The Ingham plantation was surrounded by pine forest, with a comfortable family house made entirely from logs at its centre. Mrs Ingham and a retinue of black slaves were waiting on the porch to greet her husband and young guest.
After supper, the Major received a visit from his plantation overseer. Stanley tells us that he ‘almost immediately contracted a dislike for him’. He found the man coarse, vulgar and haughtily guessed him to be ‘one of those men who haunt liquor saloons and are proud to claim acquaintance with bar-tenders’. In turn, the overseer viewed young Stanley with similar disdain.
The boy spent his first weeks in Arkansas helping plantation slaves cut down trees to make room for new cotton plants. As trees came crashing down, slaves cut them into logs, then rolled them to a clearing ready to be taken to a sawmill. Young Stanley loved the work and being the token white boy in a team of black slaves. He rose early in order to get in a good day’s work and returned exhausted to the plantation house at nightfall while slave gangs retired to less salubrious quarters on the edge of the forest.
The overseer resented the ‘son’ of a rich New Orleans merchant having such a wonderful holiday ‘slumming it’ alongside slaves. The boy noticed that whenever the obnoxious man arrived, the slaves became sullen, stopped talking and singing, keeping one eye on the man and the other on the ‘black snake’ bullwhip which he was fond of cracking in the air.
The slaves enjoyed having young Stanley around. While he worked alongside them, the overseer was restrained and less likely to crack his whip in their direction. When the lad was not present, the overseer became a foul-mouthed bully, picking on plantation workers and using his whip indiscriminately.
Things came to a head when the overseer arrived one day clearly looking for trouble. Young Stanley was helping a group carry a large log when the overseer muttered something to a slave called Jim. The slave’s reply was obviously not polite enough for the overseer’s ears and he flicked his whip onto the slave’s bare shoulders, missing Stanley by inches. As Stanley pulled out of the way, Jim fell to the ground, followed by the massive log, which landed on another slave’s foot. At the spectacle of such wanton cruelty Stanley’s temper rose and he and the overseer ‘became engaged in a wordy contest; hot words, even threats, were exchanged and had it not been for the cries of the wounded man who was fast by the log, we should probably have fought’.
The boy marched off in search of Ingham who was lounging in his rocking chair on his porch. To Stanley’s surprise, the genial gentleman remained seated, calmly informing the boy that such things were outside his province, work in the field being left to the overseer’s discretion. He told the boy not to excite himself over things he knew nothing about.
Such blatant injustice was too much for the hot-headed young Stanley, who refused to remain at the plantation a day longer and announced he was leaving immediately for Cypress Bend. It took the boy two days to hike 40 miles along forest tracks to the small swampland community, where he discovered the long wooden single-storey store in a clearing. Mr Altschul, the proprietor, had been expecting young Stanley, although he was unsure when exactly he would arrive.
The proprietor took the boy on a tour of the store which was actually a country house divided into four apartments, three of which contained all manner of things sold in a general store with the fourth room used as an office by day and a bedroom for the storekeepers at night.
Young Stanley commenced work at the shop in November 1860, working as an assistant. His previous retail experience in New Orleans and knowledge gained from observing his stepfather at work turned the boy into an ideal provincial shopkeeper. Customers were many and varied – European immigrants, rich landowners, cotton barons, poor dirt farmers and illiterate labourers. Store work proved as routine and undemanding as Cypress Bend itself, a dismal backwater where little of note occurred apart from a weekly duck shoot on the river. When anything did happen, everyone knew about it and who was responsible. Newcomers usually decided to leave the place as soon as possible. The food was terrible and the young shop assistant quickly became bored with his diet of cornbread and greens swimming in grease, salt pork and heavy biscuits. He despised the swamplands, the need to use slave labour on plantations, the wealthy customers not as refined as his stepfather and the poorer ones who made no effort to improve their knowledge through books and learning.
Malaria was rife throughout Cypress Bend and Stanley suffered his first attack within a week of arriving. It began with violent shaking and a feeling that his blood had turned to ice. No amount of blankets or hot water bottles could warm him. Two hours later, the coldness turned into hot fits, perspiration and delirium. This was followed by nausea and total exhaustion that could last a week. It was not uncommon for swampland people to be incapacitated with malaria two or three times each month. The illness would incapacitate Stanley many times in later life, sapping his strength and reducing his frame to skin and bone. The first attack reduced the stocky-framed boy to 95lb and it took weeks to regain the weight, only to lose it again to another bout of malaria.
Stanley states that the arrival of letters from his stepfather in Cuba at Cypress Bend became less frequent. One of the last he received informed the boy that Mr Stanley expected to travel to New Orleans ‘in about a month’ and would be coming out to Cypress Bend to see how his stepson was progressing in his new career. No further letters arrived. He and his stepfather ‘were destined never to meet again. He died suddenly in 1861 – I only heard of his death long after.’
Again, Stanley distorts the truth. Henry Hope Stanley lived for a further seventeen years, dying from a heart attack in November 1878 – not 1861 – shortly after his wife’s death. This means that in retirement, the educated and highly informed British-born merchant would have been aware of the fame which came to the young man who took his name and became the most celebrated newspaper correspondent and African traveller in the world. There is no evidence that the two met again.
Little is known about Henry Hope Stanley after he parted company with the boy who claimed to be his stepson. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Henry and Frances Stanley went home to England, returning after peace was declared. Mr Stanley resumed his business and moved to a new house in the New Orleans suburb of Arcola.
There were opportunities in later life for Stanley to have contacted the couple, but he chose not to. Either he had completely misunderstood the depth of his relationship with the older man or an irreparable gulf had developed between Mr and Mrs Stanley and himself, destroying any prospect of future contact for good.
Mary Willis Shuey writes that Mr Stanley refused to talk about his ‘stepson’. When he died in November 1878, Henry Hope Stanley left an estate worth $138,000 – and not one penny went to the former workhouse boy.
In 1861, newspaper readers across the United States from New York to California and North Dakota to Louisiana knew that the country was on the eve of civil war. But Henry Stanley, the 21-year-old shop assistant at Altschul’s general store in Cypress Bend, only read a small weekly parochial paper carrying news of births, deaths, marriages, church socials and tips on preventing racoons from entering cabins. He was unaware that the southern states of Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana were demanding independence from the rest of the Union and that the northern states were against the notion. It was not until March 1862 that the young man began dimly to comprehend that ‘something was transpiring which would involve every individual’. By eavesdropping on conversations at the store, Stanley learned that ‘confederate’ southern states had set up their own government, appointed a president and were pushing Arkansas to join them.
Dan Goree, son of a Cypress Bend planter returning home from college, brought young Stanley up to date with what was happening in the outside world. Dan told him that Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency had created hostile feelings in the South because of his opposition to slavery. Lincoln’s abolitionist policies would ruin plantation owners, including many in Arkansas. The call would soon come for boys to sign up for the southern cause and go to war against the Yankees – an enemy every Southerner was convinced could be thrashed with a few licks of a whip. Dan said he would be one of the first to sign up and invited Henry to follow his example.
Across the country, young men were enlisting for the southern cause. News reached Cypress Bend that a patriotic plantation owner was raising a volunteer company, to be called the Dixie Greys, and that scores had already signed up. Young Stanley viewed the coming conflict as the end product of someone else’s folly and nothing to do with a Welsh boy. He avoided conversations about the Dixie Greys, and entertained ideas of getting out of America and returning to Wales where he could offer his retail experience to shopkeepers in Denbigh, Swansea or Cardiff.
People began asking Stanley when he might be leaving Altschul’s store to train with Dan and the Dixie Greys. He explained that he was not an American citizen and had no desire to fight in a war that did not concern him. Cypress Bend citizens were not convinced by his argument.
Stanley resolutely dismissed thoughts of war, preferring to spend his time trying to attract the attention of various young ladies in Cypress Bend. He had grown a small moustache in an attempt to make himself look older and it would remain on his top lip for most of his adult life. The boy still found it hard to converse with girls, but one local young woman appeared different. Her name was Margaret Goree, Dan’s cousin, a shy, sweet-tempered and friendly girl interested in the boy’s stories from literature and tales of his travels up the Mississippi. She visited the store with her mother and while Mrs Goree toured the shelves in search of provisions and household goods, Margaret sat shyly at the counter sipping sarsaparilla and making eyes at Henry.
One day Stanley received a parcel at the store, which he half suspected might be a gift from Margaret. He carefully untied the ribbons and opened the box, the contents of which he discovered to be ‘a chemise and petticoat, such as a Negro lady’s maid might wear’. The boy had been sent Arkansas’s equivalent of a British white feather signifying cowardice and his fear of the coming conflict. A girl with whom he was only casually acquainted and had thought was interested in him as a person and whom he hardly knew, was now responsible for forcing him to fight in someone else’s war.
Within a matter of days, young members of the 6th Arkansas Regiment of Volunteers – known as Dixie Greys – boarded a river steamer bound for Little Rock with a cargo of inexperienced farmhands, schoolboys, sons of plantation owners and a 5ft 5in tall shop assistant, once known as John Rowlands and now answering to the name of Trooper Henry Stanley – accidental Confederate.
They were sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America for a year, issued with heavy flintlock muskets, knapsacks and a light grey uniform and told to make themselves ready for a fight. The boys had signed up for the cause for a variety of reasons – many were the sons of passionate patriots who had joined to please their fathers, others were seeking glory and excitement, while the majority just needed an excuse to escape the tedium of daily life in the swamplands of Cypress Bend.