Almost from his arrival in America Pinkerton had been a dedicated abolitionist and Underground Railroad agent. His house in Chicago was used as a “station” on the escape route to Canada, and after John Brown’s Missouri raid of December, 1858, in which eleven slaves were rescued, Pinkerton met them at Chicago, provided them with a railroad car and $500 which he raised at a meeting by personally taking round the hat, and saw them, “rejoicing at the safety of the Union Jack”, across the Canadian border.
Physically he was as Flashman describes him – dour, tough, small but burly, and of nondescript appearance; in his best-known picture, taken during a meeting with Lincoln, he looks like a discontented tramp with a conspicuously clean collar.
George McWatters, of the New York Metropolitan Police, was another Scot, born probably in Kilmarnock about 1814, and brought up in Ulster. He emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1840s, studied law and collected debts in Philadelphia, took part (unsuccessfully) in the California gold rush, and settled in New York as a theatrical agent, his principal client being Flashman’s old paramour, Lola Montez. In 1858 he joined the New York police, and recorded his twelve years’ service in a wonderfully self-admiring autobiography which is nonetheless a mine of curious information about the New York underworld of his day. (See J. D. Horan and H. Swiggett, The Pinkerton Story, 1952; Allan Pinkerton, Thirty Years a Detective, 1884; Mrs Rose Greenhow, My Imprisonment, and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington, 1863; George S. McWatters, Knots Untied, or Ways and By-ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives, 1873.)
29. Flashman’s reaction to the hamburger is what one would have expected. He would not know it by that name; the expression “Hamburg steak” does not seem to have come into use until later in the century.
30. For once we are able to assign a definite date to an incident in the Flashman Papers. Senator Seward, the Republican leader, sailed from New York for Europe on May 7, 1859, on the ocean steamer Ariel, receiving a tumultuous send-off from two Republican committees and three hundred well-wishers “with shouts and music, bells and whistles, dipping ensigns, waving hats, hands, and handkerchiefs”. (Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward, 1900; G. G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, 1967.)
31. William Henry Seward (1801–72), who had been a school-teacher and lawyer before embarking on a political career, was an implacable enemy of slavery. As Governor of New York he had refused to move against those who rescued slaves, passed laws to hinder the recapture of runaways, and in a memorable speech in 1858 coined the phrase “irrepressible conflict”, which “means that the U.S. must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding or entirely a free-labour nation”. His nomination as Republican candidate in the 1860 Presidential election was widely taken for granted, and when he visited Europe in 1859 he was received with the attention due to a President-elect: as he had forecast to Flashman, he met the Queen, Lord Palmerston (who had just become Prime Minister for the second time), the Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell, Gladstone, Lord Macaulay, and many other prominent figures. When the Republicans met in Chicago in the following year Seward was still firm favourite, but although he won the first two ballots he was defeated on the third by the comparatively unknown Abraham Lincoln, the “prairie lawyer” as Seward called him. He became Lincoln’s Secretary of State and rendered vital service to his country in the Trent Affair of 1861, when the seizure by an American warship of a British vessel carrying Confederate diplomats to Europe caused a crisis which might well have led to war. Three things helped to a peaceful solution: the breakdown of the transatlantic cable made hasty communication impossible; Prince Albert and the Queen moderated the tone of the British Government’s demand for the release with apologies of the diplomats, and Seward performed the apparently impossible by climbing down without losing face.
It was a turning-point in American history, for if the U.S. had refused to yield, and war had followed, she could not have hoped to fight Britain and the Confederacy together; the Civil War would have been lost and Southern independence assured. Yet yielding would have outraged the American public, which was jubilant at Britain’s discomfiture, and might have weakened Lincoln’s government to the point where it could no longer save the Union. That Britain was for once entirely in the right, naturally made the problem no easier. Seward solved it with a reply to the British demand which was a masterpiece of flannel, confused the question brilliantly (he even contended that the diplomats’ persons were contraband), managed to suggest that America had won the argument, and concluded by saying that the diplomats would be “cheerfully liberated”. He heaped coals of fire on the lion’s head by granting free passage across American soil to the British expeditionary force which had been sent to Canada in anticipation of war with the U.S., but had been forced to put in at an American port because the St Lawrence was ice-bound. Seward’s other claim to fame is as the purchaser of Alaska in 1867.
Flashman paints a fair picture of the shrewd, egotistical little statesman of whom it was said, justly or not, that he never spoke from conviction. His passion for cigars, and for informal behaviour (one observer described it as “lawless”) is well attested; in private he was genial, given to cursing, and to kicking off his shoes. He could not be described as an Anglophile, yet he obviously took entirely for granted what came to be called the “special relationship”; references to the natural “sympathy and affection” between the “European and American branches of the British race” are to be found in his speeches and letters. (See Bancroft, Van Deusen, and S. E. Morison, Oxford History of the American People, vol. 2, 1965. William Howard Russell describes an interview with Seward in My Diary North and South, 1862.)
32. The Secret Six were Dr Samuel Howe, a devoted freedom fighter who had served in the Greek army against the Turks and aided the Poles against the Russians before becoming a pioneer in the education of the deaf and blind; Gerrit Smith, philanthropist, reformer, and Congressman who had run for the governorship of New York; Theodore Parker, a leading theological scholar and a tireless and influential abolitionist; George Stearns, a Boston businessman who, with Smith, was Brown’s principal source of funds; Thomas Higginson, a fiery clergyman who became colonel of the first black regiment during the Civil War; and Franklin Sanborn, schoolmaster, poet, and author, who was Brown’s biographer and most devoted supporter. (See Villard; Oates; Sanborn.)
33. “Young Stearns”, the twelve-year-old son of George L. Stearns, one of the Secret Six, had given all his pocket money to John Brown two years earlier, to help the anti-slavery cause. In return, Brown wrote the boy a remarkable letter, his famous “Autobiography”, in which he describes his childhood in picturesque detail mingled with sound moral advice. The “Autobiography”, addressed to “My Dear Young Friend” and dated Red Rock, Iowa, 15th July, 1857, was much admired by Brown’s supporters as evidence of his warm human qualities, but excited the scorn of Brown’s fiercest critic, Peebles Wilson, who found it “valuable as an exhibit of his scheming to finance [his] operations”. No doubt Brown knew it would impress young Stearns’s parents, on whom he depended for funds, but that is not to say that he was being insincere, or was unmoved by the boy’s gift. Anyway, it is a fascinating document; simple, homely, naive perhaps, eccentrically punctuated, and quite beautifully written. One would have to be a hardened cynic to be altogether untouched by it, and if, as Wilson suggests, it was written for sordid motives, then Brown, in addition to being a fine English stylist, carried hypocrisy into the realms of high art. (See Peebles Wilson; Villard; Sanborn.)
34. There are two words to describe John Brown’s appearance: grim and formidable. Even allowing for the fact that photography of the time required the sitter to hold his pose for some seconds, which often resulted in a fixed stare, the face that looks out of his pictures is a daunting one; the long Anglo-Saxon head, prominent nose and ears, wide mouth set like a trap, stern certainty of expression, and above all, the level implacable eyes (“piercing blue-grey, flashing with energy
or drooping and hooded like an eagle”) bring to mind immediately words like Ironside, Yankee, Puritan, and Covenanter. It is, if not handsome (as most of his sons were), an extremely fine face, and it is easy to understand the spell that he seems to have cast over his followers and supporters; equally easy, too, to see why he was called a fanatic. The most impressive portraits show him clean-shaven: the early photograph, taken when he was in his mid-forties, one hand raised in pledge while the other holds the white flag; the imposing Boston portrait of 1858, by J. J. Hawes; the daguerreotype of 1857, in which he looks drawn and tired – quite the least convincing is the full-bearded painting by N. B. Onthank, based on a photo taken in the month when Flashman met him; by the time of his famous raid Brown had trimmed his beard short. Although only five feet nine inches in height, he looked taller, despite the stoop of his later years; he walked slowly, had a deep, metallic voice, normally wore a “serious and patient” expression, and had a fine head of dark brown hair sprinkled with grey.
35. This promise of Brown’s explains what would otherwise have been an insoluble mystery: why, in the highly detailed records of the Harper’s Ferry raid, and in all the correspondence of John Brown and his associates, is there no mention of “Comber” and Joe Simmons? Plainly, Brown kept his word – as did those American agents and officers who were well aware of the presence in Brown’s band, and at the Ferry, of these two additional raiders.
36. Brown visited London in 1849 on a wool-marketing venture which proved a costly failure. He travelled to Yorkshire, and spoke highly of English farming, stone-masonry, and roast beef, but thought the horses inferior to those of the U.S. He had time for a brief trip to the Continent, where he visited Paris, Hamburg, Brussels, and the field of Waterloo. The “poodle hair” story is to be found in his biographies.
37. Undoubtedly Mrs Julia Ward Howe, who two years later became famous as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. (See Note 3.)
38. This grim joke of Brown’s was obviously one he enjoyed repeating; it occurs in a different context in his biographies, as do many of the remarks which Flashman reports from their first meeting at Sanborn’s house. Artemus Ward’s description of Brown appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of March 22, 1859.
39. From the martial hymn, “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Gates of Brass”, by James Montgomery (1771–1854).
40. Jerry (Jeremiah Goldsmith) Anderson echoed his words to Flashman in a letter of July 5, 1859: “Their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly … there are a few who dare to answer this call … in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.”
41. The speaker may have been Henry David Thoreau, the celebrated American writer, who makes the comparison in his “Plea for Captain John Brown” (A Yankee in Canada, 1866). Thoreau first met Brown in 1857, and became an immediate admirer, writing of his “rare common sense … a man of ideas and principles” and “his pent-up fire”. He also coined the description quoted earlier by Flashman: “A volcano with an ordinary chimney flue”.
42. The first of Brown’s anecdotes is to be found in his own “Autobiography”, the second in Villard.
43. It is remarkable that Flashman never mentions “the Senator” by name, and it is possible that he never knew it, but this was Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. The physical description fits, and Senator Wilson described his meeting with Brown at the Bird Club (an abolitionist group who dined regularly at a Boston hotel) when he testified before the Senate Investigating (Mason) Committee after the Harper’s Ferry tragedy; his account echoes Flashman’s. Whether the warning note reached him or not is unimportant; the date apart, it merely confirmed what he knew already, for he was one of the Republican Senators (Seward being the other) to whom Forbes had disclosed the plot a year earlier. Wilson was a fervent abolitionist, a former farm labourer and shoemaker who became chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee during the Civil War. He was one of many leading politicians (President Buchanan and Seward were others) who came under the spell of the magnetic Mrs Greenhow, the Washington hostess who was also a highly successful Confederate spy. When she was arrested by Pinkerton, love-letters signed “H” were found among her papers, but hand-writing experts decided that they were not Wilson’s, which in view of his official position was just as well. (See Leech.)
44. Flashman is slightly misquoting Sir Francis Drake’s famous dispatch to Walsingham: “There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.”
45. Newby’s Christian name was Dangerfield, but he may have been known jokingly as “Dangerous”. The average age of Brown’s followers was twenty-five; only two of them were over thirty, and this has led some commentators into the error of underrating them. In fact, they were a formidable party (in spite of Flashman’s occasional disparagements) with no lack of experience of irregular warfare, and the standard of their weapon handling and marksmanship appears to have been high. The ironical nickname “pet lambs”, which occurs in “John Brown’s Body”, speaks for itself. (For a full list of Brown’s band, see Appendix III.)
46. Frederick Douglass (1817–95) was born in Maryland, the son of a white father and a Negro-Indian mother. He escaped from slavery in 1838, worked as a stevedore and handyman, and became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; his success as a speaker and journalist, combined with his fine presence and polished manners, gave rise to the suggestion that he had never been a slave at all, but he refuted this by publishing a detailed autobiography. He was frequently assaulted by pro-slavery supporters, for he went out of his way to fight segregation, and was also in danger from slave-catchers, but purchased his freedom in 1846 with funds raised on a visit to Britain. He published an abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, campaigned for women’s suffrage, was active in black recruiting during the Civil War, and held the post of marshal of the District of Columbia before becoming U.S. Minister to Haiti. As Flashman says, he was the most famous black man in America; as a campaigner for his people he was to the nineteenth century what Martin Luther King was to the twentieth.
47. The “mutiny”, Brown’s resignation as leader, and his re-election, took place more or less as Flashman describes. Villard says that “twice at least” there was almost a “revolt” against the plan. Watson Brown’s letters to his wife at this time give an interesting indication of the feeling at Kennedy Farm; in them he describes the suicide of a local slave whose wife had been sold, and the murders of five other slaves, and says: “I cannot come home as long as such things are done here,” but it seems plain that, like some of his companions, he regarded Harper’s Ferry as a death-trap.
48. Francis Meriam, the son of an abolitionist family, had made previous attempts to join Brown, but he was a frail, unbalanced youth, and according to Owen Brown his only qualification was his hatred of slavery. In September, 1859, he heard from a black freedman in Boston, Lewis Hayden, that Brown was short of money, and resolved to contribute part of a recent inheritance to the cause; he arrived at Harper’s Ferry on the day before the raid, and was brought to the farm – by Kagi, according to Flashman, by one of Brown’s sons, according to Villard.
49. If Flashman’s map of Harper’s Ferry is primitive and incomplete, it should be remembered that he was drawing it more than half a century later, and relying entirely on his memory of only a small part of the town, observed mostly at night and in a state of some alarm. It was a curious-looking place that he saw in 1859, half-village, half-armoury, standing on its peninsula surrounded by heights, and enclosed along its river banks by the tracks of two railways, the Winchester & Potomac and the Baltimore & Ohio, which ran on trestles and stone embankments designed to prevent flooding; six years later it had been reduced to ruin by nine major Civil War actions fought in the vicinity, and with the old landmarks gone it is not surprising that most historians of the Brown raid have confined themselves to written descriptions, or that Flashman’s r
ough sketch leaves much to be desired. For example, in the area marked “Town”, where he has shown a bare right angle of shops and houses, there were many more buildings behind, as there were between the arsenal and the rifle works; there were also some minor buildings between the Wager House and the armoury railings, close to the tracks, and beside Gait’s saloon on the Shenandoah shore. He has forgotten that the arsenal and the large buildings adjoining (formerly an arsenal, then a storehouse) were within a railed enclosure, and has erred in showing the Shenandoah bridge farther downstream than it actually was. But despite these flaws, his map is accurate enough in its essentials – the relative positions of the Wager House, the armoury gates and engine-house, the arsenal, Galt’s saloon, the railway lines, and the forked covered bridge across the Potomac – as I have been able to verify by comparison with the U.S. Government Printing Office maps of 1859, made available to me through the kindness of Jeff Bowers and Kyle McGrogan of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. (See GPO publications, “John Brown’s Raid” and Harpers Ferry pamphlets of 1981 and 1993; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, October 29, 1859; Dave Gilbert, A Walker’s Guide to Harper’s Ferry, and photographs and illustrations in Villard and others.)
50. “Old soldier” was a natural mistake on Hashman’s part. Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington, behaved with soldierly courage throughout the Harper’s Ferry raid, but in fact he held his military title as an aide to the Governor of Virginia. (See Keller.)
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