The Dominion's Dilemma: The United States of British America (5 page)

      “A Governor-General who won’t support or implement Crown policies…

      “That could be why London wants the results as quickly as possible. They presuppose Jackson’s opposition.” The General leaned back in his oversized chair and appeared to again contemplate the ceiling. Several minutes---they seemed unending to the Lieutenant---passed in silence. Then:
   “The question is:  how far are they willing to go in dealing with it? If you’re right, Lieutenant Wilder---and its one theory that makes sense---we are in for a constitutional crisis the likes of which this Dominion---and this Empire---hasn’t seen since 1775. 
     “It may not make for such a Happy New Year!”

                                          ___________
Georgetown, D.C.
December 23, 1833:
    Lieutenant Wilder gazed at his image in the full-length mirror late that following Sunday afternoon in something close to disgust. No matter how becoming his dark blue full dress uniform with the bold gold stripe down each leg, he simply didn’t do it justice.
Harps could carry this off
, he thought;
not as well as my polished classmate, Joe
Johnston, and certainly not as well as Bobby Lee. But Robert is down on the Virginia
Peninsula single-handedly, if you believe General Scott, turning Fortress Monroe into the
‘
Gibraltar of Chesapeake Bay.’

   
Lee, Tom knew, was expected back across the Potomac at Arlington for the holidays, though not until late tomorrow.

   
Mary was kind enough to invite me over to Arlington House for Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner, even though she hasn’t seen
Robert since the baby’s christening last fall. Johnston and Harper, though, are here in
Georgetown and will be at The Residency tonight…as will Lucille Latoure.

   Wilder had long ago conceded that ‘Black Irish’ he was not. No, he was a typical ‘Mick’---short, stocky and blond-haired---with freckles to boot! Even if his grandfather had left Cork back in the ‘60s and had made his fortune as a shipping magnate in the fledging port of New York. No matter; Wilder knew he still looked as if he was just off the boat.
   Lucille Latoure wasn’t beautiful in any classical sense; but men forgot that when she favored them with that singular smile which made them feel like world conquerors. Unfortunately, she was also an incurable flirt, a classic “belle” who possessed---and flaunted---a remarkable body. The total package had ninety-percent of the eligible (and many seemingly ineligible) males in the District of Columbia in a state of perpetual excitement whenever she appeared in town.
    Wilder had become fatally infatuated---there was no other operative phrase---with Miss Latoure, the elder daughter of a deceased planter and merchant from nearby Alexandria, at his first Residency reception the previous January. He had come upon her talking with a CG officer and made a bold misogynistic remark. She had shot him a look that electrified him---feigned outrage that camouflaged enjoyment---that had addicted him immediately and permanently.

    Satisfied with her conquest, Lucille had proceeded to make his life miserable on those occasions when they were together. Planters, other officers, senior government officials: she encouraged them all. And left Lieutenant Wilder wondering why he banged his head against this stonewall of feminine arrogance.
    
Well, if Lucille is in the mood to run roughshod over me again tonight---or simply doesn’t make an appearance---there is always Candice Samples
. 

    Mrs. Samples, the big, blond and brassy widow of one of Maryland’s most successful planters, was the proud processor of the most spectacular chest in Georgetown. Wilder had met her at a dinner-party hosted by Mrs. Scott the previous summer. They had left together in the Widow Samples’ carriage; by the time an exhausted Thomas had stumbled from her townhouse late the next morning he had absorbed intensive instruction in techniques new and thrilling.
      The ample Mrs. Samples was ever-eager, and ever-available, but the Lieutenant, who estimated her age to be at least 15 years older than his somewhat-worldly 26, simply had no interest in Candice once the initial animalistic struggling was finished.

  She’s a nice
person, ungodly rich and insatiable in the bedroom, but I’m not looking to nurse some old lady into the grave. At
least, not while Lucille is available! Still, the Samples’ townhouse is a lot more appealing than my room at the Indian Queen Hotel. Why is it that Candice Samples won’t let me alone; yet Lucille Latoure doesn’t seem to care less? I’d like to see ‘Old Fuss and Feathers’ explain that one…

CHAPTER FOUR

London, England
January 4, 1833:
    Visibility had dropped to near zero in central London as Harry Bratton’s carriage made its way back from the Thames docks. As the carriage groped slowly through the near white-out, Bratton was deep in thought.
The Liaison Office in Georgetown has been
predicting a Jackson
victory for months, so it’s not only the idea that he’ll be in The
Residency for four more years that has His Lordship concerned. Even though I know the entire Grey cabinet would have preferred Clay or one of the other candidates. Jackson’s
behavior when he was here in Parliament offended almost all proper London society
,
I’m
told.
After a while, even the Duke had apparently had enough…
  
Still, there has to be more to this than social contempt. I know Lord Grey wasn’t happy last year with Jackson’s speech hinting that taking Texas from the Mexicans should be a
primary goal of the Empire.

   
Lord Palmerston himself had fired off a sharp note reminding ‘Old Hickory’ that foreign policy for the Empire, including the USBA, is determined only in London!

      I
doubt Their Lordships understood the real rationale for Jackson’s hint, however
.
Their concern is keeping the Western Hemisphere off limits to the other European powers, especially France and Russia. Jackson’s motive is more provincial: the balance of power in the USBA Congress between the free and slave states. Simply put, the slave owners are running out of room for expansion. As the rest of the Louisiana Territory is populated and organized, and eventually, the vast Canadian West, too, the new states will come from areas where slavery is economically-unfeasible. Unless they can get their hands on all that territory from Texas to California, the slave states---and their representatives in Congress---face becoming a permanent minority. There are 26 states right now, including Ontario and Quebec. Just 10 are slave states, with the Florida and Arkansas territories likely to join them before the decade is out. As things now stand, that will be it: a block of 12 slave states plus Quebec against 15 or more free states. 
   Freeing the slaves is not the issue,
he continued
. No one’s considering that, certainly! The two blocks simply have differing goals for the Dominion. And the Southerners aren’t willing to relinquish the power they’ve wielded in Georgetown these many years. That’s where Jackson was headed with his Texas hint.
Not that anyone of influence in His Majesty’s Government knows enough about USBA politics to figure it out…or allow me explain it to them.
    Captain Harry Bratton, of His Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, (on half pay as a civilian official) came from an old Salisbury Plain family whose roots, if traceable, would have led back past Roman times. Brattons had fought, not always on the winning side, in virtually all of England’s wars: civil as well as overseas. Bratton’s great-great-grandfather had distinguished himself on Marlborough’s staff and his grandfather had fought beside Wolfe at Quebec. Bratton’s father had survived the worst of the Napoleonic Wars, only to die in the mopping-up operations after Waterloo.

     Harry, then 15 and the second eldest of five children, had always been pointed toward a military career. He had graduated from Sandhurst in 1819. His polish and quick intelligence, as well as his reputation as a crack shot and good horseman, had been noted both there and with the Guards. He was identified as a ‘diplomatic’ and sent to India in 1823. Three years later, he joined the Liaison Office in Georgetown. There, he was credited with quietly attending to some ‘under the rose’ business in Montreal, as well as the dispatching of a French agent in New Orleans in 1828.

     Dapper, an even six foot tall, he was an accomplished ladies man. Even though, much to his disgust, the traditional early-30s Bratton hairline retreat had commenced even before he had joined the Colonial Office’s American desk. Still single at 34, he was considered a good catch by London society matrons despite his lack of a noble title. (Knighthood had usually been as far as Brattons rose; though Marlborough’s aide had been made a Viscount.) He enjoyed the company of cultured women, and was certainly heterosexual in his tastes, but had never found the correct circumstances for a long-term relationship. For Harry, danger was the great aphrodisiac: his only truly-memorable relationships had been with a minor Indian princess and the wife of an American politician. Yet, he could be equally happy with the occasional visit to St. John’s Wood. And there had been that Georgetown barmaid, Joanne, with the sad story of her Army officer husband, cut down by cancer, who had left her destitute.

      As Bratton’s carriage pulled up at the War & Colonial Office, he was stunned to make out through the whirling snow the identifying markings on some of the other broughams parked outside the building. 
My God,
he thought,
that’s the Duke’s carriage!
And who got Pammy out of bed at this hour (or did he come straight from his usual nocturnal pursuits)?
    As Bratton made his way into the dark old building, he came across Frederick John Robinson, 1
^st
Viscount Goderich himself. “Good morning, Sir,” Bratton said, shaking off the last of the snow that had clung to his cloak. “Just back from the Thames. Have the pouch you wanted….”
    The Colonial Secretary quickly stuck out his hand. “Yes, Harry, hand it over. The documents inside will determine whether or not this meeting will go as planned. Bye-the-bye, don’t go far. I ‘spect we’ll have need of your counsel soon enough.”
      “Yes, Sir,” Bratton managed to get out in amazement. “I’ll be right…”
      “To hell with that, Bratton. Tell me: did that uncouth old man win another term? Or, as I’ve prayed these many months, did Mr. Clay oust him?”
        “Sir, I’ve certainly not broken the seal on this pouch,” Bratton said, helping the Secretary open the leather-bound briefcase. “However, I’m reliably told by the ship’s captain that General Jackson was the clear-cut winner, outpolling Mr. Clay by more than a half-million votes.”
         “Damned colonials deserve what they get,” Robinson muttered, just loud enough for Bratton to realize he was intended to hear the minister’s disgust. “I don’t suppose William Wirt or the Virginia governor made a difference?” Virginia’s legal legend and that state’s maverick governor, John Floyd, had also run in the plebiscite. (Together they had received a combined popular vote of less than a quarter-million. Jackson, by contrast, had received over 750,000 votes.)
      “No, Sir. It was strictly a Jackson landslide, as the Americans would say.”
      The Viscount cast a quick sideways look at his aide. “Caught many of their sayings and mannerisms, did you, Mr. Bratton, during your years across the water? How long have you been back home?”
       “Minister, I served as an Army liaison officer in Georgetown from 1826-29. After I came home and went on half-pay, I joined the Office. I’ve been working the ‘American’ desk ever since.”
      “Then you know a damn sight more about the Americans than most anyone else who’ll be here this morning.  Sit tight. Have a cup of tea; you look frozen. We’ll be calling for you soon enough.”  Robinson disappeared into the conference room as a dazed Bratton found a peg for his cloak in the outer office and walked over to the fireplace.

  
It’s going to take more than one cup of good hot English tea to get the chill out of my
bones,
he thought, as he rubbed his hands over the fire.
And more than one to help clear
my head
.
The Secretary, Lord Palmerston, the Duke, and God knows who else in
there, want
my
counsel? Well, Harry old chap, this should be interesting…

                                        ___________

    The historic meeting ordered by Prime Minister Grey and chaired by Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Minister, began secretly at the War & Colonial Office at 5 a.m. on January 4, 1833. In addition to Viscount Goderich, Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor; and Lord Durham represented the Government. Home Secretary Lord Melbourne, the consensus choice among the Whigs to replace Lord Grey whenever that ailing old man resigned, was also in attendance. Sir Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, though the leader of the opposition Tories---for the Whigs had regained power in the 1830 election---had been asked to attend for several vital reasons. Not least among them was his relationship with the USBA Governor-General. Though Bratton was still unaware of the fact, another figure had arrived at the Colonial Office in the snowy pre-dawn: John Quincy Adams, the previous USBA G-G and present Massachusetts delegate to the House of Commons. This blue-ribbon committee had been selected by the Prime Minister months earlier to develop and implement a policy that would leave Bratton speechless when he realized its scope and possible consequence some hours later.

   “Well, Frederick, what news from the Dominion? Did the electorate make our job a bit easier by refuting Jackson in favor of Mr. Clay?”
   The Colonial Secretary looked up from reviewing the report and shook his head in disgust. “No, Mr. Chairman, these results indicate that General Jackson was a runaway winner in the plebiscite, trouncing Mr. Clay by more than half-a-million votes. The other two candidates were non-factors.”
    The Duke of Wellington turned amused eyes and hook nose on the lone Committee member eligible to vote in the plebiscite. “Well, Mr. Adams. Your people seem to have permanently lost their taste in selecting leaders, wouldn’t you say?”
    Quincy Adams’ long slope of a forehead reddened, but his reply was dryly precise: “As the British electorate, Your Grace, apparently did two years ago?”
     The others, including Wellington himself, laughed. The Duke’s controversial term as P.M. had ended when the Reform-minded Whigs swept his party out of Parliamentary power in 1830. “Yes, there is no helping the taste of the electorate. Especially when you widen eligibility to the extent we now have on both sides of the Atlantic. We’ll just have to hope, Mr. Adams, that both electorates regain their senses in due course.”
     “Now then, gentlemen,” Lord Palmerston said in a formal, commanding tone. “With the USBA plebiscite results in, we can get down to it. We are all quite aware of the magnitude of the question before us, and its potential implications for the Empire.  I’ve asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer to sit in this morning as his Office has determined the financial cost of the plan we have agreed must be implemented. As we look at the question in the King’s various provinces…and Dominion,” he quickly added, glancing at Mr. Adams, “Earl Spencer will chime in with the appropriate fiscal calculations. Let’s begin with the West Indies, shall we?”
      Viscount Goderich shuffled papers set on the table in front of him. “There may be as many as 1,700,000 slaves scattered throughout our West Indies possessions. It is difficult to obtain an accurate count. But certainly, in number they dwarf the white population. If not for the Army and the Royal Marines, we would have had a Haitian situation on our hands a generation ago.”
     Emboldened by the war in Europe, and the subsequent drawdown in French troops, Tousaint L’Ouverture had sparked a slave revolt that resulted in Napoleon eventually abandoning France’s portion of Hispaniola in the century’s first decade. The independent Haiti had tottered on the brink of anarchy ever since, but no serious effort had been made by any European power to regain control. This was attributed by some to the stunning valor demonstrated by the blacks the amazing L’Ouverture had trained and led. By others, to the malarial conditions that had so weakened the large army of Dutch, Swiss and Germans Bonaparte had sent to put down the revolt that they had proved no match for the Haitians.
     “The slaveholders have no real choice. Either they accept the phased-in compensation plan His Majesty’s government will offer, or we can militarily enforce the emancipation of the Negroes without compensation. The resulting chaos would ruin them financially, of course, so, as I say, they will have no choice other than to accept a buyout.”
       “Are we agreed on the terms we’re proposing?” Lord Brougham broke in. Brougham, who among other things had designed the carriage type parked outside the Office, was a leading abolitionist.
      Palmerston nodded at Goderich. “Well, Mr. Secretary?”
      “A phased-in emancipation over seven years, with the former slaves indentured to their former owners three days per week. During the other four, they are free to toil any land they can obtain for themselves; be paid to work for their former owners or anyone else, or not work. In return, they will be clothed, housed and fed by their former owners until the completion of the seven-year period. Any freemen of course remain free and any child born once the emancipation process begins is also free.
     “In return, His Majesty’s government agrees to a phased compensation to the owners of…how much, Chancellor?”
      “Twenty million pounds.  Paid out over the seven-year period.”
       Palmerston looked at the grave faces around the table. “Any other comment, before we move on to The Cape Colony?”
      Adams looked both awed---for him---and somber. “Almost two million slaves on those few small islands alone! And the slave trade abolished a generation ago. Thank God for William Wilberforce. Think how many more poor devils would have been dragged across the Ocean if he hadn’t been so committed!”
      “And think how much richer those West African chieftains who sold their fellow blacks into slavery would be if not for Wilberforce’s determination…and the vigilance of the British Navy.” Wellington was dry.
      William Wilberforce, an early British abolitionist, had campaigned for almost 20 years before Parliament, in 1807, had outlawed the slave trade in the Empire, and therefore, in the Western World. The Royal Navy had enforced the policy ever since. Consequently, virtually all the slaves in the Western Hemisphere were at least second generation, though many, of course, were descended from African tribesmen and women kidnapped or captured during the previous 150 or more years. They had then been sold to multinational slave traders and ferried across the Atlantic in nightmarish conditions. 
    “A pity Wilberforce didn’t complete the job,” Lord Durham said with a sigh. ‘Radical Jack,’ as he was widely known, was also a longtime abolitionist.
    “Just doing what he did took two decades and ruined his health,” Lord Melbourne observed. “Besides, His Majesty’s Government wasn’t in any financial position in those days to compensate anyone. The Empire damn near went bankrupt putting Napoleon on St. Helena. Though, if Pitt the Younger had lived, the thing might have been accomplished 15 years ago.”
     The brilliant and precocious second son of the Prime Minister who had saved North America for the Empire---P.M. at 24---had supported his lifelong friend, Wilberforce, in his crusade. Pitt, however, was chiefly concerned during his two terms as P.M. with the containment and/or defeat of Bonaparte. Called a ‘genius of evil’ by the French Emperor, Pitt’s policy of financing coalitions against the French was a major financial drain on the Empire. Despite poor health, and against the advice of doctors and family, Pitt had helped forge the Third Coalition against Napoleon when he returned to office in 1805. The glorious British naval victory at Trafalgar that year notwithstanding, the subsequent Coalition land defeats at Ulm and Austerlitz had shattered the exhausted Pitt. He had died even before the slave trade abolition bill passed Parliament.  Stripped of his key political connection, Wilberforce had been unable to follow up in convincing Parliament to ban slavery itself.  He had remained in Parliament until 1824, when his own declining health forced him into retirement. He was still alive, writing and calling for abolition, at his small estate north of London, in Mill Hill.
     “Well, enough ancient history,” said Lord Palmerston gruffly. A silence that lasted almost a minute had descended over the table as the Committee members contemplated the enormity of their mission. “It’s the history we’re gathered here to make now and in the immediate future that we need concentrate on. What about the Cape, Frederick?”
     “Well, Mr. Chairman, there’s nowhere near the number of slaves in South Africa that there are in the West Indies. We can’t even approximate as no reliable census has been conducted. However, our Governor-General in Pretoria, Sir Galbraith Lowery-Cole, estimates about 100,000. Those are split between large planters, mainly British, and the small farmers, overwhelmingly Boer. That’s how the descendents of the original Dutch colonizers of Cape Colony style themselves.
       “Governor-General Lowery-Cole feels the British plantation owners, who also utilize slaves in the gold, silver and diamond mines, will reluctantly accept emancipation, as long as they are duly financially compensated. His estimate is approximately a half-million pounds. Remember now, these slaves do more than work in the fields and mansions. They carve out precious metals, too.”  
     “What about the Dutch, Frederick? How will they accept our decision?” Lord Brougham.
     “Not well, Henry, according to Sir Galbraith. But that may be a plus for us, nevertheless. You see, the Boers have been threatening to pull up stakes and migrate north---out of British authority---almost since the day we took control of the Cape. If this planned emancipation forces their hand, so much the better for us. We won’t have to pay them and, if they survive further into Africa, why, we send an armed force to take over their new colony whenever it suits us.”
       The ensuing laughter around the table wasn’t shared by the British American, who, nonetheless, determined to keep his dismay to himself.  Instead, Adams asked the rhetorical question: “Are we doing this for our conscience alone…or to help these poor people?  Surely we care as much about the blacks caught in slavery by the Boers as we do about those in the West Indies…or in the British American South!”
      It was Wellington who answered, expressing the prevailing view of most of his colleagues and countrymen: “Don’t bombard us with your self-righteousness, Mr. Adams. Your New England got religion after it got economics. Your predecessors decided slavery was a great evil after they realized it was too costly in your climate. You simply couldn’t afford to house, clothe and feed slaves 12 months a year when you could only have them in the fields for half that time… If Massachusetts had the growing season and could produce the tobacco and cotton that comes out of Virginia and the Carolinas, with slaves working 11 or 12 months per year, at least some of your people would be employing overseers to this day.”