The Roll

Edmund wrote to me in March, for the first time since the April of 1861.

It was a short letter and a business letter, and it was written in his left hand, which he had taught himself to write with in the prison, and which was very like a child’s. He said that the men of the company who had come home had formed themselves into a society, for the burial of their dead and the relief of the widows and children of the men who had not come home, and that it had a president and a secretary and a treasurer, and rules, and a roll, and a subscription, which most of them could not afford and all of them paid. He said that the society had resolved, at its meeting in February, to bring the nine home from Arlington Heights and bury them in the churchyard, and that it had money enough for the coffins and the boat. And he said that nobody in the county knew where on the heights the nine were lying, except that it was in a trench at the edge of a wood in front of a fort, which was not enough; and that I had staked the line between the burial parties that day, and must know the ground; and would I find it for them.

That was all. He did not say please, and he did not need to.

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I knew the ground, but I did not know the trench. I had stood at the stakes all that day in the September of 1862, and I had watched the rebel parties carry their dead back from the line to the edge of the woods, and dig, and fill; but I had been watching the line, which was my business, and not the trenches, which were theirs, and three and a half years of weather and brush had been over the place since.

The Colonel knew it. I had reported to him that evening, as I have told Your Majesty, how many trenches had been dug and how long they were, and he had written something in his book. I went across the river on a Sunday in the beginning of April and asked him whether he had the book still. He had. He sent his daughter for it, and found the page, and read it, and then took a sheet of paper and copied it out for me himself, at the table on the terrace, in his small hand: the number of the trenches, and the length of each, and the bearing of each from the salient of the fort, and its distance from the fence. He did not ask me what I wanted it for. I told him. He listened, and nodded, and gave me the paper, and said, “The ground there is clay, Mr Ashton. You will want a probe.” He did not say anything else about it, then or afterwards.

The Quartermaster-General’s office gave the leave in a week, on a printed form, which had a space for the number of bodies to be removed and the place they were to be removed to, and none for which side they had fought on.

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They came up the river on the Monday in a schooner that belonged to one of the society’s members, a man who had carried wood and oysters to the capital before the war, and they tied up at the wharf below the heights and slept on board. There were six of them, with the coffins in the hold. Tom Sisson was one, who had been on the burial party that day and had stood at the stakes and asked me whether the captain was alive. Edmund was another.

I had not thought that he would come. I met them at the wharf in the morning with a cart and a probe and the Colonel’s paper, and he was standing on the deck of the schooner in a black coat, with his right arm held a little stiff, and he came down the plank and shook my hand, left-handed, and did not say anything about where we were. We went up the road through the works to the north end of the line in the cart, and from the fort I paced the bearings out along the edge of the woods with the Colonel’s paper in my hand, and found the fence, or what was left of it, and the end of the third trench where the paper put it; and Tom Sisson walked along the edge of the trees for a while, looking at nothing that I could see, and then stopped and said that it was here, by this stump, that the county’s men had gone in, because they had laid them together at the end, and he had stood here when they did it.

I am not going to tell Your Majesty about the work. The men of the society did it themselves, with their own spades, and would not let the soldiers from the fort help them, though the soldiers offered, and stood about at a little distance all day with their hands in their pockets. I will say only that the jackets were green, and that this is how they knew which of the men in the trench were theirs. There were not many companies in Virginia that wore green with buff facings, as I have said, and Tom Sisson knew the buttons.

They found seven. The other two they did not find. Tom Sisson thought that they might have been carried to another trench, or never brought back from the ditch at all, and Edmund said that they would be lying beside the men they had died beside, and that this was as well as anywhere, and that the society would enter them on its roll with the rest. They closed the trench again over the others, carefully, and Edmund read the names of the seven from a paper, one by one, as the coffins went into the cart, and then the names of the two, and then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

While they were filling the trench he walked out from the woods by himself, across the field where the stakes had been, to the ditch.

I followed him after a while. He was standing on the lip of it, at the place where the company had come to it, I suppose; he did not say, and I did not ask. It had silted a good deal in nearly four years, and the grass had come down over the edge of the counterscarp, and there were brambles in the bottom; but it was still a ditch, and the fort was still behind it, and the slope in front of it was still bare, because I had cleared it so that it would be. He stood there a long time. Then he said, “You drew it well, Harry.” I did not answer him. There was nothing I could say that both of us did not already know. After a while he turned round and walked back to the woods, and took his spade from Tom Sisson, and helped to fill.

They went down the river on the Wednesday morning, on the ebb, with the seven in the hold, and I went with them, with a week’s leave, which the department gave me without asking what for.

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They were buried on the Saturday, in the churchyard of the church where the flag had been blessed.

It was a fine morning, and the whole county was there, I think: the families of the seven, and the families of the two who had not been found, and the families of the men who had died in other places and were not coming home at all; and the men of the society, in black coats, those who had them, and in what was left of their green jackets, those who had not. Most of them had come on horseback. The terms that Parker drew for the General had let any man who claimed a horse as his own keep it, because a man going home to a farm in the autumn needs a horse to plough with in the spring, and a good many of the company had come home with horses, and they rode to the burial on them, and tied them along the churchyard wall in a long line, and the boys of the county held them.

The old captain spoke at the graves. He was nearly seventy now, and he was the society’s president, and he made the speech he had always made, from the cart on the green, about duty and honour and the county, and about the men who had answered when they were called. Nobody minded that it was the same speech. I think they would have minded if it had not been.

And then my mother came forward from among the women, with the flag.

She had brought it from the chest in the hall, where it had lain folded since Edmund brought it home. I had never seen it unfolded. It was green silk, with the arms of the Province on it, and the name of the company, and the date of 1861, in gold thread that she had sewn herself with the women from the quarters, who were gone. She unfolded it with Mrs Turner from Woodlawn, who had lost two sons, and they laid it on the first coffin as it went down, and took it up again, and laid it on the second, and so on down the row, the same flag on each of the seven, until the last was in the ground. Then they folded it again, very carefully, the two of them, as women fold a sheet, and my mother carried it home.

The captain of the garrison stood at the churchyard gate through all of it, with his hat in his hand, by himself. He had come, I learned afterwards, because he had been asked; the society had sent him a letter, as a matter of courtesy, to say when and where it would be. He did not come in. He did not do anything when the flag came out, and nobody looked at him when it did, and I do not think anybody expected him to do anything. He had no instructions about flags.

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Edmund showed me the roll that night, at the table in the parlour, after my mother had gone up.

It was a book bound in green cloth, the kind of book a county clerk keeps his minutes in, and it was very well kept. In the front were the rules of the society, written out fair and signed by every member: that its purposes were the burial of its dead and the relief of the widows and children of its members, and no other purpose whatever; that it met on the first Saturday of each month, in the vestry of the church, since the garrison had the green; that its officers were a president, a secretary and a treasurer, elected every year; and that every member paid his subscription quarterly into the hands of the treasurer, who was Tom Sisson. Then came the roll. It was the old roll of the company, copied out from the muster roll of 1861, every man of the forty and the men who had joined after, with a column for the subscription, and a column for remarks; and against the names of the dead was written where they had died, and where they were buried, if anybody knew; and against seven of them, that afternoon, in Edmund’s left hand, he had written the name of the churchyard, and the date. Then came the minutes. Edmund was the secretary. He kept the minutes himself, and they were the best minutes I have ever read, short and exact and in good order, with every motion and who had moved it and how it was carried.

I told him then about the Colonel’s speech in the Lords, in the July, which I had meant to tell him at Christmas and had not; and I told it him as exactly as I could, as I have told it Your Majesty.

He listened to the whole of it without saying anything, turning the roll round and round on the table in front of him with his good hand. When I came to the part about the men who had been lied to by their betters he stopped turning it. When I had finished he said, “Lied to.” I said yes. He said, “By our betters.” He laughed, a little, not much. He said, “I suppose he means it kindly.” I said that I thought he meant it exactly. He said, “That’s worse.”

Then he said, “Nobody lied to me, Harry. I read every word they said, before they voted and after. I knew what they were saying, and I knew what it was worth, and I went anyway, because the company was going and it was mine, and because Mother had sewn the flag. Nobody lied to me.” He looked down at the roll. “I’d sooner be hanged for it than let off for a fool.”

I said nothing. After a while he said, “Don’t tell him I said so.” I said that I would not. I have not. I have only told Your Majesty, which I think he would allow, since it is not the same thing.

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The captain of the garrison sent a corporal for me in the morning, to ask whether Major Ashton would call on him.

He was a young man from Vermont, who had been a schoolmaster before the war and looked it, and he had his quarters in the old jury room of the courthouse, with his company in tents on the green; and I think he had asked for me because I was the only regular officer he had seen in a month, and he wanted to talk to somebody who would understand what he was showing me. He showed me his letter book.

He had reported, since the New Year, three things that had happened in the counties up the river, and he had copied every report fair into the book before he sent it, as he had been taught. A school that had been opened for the children of the freed people, in a church of their own, had been burned at night in the middle of February, with nobody in it, and nobody had seen who did it. A man who had served in one of the Black regiments, and had come home to the county he had been held in before the war, had been taken out of his house at night in March by a party of men on horses, with sacks over their heads, and beaten, and told to leave the county, and he had left it. And a freed woman who had sworn to a debt before the magistrate in another county had had her house fired a week afterwards, and had withdrawn her evidence. He had reported each of them to his colonel, and his colonel had sent them on, and they had gone up to the General, he was told, who had endorsed them and sent them on again, and asked for instructions; and the instructions had come back down the same way, and they said that the matter was for the authorities of the Province and for the courts.

I asked him what he did then.

He said, “I report the next one.”

I asked him whether anything of the kind had happened in King George. He said that it had not. He said it as a man says that it has not rained yet. He said that the society was a lawful body, and that he had been to a meeting of it, on its invitation, and that it had read its minutes and voted money to a widow and resolved to buy a pall, and that he had nothing to report about it and had reported nothing. He said, “They keep very good minutes, Major. Your brother keeps them.” Then he looked out of the window of the jury room, across the green, at the churchyard wall, where the horses had been tied the day before. He did not say anything about the horses. Neither did I.

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I have been asked since, in the capital, by men who knew that I had been in King George that spring, whether what I saw there was the rebellion settling into its grave or something else getting up out of it, and I have not been able to answer. I saw men bury their dead, under the flag my mother had sewn, and go home. I saw a roll and a subscription and a minute book, and a captain of the garrison with nothing to report. I saw a line of horses along a churchyard wall. I have told Your Majesty that I have heard the hangings called the thing that settled the rebellion for ever, and the thing that poisoned it for ever, and that I think both are true. I think the same of that churchyard. I do not know yet which will prove the truer, and I do not think the men who were in it know either. I think my brother does not know. I think that may be the worst of it.

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When I got back to the capital there was a newspaper on my desk in the drawing office, folded open, which somebody had left there; I never learned who.

It was an abolitionist paper, and it had printed an account given by a man named Wesley Norris, who had been held at Arlington before the war, among the people the Colonel’s father-in-law had left to be freed. I will give Your Majesty the substance of it, as I have given other papers that were not mine. He said that in 1859, before the October, he and his sister and a cousin of theirs had run, and had been caught in Maryland, and brought back to Arlington; and that the Colonel had had them whipped; that he had told the overseer to lay it on well; that when the overseer would not, a constable had been brought in to do it; and that afterwards their backs had been washed with brine.

The Colonel never answered it in public. I heard at second hand, a week or two afterwards, that he had written, in a private letter, that there was not a word of truth in it. I had that from Custis, who mentioned it in the drawing office without my asking, as a man mentions the weather, and went back to his drawing; and I did not ask him to whom the letter was written, or what else it said, and I have not seen it.

I was not at Arlington in the summer of 1859. I was not one of his household; I had not served under him since I left the Point, and I did not serve under him again until he came into the Chief Engineer’s office in the October and took me with him to Harpers Ferry, after whatever happened at Arlington had happened. I know of no other witness, on either side. I have tried to think what I know of him that bears on it, and everything I know of him bears both ways. He hired out his father-in-law’s people to pay the debts of the estate, as I have told Your Majesty, and I have been told since that families were parted by it; and he freed them on the last day the will allowed, and not on the first. He is the most exact man I have ever served under, and the most just, and the coldest. I have seen him stop an oak from being felled. None of that tells me what was done in a yard at Arlington in the summer of 1859, to three people who had run and been brought back. I cannot settle it, and I will not try. I set it down because it was printed, and because Your Majesty will hear it from other mouths, and because I will not leave it out of an account that has put in so much else of his; and I set down beside it that he has said that it is not true, and that I do not know.

And I will set down one thing more, since I have set down the rest. I have never had a man whipped. I have never needed to. Whatever was done at Marlfield was done by my father, and after him by my mother, and by whoever they employed to do it, and I was always somewhere else: at the Point, or on the forts, or at the department, drawing harbours. And when I read the account of the yard at Arlington, at my desk that morning, the thing I found I could not stop thinking about was not the Colonel at all. It was that I did not know whether anything like it had ever been done at Marlfield, in my name, while I was away; and that in thirty-four years it had never once occurred to me to ask.