Flash For Freedom!

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 claim 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.