Betters

Henry Ashton. Parliament House, in the United Kingdom of America. Tuesday, 11 July 1865.

He spoke once on the treason trials of 1865 and 1866. He asked for leniency for the men who had carried arms in the rebellion, on the ground that a soldier who had been told by his Province where his duty lay had been lied to by his betters. He asked for none for the men who had governed the rebel state, and he said so in the same speech. Dozens were hanged, including the Lord Protector, and Lee made no further comment on it.

The Universal Register: Robert E. Lee

I have run ahead of myself, Sir. I wished to finish with Philip and with the Lord Protector together, and so I have told Your Majesty of a hanging in the February of this year before I have told you of a speech that was made in the July before it. I must go back now to that July, when the Lord Protector was still in the gaol across the town waiting for his trial, and a good many other men with him, and nobody had yet been hanged at all.

The Colonel had left the Army in the spring.

He did it without any ceremony that I saw. There was a notice in the newspapers, and a dinner given him by the officers of the works, at which he spoke four sentences and sat down; and the next week he gave up the farmhouse on the crest, where he had kept his headquarters since the autumn of 1861, and went the mile along the heights to the house, and opened it. The hall that had been shut since the spring of 1861 was aired, and the shutters were taken down, and Mrs Lee was brought home in her chair and carried up the steps, and the daughters came home with her; and Traveller was turned out into the paddock below the terrace, and the house was lived in again, above the rows.

I had been his officer for nearly four years, and I was not his officer now. I was sent back to the department, to a desk in the drawing office and the river works below the town, which were very dull after the war and which I was glad of. There was no duty any longer that took me across the river. I found that I went anyway: in the evenings, as I have told Your Majesty, to stand by the oak; and on Sundays, with Anne, because the Colonel’s daughters asked us to dinner a good deal more often than we had any right to expect. And the Colonel, when I was there, talked to me about drains.

On the Monday, the tenth of July, he sent me an order for the gallery of the Lords.

It came to the department by his servant, in an envelope addressed in his own hand, and there was nothing in the envelope but the order, made out in my name for the next day and signed by him, as a peer may sign for a stranger to be admitted. There was no note with it. When I saw him on the Sunday after, he did not mention it, and I did not either, and I have never asked him why he sent it, any more than I asked him why he named me to stand at Gettysburg, or to witness the deed. I have come to think that this was a part of what I was for, to the Colonel. I was a man he could send somewhere without being asked why.

I knew what was down for the Tuesday, because everybody in the capital knew. An old lord from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had voted against the war in 1861 and against most things since, had put down a motion for an address to the Governor-General, praying that the Crown’s mercy might be extended to every man indicted for his part in the rebellion, whatever his part had been. It was not going to be carried, and he knew it. The ministry had said what it would do, and an address from the Lords binds nobody. But it was going to be debated, and the capital wished to hear it debated, because the trials had been going on since the spring, and Philip had been tried and acquitted, and some of the men who had served in the rebel regiments had been indicted along with the men who had governed them, as Parker had warned me in South Carolina that they might be; and nobody in either House had yet stood up and said anything about any of it.

I did not know that the Colonel meant to speak. Nobody did. He had sat on the cross benches since he left the Army and had not once opened his mouth there, and I do not believe there was a man in the capital who expected him to begin with that.

I had never been in the Lords before. I had sat in the gallery of the Commons four or five times, most of them on tickets from the member from Ohio, and I thought I knew what a House of Parliament was like; and the Lords was not like it. It is at the other end of the building from the Commons, at the end of a long lobby, and it is smaller, and redder, and quieter, and it seemed to me older, though I believe it is not. The benches are red. At the head of the chamber stands the Throne, which is used by whichever of Your Majesty and Your Majesty’s Governor-General is present, and which was empty, as it is nearly always empty; and I thought, before I could help it, of the other chair, at Charles Town in South Carolina, on its dais, which had been made to be filled and never was, and I made myself look at the Woolsack instead. The Lord Chancellor sat on it, in his wig, an old man with his eyes shut, who opened them twice in the course of the evening and both times, I thought, to make sure that nobody was looking at him. The Clerk of the Parliaments sat at the table below him with his books. The bishops sat together on their own bench, in black. And the cross benches ran across the chamber at the far end, facing the Throne, and the Colonel sat at the end of the second of them, by himself, in a plain black coat, with his hands on his knees.

There were not above forty lords in the House when the debate began, at a little after five, because the Lords sits late, and thinly, and waits for the Commons to send it something to do. The old lord from the Eastern Shore moved his motion, at great length, with a good deal about the King’s mercy and the quality of mercy and the example of the Peace of Boston, when there had been no prosecutions for rebellion or for loyalty and no reprisals by either side. A bishop of one of the southern sees seconded him, and spoke about the families, and about the wives and children of men in the gaols, and he was moved, and some of the House was moved with him. Then the minister who answered for the government in the Lords stood up and said what the ministry had said before: that the trials were in the ordinary courts, under the ordinary law, before juries; that the Crown’s mercy was the Crown’s, and would be advised upon in each case when that case was decided, and not before it, and not wholesale; and that the law must take its course. He said it shortly, and sat down, and I thought that was the end of it.

Then the Colonel stood up.

I will not give Your Majesty his words. They are in the record of the Lords, which is better kept than the record of the Commons, and anybody who has the right may read them there; and I have found, in writing this account, that the Colonel’s words are the thing I am least willing to put into my own hand, except where he put them on paper himself and let them go. I will give you what he said.

He began by telling the House that he had built the defences of the capital and had had charge of them through the whole of the rebellion; that a great many of the men of whom the motion spoke had been sent against those works, and some of them had died in front of them; and that the House should weigh what he was about to say knowing that. That was all he said about himself.

Then he asked the House for mercy for the men who had carried arms. He did not ask it in the motion’s terms. He said that a soldier is told where his duty lies and is not asked to judge it, and that this is what makes him a soldier and not a mob. He said that the men who had filled the rebel regiments had been told where their duty lay by their Province, which was to say by the men whose business it was to know: by its assembly, and its governor, and its judges, and its newspapers, and its pulpits; and that they had believed what they were told, as soldiers must; and that they had been lied to by their betters. He used that word. I heard the House take it, as a room takes a draught when a door is opened behind it. He said that a man who had been lied to by his betters, and had believed them, and had gone where he was sent, ought not to be hanged for it by the Crown he had been lied to about.

And then, without any pause that I could hear, and in the same voice, he said that he asked nothing for the men who had governed the rebel state. He said that they had not been told where their duty lay. They had done the telling. He said that he would not ask the House to pray for mercy for them, and that he did not, and he sat down.

He had spoken, I suppose, for a quarter of an hour. He had not raised his voice once, and he had not looked at the gallery, or at the bishops, or at the Throne. The House had filled while he was speaking, as the word went out into the lobby that he was up, and the doors at the bar opened and shut, and opened and shut, and by the end there were lords standing at the bar because there was nowhere left for them to sit. When he sat down nobody made any sound at all.

The bishop who had seconded the motion stood up again after a while and said, with a good deal of feeling, that the noble Lord had divided what mercy did not divide; that the Crown’s mercy was not a thing to be weighed out by the noble Lord between one sort of sinner and another. The Colonel did not answer him. He did not answer anybody. He sat at the end of the cross bench with his hands on his knees through two more hours of it, while men on both sides of the House said what they thought he had meant, and at the end of it the old lord from the Eastern Shore withdrew his motion, as everybody had known he would, and the House rose, and there was no division, and nothing was decided by any of it that I know of.

I wrote in an earlier place in this account that I never once heard the Colonel say what he thought of the rebellion, and I have read that place over since, with this speech in mind, and I have let it stand. He did not say what he thought of it. He did not say that the cause had been wrong, or the Province, or that the men he spoke for had been wrong to fight; he said only that they had been told, and had believed, and that the men who told them had not told them the truth. He said what he thought of a soldier’s position, and of the men who had put him in it, which is a different thing, and he was exact about the difference, as he was exact about everything. He had been told too, in the same April, by the same Province. Your Majesty will remember that it offered him the command of its forces, and what he answered. He did not mention it.

I sat in the gallery, when it was over and the lords were going out below me, and thought about my brother, who had been told by the Province in the April of 1861 where his duty lay, and had believed it, and had written to tell me so in a letter in which I could hear his voice in every line; and who was at home at Marlfield that July, on his parole, with his shoulder stiff, under no indictment, and, as far as I know, under no fear of one. My brother was never indicted. I do not know why. I do not think it was because of anything the Colonel said in the Lords, and I do not know that it was not.

And I thought about Philip, who had been acquitted in May, and who had not been told where his duty lay by anybody, because he had helped to draft the telling, and was proud of it, and had told me so in my lodging in London. The Colonel had known him as a cadet, as he had known me. I do not know which of the two of them the Colonel was thinking of, if he was thinking of either. I do not suppose he would have told me if I had asked.

I waited for him at the foot of the gallery stairs. He came out with his hat in his hand, alone, and saw me, and stopped. He asked me whether the gallery could hear. He said that he had been told that it heard badly, and that he had not known how loud to speak. I said that I had heard every word. He said, “Thank you, Mr Ashton,” and asked me to give his compliments to Mrs Ashton, and went out to his carriage, and I walked home.

I have thought a good deal about why he sent me the order. I have thought that he wanted somebody in the gallery who would not make anything of it, as he had wanted a witness at the deed who would not; and I have thought that he wanted me to be able to tell my brother that it had been said, by somebody, in that House, so that he should not have to write it himself to a rebel captain on his parole. I did tell my brother, in the spring, in the way I shall come to. I do not know which it was, or whether it was either. I have been wrong before about why the Colonel did things, and he has never once told me when.

He did not speak on it again. Your Majesty knows what was done that winter, because I have told you: the trials ended one after another, and the men were hanged, dozens of them, and the Lord Protector among them, in the February. The Colonel did not speak of it in the Lords, or on his terrace, or anywhere that I was, then or since; and when the Lord Protector was hanged he made no comment on it that anybody I know has heard. I do not think that was indifference. I do not know what it was. I have thought that he had said what he had to say, once, in the place where it would be written down, and did not see that saying it again would make it any more true; and that is very like him; but it is my thought, and not his.

The General began to come on Sundays that summer.

He was disbanding the armies, regiment by regiment, and he worked, I was told, all the week, from early in the morning until late at night. On Sunday afternoons he rode across the bridge to the heights, by himself or with a single orderly, on a big bay horse, in an old coat with one of its shoulder straps half off, smoking; and he came up the road past the rows to the house, and left his horse in the paddock with Traveller, and went up the steps to the terrace; and he and the Colonel sat there in two chairs for three or four hours, until the light went.

They talked very little. I was there on a good many of those Sundays, because Anne and I had been asked to dinner, and after dinner the ladies went in to Mrs Lee and I went out to the terrace and sat on the step below the two chairs, because nobody told me not to. I can tell Your Majesty very nearly everything that was said on any one of those afternoons, because there was so little of it. They talked about horses. The General rode better than any man I have ever seen, and knew it, and the Colonel knew it, and they talked about Traveller, and about the General’s bay, and about a horse the General had had in Mexico and one the Colonel had had there, and once, for nearly an hour, about how a horse should be shod for the frost. They talked about the river, and how high it was, and about the weather. The General smoked one cigar after another and said nothing for a quarter of an hour at a time, and the Colonel did not seem to need him to say anything.

They never talked about the war, that I heard. They never talked about the trials, though the trials went on all that summer and autumn across the water in front of them, and every newspaper in America was full of them, and the General’s own terms had been drawn to keep the army out of them and had done it. He gave no opinion on the hangings, then or afterwards, to the Colonel or to anybody I know of. The Colonel never asked him for one.

I told Your Majesty, near the beginning of this account, that the General once said to me that he had no idea how the Colonel had come to know of him, in the April of 1861, when he was a clerk in a leather store whom nobody had heard of, and that he had always meant to ask him. That was at the river forts, in the February of 1862, with his cigar in his mouth. I sat on the step below the two of them through a good many Sundays after that summer, and I confess that I listened for it every time; and he never asked. Once, at the end of an afternoon in August, when I had walked down with him to his horse in the paddock, he got up into the saddle and sat there for a moment, and looked back up the slope at the terrace, where the Colonel was sitting by himself in the evening light with his hands on his knees; and I thought, for no reason that I could have given, that he was going to get down again, and go back up the steps, and ask him then. He did not. He touched his hat to me and rode down past the rows to the bridge. He came again the next Sunday, and sat for three hours, and did not ask, and I do not believe he ever has.

From the terrace at Arlington the whole of the capital is laid out across a mile of water: the Axis running up from the river, and Parliament House on Charter Hill at the top of it, and Columbia Palace at the far end. On a clear evening you can see the windows of the Lords from there, at their end of the building, where the Colonel stood up once and said what he said. You can see the roof of the gaol, if you know where to look, where the men he would not ask for were waiting their turn. And if you look down instead of across, you can see the rows below the terrace, going down the slope towards the river, a few more of them every week.

The two of them sat with all of that in front of them, Sunday after Sunday, through the summer and into the autumn, and talked about horses. I sat on the step below them, with my back to their chairs, and looked at it too, and said nothing, because saying nothing was the one thing I had learned to do well in that company. I have tried since to decide whether they did not speak of it because they could not, or because they had no need to, and I cannot decide. I know only that neither of them ever turned his chair away from it, and that the light went off the water every Sunday at about the same time, and the General went home.