Flash For Freedom!

by George MacDonald Fraser

  [1] The great Chartist Demonstration of Monday, April 10, 1848, was, as Flashman says, a frost. Following the numerous continental revolutions, there were those who feared that civil strife would break out in Britain, and in addition to extra troops brought to the capital, the authorities enlisted 170,000 special constables between April 6 and io to deal with disturbances. Peel, Gladstone, Prince Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III), about half the House of Lords and an immense number of middle-class volunteers were among the “specials”. In the event, only about twenty to thirty thousand Chartists demonstrated, instead of the half million expected, and there was little violence apart from the fight between the butcher's boy and the French agitator, which happened as Flashman describes it. (Foreign agitators and hooligan elements were a frequent embarrassment to the Chartists, since they discredited the movement). Of the two (not five) million signatures to the great petition, about one-fifth are said to have been bogus—“Punch” noted caustically that if they had all been genuine, the Chartist procession should have been headed by the Queen and seventeen Dukes of Wellington. (See Halevy's History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, pp. 242-6.)

  [2] From this and other allusions it is obvious that Flashman spent at least part of the 1843—47 period (the “missing years” so far untouched by his memoirs) in Madagascar and Borneo. He is known to have been both military adviser to Queen Ranavalona and chief of staff to Rajah Brooke of Sarawak; it now seems probable that he held these appointments between 1843 and 1847. Other evidence suggests that he may also have taken part in the First Sikh War of 1845-6.

  [3] Lord John Russell was then Prime Minister; Lansdowne was Lord President of the Council.

  [4] Berlins: articles, particularly gloves, knitted of Berlin wool.

  [5] Attendance money. A charge introduced on the railway about this time, which amounted to a kind of cover or service charge. It appears to have been levied for as small a service as asking a railway servant the time of day. Flashman's memory may be playing him false when he speaks of a railway book-stall; it was more probably a railway library.

  [6] Frances Isabella Locke (1829-1903) was to become famous in later years as Mrs Fanny Duberly, Victorian heroine, campaigner, and “army wife” extraordinary. She left celebrated journals of her service in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny. (See E.E.P. Tisdall's Mrs Duberly's Campaigns.)

  [7] Lord George Bentinck (1802-48), one of the foremost sporting figures of his day, and leader of the Protectionist Tory opposition in the Commons. Handsome, arrogant, and viciously aggressive in political argument, Bentinck was widely respected as a guardian of the purity of the turf, although after his death his former friend Greville alleged that he was guilty of “fraud, falsehood, and selfishness” and “a mass of roguery” in his racing conduct. Bentinck resigned his leadership of the opposition early in 1848, but was still the power in his party at the time of his meeting with Flashman at Cleeve. He died suddenly only a few months later, on September 21, 1848.

  Disraeli, who then succeeded him as Tory leader in the Commons, was not to become Prime Minister for another twenty years. Flashman's view of him in 1848 fairly reflects the feeling of many Tories—“they detest D'Israeli, the only man of talent”, wrote Greville in that year. His extravagances of dress and speech, his success as a novelist, and his Jewish antecedents combined to render him unpopular—Flashman, like Greville, insists on spelling him D'Israeli, although Disraell himself had dropped the apostrophe ten years earlier. The nickname Codlingsby is a pun on Coningsby, perhaps his best novel, published in 1844. (See Charles Greville's Memoirs, January 7-September 28, 1843.)

  [8] Surplice had just beaten Shylock in the Derby, and on the following day the Jewish Disabilities Bill failed in the House of Lords.

  [9] With revolution everywhere on the Continent in 1848, it was confidently expected that Ireland would erupt, and there was a small abortive rising in the summer. John Mitchel, a leading agitator, was sentenced in May to fourteen years' transportation.

  [10] Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was published in the autumn of 1847. Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood by Malcolm Rymer was an outstanding horror story even in a decade which was unusually rich in novels of ghouls, vampires, and gothic spine-chilling.

  [11] Miss Fanny's excuse was not very flattering to her fiancé, whose position with the Eighth Hussars was that of paymaster.

  [12] The Black Joke schooner had a career befitting its romantic name, being in turn a slaver, a Royal Navy tender, and an opium smuggler in the China Seas.

  [13] Under the Anglo—Dutch treaty of 1822 a ship fitted out for slaving (with shackles, slave shelves, unusually large cooking facilities, etc.,) could be condemned as a slaver even if she was not carrying slaves. (See W. E. F. Ward's The Royal Navy and the Slavers.)

  [14] What Flashman says of the background to the slave trade in the 1840s is accurate enough, but obviously he does not give more than a hint of the complicated system of treaties and anti-slavery laws by which the civilised nations fought the traffic. (See Ward). Virtually all were prepared to pay at least lip service to the anti-slave trade cause, but only Britain mounted a continuous major campaign against the slaving vessels on the high seas and along the African coast, although at the time of Flashman's voyage the United States Navy was also lending its assistance. But there was no consistency about the various national laws against the trade, and the slavers were quick to take advantage of the numerous loopholes. What is sometimes not appreciated is the distinction that was drawn by governments between slavery and actual slave trading: for example, Britain prohibited the trade as early as 1807, but did not abolish slavery within the Empire until 1833; the United States prohibited the trade in 1808, but continued to practise slavery in her slave states until the Civil War. In this topsy turvy situation, with huge private interests involved in the traffic, slave trading flourished into the second half of the century.

  [15] Pedro Blanco was a leading slave-broker who specialised in collecting Africans for sale to slaving ships. His usual scene of operations was farther north, on the Sierra Leone coast. Flashman's description of Whydah and the Kroos corresponds very closely with contemporary accounts.

  [16] With epidemics an ever-present danger on the Middle Passage, slaver captains took every precaution against shipping diseased or weakly slaves However, they had no scruples about marketing those who fell ill on the voyage, and were at pains to disguise their disabilities. Spring is here referring to a particularly revolting means of hiding the symptoms of dysentery.

  [17] Spring was giving considerably less space to his slaves than that allowed by the Wilberforce Committee in 1788, when the famous plan of the slaving ship Broohes gave the following figures: Males, six feet by sixteen inches; females, five feet by sixteen inches; boys, five feet by fourteen inches; girls, four feet six by twelve inches. This, as F. George Kay points out in The Shameful Trade, meant that five men were packed into a space equivalent to two modern single beds, and lay there for perhaps twenty hours a day over a period of several weeks. Parliament was prepared to accept a death rate of two per cent.

  [18] The Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper published from 1821 to 1839 by Benjamin Lundy, an early American abolitionist. William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the greatest of anti-slavery journalists, worked with Lundy before founding his own paper, The Liberator, in 1831 which ran until the end of the Civil War. Arthur and Lewis Tappan were dedicated New York abolitionists.

  [19] The revolvers, by Flashman's description, were probably early Colt Patersons of 1836 (single-action muzzle-loaders, five-shot, .40 calibre), although it is not impossible that they were Colt Walkers of the type produced for the Mexican War (six-shot, .44). The needle guns must be the Prussian Dreyse single-shot breech-loaders of 1840, which were the first bolt-action military weapons.

  [20] The Dahomeyans believed that human sacrifices were messengers to the gods, and despatched about 500 each year, about a tenth of whom were killed at
the “annual custom”, as the great ritual slaughter festival was called. The “grand custom”, held only when a king died, involved much greater bloodshed.

  [21] King Gezo, a liberal ruler by Dahomeyan standards, made 60,000 a year from the slave trade, according to Royal Navy intelligence estimates, and also reorganised the army of Amazons, which had previously been composed of female criminals, unfaithful wives, etc. Gezo, by recruiting from all the unmarried girls of his kingdom, raised a force of about 4,000 fighting women, and there is ample evidence of their ferocity and discipline. Flashman's description of them is accurate. Gezo ruled Dahomey for 40 years, dying of small-pox in 1858.

  [22] Quite apart from Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous villain, there was a Southern slave trader called Legree in Spring's time.

  [23] Methods of slave-packing varied according to a ship's accommodation, but Flashman's account gives a vivid impression of what a hideous business it was. His details of branding, sizing, and dancing are accurate; even so, it appears that Spring, despite his insistence on close packing, was a more humane skipper than most on the Middle Passage. Conditions on the Balliol College compare favourably with those on other slave ships of which contemporary records exist, and which tell appalling tales of human cargoes thrown overboard, epidemics, mutinies, and unspeakable cruelties. Even the sailors' stories which Flashman retells give only a pale impression of the reality. Figures compiled by Warren S. Howard in his American Slavers and the Federal Law indicate that on average one-sixth of slaves shipped died on the Middle Passage. The Balliol College's low mortality rate was not unique, however, in 1847 only three slaves died out of 530 aboard the barque Fame, running to Brazil.

  [24] Captain Robert Waterman of the Sea Witch, one of the great Yankee tea clippers. His passages from China to New York broke all records in the mid-1840s.

  [25] Blackwall fashion: competent but leisurely sea-faring, as opposed to the tough life aboard the packets.

  [26] One of the slaver's common ruses was to fly whatever colours seemed safest, according to their position at sea. In fact American colours were most common on the Middle Passage.

  [27] Although Spain had banned the slave trade, Cuba continued to operate a large unofficial slave market, and cargoes were smuggled in as circumstances permitted. Possibly these did not appear favourable to Spring, and he determined to run to Roatan, a popular clearing house.

  [28] On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at Coloma, California. News of his discovery led to the great rushes of '48 and '49.

  [29] Prices varied enormously from year to year, but the figures quoted generally by Flashman are above average. Possibly 1848 was a good year from the seller's point of view.

  [30] Slaves certainly were thrown overboard on the approach of patrol vessels (see the case of the Regulo which drowned over 200 in the Bight of Biafra, and the reported case of the clipper captain who was said to have murdered over 500 by dropping them with his anchor chain, both quoted in Kay).

  [31] Abraham Lincoln was 39 at this time, and the physical description tallies closely with his first known photograph, taken in 1846. When he met Flashman he was in the middle of his only term as a U.S. Congressman, although he already had a successful career in local politics and as a lawyer behind him. As a Congressman he was not especially distinguished, and his bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia was never brought in.

  [32] Cassius Clay (1810-1903), a fighting Kentuckian and fervent abolitionist, who later became President Lincoln's minister to Russia.

  [33] The underground railroad was a truly heroic organisation which ran more than 70,000 slaves to freedom. Founded in the early 1840s by a clergyman, its agents included the famous John Brown of the popular song, and the extraordinary little negress, Harriet Tubman, herself a runaway. She guided no fewer than nineteen convoys of escaped negroes out of the slave states, including infants who had to be drugged to escape detection, and is reputed never to have lost any of her many hundred “passengers”.

  [34] The true identity of “Mr Crixus” can only be guessed at. Obviously he had adopted the name from the Gaulish slave who was a chief lieutenant to Spartacus in the Roman gladiators' rebellion of 73 B.C.

  [35] The Sultana's record for the trip was five days and twelve hours exactly, set in 1844. Although often exaggerated, the performance of the Mississippi steamboats was extraordinary, and reached a peak with the run of Captain Cannon in the “good ship Robert E. Lee” in 1870, when the 1218 miles from New Orleans to St Louis was covered in three days eighteen hours fourteen minutes. Normally a big sidewheeler could easily maintain an average of over 12 m.p.h. upstream.

  [36] Mr Bixhy was later head pilot of the Union forces in the Civil War. His other claim to fame is that he taught the craft of steamboat piloting to Mark Twain.

  [37] Mustee, a shortened form of musteefino or musterfino: loosely, a halfcaste, but particularly one who was very pale skinned. Strictly speaking, the child of one black and one white parent is a mulatto; the child of a mulatto and a white is a quadroon (one quarter black); the child of a quadroon and a white is a mustee (one eighth black). It is a curious feature of colour prejudice that any admixture of coloured blood, however small, is deemed sufficient to make the owner a negro.

  [38] Thanks to Flashman's vagueness about dates, it is impossible to say in exactly which week he and Cassy were contemplating their journey up the Ohio. It must surely have been early spring in 1849, in which case Flashman must have spent longer on the Mandeville plantation than his narrative suggests; he was there for cotton-picking, which normally takes place in September and October, but can extend into early December.

  [39] There can be little doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was living in Cincinnati at the time, must have heard of Cassy and Flashman crossing the Ohio ice pursued by slave-catchers, and decided to incorporate the incident in her best-selling Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published two years later. She, of course, attributed the feat to the slave girl Eliza; it can be no more than an interesting coincidence that the burden Eliza carried in her flight was a “real handsome boy” named Harry. But it seems quite likely that Mrs Stowe met the real Cassy, and used her, name and all, in that part of the book which describes life on Simon Legree's plantation.

  Incidentally, Mrs Stowe timed Eliza's fictitious crossing for late February (which she calls “early spring”); this provides a further due to the time of Flashman's crossing in similar weather conditions.

  [40] A “who's-yar” (usually spelled hoosier): an Indianan, supposedly deriving from the rustic dialect for “who's there? ”, although this is much disputed. In fact, although Lincoln spent most of his youth in Indiana, he himself was a Kentuckian by birth.

  [41] But not for much longer. Lincoln's term in Congress ended, on March 4, 1849, which can only have been a few days after his meeting with Flashman in Portsmouth; it is curious that their conversation contains no mention of his impending retirement.

  [42] The Butterfly, a newly-built slave ship, was captured before she had even reached Africa, let alone taken on slaves. After a fierce legal battle she was condemned.

  [43] From Flashman's account of the adjudication, it is obvious that he has greatly simplified the procedure of the court; no doubt after half a century only the highlights remained in his mind. Procedure in slaveship cases varied greatly from country to country, and did not remain consistent, and many such cases were never even printed. So bearing in mind that what he is describing was a form of preliminary hearing, and not a slave-ship trial proper, one can only take his word for what happened in the Balliol College adjudication.

  As to Flashman's allegations ot corruption and pressure exerted in slave-ship cases, one cannot do better than quote the words of a contemporary skipper, Captain C. E. Driscoll (see Howard), who boasted flatly: “I can get any man off in New York for a thousand dollars.”

  [44] The owners of a ship arrested as a slaver, but subsequently acquitted, might well be in a strong position to c
laim damages from the arresting party. For this reason there was some reluctance in the late 1840s, especially among American Navy officers, to capture suspected slaveships, for fear of being sued.