Part 17 (1/2)

To be sure, governments can be uncommonly blind, deaf, and lazy - to which the last survivor of John Brown's band would certainly add: ”Aye, especially when they don't want to see, hear, or move.” There were many in the North, and doubtless some in the South, who wanted the raid to happen; Crixus and Atropos were not alone; but probably only a cynic like Flashman would speculate that there were those in authority who, knowing of the plot and having the power to prevent it, allowed it to go ahead, for their own inscrutable ends. Since there is no evidence to support this view, we can only accept the alternative: that it was just monumental bad luck that no responsible person got wind of the plot, or took it seriously, or bothered to investigate it, or thought it worth posting even a couple of armed sentries on an unguarded a.r.s.enal at a time when talk of slave insurrection was in the air, or decided to keep an eye on the most violent and ruthless abolitionist in the country, the butcher of Pottawatomie, who was stumping the sticks and cities preaching the invasion of Virginia ...

Bad Luck Indeed, for the upshot was that against all the odds, and in spite of all his follies and hesitations and mismanagement, John Brown was given what he had no right to expect; a clear run at Harper's Ferry.

APPENDIX III: John Brown's Men John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back, He's gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, His pet lambs will meet him on the way, And they'll go marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah .. .

John Henry Kagi, 24, killed Aaron Dwight Stevens, 28, hanged Owen Brown, 34, escaped Watson Brown, 24, killed Oliver Brown, 20, killed Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, 26, killed John Cook, 29, hanged Albert Hazlett, 22, hanged Charles Plummer Tidd, 25, escaped William Thompson, 26, killed Dauphin Osgood Thompson, 21, killed Edwin Coppoc, 24, hanged Barclay Coppoc, 20, escaped John Anthony Copeland, 25, hanged William Leeman, 20, killed Stewart Taylor, 22, killed Osborn Perry Anderson, 29, escaped Dangerfield Newby, 44, killed Lewis Sheridan Leary, 24, killed s.h.i.+elds Green, 23, hanged Francis Jackson Meriam, 21, escaped John Brown, 59, hanged To which may now be added the names of Beauchamp Millward Comber, 37, escaped Joseph Simmons, 23, killed.

Fourteens persons were killed or wounded by the raiders at Harper's Ferry. No slaves were liberated.

NOTES.

1. John Arthur (Jack) Johnson (1878-1946), the first black boxer to win the world heavyweight t.i.tle, was the most unpopular of champions and, in the opinion of the most respected ring historians, the best. He won the t.i.tle in 1908 by beating Tommy Burns of Canada, having pursued him from America to England and finally to Australia, and lost it in 1915 to Jess Willard of the U.S.A. In the intervening years he was the object of a campaign of race hatred unique in sport; in that colour-conscious age Johnson's arrogance in and out of the ring, his cruelty to opponents, his white wives, his complacent smile showing gold-capped teeth, his skipping bail to Paris to avoid a prison sentence in America (he had violated the Mann Act by taking a woman with whom he was having an affair across a State line), and above all, his undoubted supremacy in a game which had always been a peculiar source of white pride, brought out the very worst in the sporting public. None was more vicious than the novelist Jack London, who had covered Burns's ”funeral” as he called it, for the New York Herald, and who conducted the notorious ”Whip the n.i.g.g.e.r” campaign to ”remove the golden smile from Johnson's face”. He and others persuaded Jim Jeffries, a former champion, to come out of retirement to challenge for the t.i.tle. The fight took place in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, and so highly charged was the atmosphere beforehand (fatal race riots had followed some of Johnson's previous victories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was invited to act as referee; it was felt, rightly, that no sportsman on earth was so universally respected, or more likely to exert a calming influence. Doyle wanted to accept, but his own campaign against the atrocities in the Belgian Congo was demanding all his attention, and after a week's hesitation he reluctantly declined. In the event, Johnson won easily, there were no disturbances, and the quest for a ”White Hope” lasted another five years, until Johnson succ.u.mbed (voluntarily, in the opinion of many) to the gigantic but undistinguished Willard.

Flashman's view of Johnson was widely shared; his unquestioned brilliance as a ring mechanic apart, the black champion was not an endearing figure, but it is only fair to quote the opinion of another well-known Victorian, who had the rare distinction of meeting him in the ring and coming out on his feet. Victor McLaglen was an admired British heavyweight long before he became a film actor; he went six rounds to a draw in a ”no-decision” bout with Johnson in 1909, and wrote afterwards that the champion ”fought like a gentleman”, was ”undoubtedly the hardest man to hit whom I ever met”, and was also ”the most charming opponent”. (See Terry Leigh-Lye; In This Corner, 1963; Nat Fleischer and Sam Andre, Pictorial History of Boxing, 1959; M. and M. Hardwick, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes, 1964; Jack London, in the New York Herald, 1908; Victor McLaglen, Express to Hollywood, 1934.) [p. 13]

2. Flashman was born in 1822, so the present memoir was presumably written in 1913, two years before his death.[p. 14]

3. The famous march, one of many John Brown songs sung in the U.S. Civil War, is said to have originated in ”a sarcastic tune which men in a Ma.s.sachusetts outfit made up as 'a jibe' against one Sergeant John Brown of Boston”. If so, it soon became a.s.sociated with the famous abolitionist; a Union soldier, Private Warren Lee Goss, records that when the 12th Ma.s.sachusetts Regiment marched down Broadway on July 24, 1861, they sang ”the then new and always thrilling lyric, John Brown's Body”. Five months later Mrs Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the author, reformer, and abolitionist, wrote new words to the old tune; they subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as ”The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. One tradition (hinted at by Flashman) is that she had been scandalised by the words which she heard soldiers singing; the accepted story is that she and a party of friends were singing patriotic songs, and one of them suggested to her that new verses would be appropriate. (See Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, 1970, quoting Boyd B. Stutler, ”John Brown's Body”; Warren Lee Goss, ”Going to the Front”, in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 1, ed. R. U. Johnson and C. C. Buel, 1887.)[p. 17]

4. For evidence that Benjamin Franklin (”Agent No. 72”) and his a.s.sistant, Edward Bancroft, were working for British Intelligence during their time at the American Emba.s.sy in Paris, and pa.s.sed information to London which resulted in heavy American s.h.i.+pping losses, see Richard Deacon, A History of British Secret Service, 1980.[p. 24]

5. Flashman is habitually vague about dates, and it is impossible to say when he left Calcutta - it may have been late in 1858 or even early in 1859, but he was certainly at the Cape sometime in January or February of the new year. In that case, it seems probable that the stranded wreck was the Madagascar (351 tons), which ran ash.o.r.e off Port Elizabeth on December 3, 1858. (See Marischal Murray, s.h.i.+ps and South Africa, 1933.)[p. 28]

6. The self-destruction of the 'Zoza tribe (more usually spelled Xhosa or Amaxosa) began late in 1856, when the belief arose that spirits of the dead, speaking through the medium of a girl of the tribe, had promised that if all cattle and crops were destroyed, these would be replaced in abundance on a certain day, and the hated white men driven from the land. In obedience to their chief, the Xhosas destroyed their food supplies entirely, and in the famine which followed more than 60,000 are believed to have died. (See sources to Note 9.) [p. 31]

7. In view of recent South African history, and the common belief that 1994 would be the milestone marking the introduction of universal suffrage, it is worth noting that in Cape Colony in the 1850s, under British rule, every man had the vote, regardless of race or colour. The only qualifications were birth in the Colony and a financial condition set so low that many non-whites were enfranchised. Like many progressive features of the old British Empire, it is one that modern revisionists are either unaware of or choose to forget. (See sources to Note 9.)[p. 32]

8. The pollution of the Thames and the anti-smoking campaign were perennial topics; the Act of Parliament removing the disabilities of the Jews had pa.s.sed in July, 1858, and Lionel de Rothschild had become the first Jewish M.P.[p. 34]

9. Flashman's summary of South African affairs in 1859, if characteristically sketchy, is accurate and perceptive, and his portrait of the Cape Governor is fair; if anything, he gives him more sympathetic treatment than he usually metes out to imperial pro-consuls, a cla.s.s of whom he tended to take a jaundiced view.

Sir George Grey (1812-98) was that peculiarly Victorian compound of the man of action, scholar, visionary, and maverick. His guiding principles were the welfare and progress of the people he was given to rule, and getting his own way, and he pursued them with an energy and impatience which frequently brought him into conflict with his superiors at home, and eventually brought his career to a premature close, which was his country's loss, for he was one of the best. He left the army when he was twenty-three to explore north-western Australia, an adventure of extreme danger and hards.h.i.+p in which he skirmished with Aborigines, was wounded, lost his supplies, and finally tramped alone into Perth, so altered by suffering that he was unrecognisable. He was twenty-nine when he was appointed Governor of South Australia, and subsequently of New Zealand, where he defeated the Maoris, won their friends.h.i.+p, and established a popular and prosperous administration before being transferred to the Cape in 1854. There he pre-vented a Kaffir uprising, encouraged settlement, and acquired something rare, if not unique, in South African history - the trust and respect of Britons, Boers, and tribesmen alike. Foreseeing that the peaceful development of the country depended on recognising and balancing .the interests of all three (particularly between the Boers and the black tribes) he worked tirelessly to bring about a confederation, won the support of the Boers of the Orange Free State and the British of the Cape, and would have succeeded but for the reluctance of the home government to a.s.sume further responsibility and expense in Southern Africa. His persistence caused offence at the Colonial Office (”a dangerous man”), and he was recalled in 1859, a few months after Flashman met him. Palmerston's new administration reinstated him, but his plan of confederation was shelved. In 1861 he was again Governor of New Zealand, fought in the Maori wars (personally leading the attack and capture of their main stronghold), and was making progress towards a settlement between settlers and Maoris when, his highly individual style having given renewed offence in Whitehall, he was recalled. He was only fifty-five. The rest of his life was spent mostly in New Zealand. He left behind a standard work, Polynesian Mythology, and splendid libraries at Cape Town and Auckland, but his great achievement was that, whatever his chiefs at home thought, the people of all races and colours whom he governed were invariably sorry to see him go.

A handsome, slightly-built man with a cold eye and a quiet voice, Grey seems to have been quite as a.s.sured and impatient of opposition as Flashman found him: an idealist, he had a strong ruthless streak, and his portraits do not suggest a man whom it would be safe to cross. During his final months at the Cape his health was poor, and his marital relations were approaching a crisis - something with which we may be sure Flashman had nothing to do, or he would certainly have told us about it. (See G. M. Theal, History of South Africa, vol. 3, ”Cape Colony, 1846-60”, 1908; James Milne, Sir George Grey, the Romance of a Pro-consul, 1899; G. C. Henderson, Sir George Grey, 1907; James Collier, Life and Times of Sir George Grey, 1909; W. H. S. Bell, Bygone Days, reminiscences of pioneer life in Cape Colony from 1856, 1933; J. n.o.ble, Descriptive Handbook of the Cape Colony, 1875.)[p. 34]

10. The first ministry of Lord Palmerston, who had sent Flashman on secret service to India shortly before the great mutiny of 1857, had ended in February, 1858, when he was succeeded as Prime Minister -by the Earl of Derby. Palmerston regained office in June, 1859, a few months after the meeting of Flashman and Sir George Grey at the Cape.[p. 35]

11. The outdoor swimming pool was an occasional feature of private gardens at the Cape: the Constantia mansion, the first large country house in the Colony, dating from the seventeenth century, had one in its grounds. (See Alys Fane Trotter, Old Colonial Houses of the Cape of Good Hope, 1900.)[p. 45]

12. A native of New England, especially a typical seafarer from the coast of Maine, reputed to be unusually tough and reactionary, and supposedly so-called be-cause the region lay east and down-wind of the main American Atlantic ports. The term was also applied to s.h.i.+ps.[p. 64]

13. There was no British Emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton at this time: H.M. Government was represented by a minister, not an amba.s.sador - a diplomatic distinction which Flashman could not be expected to appreciate. [p. 68]

14. If so, it was a slow pa.s.sage; a clipper would have done it in half the time, given favourable weather, which Flashman's s.h.i.+p does not seem to have had.[p. 69]

15. Captain Robert (”Bully”) Waterman was one of the fore-most clipper captains of the day, famous for his record-breaking runs in the Sea Witch between China and New York, and notorious for the brutal discipline he imposed on his crews. Flashman mentions him twice in earlier packets of the Papers, but there is no evidence that they ever met.[p. 731 16. There is something of a literary mystery here. The Knitting Swede's hostelry is mentioned in The Blood s.h.i.+p, published some time early in this century by Norman Springer, but I cannot recall whether it was located in Baltimore or not. However, the two bucko mates of The Blood s.h.i.+p were certainly Fitzgibbon and Lynch - the names of the skipper and mate of the vessel which carried Flashman to America. These things can hardly be coincidental.[p. 74]

17. A remark attributed to Senator David R. Atchison of Missouri, when urging on Border Ruffians before the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, headquarters of the Free Staters, on May 21, 1856.[p. 91]

18. Crixus's account and Flashman's interpolations between them provide a rough but balanced biographical summary of John Brown up to the spring of 1859. Whether the famous abolitionist was a Mayflower descendant has been disputed, but he certainly came of old American stock. Born in Torrington, Connecticut, on May 9, 1800, he received a rudimentary education and worked at various rural trades with indifferent success; his business ventures ended in failure, and he was usually hard pressed for money. He married twice, and had twenty children. His hatred of slavery, inherited from his father and nourished by his own observations, took an active form when he was still in his twenties, and his home was a station on the Underground Railroad. In 1851, at Springfield, Ma.s.sachusetts, he organised a_ black defence group, the League of Gileadites, to resist slave-catchers and prevent fugitives from being returned to the South. It is not certain when he conceived the idea of invading Virginia, but he was talking about it as early as 1847, and in the winter of 1854-5 was discussing a raid on Harper's Ferry and making notes on guerrilla warfare from Stocqueler's Life of the Duke of Wellington. At this time several of his sons, imbued with their father's abolitionist zeal, went to Kansas, where the ”slave or free territory” issue was coming to a head, and were soon followed by Brown himself, ostensibly to set up in business but in fact to fight on the Free State side. He soon became the most notorious of the Border irregulars, organising a guerrilla band called the Liberty Guards, with himself as captain and four of his sons, Owen, Frederick, Salmon, and John, junior, among his followers, and earning a fear-some reputation as a result of one savage exploit in the summer of 1856.

The Pottawatomie Ma.s.sacre took place on the night of May 24-25, and arose directly from the destruction of the town of Lawrence (see Note 17 above) and another incident on the following day. On May 22 an anti-slavery orator, Senator Charles Sumner of Ma.s.sachusetts, denounced the Lawrence attack in the U.S. Senate, and was then a.s.saulted by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who invaded the chamber and thrashed Sumner, who was seated at his desk, so brutally with his cane that the unfortunate Senator did not recover for two years. Brown, who had been too late to defend Lawrence, and was in a fury because the citizens had not put up a fight, was already contemplating retaliation against the pro-slavers when news of ”Bully Brooks's” outrage reached him on May 23. At this, according to his son Salmon, the old man ”went crazy - crazy!”, and on being urged t6 use caution, cried: ”Caution, caution, sir, I am eternally tired of hearing that word caution! It is nothing but the word for cowardice,” and set off to strike back at ”the barbarians”. This consisted of descending on three houses along the Pottawatomie Creek, first murdering a pro-slavery man named Doyle and two of his sons, then another named Wilkinson, and finally one Sherman. The killings were carried out with the utmost brutality, the men being forced from their beds and, despite the pleas of wives and the presence of children, hustled out into the dark and literally hacked to pieces with sabres; fingers, hands, and arms were severed and skulls split. Owen and Salmon Brown killed the three Doyles, and Brown's son-in-law, Henry Thompson, and a man named Theodore Weiner, murdered the two other men. Brown himself does not seem to have struck a blow, although he probably fired a single shot into the corpse of the oldest Doyle. Later, when his son Jason taxed him with the killings, Brown said: ”I did not do it, but I approved of it”. Nor did he ever deny responsibility, and only once offered anything like an excuse for the crime: according to an old Kansas settler, Brown claimed that the five had been planning to kill him. ”I was satisfied that each of them had committed murder in his heart . . . and I felt justified in having them killed.” This is doubtful, and even Brown's most admiring biographers are at a loss when confronted with Pottawatomie; one suggests that he was in a trance, another refers to the murders as ”executions”, but none can offer an acceptable explanation, let alone a defence. At the time, Crixus's view of the affair was shared by many in the North, who believed that Brown was justified by necessity, and that his terrorist tactics and subsequent skirmis.h.i.+ng against the pro-slavery forces were of critical importance in the Kansas struggle. Certainly Pottawatomie did nothing to lessen support for Brown among Northern liberals; some might condemn it, but others, especially the group known as the Secret Six (see Note 32), gave him moral and financial a.s.sistance, and the great ma.s.s of abolitionists regarded him as a champion. He continued to operate against the pro-slavery forces with some success before being driven from his base at Ossawatomie in a battle in which his son Frederick was killed. For almost three years thereafter Brown divided his time between campaigning for the abolitionist cause in the East, and preparing in the field for his projected invasion of Virginia.

There are many biographies of Brown, and they cover the closing years of his life in detail, drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources. Indeed, there is almost an embarra.s.sment of information; one writer, Villard, has even been able to compile a daily calendar of his life from mid-1855 to his death in December 1859. Most of the early biographies, including those by Sanborn and Redpath, who knew Brown personally, are friendly: one, by Peebles Wilson, is a raging denunciation. Of special interest is the autobiographical sketch written by Brown in 1857, which is the best source for his early life, and is quoted in full in Villard. (See O. G. Villard, John Brown, 1910 (the fullest account); Franklin B. Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown, 1885 (Sanborn was a friend and leading supporter): James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown, 1860 (Redpath was a newspaperman who met Brown in the field); H. Peebles Wilson, John Brown, Soldier of Fortune, 1913; Barrie Stavis, John Brown, the Sword and the Word, 1870; Oates; R. D. Webb, Life and Letters of Captain John Brown, 1861; Louis Ruchames (ed.) A John Brown Reader, 1959; Allan Keller, Thunder at Harper's Ferry, 1958.)[p. 92]

19. Hugh Forbes, the British adventurer whom Brown hired as an instructor and military advisor at $100 a month, shared certain characteristics with Flashman; he was tall, handsome, soldierly, plausible, and probably something of a confidence man. He was born about 1812, had been a silk merchant in Italy, claimed to have fought under Garibaldi, and styled himself ”Colonel”, but when Brown met him in New York in 1857 he was eking a bare living as a fencing-master, translator and occasional journalist. In Brown's employ he worked on a manual of guerrilla tactics and produced a pamphlet apparently designed to lure U.S. soldiers to the abolitionist cause, but his chief talent was for absorbing money to support his family whom he described as starving in Paris. Eventually he and Brown fell out over alleged arrears of pay and, perhaps more seriously, the Harper's Ferry project: Forbes was convinced that an attempt to rouse the slaves for a guerrilla campaign must fail, and pro-posed instead a series of ”stampedes” in which small parties of slaves would be run off from properties close to the North-South border, thus eventually making slave-holding impossible in the region, and forcing the ”slave frontier” gradually southwards. It was at least a feasible plan, but Brown rejected it. Forbes then began writing to Brown's leading supporters, from many of whom he had begged money, hinting that unless further payments were made he would divulge the invasion plan, a threat which he carried out in the spring of 1858, when he accosted two Republican Senators, Seward and Wilson, on the floor of the Senate, and told them what was planned. The Senators, both devoted abolitionists, seem to have kept the information to themselves, but warned Brown's supporters, and the project was postponed. (See Villard; Sanborn.)[p. 94]

20. The marble frontage, and later clues in Flashman's narrative, suggest that the hotel was Brown's, at the junction of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street. It was much patronised by Southerners. (See Margaret Leech, Reveille in Was.h.i.+ngton, 1942.)[p. 110]

21. The Parcae, or Fates, of cla.s.sical mythology were Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the arbiters of birth, life, and death. The dandy's little joke lay in suggesting that they should have called themselves Eumenides (”the good-natured ones”), the name ironically applied by the Greeks to the Furies. The white hoods and the name ”Kuklos” are strongly reminiscent of the infamous Ku Klux Klan, founded by Confederate ex-officers in Tennessee after the Civil War; originally a social and literary club, it became an anti-negro terrorist organisation which flourished intermittently into modern times. It certainly owed its name to the Greek kuklos, a circle (not, as the fanciful theory has it, to the triple click of a rifle being c.o.c.ked), but there is no evidence either of its existence before 1866, or to suggest that it had its origins in the kind of Southern intelligence network which Atropos described to Flashman. The ident.i.ties of ”Clotho” and ”Lachesis” cannot even be guessed at.[p. 122]

22. Telemaque (”Denmark”) Vesey and Nat Turner led the two most notable slave revolts, in 1822 and 1831 respectively. Vesey, a mulatto who had bought his freedom with lottery winnings, organised a plot to take Charleston, but was betrayed by a slave out of affection for his owner, and went to the gallows with more than thirty black comrades; several whites who were implicated in the plot were imprisoned. Nat Turner, a black lay preacher who was inspired by the Bible to believe himself the chosen deliverer of his people, led a rebellion of some seventy slaves at Southampton, Virginia, in which more than fifty whites and twice as many blacks died; Turner himself was executed. How many other smaller outbreaks took place it is impossible to say; no doubt some went unrecorded. Unrest was certainly more widespread than Southerners cared to admit; the contention that slaves were happy or resigned concealed a genuine fear which was reflected in strict laws against black a.s.sembly and education, patrols, curfews, and the kind of savage treatment dealt out to a band of about seventy Maryland runaways who were executed or sold down the river in 1845. Rumours spread of a general slave conspiracy in the years before the Civil War, a by-product perhaps of Southern fears of the growing abolitionist feeling in the North, for they seem to have been unfounded. [p. 129]

23. If Flashman and Annette had a table for two, as he seems to suggest, they were singularly favoured, since most American hotels of the period favoured the common table - ”the comfort of a quiet table to yourself . . . is quite unknown”, complained a British traveller of the period. ”The living [dining arrangements] at these hotels is profuse to a degree, but, generally speaking, most disagreeable: first, because the meal is devoured with a rapidity which a pack of fox-hounds, after a week's fast, might in vain attempt to rival; and secondly, because it is impossible to serve up dinners for hundreds, without nine-tenths thereof being cold.” (See Henry A. Murray, Lands of the Slave and the Free, 1855.)[p. 140]

24. Stephen A. Douglas (1813-61), leader of the Democrats in the North, was a portly, dynamic figure known to admirers as the ”Little Giant” and to enemies as the ”Dropsied Dwarf ” (he was only five feet tall), and best remembered for the debates in which he successfully defended his seat as Senator for Illinois against Lincoln in 1858. Douglas was to the fore in the slavery question; his first wife was the daughter of a slave-holder, but Douglas himself was a champion of ”popular sovereignty”, holding that it was up to the residents to decide whether a state should be slave or free, and his declaration that any territory could exclude slavery irrespective of the Supreme Court's ruling cost him the support of many Southern Democrats. The party split before the Presidential election of 1860, with the Deep South States breaking away, and although Douglas was nominated as one of the candidates against Lincoln, he was heavily beaten. His second wife, Adele, was a noted beauty and leader of Was.h.i.+ngton society in the years before the Civil War.[p. 140]

25. The cynic was Anthony Trollope, who gave this unflattering view of New York in his North America, 1862.[p. 151]

26. Flashman's impressions of New York are echoed by other British travellers of the mid-nineteenth century, as well as by American writers. Like them, he was struck by the size and up-to-date appointments of the hotels, with their hundreds of apartments, half-hour laundry services, no-smoking areas for ladies, dining-rooms which seemed to foreshadow ma.s.s-production, peanut sh.e.l.ls, cigar fumes, and continual clamour and bustle which many European visitors, used to smaller and cosier establishments, found trying. Nor is he alone in his admiration of the city's women, and the freedom and independence which they enjoyed (and a.s.serted) compared to their European sisters; Trollope had the same experience of paying ladies' fares on the omnibuses, and James Silk Buckingham, an English observer of the previous decade, enthused at some length about their beauty (”almost uniformly good-looking ... slender and of good symmetry . . . a more than usual degree of feminine delicacy ... a greater number of pretty forms and faces than [in England] . . . dressed more in the extreme of fas.h.i.+on ...”). He also noted the deference shown to them by American men, and their dependence on it. A contemporary of Flashman's, G. Ellington, devoted a long book to the city's women of every cla.s.s and kind, from the society set of Fifth and Madison Avenues to the fallen angels of the House of the Good Shepherd; he is a mine of information on fas.h.i.+ons, parties, amus.e.m.e.nts, social behaviour (and misbehaviour), shopping, menus, and polite trivia, as well as on the female under-world - the ”cruisers” of Broadway, the down-town cigar-store girls, the all-women gambling and billiard halls, and the drug scene. From him we learn of the popularity among society ladies and their imitators of powdered hands, the Grecian bend, dancing ”the German”, blonde hair, and exaggerated high heels; he knows the price of everything from Murray Hill boarding-school fees to the going rate paid by white slavers for ”recruits”, and presumably is a reliable guide to what was ”done” - going to Saratoga and the White Mountains in summer - and what was ”not done” - being seen anywhere south of 14th Street. Among other commentators, Theodore Roosevelt is critical of '50s New York (which he was not old enough to remember personally), deploring its vulgarity, devotion to money, and slavish copying of Paris fas.h.i.+on, and is interesting on the ”swamping” of ”native American stock” (Dutch-Anglo-Scots-German) by Irish immigration, the growth of Roman Catholicism, the New York mob's tendency to riot, the corruption of local politics, and the attempt by its Democrat mayor to align the city with the South in the Civil War by seceding from the Union and establis.h.i.+ng the commonwealth of ”Tri-Insula” (the three islands of Manhattan, Long, and Staten). The Hon. Henry Murray, whose strictures on public dining arrangements are mentioned in Note 23, is an entertaining source of domestic detail - barbers' shops, hotel security, Bibles in bedrooms, and bridal suites (”the want of delicacy that suggested the idea is only equalled by the want of taste with which it is carried out . . . a matrimonial couch, hung with white silk curtains, and blazing with a bright jet of gas from each bed-post!”). Alexander McKay is worth reading on Anglo-American att.i.tudes in general, and American sensitivity to British opinion in particular: his reporting of conversations is first-cla.s.s. (See Murray; Trollope; James Silk Buckingham, America, 1841; G. Ellington, The Women of New York, 1869; Theodore Roosevelt, New York, 1895; Alexander McKay, The Western World, 1850.)[p. 153]

27. The enamelling studio, in which ladies had their faces, shoulders, and busts coated with a mixture of a.r.s.enic and white lead, was the forerunner of the modern beauty salon. To judge from advertis.e.m.e.nts of the time, the range of cosmetics, treatments, and appliances for enhancing the female face and figure was almost as extensive as it is now; Flashman's description is accurate, and the prices he quotes tally with those of one of the Broad-way studios. What the effect of an application designed to last for a full year must have been can only be imagined. (See Ellington.)[p. 160]

28. Allan Pinkerton (1819-84), the most famous of all private detectives and founder of the agency which bears his name, was born in Glasgow, the son of a police sergeant. He trained as a cooper, and became an enthusiastic member of the Chartist movement for workers' rights, taking part in the Glasgow spinners' strike and in the attempt to free a Chartist leader from Monmouth Castle, Newport, in 1839, when shots were exchanged between rioters and police. It was about this time that Flashman was engaged in training militia at Paisley, and was briefly involved in a disturbance at a mill belonging to his future father-in-law, John Morrison (see Flash-man). Subsequently Pinkerton's Chartist activities took him into hiding to avoid arrest, and in 1842 he emigrated to Chicago. He worked as a cooper at Dundee, Illinois, but crime prevention was evidently in his blood, and after running down a counterfeiting gang he was appointed deputy sheriff of Kane County, and later of Cook County, Chicago. Here he organised his detective agency in 1852-3, and had considerable success against railway and express company thieves. He foi led an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt against President-elect Lincoln in 1861, and in the Civil War became effective head of the U.S. secret service, but while he was an efficient spy-catcher - he broke the Confederate espionage ring operated in Was.h.i.+ngton by the glamorous Rose Greenhow (see also Note 43) - he was less successful as gatherer of military intelligence, and his over-estimation of Confederate strength in the peninsular campaign contributed to a Union reverse. He was eventually- replaced, but his agency continued to flourish; one of its princ.i.p.al successes, ironically enough, was against a working-cla.s.s movement, the Molly Maguires, who terrorised Pennsylvania coalfields for more than twenty years before being penetrated by a Pinkerton agent.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 1863; George S. McWatters, Knots Untied, or Ways and By-ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives, 1873.)[p. 166]

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.[p. 170]

30. For once we are able to a.s.sign 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.)[p. 177]