The Kingdom of the American States

I came into London on a Sunday evening in the rain, by the train from Liverpool, with the box of charts on the seat beside me and my hand on it the whole way, and on the Monday morning I presented myself at the legation and was told that the Minister was at breakfast and would see me when he had finished, and that I might wait in the hall.

I am not going to name the Minister, Sir. He is living, and he has told me that he dislikes being written about more than he dislikes anything else in public life, which is saying a good deal, and I owe him a great deal of kindness. I will say only that he was a New England man of the old kind, a lawyer and the son of a lawyer, with a dry voice and a dry manner and a mind like a good lock, and that he had been sent to London in the spring with instructions from Mr Seward that I saw later and have not forgotten. They said that on the question of the rebellion’s standing the Union asked nothing of Your Majesty’s British government except that it should do nothing; that the reception of any agent of the rebellion, in any capacity, would be regarded by the ministry as an unfriendly act; and that the Minister was to make the case against recognition in terms that a European chancellery would understand, which is to say in terms of precedent and not of principle, because every government in Europe had rebels of its own, and would not wish to see a rebellion within a friendly monarchy rewarded for having been impudent enough to call itself loyal.

He finished his breakfast at a quarter to eleven and came out into the hall with his napkin still in his hand, and looked at me and at the box, and said, “You are the man who knows where the water is.” I said that I was. He said, “Good. Nobody here does,” and took me into his study, and gave me a chair, and for the next hour asked me questions about the coast of the Carolinas that I should not have expected a lawyer to know how to ask. At the end of it he said that the Admiralty would see me on the Wednesday, and that I was to tell them everything they asked and nothing they did not, and that I was on no account to give an opinion on whether Your Majesty’s British government ought to grant the request, because that was not a question on which an officer of the Union could be heard, and he would be obliged if I would not be heard on it at dinner either. I said that I was an engineer and thought about drains. He said that it was the most sensible thing anybody had said to him in London.

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I went to the Admiralty on the Wednesday, the one in Whitehall, which I had better specify too, since we have a board of Admiralty of our own at home and it does not resemble this one either.

I was taken up a great many stairs to a long room at the top of the building, under a skylight, where the Hydrographer kept his charts, and the Hydrographer himself was waiting for me there with two captains of the surveying service, all three of them in plain clothes and all three of them, I saw at once, men who had spent their lives on bad water in small boats. They had a long table cleared. I opened the box and spread the charts on it, the whole coast from the Capes of the Chesapeake to the Florida line, and then the sheet of Mobile Bay by itself at the end, and weighted the corners with the inkstands, and stood back; and for three hours they went over them inch by inch, with dividers and a glass, and asked me questions.

They knew a great deal already. They had their own charts of every harbour I had brought, some of them better than mine, and they had soundings of the bar at Charles Town that had been taken by a British frigate in the ‘forties and were more exact than anything in our department. What they did not have was the forts. They wished to know which of the batteries round each harbour could bear on which channels, and how far, and with what weight of shot; which of the old works had been rearmed since the spring and which had not; where the inlets through the outer banks of North Carolina could be passed at night by a vessel drawing eight feet, and where by one drawing twelve. I told them everything I knew, as the Minister had said I should. It took a long time, because I knew a great deal. One of the captains asked me, towards the end, about the walls of Sumter, which he had seen from a frigate’s deck when it was half built, and I told him which face had been finished last, and he wrote it down, and did not ask me how I knew, and I did not tell him.

Nobody said anything about whether the request would be granted. Nobody so much as mentioned it. When we had finished the Hydrographer rolled up the last of the charts himself, very carefully, and tied it, and said that their Lordships were obliged to me, and that the charts would be kept, if I had no objection, in case their Lordships should have occasion to need them. I said that I had no objection. He shook my hand and said, “We shall see whether we are to have the pleasure, Captain,” and that was the whole of it. I walked back to the legation down Whitehall in the sun, with the empty box under my arm, and the Minister asked me how it had gone, and I said that I did not know, and he said that this was what everybody in London said about everything that summer, and that I would get used to it.

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The legation was a tall narrow house in a square west of Piccadilly, rented furnished from a baronet who had gone abroad for his debts, and it was full of the baronet’s furniture and the baronet’s ancestors, who looked down from the walls at the Minister’s secretaries copying despatches as though they had never seen anything so vulgar in their lives. I did not lodge there. I had a room in a street off the Strand, in the house of a widow who let to gentlemen in the professions, and who asked me on the first evening whether I was one of the Americans who were fighting the King, and when I said that I was one of the Americans who were fighting for him, asked me what the difference was. I have been asked that question since by a great many people, some of them a good deal cleverer than my landlady, and I have never answered it as well as I should like.

I should tell Your Majesty what London was like that summer, because I do not think you were told.

It was the season. The streets were full of carriages, and the Park was full of horses, and every evening there were dinners at which I was a curiosity, because there were not many American officers in London that year and none at all who had stood in the engine house at Harpers Ferry. I went to a good many of them, because the Minister said that I should, that it was useful for the legation to have a Virginian in a Union coat at people’s tables, since the people at those tables could not otherwise be made to believe that such a thing existed. I was asked about the war at every one of them. I was asked about Harpers Ferry, and about John Brown, and whether it was true that he was alive, and whether it was true that the Crown had refused to hang him out of sympathy for the abolitionists; and I said that it was true that he was alive and not true that it was sympathy, and I told them about the plea, and they listened politely and did not believe me, exactly as my neighbours in King George County had not believed me eighteen months before, and for the same reason. They had decided what it meant.

But mostly I was asked about cotton.

I had not understood until I came to England how much of England was made of our cotton. I knew, as everybody in Virginia knew, that the southern crop went to Liverpool and was spun in Lancashire, and I had a vague notion of mills and chimneys. I did not know that there were whole towns in the north of England, towns of fifty and a hundred thousand people, that did nothing else; that four out of every five bales they spun came from the five polities and the rest of the cotton country; and that every one of those towns had begun, that spring, to count its stocks of raw cotton in the warehouses and to work out how many weeks they would last. The blockade was not yet closing anything much. It was a declaration and a handful of ships. But the merchants at Liverpool had read the declaration, and the mill owners at Manchester and Preston had read the merchants, and they had begun to put their hands on short time, and the hands had begun to understand why.

It was put to me at a dinner in Belgrave Square, by a gentleman who owned three mills near Blackburn and was a member of the House of Commons, the British one, which I had better specify, since I sat in the galleries of two Houses of Commons that year and they did not resemble each other in the least. He said that he did not care twopence about the rights and wrongs of the American quarrel, and that he did not think Englishmen should be asked to; that the rebel polities had grown the cotton, and that the Union proposed to stop them selling it; and that the result of the Union’s proposal would be that forty thousand families in his part of Lancashire would have nothing to eat by Christmas. He asked me whether I thought that was just. I said that I was an engineer. He said that he had heard that was what I said, and that it was not an answer, and he was right, and I did not have another.

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That was the case for recognising the rebellion, and it was a strong case, and it was made by serious people. I want Your Majesty to understand that, because I think it is sometimes said now that recognition was never more than a few Liverpool brokers and a few newspapers, and that it is a kind of insult to Your Majesty’s British ministers to suggest that they could ever have contemplated it. They contemplated it. I was in London from the beginning of June to the end of August and I heard it contemplated at every table I sat at. The mills depended on the cotton. The blockade, if it ever closed, would strangle the mills. There would be real hunger in real towns, and the people who were hungry would have had no say in the war and would get no good from it. And the rebels said, very loudly, in every newspaper that would print them, that they were not rebels at all; that they were loyal to the Crown and resisting only a ministry that had lost the right to govern them; and that the British government, which served the same Crown, could hardly refuse to hear the King’s loyal subjects merely because a ministry in New Westminster called them names. There were men in the British Commons who found that argument very attractive, and some of them were not fools.

The other case was made, so far as I ever heard it made, by Lord Palmerston, and he did not make it to me. I saw him once that summer, at a reception at the Foreign Office, across a crowded room: an old man with dyed whiskers and a high colour, standing with his back to a fireplace and laughing at something, very upright, very much at his ease. I was told that he had not decided. I was told that by people who were in a position to know, and I believe it was true; the question was still open when I left London, and it stayed open, I learned afterwards, for a long time after that, and nearly cost him his ministry when he closed it. What I was told, by the Minister and by others, was that if he decided against recognition it would not be on account of slavery, which he did not much care about either way, but on account of Ireland, and India, and Canada: that a Prime Minister who governed the largest empire in the world, full of people who would very much like to be rid of it, could not afford to establish the principle that a province which rose against its government in the sovereign’s name might be recognised by the sovereign’s other ministers for having done it so politely. I did not know whether that was true. I knew that it was the only argument against recognition I ever heard put in London that had nothing to do with us at all, and that I found it more reassuring than all the others put together.

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It was in the middle of June that the papers found the joke.

The rebel state had not got a name. That was the truth of it. The assemblies that had gone over had constituted something among themselves, with a head who was styled the Lord Protector and a seat that was to be at Charles Town in South Carolina, and a great chair on a dais in its chamber that was kept empty for the King’s representative, whom they had invited the King to name; but they had not given the thing a name, because to give it a name would have been to admit that it was a new thing, and their whole case was that it was not new, but only the loyal part of the old. In their own papers they called themselves “these States,” or “the American States,” and nothing more. And a comic paper in Fleet Street, one week in June, observed that a state which insisted it was a monarchy, and had no monarch, might as well be called one, and called it the Kingdom of the American States, and printed a drawing of a great empty throne with a planter in a straw hat standing beside it holding a cotton bale, waiting.

It was all over London in a week. It was said at dinners and printed in the serious papers and shouted by the boys selling the comic ones in the Strand, and I heard it in my landlady’s kitchen. The rebels in London, of whom there were a good many that summer, gentlemen of good family who had come over on private business that was not private, protested against it in letters to The Times; and I was told afterwards that they used it themselves, in their own correspondence home, because it was easier than anything else. I laughed at it when I first saw it. I did not laugh at it later. It seemed to me later that the joke had got hold of the one thing about the rebellion that the rebellion could not answer, which was that it had made a seat for a King who had not asked for one, and was waiting for him to sit in it.

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Philip Lightfoot came to my door on the evening of Saturday the twenty-second of June.

My landlady brought his card up. I looked at it for some time before I told her to show him in, because I knew the name and the hand, and I knew that he could not be in London on any business that I could be glad of; and I thought, for the length of time it took her to go down the stairs, about telling her that I was out. I did not tell her that. He came up the stairs two at a time, as Stuart used to, and stood in my door in a black coat and a grey hat, very brown from the sea, and held out his hand and said, “Harry. I told you I would see you soon.”

I took his hand. I want that set down, Sir, because there are people who have said since that I should not have, and I would like Your Majesty to know that I did, and that I would do it again.

He had come by way of Nassau. He had gone out of Wilmington in a fast steamer in the dark, past two of our ships that did not see him, and had taken the mail packet from Nassau to Southampton, and he had been in London three days. He told me all of this as though he were telling me about a shooting trip. He was in high spirits, and very thin, and he talked faster than I remembered, and he drank my landlady’s sherry, which was not good, as though it were. He asked about Anne, and about my mother, and I told him what I could, which was not much. He told me about Edmund, who was with Colonel Jackson’s brigade in the valley, with his company, and was well, and sent his love, if I would take it. Then he put his glass down and said, “I had better tell you why I am here, since you will know in a week whether I tell you or not.”

He was carrying a petition to the King.

He did not show it to me, and I did not ask to see it. He told me what was in it, because he said that it would be printed soon enough in any case and he would rather I heard it from him. It had been adopted at Charles Town, by the assembly of the American States, with the Lord Protector’s authority, and it set out the constitutional position at length, in a great many pages that Philip said he had helped to draft and was very proud of; and it asked Your Majesty to acknowledge the American States as loyal to your person, and to recognise the men who had adopted it as your true subjects in America, and to name a representative to the chair that had been kept for him. He said that there were several gentlemen in London charged with getting it into Your Majesty’s hands, and that he was one of them, and that they had friends near the Court who would know how it could be done. He said that he did not ask anything of me. He only wished me to know, so that I should not hear it from somebody else and think that he had hidden it from me.

I said, “Philip, you know what my instructions are.”

He said that he supposed they were to tell the Minister. I said that they were. I said that Mr Seward had instructed the legation that the reception of any agent of the rebellion would be treated as an unfriendly act, and that the Minister was bound to know of any such agent’s presence and purpose, and that I was bound to tell him. He said that he had expected nothing else. He said, “I should think the less of you if you did not,” and he meant it; I have known him all my life and I know when he means a thing. I asked him where he was lodging, and then I said that I did not want to know, and he laughed and said that I was quite right, and that it would save us both a great deal of trouble later.

He stayed an hour more. We talked about the Point, and about Stuart, and about a professor of drawing we had both detested, and about a girl in Highland Falls whom neither of us had married. When he went he stood at my door again with his hat in his hand and said, “You might come to the Court with us, Harry, if you liked. You would only have to stand there. Your face would be worth a hundred pages.” I said that I would be at the Court in any case; that the Minister was to present me at the levee on the Wednesday, as a Union officer. He looked at me for a moment and then he laughed again, the old laugh I had known since we were eighteen, and said, “Then you will be nearer the King on Wednesday than any of us will get all summer. Tell him we are loyal, Harry. He will believe it from a man in a Union coat,” and went down the stairs.

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I went to the legation on the Monday morning and told the Minister.

I told him everything that Philip had told me, and his name, and that he was a classmate of mine and a friend, and that he had come from Charles Town by way of Nassau, and what the petition asked; and I told him that I did not know where he was lodging and had not asked. The Minister listened to all of it without interrupting, writing nothing down, as was his way, and when I had finished he was quiet for some time. Then he said that he was obliged to me, and that he knew it could not have been agreeable. He said that he would do nothing whatever about it.

I asked him what he meant.

He said that his instructions were to make it understood that the reception of a rebel agent would be an unfriendly act, and that he had made it understood, in the proper quarters, in the proper form, some weeks ago, and that there was nothing to be gained by making it understood again more loudly. He said that the worst thing the legation could do that summer was to give anybody in London the chance to say that the Union had made a scene; that a scene was precisely what the rebels wanted, because a scene would make them a party, and a party could be heard. He said that he did not propose to have the gentleman watched, or followed, or complained of, or mentioned. He said, “If your friend’s paper reaches the King, Captain Ashton, it will be because somebody near the King chose to let it, and nothing we can do from this house will change that. And if it does not, it will be because somebody chose otherwise, and nothing we can do will help that either. All we can do is not to make a noise. It is a very hard thing to do well. Most of my profession never learn it.”

I asked him what he thought would happen.

He said that he thought nothing would happen. He said it in his dry voice, looking out of the window at the square, where it had begun to rain again. He said, “I think, Captain, that the most useful thing in the world this summer would be for nothing to happen, very loudly, for a long time.” And then he asked me whether my coat was in order for the Wednesday, and whether I knew how to walk backwards out of a room without falling over, and when I said that I did not, he rang for a secretary who did, and I spent the rest of the morning learning.