The Army of North Virginia - 3 April 1992

Something very strange and very new and rather frightening is happening. In a new national poll just over half the voters of the entire country have said that they have lost faith in the Congress and the way it practices the system.

Now this is not the familiar cynicism of smart alecks or street radicals, people who exist in every country, under every system. Not people who temperamentally bristle at the first expression of authority, whether it's a father or a policeman or just a traffic sign that says don't walk. I have an old friend who swears very time he sees that red sign flash on. Who are they, he mutters, to tell me when I can walk and when I can't? He's a type – every family has one – who is, as we say, agin the government. But this poll of ours is something deeper and widespread, an expression of something close to despair with the way the American system of government is working or not working. Just when we're sending off batches of politicians and businessmen and others to teach the benighted Russians and Ukrainians and Czechs and Poles the beauty and the blessings of our system.

Last week a distinguished, very able senator, Senator Warren Rudman from New Hampshire, simply quit. He's not campaigning, he's not running again, he's been in the Senate 12 years, he's not interested in making money, he's the leading Republican on two influential Senate Committees. He is, as senators go, youngish, just into his 60s. He's had it with his own party's administration, with the Bush presidency, with the Congress and not just because the Democrats are in a great majority and can control it. He feels that neither the president nor the Congress, both parties, are dealing any more with fundamental issues. He's frustrated at the inability of the President and the Congress to take seriously and do something now about what he considers he most fundamental, the most threatening issue of all: the national deficit.

Twenty-five per cent of everything the government spends is borrowed. We're coming into a time, Senator Rudman believes, when the annual deficit will be $400 or $500 billion, a rate that will, quote, wreck the country. Foreign governments will be able to dictate the terms and conditions of their loans, just as we do with Third World countries. He sees the economy going steadily down and something the whole country is certainly not prepared for, the general standard of living going down and down and down.

There's much else in Senator Rudman's lamentation that affects the coming election – I mean our election in November – and I was about to take off and talk about some of those things when it occurred to me, not a minute too soon, that much of what I might say could easily be interpreted in Britain as code language, an underhanded, cunning way of trying to influence, in a small way, next Thursday's election. The date had honestly escaped me because, to me, and a lot of other people who will gather in Augusta, Georgina, next Thursday, 9 April, is not only the date on the calendar marked off as the first round of the Masters tournament, 9 April is an immortal date to the Southern states. Let me remind you why.

At the end of the month of March 1865, the Northern armies had destroyed every growing thing in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, so that as somebody said, a crow flying over it would have had to carry his own rations. The Southern armies were hungry, divided, deserting, beaten. The last railroad that brought food to General Robert E Lee's army was captured. The conquering Northern General, Grant, had a sick headache on the night of 8 April and he sat with his feet in hot water and mustard plasters on his neck. Only a mile of two away, General Lee looked up to high, puffing clouds and saw the reflection of Grant's camp fires on three sides. He sent a note over to Grant, he would like to discuss peace terms but not a surrender. Grant politely refused.

Next morning, Lee adopted one final, desperate remedy, to cut himself out from the encircling Northerners. The odds in fighting men alone were about nine to one against him. In the last encounter, Lee tried to stand against oncoming infantry and cavalry. It was brief and murderous and hopeless. Lee put out a white flag and once the word got through to Grant, he and his generals agreed to a two-hour ceasefire. Lee submitted his surrender just before noon. Grant had never expected the end so soon, He was in battle blouse, no coat, his trousers tucked into muddy top-boots when he rode off into an apple orchard and a little two-storey brick house beside it. Grant was 42, small, bearded. He walked into the house alone and met the tall, grey-bearded, enormously handsome older man, the graceful idol of the South, General Robert E Lee. He had put on a new dress uniform, a sash and a sword, What his feelings were, Grant said later, I do not know, he was a man of such dignity. They sat down and talked of old army times when both of them were officers in the army of the United States, before the break. Eventually, Lee reminded Grant gently what he was doing there and Grant took a pen and wrote in his old ledger, the ultimate terms.

The surrender of the army of Northern Virginia, all arms and artillery to be stacked; he thought it would be a humiliation to ask for sidearms. As a farm boy from Ohio, Grant knew that the Southern countryside, over a vast stretch, had been devastated and would have to be worked again if the defeated were to eat and survive. So Grant wrote in a final noble sentence. Let every man of the Confederate army, who claims to own horse or mule, take it home with him to help with the spring ploughing. It's an unforgettable scene and it will be recalled in many, many towns throughout the South as Confederate flags, at half mast, flap in the warm wind next Thursday morning.

So, thinking of this, it was with a start that I suddenly realised that to Britons 9 April this year has nothing whatever to do with golf or Robert E Lee, but the election and I had better voice no more reflections about it. Or elections in general, for fear, as I mentioned, of interfering in another nation's domestic affairs. I've been accused of this once before and ever since, I swore never, by so much as the pronunciation of a syllable even, to give the appearance of interference. I'm morbidly sensitive perhaps, to this possible crime. Several times I've had the honour of reminding incoming British ambassadors of the little blunder that ended the diplomatic career of the gone, but never forgotten, Sir Lionel Sackville-West. It's quite a story, enough to frighten recent resident ambassadors, during an American election, out of the country for the time being. Several I know have done exactly that. Called home, they always explained to the State Department, on urgent business.

The year was 1888. Sir Lionel Sackville-West was the British Minister in Washington. A hundred years ago, believe it or not, the United States was not a power important enough to rate the presence of a British ambassador. 1888 was the year of a presidential election. The two candidates were the Democrat, President Grover Cleveland, running for a second term; his Republican opponent was Benjamin Harrison. Some weeks before the election, Sir Lionel received a letter from California. It was from a man claiming to be a former British subject, now naturalised. He was asking advice, who should he vote for in November? Incredibly today, incredibly then, the Minister send a handwritten reply. I think he wrote President Cleveland is the man. Well, the Californian was not an ex-Briton, he was a wily Republican or the tool of wily Republicans. Sir Lionel's letter was published far and wide, under blazing headlines: British lion's paw thrust into American politics. The State Department soon demanded Sir Lionel's recall. He was given his papers and packed off. Luckily, in the official exchange of letters, Sir Lionel could say correctly, that his brother had just died, that he had succeeded to a peerage and was so burdened with new responsibilities that he much regretted he could not return to Washington.

It occurs to me that there's another private, maybe half-conscious reason, why Sir Lionel was well-disposed to President Cleveland. When Cleveland was campaigning for his first term, it came out that he had an illegitimate son, for whom he'd provided. The Republicans got up a song: Ma, ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha. Nevertheless, Cleveland won the presidency. It was four years later that Her Majesty's Minister in Washington thought Mr Cleveland is the man. Way back, Sir Lionel had met, fallen in love with and lived with a Spanish dancer till the day she died. He had, by her, seven illegitimate children. One of them went with him to Washington and once the situation had been explained to Queen Victoria and the Foreign Office, the glamorous young daughter was allowed to serve, which she did brilliantly, as the Minister's hostess. The Minister's irregular family history was well-known to Washington insiders, just as President Kennedy's girls, some of them, were known to us reporters who followed him, but I guess that in 1888, as in 1960, the press would not have considered such private details to be in the public interest.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.