. He was sentenced to death. And he was hanged in the February of this year, in the yard of the gaol, in the early morning, with very few people present; and I was not one of them, and will not describe what I did not see.

There were dozens of them, in the end. I do not know the number, and I do not think it was known at the time; they were hanged over the winter and into the spring, in the capital and elsewhere, as their trials ended: the men who had governed the rebel state, and some of the officers who had commanded its armies, and the men who had kept its prisons, and the men who had been responsible for what was done to the Black soldiers of the Crown who were taken by the rebels and were not treated as prisoners. I have been told that there were men in the ministry who argued for mercy, at least for some of them, and that the Prime Minister would not give it, and I do not know what reasons he gave, because he did not give them in public. Their graves are known, and their families are not silent about them. I have heard it said that the hangings have settled the rebellion for ever, because the men who might have led another watched the last ones hang; and I have heard it said that they have poisoned it for ever, because a grievance with a gallows in it never runs dry. I think that both are true, and I do not know which will prove the truer, and I do not think anybody does yet.

John Brown is at Fort Warren still, as I write, in his casemate on the landward side, with the stove and the table and the slit in the wall that lets in the sea. He was sixty-six in May. I have not seen him since the spring of 1861. He writes letters, I am told, and they are read before they go out, and some of them are printed.

I set him down here because a great many people in America have set him down beside the men who were hanged, and asked why he lived and they did not, and I am one of them. I know the answer that the courts and the law officers gave, because I was in the witnesses’ room when it was given out, and it is exact. Treason was taken off his indictment in the November of 1859, in exchange for his plea to murder and armed insurrection, and once it was taken off it was gone, and the crimes he was convicted of did not carry death. Treason was pressed against the rebel leaders, and proved, and did. That is the whole of the answer, and it is true.

I have heard the other answer as well. It is that the Crown found it convenient to spare a man whose cause it was going to adopt within six years, and convenient to hang men whose cause it had just defeated, and that the same government drew the distinction both times. I have heard that said in Richmond and in the capital, by men on both sides, and I have heard it answered that a plea is a plea, and that the law is not made unjust because the men who administer it must choose. I have been in the court where both choices were made. I have sat at the green table with the word carved on it, in 1859 and in 1865, and waited to be called. I set the two answers side by side, Sir, as I have set other things side by side in this account, and I do not choose between them. I do not think I am able to. I was taught that patience is the virtue of the witness. I have come to think that it is the only one I have.