The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  14. If so, it was a slow passage; a clipper would have done it in half the time, given favourable weather, which Flashman’s ship does not seem to have had.

  15. Captain Robert (“Bully”) Waterman was one of the foremost 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.

  16. There is something of a literary mystery here. The Knitting Swede’s hostelry is mentioned in The Blood Ship, 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 Ship 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.

  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.

  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, Massachusetts, 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 fearsome reputation as a result of one savage exploit in the summer of 1856.

  The Pottawatomie Massacre 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 Massachusetts, denounced the Lawrence attack in the U.S. Senate, and was then assaulted 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 to 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 skirmishing 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 assistance, and the great mass 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 embarrassment 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.)

  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 proposed 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” gradu
ally 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.)

  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 Washington, 1942.)

  21. The Parcae, or Fates, of classical 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 cocked), 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 identities of “Clotho” and “Lachesis” cannot even be guessed at.

  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 assembly 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.

  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.)

  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 Washington society in the years before the Civil War.

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

  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 mass-production, peanut shells, 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 asserted) 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 fashion …”). 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 class 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 fashions, parties, amusements, social behaviour (and misbehaviour), shopping, menus, and polite trivia, as well as on the female underworld – 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 fashion, 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 establishing 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 attitudes in general, and American sensitivity to British opinion in particular: his reporting of conversations is first-class. (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.)

  27. The enamelling
studio, in which ladies had their faces, shoulders, and busts coated with a mixture of arsenic and white lead, was the forerunner of the modern beauty salon. To judge from advertisements 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 Broadway studios. What the effect of an application designed to last for a full year must have been can only be imagined. (See Ellington.)

  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 Flashman). 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 foiled an assassination 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 spycatcher – he broke the Confederate espionage ring operated in Washington by the glamorous Rose Greenhow (see also Note 43) – he was less successful as a 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 principal successes, ironically enough, was against a working-class movement, the Molly Maguires, who terrorised Pennsylvania coalfields for more than twenty years before being penetrated by a Pinkerton agent.