CHAPTER EIGHT

Freedom’s Fortress

O a new song, a free song,

Flapping, flapping, flapping, flapping, by sounds, by voices clearer,

By the wind’s voice and that of the drum,

By the banner’s voice and child’s voice and sea’s voice and father’s voice,

Low on the ground and high in the air …

—WALT WHITMAN,

“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

Fugitives fording the Rappahannock, Virginia, 1862 (photo credit 8.1)

Hampton Roads, Virginia, May 1861

THIS WAS WHERE IT HAD ALL BEGUN.

Here, where the river washed into the great bay: a place as freighted with the heavy past as anywhere in the still-young country; a place of Indian bones and deep-cellared manor houses and the armor of King James’s men rusting away beneath the dark soil.

Time itself seemed to move here like that tidal river, its ambivalent currents stirred first upstream, then down. By night, from the water, the sharp-edged silhouette of the federal fort might seem to soften and sink, becoming again the low palisades that the first colonists had raised on the same spot two and a half centuries ago. The navy steamship, moored in the fort’s lee, might raise its black hull into the form of a bygone man-of-war.

History recorded that late in the summer of 1619, a Dutch corsair under an English captain had come in from the south and anchored at Point Comfort. On this promontory at the mouth of the James, thirty miles downstream from their fledgling capital, the Virginia colonists had built a lookout point and trading post that they called Fort Algernourne. John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s widower, recounted the ship’s arrival in a letter. The corsair, he wrote, “brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes.” These it had captured from a Portuguese slaver, bound to Veracruz from the coast of Angola. A strange and circuitous voyage, a strange cargo, and yet exactly what the colonists needed. A single pound of tobacco would fetch three shillings in London, but here in Virginia there were never enough hands to tend and harvest the crop. English men and women were lured across the ocean with false promises; stray boys were kidnapped on London streets and shipped off to be auctioned like calves at the Jamestown wharf. They worked the fields for a few months and then died, regretted but unmourned. These Negroes, cheaply bought, would be put to work in the tobacco fields, too.¹

Two and a half centuries later, there were four million descendants of Africans held in slavery on these shores.

But now, on a spring night in 1861, three of them were making their way across those same waters, toward the fort at Point Comfort—and, this time, to freedom.

THIS IS HOW IT WOULD ALL END.

The three men who crossed the James River to the fort that night—Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend—had been enslaved field hands on a farm outside Hampton, a quiet county seat on the north bank of the river. Then the war came. Like so many other Americans at that moment, the men unexpectedly faced a new set of challenges and decisions.

The tranquil rural landscape they had known suddenly blazed with activity. Seemingly overnight, it emerged as one of the most strategically important regions in the entire Confederacy—especially since its shoreline bordered the expanse of water at the mouth of the James known as Hampton Roads. One of the greatest natural harbors on earth, this estuary commanded direct water routes to the capitals of both belligerents: the James, highway to Richmond; and the Chesapeake Bay, highway to Washington. It would be repeatedly contested in the years to come, most famously in the 1862 naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack.

As the war opened, Hampton Roads and its surroundings were dominated by one of the few military strongholds in the South that the federal government had managed to keep: Fortress Monroe, which sat at the tip of Point Comfort, a mile or so from the town of Hampton.² The small peninsula had been occupied as a strategic point not just by the Jamestown colonists but also by both British and French forces in turn during the Revolution. Construction of the massive stone citadel, designed to hold heavy armament and a large garrison, had begun after the War of 1812—during which the British had secured Hampton Roads with embarrassing ease and spent the next two years raiding and burning towns and cities up and down the Chesapeake, including the nation’s capital. The federal government was not about to let that happen again. Unlike such haphazardly designed coastal defenses as Fort Sumter, Fortress Monroe had received loving attention from the nation’s best military engineers, among them a talented young lieutenant named Robert E. Lee.³ Once complete, it became America’s most impregnable military installation. At the start of the secession crisis, the War Department quickly sent additional artillery pieces and hundreds of extra troops to the fort. Thousands more Union reinforcements arrived in the weeks after Sumter. Fortress Monroe was now poised to become a major base of operations in the heart of enemy territory.⁴

The Confederates, too, were hurriedly marshaling forces in the area. And one of their leaders happened to be Colonel Charles King Mallory: county judge, commander of the local militia, and master of the three nocturnal fugitives, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend.

On May 13, the Union commander of Fortress Monroe sent a small squad of men across the narrow creek separating the fort from the mainland. Their job was to secure a well that lay on the far side, since the fort’s limited cisterns could not support all the new troops arriving continually by steamer. Although the federal soldiers had advanced merely a few yards into Virginia, and although the state had not yet officially ratified its secession, the vigilant Colonel Mallory perceived nothing less than a Yankee invasion of the Old Dominion’s sacred soil. He immediately called up his troop, the 115th Virginia Militia.⁵

Gallant as they may have been, these defenders of Southern rights and Southern homes were not exactly ready for a full-scale engagement with the enemy. (The militiamen’s previous duties had consisted largely of standing guard on local pilot boats to prevent fugitive Negroes from escaping.) Instead, they joined the several thousand other Virginia troops already dispersed throughout the area, busily setting up camps, digging entrenchments, and building gun platforms.

Or rather: the Virginia militiamen were supervising the construction of entrenchments and gun platforms. The actual hard labor was being done by local slaves, pressed into service from surrounding plantations. Soon, indeed, Confederate authorities required every slaveholder in the three nearest counties to offer at least half his able-bodied hands for military use. “Our negroes will do the shovelling while our brave cavaliers will do the fighting,” a Richmond newspaper said.⁶

Baker, Mallory, and Townsend had accompanied their master across the James to Sewell’s Point, where, directly opposite Fortress Monroe, the Confederates were constructing an artillery emplacement amid the dunes. The three men labored with picks and shovels beneath the regimental banner of the 115th Virginia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH.⁷

After a week or so of this, however, they learned some deeply unsettling news: their master was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build Confederate fortifications in North Carolina. They were bidding farewell to the area where they had spent most, if not all, of their lives. Moreover, two of them—probably Baker and Townsend, the elder members of the trio—had wives and children on the opposite side of the river. If they went south, away from their master’s immediate supervision, into the hands of unknown military authorities, and in the direction that all slaves dreaded most, would they ever see their families again?⁸

Just four miles across the water, in the direction of their home and their families, sat Fortress Monroe. It must have been a familiar sight to them, especially since Colonel Mallory had a house in the shadow of its ramparts, on the outskirts of Hampton. Indeed, it is quite possible that they had been inside the fort already, in peacetime; relations between the townsfolk and the soldiers had always been neighborly, so any number of errands for their master might have taken them there. Now, of course, their master, along with all the other loyal Confederates, considered it enemy territory.…

That was when the three slaves decided to choose their own allegiance. And they joined the Union.

All it took was one small boat. With Confederate officers frequently coming and going across the James, there must have been plenty such vessels at Sewell’s Point. On the night of May 23, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend slipped down to the beach and rowed stealthily away. As they drew nearer to Hampton, they must have heard distant shouts and commotion. It was the day Virginians had voted to ratify the ordinance of secession, and here, as in distant Alexandria, citizens of the newly independent state were celebrating. (Only six townsfolk had cast votes for the Union.) The fugitives’ timing may have been no coincidence, either. Colonel Mallory had served as his county’s delegate to the secession convention; it is hard to believe that on the big night he would have stayed to swat sand flies by the campfire at Sewell’s Point. Perhaps he was in town, rejoicing at his state’s self-liberation, when his three slaves spied a chance to liberate themselves, too.⁹

Still, it cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways—perhaps even as traitors? Even if they were allowed to remain inside, might this leave their families exposed to Colonel Mallory’s retribution? How, and when, would they ever reunite with their loved ones?

But the choice was theirs to make, and they made it. Approaching the high stone walls, they hailed a uniformed picket guard, and were admitted within the gates of Fortress Monroe.

Next morning they were summoned to see the fort’s commanding general himself. The three fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. And however familiar Monroe’s peacetime garrison may have been to them, at least by sight, the officer who now awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen in their lives.

Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: low, balding forehead; slack jowls; and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity, had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh, like dark little jewels in a nest of tissue paper. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as though its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him.

These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory, and Townsend. The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? (This was not an auspicious start.) Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field Negroes or house Negroes? Did they have families? Why had they run away? What had they been doing at Sewell’s Point? Could they tell him anything about the fortifications they had worked on there? Their response to this last question—that the battery was still far from completion, with only two cannons, although the rebels planned to install many more—seemed to please him. Next, to be sure there had been no collusion to deceive him, he carefully interrogated each man privately, making sure that their stories did not conflict with one another. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate. But as terrifying as the general had initially appeared, something in his manner may have reassured them. Was there a hint of compassion, even, in that gruff Yankee voice?¹⁰

Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler had arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the three fugitive slaves—although unlike them, of course, he had been greeted at the esplanade by a thirteen-cannon salute and a squad of soldiers at parade attention. His new command was one of the most significant in the army: the Department of Virginia and North Carolina. Admittedly, that entire department now comprised, in practical terms, little more than the sixty-three acres within Fortress Monroe’s stout walls, but it might soon become the staging point for a major Union assault on Richmond. That morning, before the slaves were brought to his office, Butler had sat down to compose an all-important initial report to General Winfield Scott, detailing the garrison’s troop strength, supplies, and fighting readiness. Yet when an adjutant interrupted to inform him about the fugitive slaves, Butler immediately set down his pen. General Scott could wait. The three ragged Negroes waiting outside were a matter of even more pressing urgency.¹¹

To many Union commanders in the spring of 1861, the runaways would have presented no dilemma whatsoever. The laws of the United States, of course, were perfectly clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The Founding Fathers had enshrined this concept in Article Four of the Constitution; Congress had reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land throughout the nation, including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it.

In fact, federal forces had already found occasions to prove as much. Back in March at Fort Sumter, a sentry standing watch one night had heard a splashing sound alongside the wharf, and looked down to see a slim, dark figure disappearing among the pilings. Finally the soldier persuaded the fugitive to come out. He was a young man who claimed to have been beaten almost to death by his master but had managed to escape and paddle across the harbor in a canoe, trusting the Northern “gem’men” of Sumter to shelter and protect him. Those Northern gentlemen promptly sent him back to his lawful owner.¹² At Fort Pickens, meanwhile, the Union commander had sent back eight fugitives. And Butler himself, at his previous post in Maryland, had seemed as ready as anyone to do his constitutional duty. When rumors of “an insurrection of the negro population” began spreading around Annapolis in late April, he wrote immediately to the state’s governor to assure him of his readiness to put it down by force of arms.¹³

Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy, as every sentient American knew. President Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” the president said, quoting one of his own speeches from 1858. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” The same pledge had been reiterated in countless other Republican speeches, countless newspaper editorials.

Yet, to Fortress Monroe’s new commander, these three Negroes who had turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case, in several important respects. The fugitives had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. The enemy had been deploying them for offensive purposes—to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort, no less—and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a good sound beating. And circumstances had changed. The renditions at Sumter and Pickens had occurred before war was declared; Maryland, where he had so gamely offered to help enforce the law, was still loyal to the Union. But Virginia, as of twelve or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, marshaling all her resources to wage fratricidal war. (Indeed, on the far side of the state, at this very hour—though Butler was unaware—the Fire Zouaves were carrying their dead colonel’s body back across the Potomac.) Here were Butler’s men on their sixty-three acres, a tiny oasis of safety amid vast hostile territory. They needed all the help they could get, and they certainly could not afford to do anything that might help their opponents. He knew this much about military strategy, at least.

Despite his exalted rank, Major General Butler had been a professional soldier barely five weeks. In private life back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one, though he had grown up poor, the swamp-Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse for female factory workers in Lowell, the famous textile-mill town. Unlike Boston’s white-shoe attorneys, the self-made Butler could not attract clients through social connections or charm, so he became a grind, a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law, and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest tug. (At his bar examination, he liked to boast, he had corrected the presiding judge on a subtle but important legal point, causing the distinguished jurist to hurriedly reverse one of his recent verdicts.) By his early forties, at the beginning of the Civil War, Butler had offices in both Lowell and Boston and was earning the princely sum of eighteen thousand dollars a year. He had also built quite a successful political career, becoming a prominent state legislator, one of the leaders of the state Democratic Party, and its candidate for governor in 1860. Though he had lost, many people (not least Butler himself ) remained convinced that he had bright prospects.¹⁴

This, indeed, was the reason behind his dizzying military apotheosis. Lincoln, fearful of having his contest with the South branded a “Republican war,” had elevated a number of reliably Unionist Democrats to high rank. Benjamin Butler’s long service as a leader of the volunteer militia was the least of his dubious qualifications; much more important, he was the last man anyone could accuse of being an abolitionist zealot. Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class Lowell constituents, and he had always been glad to toss healthy morsels of it in their direction. He had publicly endorsed the Dred Scott decision, and a central plank of his gubernatorial campaign was his fiercely sarcastic opposition to enlisting blacks in the state militia. (He also reminded his fellow citizens that “we buy and sell the products of slave labor”—no doubt with his hometown textile mills in mind.) In fact, when representing his district at the 1860 Democratic National Convention, Butler had cast his vote for Jefferson Davis as the party’s nominee—not once but on fifty-seven successive ballots, an extravagant blunder that would dog his political career for decades to come.¹⁵

A fellow officer once said that Butler was “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” And after barely twenty-four hours at Fortress Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of fresh but eager volunteers from New England, men who had flocked to the recruiting stations while the smoke of battle still hung over Fort Sumter. These were no Lowell mill hands, either. The Third Massachusetts hailed mainly from the starchy old Puritan settlements around Boston; there were many college men in its ranks—one entire company had formed at Cambridge. The soldiers of the First Vermont had marched off to war with evergreen sprigs pinned to their lapels, under the leadership of Colonel John W. Phelps, a West Pointer and Mexican War veteran and, as it happened, an abolitionist of the deepest dye. (The London Times’ ubiquitous William H. Russell, visiting the fort in July, would call him “an excellent type of the chief of a Puritan regiment”—and, on a later occasion, “one who places John Brown on a level with the great martyrs of the Christian world.”) The sentry who had brought Baker, Mallory, and Townsend into the fort belonged to the First Vermont; the tale of their bold escape from the rebels was no doubt spreading quickly through the regiment, if not the entire garrison. Finally, closest at hand among the bleeding hearts, there was Butler’s new military secretary, Theodore Winthrop, the poet-turned-private (elevated now to the rank of major) who had sent correspondence to The Atlantic from his makeshift bivouac in the Capitol. When Winthrop left for the war, he had written to his family: “I go to put an end to slavery.”¹⁶

How was Butler to win the confidence—or even obedience—of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor Negroes back into bondage?

And it was not only a matter of calculation. The general was a more complicated person than he at first appeared. His features were brutish, his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men—vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart. He had fought hard in the state legislature to win shorter workdays for the Lowell mill hands, a crusade informed to some degree by political self-interest, no doubt, but also by memories of the wan and sickly young women in his mother’s boardinghouse. Once, after the death in battle of a beloved junior officer, Butler wrote to the young man’s mother: “Although a stranger, my tears will flow with yours.” This was no mere formula—one hundred fifty years later, the rough draft of that letter, written in a tremulous hand, still bears the splash marks of his lachrymosity.¹⁷

Still … sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander-in-chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell as a mere civilian—and with another stroke, for that matter, send the Negroes back to Hampton as slaves.

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report to General Scott before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fortress Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

FROM THE FORT’S PARAPET, the black men could see the world they had left behind.¹⁸

This was not the South of cotton fields and column-swagged mansions, of slaves toiling by the hundreds under the overseer’s lash. The land beyond the moat and the creek spread out low and flat, lagoons and marshes rising almost imperceptibly into a patchwork of small farms, each with its plain old-fashioned farmhouse, its orchard and vegetable patch, its woodlands and its field of wheat, now ripening from green into gold for the early-summer harvest. A few roads, paved with oyster shells, crisscrossed the landscape like wavering lines of white chalk.

A mile or so off lay the town of Hampton, noble relic of an older Virginia. Along the waterfront, shaded by stands of slender cypresses, stood high-fronted brick mansions from colonial times, nearly all with neatly fenced gardens behind, bowers of peach trees, blueberry bushes, grapevines, and rambling roses. Owners of those houses were summoned to prayer each Sunday morning by the ancient bell of St. John’s Church, reputedly Virginia’s oldest place of worship, where the pious lips of eight generations had brushed the silver rim of the communion chalice, a treasured relic of the first King James’s day. Hampton was a place not just of inherited privileges but of inherited civilities; a place of wax-dimmed mahogany and dusty volumes of The Spectator, the legacies of one’s great-grandparents.

The old families, like all aristocrats, had been nouveaux riches once upon a time, back in the days when the James River was the British Empire’s far West—when an inspector of His Majesty’s Customs presided over the busy port of Hampton, recording outbound cargoes of tobacco and wheat; rum and slaves and Old World luxuries coming in. The Revolution, although bravely fought by many local patriots, had left little lasting mark. No one bothered to suggest renaming King and Queen Streets, Hampton’s two main thoroughfares. County and town continued to be governed by the same rules and same families as before—even as the latter grew both less nouveaux and less riches with every passing year. By 1861, it had been an age since a ship called at Hampton from Lisbon or Antigua. The harbor, half silted in, now saw few vessels larger than an oyster boat or a bay schooner. Hampton’s more venturesome sons and daughters went westward to seek their fortunes, while their conservative brothers and sisters stayed behind to prune the rosebushes and polish the mahogany. Values passed from one generation to the next at the Hampton Military Academy, whose principal—one John Baytop Cary, possessed of the most desirable surname in the county—schooled his young gentlemen beneath a painted sign: “Order is heaven’s first law.”¹⁹

Colonel Charles King Mallory, who held ownership rights to the three Negro fugitives at Fortress Monroe, was also a sprig on one of tidewater Virginia’s loftiest and most venerable family trees, just the slightest gradation beneath that of the Carys themselves. His ancestors had prospered here since the seventeenth century. A previous Colonel Mallory, his grandfather, had fallen in combat against the invading redcoats in 1781, beside a nearby church known as Big Bethel. The family still reverently preserved this martyred ancestor’s buff waistcoat, pierced by British bayonets in no fewer than eleven places. (Over the years—thanks, perhaps, to the depredations of sacrilegious moths—the purported number of bayonet slashes would eventually grow to nineteen.)²⁰

Slaves, too, were part of the ancestral legacy. Among the tattered folios in the county courthouse could be found a deed, dated at Hampton on the 18th of December, 1696, by which a certain William Mallory—the present colonel’s great-great-great-grandfather—granted unto his son Francis “one negro Lad nam’d Will and one Gray Mare & their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.”²¹

All through the pre-Revolutionary decades, slave ships called frequently at Hampton—sometimes dozens in a single year—almost all of them direct from the West Indies, often bringing just three or four Africans for sale, but now and then forty or fifty at a time. There had been occasional annoyances over the years—during the two wars against Great Britain, local slaves had showed a disconcerting eagerness to flock to the enemy, who had promised freedom to any cooperative bondsman. But the British departed, the overseas slave trade ceased, and by the eve of the Civil War, the county’s population remained more or less the same year after year: half black and half white; and, it so happened, half slave and half free, apart from a small community of free Negroes, some of whom had even won a degree of prosperity. Each of the town’s handsome old mansions had behind it a little lean- to shanty where the slaves lived and where they did their masters’ cooking and washing.²²

Slavery wore a more human face here than among the industrial-scale cotton and sugar plantations of the Gulf Coast, where each Negro man, woman, and child might be little more than an anonymous line in the absentee owner’s ledger book. Around Hampton, people knew one another. Even the largest planters rarely owned more than a couple of dozen slaves—Colonel Mallory possessed thirteen. The county had its old black families as well as old white ones. Indeed, these were quite often intertwined. Outsiders noticed what the locals seemed not to: very few of the area’s so-called blacks were anything approaching black in color, and the physical resemblances to their white neighbors (and masters) could be striking. Occasionally, tangled relationships emerged into the open; forty years before the Civil War, a local white man left half his estate to the daughter he had conceived with a black woman, the slave of a close friend of his. Much more often, things went unspoken. “Well, ah ain’t white an’ ah ain’t black, leastwise not so fur as ah know,” an octogenarian farmer named Moble Hopson would tell an interviewer in the 1930s. “Fo’ de war dere warn’t no question come up ’bout et.”²³

At least one of Colonel Mallory’s three fugitives was an instance of such ambiguity. Shepard Mallory was the only one described consistently as a mulatto; he was also the only one who claimed the colonel’s surname as his own, as he would continue doing for the rest of his long life. (It is unclear whether he used the Mallory name while still in slavery.) Shepard Mallory was born when Charles King Mallory was in his early twenties, either not long before the colonel’s marriage or not long after it.²⁴ Such facts hint at the possibility—intriguing even if speculative—that in leaving his master, Shepard Mallory might also have been leaving his cousin, his uncle, or maybe even his father.^*

In years to come, philanthropic Northerners would be surprised (perhaps in a few cases secretly disappointed) to learn that not all Hampton slaves were lashed daily—and, moreover, that quite a few spoke of their masters as decent, even kindly, people. Some slaves here, as in other places, were left to lead more or less independent lives, working aboard oyster boats on the Bay or practicing trades in town, and simply remitting most of their earnings to their masters. The town’s location also offered them unusual access to information about the outside world. In the decades before the war, a summer resort called the Hygeia Hotel turned Hampton into a popular watering place for wealthy visitors, including men of national prominence. John Tyler, Winfield Scott, and Roger Taney, among others, became familiar faces. Indeed, Tyler and his family purchased a beachfront villa right next door to the Mallory estate; when they arrived each summer they would erect a temporary cabin behind the house to accommodate their retinue of slaves. As these visiting blacks mingled with Hampton’s local Negroes, they must have confided a good deal of inside political news and high-class gossip that James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley would have given their eyeteeth to acquire.²⁵

And yet Hampton’s picturesque, shabby-genteel exterior hid far shabbier, and far less picturesque, realities under its surface. One visiting Northerner, asking an elderly slave if she had a “good” master, was assured that the man was “a kind—a werry kind massa!” And then she added: “Why, bless de Lor’… he nebber put wires in his cowhides in all his life!” The woman, of course, was making a larger point: a whip without metal wires woven into it is still a whip. There was no such thing as a “good” slaveholder; no such thing as a gentle version of bondage.²⁶

In July 1850, an article titled “New Way of Raising Pigs” appeared in a magazine called The American Agriculturalist. “Dr. Mallory, of Hampton,” it began, “has a new way of keeping both pigs and negroes out of mischief.” It went on to explain that the esteemed doctor—he was the colonel’s elder brother, Francis—made a practice of giving each of his slaves one or two piglets every spring to tend and feed throughout the rest of the year. Then, at slaughtering time, half the butchered hog would go to the master, the other half to the slave. It was an efficient way to fatten swine, the article noted—“and besides, it is contrary to negro nature to run away and leave a fat pig.”²⁷

That was how slavery worked in Hampton. As beneficent as a master might be, he ultimately had to treat his Negroes as a type of livestock—a type, moreover, that could be damnably hard to keep from straying off. This was no small matter, as Virginia’s slaves were growing more and more valuable over time. With the Old Dominion’s best soil long since exhausted, its farmers could only gaze enviously southward at the bountiful fields of the Cotton Kingdom. Yet the good fortunes of the Gulf States did not bypass Virginia entirely. The Chesapeake became America’s own Congo River, its new slave coast.²⁸ The higher the price of cotton in New Orleans (and in Lowell and Liverpool, for that matter), the higher the price of Negroes in Richmond. Indeed, it was often said that black folk were Virginia’s only worthwhile cash crop.

The old fortunes of the tidewater stretched thinner and thinner with each new generation. Heirs multiplied; debts multiplied; a gentleman from even one of the finest bloodlines might easily find himself in financial embarrassment. Meanwhile his Negroes had multiplied, too—more mouths to feed; more backs to clothe; more hands to do the same amount of work. Their Increse to him & his heirs for ever. Then one heard about the most remarkable prices being fetched: two thousand dollars for a prime male! It was beyond exorbitant—it was insane; it couldn’t last. It was also, by coincidence, the exact amount of the note of hand that one had imprudently signed two years ago, back when it had seemed, briefly, that grain prices must rise—the note of hand that would fall due next quarter, and nary a cent of cash to pay it with. The slaves’ rations had already been cut to bare subsistence; their annual clothing allowance postponed; but still one’s balance sheet showed an appalling deficit. Perhaps, indeed, they would be better off with a master who could afford to feed and clothe them properly. Surely it would be no sin to sell just one or two, sparing at least the faithful house servants. And come to think, there was that strapping young fellow Billy, on Uncle Jack’s old farm … the one with the unpleasantly truculent look in his eye, as if he were daring you, his master, to show him who was boss.…

And so came the discreet trip upriver, to shamefacedly answer one of those vulgar ads inside the Richmond papers: CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! Well, better that, anyhow, than having one’s ancestral house on King Street—its roof a bit leaky these days, to be sure, but still a handsome old place—seized and auctioned by the sheriff at the courthouse door.

This was how it might have gone with a slaveholder of the very best intentions. There were many whose intentions were a good deal worse.

Back at the turn of the century, no less a Virginian than Thomas Jefferson had recognized the strong financial incentives for a planter to increase his yield of Negro children. The author of the Declaration was always half idealist, half scientist—the two halves often at war with each other. The idealist dreamt of universal emancipation (someday), while the scientist could not help calculating that the offspring of a “breeding woman” at Monticello were worth substantially more than her labor. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law—since, as he explained, “what she produces is an addition to capital.” (A few lines later, he went back to discussing his lofty schemes for the University of Virginia.) By the 1850s, this calculus had given rise to an industry that each year converted tens of thousands of black Virginians into hard cash before sending them south. The Richmond firm of D. M. Pulliam & Co.—one of many competing dealers in the state capital—went so far as to classify its wares into twenty separate categories, from “No. 1 MEN, Extra” down to “Scrubs,” a term for the elderly, the sickly, or the crippled.²⁹

Rare indeed was the black family in Hampton that had not lost one of its members—a sister, a husband, a daughter, a father—to this ever-burgeoning trade. On local farms where slaves were expressly raised for sale, the common practice was to send children to market when they reached the age of eight: old enough to have survived the common diseases of infancy and to be useful in the fields.³⁰

For those not sold, enslavement still often meant a life of sudden disruptions and separations. Hampton was neither quite as placid nor quite as stable as it appeared. The antebellum South had invested heavily in its self-image as a place of changeless order, but in truth, it could sometimes be almost as ruthlessly dynamic as a California gold field or a Manhattan slum. When the more ambitious scions of the old families decided to seek their fortunes in Arkansas or Texas—or even just in another county—the slaves must be equitably divided according to their cash value. Many tidewater field hands, too, were “hired out” annually: slaveholders who possessed more Negroes than they needed rented them to planters short of labor. In Hampton, as in many other places, January 1 was when old rental contracts expired and slaves’ services were auctioned off for the year ahead, sending them to different, often far-flung, plantations. One former slave would recall how each New Year’s Day, “the cries and tears of brothers, sisters, wives, and husbands were heard in [Hampton’s] streets” as black families were separated—at least for twelve months, but possibly forever.³¹

In short, enslaved Negroes bore witness to, and suffered, all the unbridled energy and restless change of entrepreneurial America, without ever reaping its benefits. Occasionally, perhaps, a slave might put aside a fistful of seeds at harvest time and plant a little garden behind the kitchen shed, tending and watering it each evening after her long day’s toil in the master’s fields, hoping to raise a few gourds and melons that she could send to town—if she were permitted—on market days. Some pennies here, a silver dime or quarter there, and perhaps one day she might hoard enough to purchase her own freedom or her children’s. But then one morning the arbitrary hand of fate would intervene, dispatching her suddenly to another farm or to another state, leaving the young shoots to wither.

No wonder that so many dreamt of running away, of at last seizing command over their own destinies. Some succeeded; the kindly captain of a Providence schooner might sneak a stowaway aboard on the homeward voyage. But the price of failure could be steep. One June 23, 1859, the clerk of Hampton’s county court—a panel comprising a dozen leading citizens—penned a chilling entry in his minute-book:

It appearing to the Court from satisfactory evidence adduced before it, that certain slaves, the property of the estate of Sarah A. Twine deceased—to wit, Sam Watts, Mary Watts & child Louisa; Ann Riddick, John Riddick, Mariah Becket & her child Georgeanna; Frank Williams and Purdah—are making preparation to abscond to a free State & thereby become a loss to said Estate—It is ordered that Jacob K. Wray personal representative of the estate of Sarah A. Twine dec’d do sell the said slaves in Richmond at a public slave auction for cash.³²

Thus the hand of justice dealt with Negroes in antebellum Virginia—Negroes who had not even committed a crime but were simply believed to be considering one.

More surprising is another entry dated five months later, this one an indictment against a white man:

On the 1st of November 1859, Severn Knottingham (or Nottingham) did seditiously speak & utter the following, to wit: He believed that Brown done perfectly right in doing as he did at Harper’s Ferry.

In making this statement, the court continued, Knottingham (or Nottingham) was implicitly “maintaining that owners have not the right of property in their slaves, to the manifest injury of the institution of slavery.”³³

Sedition against the institution of slavery. A heinous offense in Virginia—or, indeed, anywhere in the South—just two weeks after John Brown had come on his mission of divine retribution.

And yet Severn Knottingham—whose ultimate sentence, if there was one, is unrecorded—was not alone. Two other white men in the county faced similar criminal charges that day. Jefferson Craven had been overheard saying “that he wished or would be glad if the insurrection would happen to-night.” Most shocking of all, a certain Henry Hawkins had allegedly declared that “he wished all the slaves would rise & kill the whites, & damn Henry A. Wise [the governor of Virginia] & Harper’s Ferry.”³⁴

Nor were Knottingham, Craven, and Hawkins the only white Virginians to feel this seemingly perverse sympathy with the fanatic who had invaded their state and tried to destroy the world they knew. Even Governor Wise himself, along with other Southern political leaders, had come to see Brown immediately after his capture and sat almost mesmerized for three hours as the old man, bleeding from a serious head wound, held forth about human rights, the curse of slavery, and the inexorable judgment of eternity. Wise said afterward: “They are mistaken who take him to be a madman.… He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to say [that]… he inspired me with great trust in his integrity, as a man of truth.” Certainly Wise did not agree with Brown’s position on slavery, to say the least; he yielded to no one in his defense of the peculiar institution. And yet some part of him seems to have responded not just to Brown’s courage but also to the stark grandeur of his moral message. “Black slaves make white slaves,” Wise had once confessed. This lament spoke for many of his fellow Virginians.³⁵

The old Jeffersonian ambivalence about slavery had never disappeared: it had simply gone underground. Within their most private selves, many Southerners—even those with large investments in the institution—had secret thoughts that they would never have spoken aloud; thoughts that, if spoken, would have been crimes. Even in South Carolina; even in the very heart of the rebellion. Mary Chesnut, the most penetrating gazer into the Southern soul, was married to a former United States senator and ardent Confederate, heir apparent to more than five hundred family slaves. (Indeed, James Chesnut was one of the two adjutants who delivered Beauregard’s surrender demand to Fort Sumter.) Publicly, Mary supported her husband when, for instance, he declared on the Senate floor that “commerce, civilization, and Christianity” all went hand in hand to sanctify Negro servitude. Privately, she wrote in her diary in March 1861: “I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. [Charles] Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true.” A few months later she confessed her belief that two-thirds of the slaveholders in the Confederate army inwardly “dislike slavery as much as Mrs. Stowe or Greeley.” And yet, she also recognized, they had just gone off to lay down their lives for it.³⁶

The last time any significant misgivings about slavery had been aired publicly in Virginia was thirty years earlier, in the wake of the terrifying 1831 Negro uprising led by Nat Turner. A month after Turner’s execution—he was flayed, quartered, and beheaded—legislators gathered in Richmond to consider various plans that would have emancipated the state’s slaves and resettled them somewhere beyond the Old Dominion’s borders. The governor, John Floyd (father of the Buchanan administration’s notorious secretary of war), went so far as to write in his diary: “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” But it soon evolved into the same classic debate that would reemerge, in different shapes and colors, at other moments in American history: when threatened from within, should the state reform itself, or clamp down on dissent? In the end, Virginians chose to clamp down. And so sedition laws and slave patrols became indispensible elements of Southern life. Northern publications expressing unorthodox sentiments on the peculiar institution were seized and destroyed by local postmasters. By 1861, the patrols around Hampton paid surprise visits at least weekly to every slave quarter in the county, making sure that no Negroes would “stroll from one plantation to another” or hold “unlawful assemblies,” among other misdeeds. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen checked outbound vessels for fugitives. Order must be heaven’s first law.³⁷

Memories of the Turner rebellion stayed fresh in Hampton. The calamity and its backlash had unfolded just across the James River in Southampton County—formerly just another quiet old corner of the tidewater, another place of small farms and “kind” slaveholders.³⁸ There, in a matter of hours, the time-hallowed relationship between the races had devolved into a nightmare: white children with their brains dashed out, black men’s heads skewered on stakes along the road to deter other would-be conspirators. After that, who was to say that such horrors might not occur without warning elsewhere in the Virginia tidewater—or, indeed, in any town or county of the slave states? This never-ending threat of black violence must be met with a never-ending, and even more forceful, threat of white violence in return. Pieces of Turner’s body were distributed as talismans among the whites; one Southampton man made a change purse from its skin. Eternal vigilance would be the price of Southern liberties. Whites must learn, and must teach their children—as blacks had been doing for centuries—to bear a constant burden of fear. Perhaps even more difficult, they must learn to pretend that this fear did not exist. “There is something suspicious,” noted the sharp-eyed William H. Russell, reporting this time from a South Carolina plantation, “in the constant never-ending statement that ‘we are not afraid of our slaves.’ ”³⁹

Thus, even if on some deep level slavery was, as Mary Chesnut said, a hated institution, it must be defended unequivocally, unambivalently. (All the more so, in fact, since the slightest crack in the façade, whites feared, might become an invitation to rebellion, to rape, and to murder.) Defended illogically, too: slaveholders must learn to insist that their slaves were happy and affectionate, while insisting in the same breath that even the mildest abolition propaganda might spark a bloody massacre. Yankee voices must be silenced in the South. Negro voices, too, needless to say. Southern voices, meanwhile, became ever more stridently defensive, rising in an awful crescendo with secession.

Little wonder, then, that Mrs. Chesnut, by 1861, would come to call slavery the “black incubus.”

Little wonder, too, that in the front yard of Hampton’s quaint colonial courthouse stood the naked, wizened trunk of an old locust tree: a whipping post.⁴⁰

WAITING ON THE CAUSEWAY before the front gate of Fortress Monroe was a man on horseback. He wore the blue-and-green uniform coat of the 115th Virginia Militia and the white-plumed hat of an officer.⁴¹

He was Major John Baytop Cary—in civilian life, the principal of Hampton Academy and promulgator of heavenly order among the local youth, but now commander of the Virginia Artillery company of the 115th. Colonel Mallory, he explained, was “absent,” and had sent Cary to represent him. In truth, Mallory himself probably could have found his way there if he had wished. After all, those three prime field hands represented as much as 10 percent of his net worth.⁴² But it would have been humiliating, going to beg these Yankees for something you knew was yours by law and by right. And the balding, purse-lipped Mallory would have looked more or less like what he was: a lawyer on horseback. The splendid Cary, on the other hand—silver-gray whiskers, erect bearing, haughty tilt of chin—appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.⁴³

Major Cary, moreover, knew General Butler slightly from before the war. Barely a year earlier, both had been delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, that ill-fated assembly where men like Butler had supported Jefferson Davis in the interests of national unity, but where, in the end, North and South had still failed to reach an understanding. Even so, the Virginian could address the Massachusetts man—painful though this might be—as one gentleman to another.⁴⁴

Butler, also on horseback and accompanied by two mounted adjutants, went out to meet Cary at the midpoint of the sandy causeway. The men rode, side by side, to the far bank of the creek—off federal property and into rebel Virginia.

After an exchange of pleasantries and a recollection of their previous acquaintance, Cary got down to business. “I have sought to see you for the purpose of ascertaining upon what principles you intend to conduct the war in this neighborhood,” he began stiffly.

First the major wished to know whether the Union fleet in Hampton Roads would allow Virginia civilians safe passage from the area. General Butler replied that the naval blockade would hardly be much of one if it let any Southern ships through. Cary asked if they could go by land. Certainly, Butler replied—since all but a few square miles of Virginia were rebel territory anyhow, who was to stop them?

The two men had turned their horses and were riding together along a country road, with woodlands on one hand and fields on the other, sloping gently down to the creek. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Now Cary reached the third and most delicate question he had come to address.

“I am informed,” he said, “that three negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those negroes?”

“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

Here Cary reminded the general about the Fugitive Slave Act: “Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Butler, dour though he usually seemed, must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever—even a rather witty—answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent scholar of jurisprudence, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize and hold any enemy property that was being used for belligerent purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, had been helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then—if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. In that case, he had as much justification in confiscating Baker, Mallory, and Townsend as he would in intercepting a shipment of muskets or swords. Legally speaking, Butler’s position was unassailable.

There was, he admitted to Cary, one loophole: “If Colonel Mallory will come into the fort and take the oath of allegiance to the United States, he shall have his negroes.” The rebel officer was, to say the least, unlikely to do so.

If anything could have flustered the courtly headmaster-major, surely this conversation must have. Cary rode back to the Confederate lines having accomplished none of the aims of his errand. Butler, for his part, returned to Fortress Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer with case law was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.

The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to General Scott. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to hereby submit.”

But before this missive could even reach the general-in-chief’s desk up in Washington, matters at Fortress Monroe would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were forty-seven, and not just young men now but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a three-month-old infant in her arms. There was an ancient Negro who had been born in the year of America’s independence.⁴⁵

By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”⁴⁶

“WHAT’S TO BE DONE WITH THE BLACKS?” asked a headline in the Chicago Tribune. It was a question that more and more white Americans—in both the North and the South—were starting to pose.⁴⁷

Before the attack on Sumter, the answer had seemed clear to many. The Tribune’s rival paper, the Chicago Times, expounded it in no uncertain terms:

Let the South have her negroes to her heart’s content, and in her own way—and let us go on getting rich and powerful by feeding and clothing them. Let the negroes alone!—let them ALONE!… ABOLITION IS DISUNION. It is the “vile cause and the most cursed effect.” It is the Alpha and Omega of our National woes. STRANGLE IT!⁴⁸

For many Northerners, the outbreak of armed hostilities did little to change this—at least initially. In early May, the New York Herald praised Lincoln’s “humane war policy”—by which it meant “his respect … for the rights of ‘property’ ” as opposed to the “lawless disorganizers” within his own party who urged “a war policy of extermination and confiscation against the South.” The paper’s position, in effect, conceded the premises on which the Confederates themselves had gone to war: Law and slavery were on the same side. So were slavery and union. Liberation of the slaves would be a confiscation of Southerners’ rightful property—and would mean the extermination of Southern society, perhaps even quite literally. The North’s struggle was simply one against a treasonous conspiracy, and for “the integrity of the Union.” In other words, Unionism was still a purely conservative cause.⁴⁹

Even some of the Northerners who were considered radicals had deferred to what seemed the necessity of disavowing any abolitionist intentions. “Some people ask if this is to be a crusade of emancipation,” Henry Ward Beecher told his congregation. “No, it is not. I hate slavery intensely.… Liberty is the birthright of every man, yet ours is not an army of liberation. Why? Because the fifteen States of the South are guaranteed security in their property, and we have no right by force to dispossess them of that property.”⁵⁰

For America’s small community of black intellectuals, the spring of 1861 was a disorienting time. “I have never spent days so restless and anxious,” Frederick Douglass confessed two weeks after Sumter. “Our mornings and evenings have continually oscillated between the dim light of hope, and the gloomy shadow of despair.”⁵¹

The past few years had been dispiriting and exhausting ones for Douglass, who had never ceased fighting for emancipation since his own escape from slavery in Maryland more than two decades earlier. In 1855, he closed the second edition of his autobiography with a ringing proclamation:

Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hindrances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.⁵²

Of all the Negro abolitionists, Douglass had always been the one to insist, often to the derision of other black leaders, that Africans might one day also be Americans, that the promise of freedom embedded in the Declaration might one day apply to them, too. He remembered when, as a boy clandestinely teaching himself to read, he had pored over a book of political oratory from the Revolution, deciphering the stirring words one letter at a time. He spurned those who sought an independent black republic in Africa or the Caribbean.

By 1861, however—after Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown—even Douglass’s rock-solid faith had been badly shaken. The final blow for him was the inauguration of the new Republican president. Douglass had campaigned for Lincoln. But the “double-tongued document” of the inaugural address, as he had called it, came as a shocking betrayal. If even such a leader as Lincoln would sacrifice four million Negroes to appease the South, then clearly all hope was lost. Blacks had no future in America. At the end of March, he booked passage to Haiti, planning to set sail from New Haven on April 25 and arrive in Port-au-Prince by May 1. If the island nation lived up to its promise—as a sun-kissed “city set on a hill” for former slaves—Douglass would move down there for good, and he would urge other black Americans to do the same.⁵³

But at the last minute, ten days after the attack on Sumter and in the midst of his oscillations between hope and despair, Douglass changed his travel plans, staying behind in the chilly dampness of western New York State. On April 27, as the ship steamed toward Port-au-Prince without him, he gave a lecture at a church in Syracuse. It was one of only a few speeches that Douglass, usually a tireless orator, would deliver in the year ahead. At the most tumultuous moment of the national crisis, he seemed briefly to find the voice, by turns soaringly prophetic and frankly personal, that had moved audiences ever since his first public address in a Nantucket meetinghouse, many years before. Instead of trying to hide his doubts and uncertainties about the future, Douglass embraced them. “We cannot see the end from the beginning,” he confessed. “Our profoundest calculations may prove erroneous, our best hopes disappointed, and our worst fears confirmed.” He continued:

And yet we read the face of the sky, and may discern the signs of the times. We know that clouds and darkness, and the sounds of distant thunder, mean rain. So, too, we may observe the fleecy drapery of the moral sky, and draw conclusions as to what may come upon us. There is a general feeling amongst us, that the control of events has been taken out of our hands, that we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.⁵⁴

“At any rate,” Douglass also wrote that week, “this is no time for us to leave the country.”⁵⁵

WITHIN DAYS AFTER FRANK BAKER, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend crossed the James River in a stolen boat, their exploit—and their fate—were being discussed at the White House. Indeed, they were a topic of conversation throughout the entire nation.

Word of Butler’s decision on the three fugitive slaves hit the Northern press on Monday morning, May 27, not long after Scott received his dispatch; almost certainly Butler himself, never one to shy away from publicity, had leaked it to a correspondent. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a joke. “General Butler appears to be turning his legal education to good account,” a five-line report in The New York Times began. “We think the people of [Virginia] will find the General a match for them in more ways than one.” It was like a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling “F.F.V.,” as the Times described Major Cary. (This was short for First Families of Virginia, a term of chivalrous pride in the Old Dominion that had become the butt of widespread ridicule in the North.) In fairness, the paper’s readers badly needed something light that day, on the heels of a mournful weekend: the Butler item was wedged among long columns of type describing every detail of Colonel Ellsworth’s funeral cortege and its passage through the streets of Manhattan.⁵⁶

Winfield Scott was also inclined at first to take the whole thing as a joke—for he, too, was in dire need of comic relief. The general-in-chief’s gout had flared up even worse than usual, forcing the Hero of Lundy’s Lane to spend his days prostrated on a sofa, his swollen feet propped up on a stack of pillows, as he gestured with a stick at a large wall map, barking commands at his scurrying bevies of secretaries and aides. (This scene of military grandeur, a correspondent wrote, “was one on which the pencil of a Leutze would dwell lovingly”—the acclaimed painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware had just been commissioned to paint a new mural at the Capitol.) On Wednesday morning, Lincoln met with Scott and found the old man chortling delightedly at what he called “Butler’s fugitive slave law.” Afterward, the president told Montgomery Blair that “he had not seen old Lundy as merry since he had known him.”

Of course, Scott also expected that Lincoln would instruct him to overrule Butler. And perhaps it was this prospect, even more than the joke itself, that cheered him: this greenhorn president had just been shown what could happen when you slapped a major general’s epaulettes onto the undeserving shoulders of a politician.⁵⁷

But Lincoln was not so certain. “The President seemed to think it a very important subject,” Blair wrote after their conversation, “and one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Lincoln made it known that he would address the matter with his cabinet the following morning.⁵⁸

By all appearances, nothing in the administration’s slavery policy had changed in the past three months. Lincoln had continued to avow, both publicly and privately, that he had no desire to interfere with the peculiar institution in either the rebellious or the loyal states. And yet one or two of those closest to him—closer, certainly, than the members of his own cabinet—had begun to notice that his position was slightly less absolute than his inaugural address would have it. They may even have known that the news from Fortress Monroe did not catch him entirely off guard.

On May 7, John Hay had gone into Lincoln’s office to brief him on some of the recent White House mail. He found the president contorted into a most unusual position: scrunched up in a chair with his boots braced against the windowsill and a large telescope balanced on the tips of his toes. He was apparently surveying some naval steamboats passing on the Potomac.⁵⁹

Hay told the chief executive that several correspondents were suggesting the administration could quickly kill secession, present and future, by attacking the taproot of the South’s economy: slavery. Orville Browning, a leading Illinois Republican and a close friend of Lincoln’s for the past thirty years, had sent the most extraordinary letter urging him to “crush all rebel forces” without mercy, and let the Negroes, after having “avenge[d] the wrongs of ages,” turn the confiscated Cotton Belt into a republic of their own. Perhaps Hay even read some of the letter aloud:

Our armies must march into the rebel states, and the negroes will flock to our standard. What is to be done with them? We cant avoid considering and dealing with this question.… There is no escaping it. We must meet it, and solve it, and we had better do it in advance—before the emergency is upon us. When they come we cannot repulse them—we cannot butcher them, we cannot send them back to bondage. Heaven would blast us with its wrath if we did. We cannot incorporate them into our population in the free states. We cannot drive them into the sea—We cannot precipitate them upon any other country. What are we to do with them?⁶⁰

Lincoln chuckled at this. Yes, he told Hay, some of his Northern friends seemed a bit “bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour.” Some of them appeared to think that the war—still less than a month old and practically bloodless—was going to result in the total abolition of slavery. One gentleman had even proposed—in earnest, it seemed—that he should enlist blacks in the army!

The young secretary persisted. Quite a few people were saying such things, he told Lincoln. Not just politicians, either, judging by the White House mailbag, but ordinary citizens, too.

Behind his boss’s back, Hay had recently given Lincoln a nickname: “the Tycoon.” This word had entered American slang within just the past year or so, as part of the fad for all things Japanese. Taikun was the title of the chief shogun, and suggested—at least to the Western mind—not just a wise and powerful ruler but a figure of deep oriental inscrutability. The Tycoon now made a reply worthy of his name. It impressed Hay so much that he copied it word for word that night into his diary; thirty years later, he would also copy it verbatim into his biography of Lincoln.

“For my own part,” the president began, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”

So far this was clear enough. In fact it was classic, lambent Lincoln: in three simple sentences he had explained why secession represented not just the failure of democracy but the triumph of anarchy. Those sentences have been quoted in innumerable Civil War histories and Lincoln biographies. But it was also part of his genius with language to deploy words as camouflage, to reveal and mask himself at the same time, like a taikun behind a rice-paper screen—or like an Illinois lawyer in front of a jury. It was this Lincoln who spoke next, in oblique phraseology that would be quoted by very few historians or biographers besides Hay:

There may be one consideration used in stay of such final judgment, but that is not for us to use in advance. That is, that there exists in our case, an instance of a vast and far reaching disturbing element, which the history of no other free nation will probably ever present. That however is not for us to say at present. Taking the government as we found it we will see if the majority can preserve it.⁶¹

One consideration. Disturbing element. Where Browning had conjured images of fire and blood, the president declined even to breathe the words slavery or slave. In speaking of a “stay of … final judgment,” however, he was using legalese—Lincoln the attorney talking to Hay the law clerk in unmistakable terms. Hay understood the startling import of what he was hearing: Lincoln had just admitted, for the very first time, that a decree of emancipation might become necessary in the course of the war. It would be the Union’s last appeal, to the universe’s highest court, for a stay of execution. (This was not the last time Lincoln would conjure a vision of Providence as supreme tribunal: in his second inaugural address, he described more explicitly a God who sat in impartial judgment of North and South, master and slave.) Lincoln’s choice of language revealed something else, besides: when the day of jubilee did come, judgment would not be hurled down from Sinai amid wrathful blasts of brimstone, as Browning would have had it. Rather, the slaves would have to be released from bondage by mundane legalese—perhaps even allowed to slip out through a legal loophole. Legalese, Lincoln knew, was the language of democracy itself: the rule of law, whether civil or military, came down to the power of words to compel. Had not the Founding Fathers framed their declaration of independence as a last-ditch political “necessity” to which they must reluctantly “acquiesce” in the face of tyranny? Decrees by fire and brimstone were a version of anarchy, just like secession.⁶²

It is somewhat ironic: anarchy was what both Lincoln and the South feared most.

In his conversation with Hay, the president had characterized slavery as a “vast and far reaching disturbing element”: a great structural crack in the edifice of the old Union. Here Lincoln reiterated what many other Americans—notably Jefferson—had been saying ever since the nation’s founding. (He was also echoing his own famous “House Divided” speech.) Meanwhile the edifice of the new Confederacy had been, in the words of its vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, “founded upon exactly the opposite” of Jefferson’s idea: “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” By using this metaphor, Stephens was not simply saying that he and other Confederate founding fathers believed profoundly in the rightness of slavery and white supremacy. He was also confessing that their new Southern republic would stand or fall depending on the solidity of its peculiar institution. In this perverse way, the very architecture of the Confederacy relied on blacks, no less than Colonel Mallory’s gun platforms at Sewell’s Point.

But by late May of 1861, some Southerners were already starting to realize that their war to defend the institution of slavery was actually undermining the foundations of slavery—in all sorts of alarming and unexpected ways—before even a single federal regiment had marched onto rebel territory.

In the first months of the war, Southern newspapers often boasted of slaves’ loyalty to the Confederate cause. The Richmond Dispatch, under the headline “Negro Heroism,” told its readers about some black men in North Carolina who—under the direction of local whites—had collected a thousand pounds or so of scrap iron to be molded into cannonballs. The Negroes, according to the editors, “express themselves highly pleased with the preparations that are being made to kill up the Black Republicans. Wonder what Greeley will say to that?” Another report spoke of fifteen hundred “patriotic yellow men” in New Orleans—members of the free mulatto community—who had offered to defend their city if necessary.⁶³

Yet the slaveholders’ confident public declarations were belied, as usual, by their private confessions.

It is true that some Confederate officers had enough faith in certain trusted slaves to bring them along to war and even put guns in their hands. This occurred especially at the beginning of the war, in tight-knit local militia units, including those around Hampton. It is also true that some free blacks, especially those of mixed race, voluntarily—perhaps even enthusiastically—joined up. Human nature is a complicated thing. Later history would show, moreover, that such support of their oppressors was not entirely irrational. Moble Hopson, a very light-skinned mixed-race man near Hampton, would recall that when he was a boy before the war, no one mentioned his race, and local authorities even looked the other way when he attended a tiny church school with the white children. But as soon as the war ended, he was summarily thrown out of that school. He and his family would henceforth be classed as Negroes and lumped together with the masses of destitute (and now dangerous) black freedmen, their past privileges revoked.⁶⁴

The “black Confederates”—a misleading term, since the Confederacy never accepted Negro enlistments—have received a great deal of attention from present-day apologists for the Lost Cause. Far more widespread throughout the South in early 1861, though, were signs of white fear and black rebellion.

On April 13, as her Charleston mansion trembled with the shock waves of bombs falling on Sumter, and with her husband away at the Confederate fortifications, Mary Chesnut had found herself studying the faces of her black house servants. James Chesnut’s valet, Laurence, sat by the door, apparently “as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent” as ever. The other Negroes wore similar expressions. But, the canny Mrs. Chesnut observed, “they carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, even though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”⁶⁵

For her, as for many slaveholders, that question answered itself. As early as November, towns and counties across the South had begun stepping up slave patrols, worried that Lincoln’s election would inspire Negroes to rebel. One unsettling story told of a Georgia slave who suddenly refused to chop wood for his master and mistress, telling them that “Lincoln was elected now, and he was free.” The black man, according to a newspaper, “after being sent to the whipping-post, gained new light on the subject of Lincoln and Slavery, and returned to his duty.” Many of the first Southern militia companies that formed that winter, the reporter added, “had quite as much to do with fighting niggers as with repelling Abolitionists.”⁶⁶

When war became inevitable, Mary Chesnut herself predicted that Southerners would have to deal “with Yankees in front and negroes in the rear.”⁶⁷ Many whites shared this expectation. On May 4, a farmer in Alabama named William H. Lee wrote to warn Jefferson Davis: “the Negroes is very Hiley Hope up that they will soon Be free so i think that you Had Better order out All the Negroe felers from 17 years oald up Ether fort them up or put them in the army and Make them fite like good fells for wee ar in danger of our lives hear among them.”⁶⁸

Southerners tried in vain to keep their slaves from learning any information that might put the wrong sorts of ideas into their heads. William Henry Trescot, the wealthy Charlestonian who had acted more or less as a double agent within Buchanan’s State Department, took to speaking about current affairs only in French when a Negro was present. This was not a widely applicable precaution, however. (It would likely not have worked in William Lee’s case, for instance.)⁶⁹

Jefferson Davis was prepared neither to “fort up” all the Negroes nor to put them in the Confederate army. He simply let whites like Lee continue fearing for their lives, which dampened military enlistment, since many men were unwilling to leave their wives and children unguarded with the slaves. (The following year the Confederate Congress would reluctantly vote to exempt owners of twenty or more slaves from conscription, exacerbating Southern complaints that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”) Some state governments even refused to turn over their arms stockpiles or dispatch all their troops to the Confederate authorities, afraid of being left helpless when the Negroes rose up to butcher their masters. They cited “local defense” as their justification, and the authorities in Richmond—committed as they were to the doctrine of states’ rights—found it difficult to overrule.⁷⁰

And in many places, rebel troops quickly found themselves facing exactly the kind of two-front battle that Mary Chesnut had predicted. The heavenly order of slave society—enforced for so long by the constant threat of white Southern violence—began to crumble as soon as Southern violence needed to be directed externally, against the North, instead of just internally, against the slaves. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen were no longer chasing fugitives; they were aiming cannons at the Yankees. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.

On May 8, Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles, commanding Confederate forces at Fredericksburg, Virginia, reported to General Lee’s headquarters that he had sent his cavalry off in pursuit of Negroes. The day before, he wrote, a local planter named John T. Washington—great-great-nephew of the late president, as it happened—had noticed that five of his slaves seemed to have disappeared. Hastening off to nearby plantations in search of them, Washington discovered that almost all of his neighbors were missing some Negroes as well, and they alerted the military authorities. General Ruggles told headquarters that he had immediately dispatched mounted troops “to intercept and recover the slaves supposed to have escaped, but thus far without satisfactory results.”⁷¹

In other words, the Confederates were fighting Negroes on Virginia soil weeks before they fought even a single Yankee.

Northerners, of course, delighted in such tales. Even those who loathed the thought of abolition loved the idea of traitorous rebels scurrying helter-skelter across the countryside in pursuit of mischievous blacks. The New York Herald, certainly no friend of the slave, welcomed Butler’s “contraband of war” decision, noting that the ruling “meets with universal approbation of the supporters of the Union cause throughout the country”—as a clever military tactic, it meant. (The Herald was also glad to praise a good solid Democrat like Butler; no radical, he.) The Springfield Republican reported: “The entire country laughed at the exquisite humor of the transaction.” A cartoon captioned “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine” began circulating widely. It showed a grinning Negro standing outside the citadel as a Southern planter (broad-brimmed hat, stringy goatee) chases him with a whip, yelling, “Come back you black rascal.” The black man points toward the fort with one hand and thumbs his nose with the other. “Can’t come back nohow massa,” he says. “Dis chile’s contraban.” Meanwhile, behind the planter’s back, dozens more fieldhands dash toward the walls of Monroe.⁷²

There was, however, a serious undertone to such humor. By the end of May, Northerners were starting to accept the idea of Southerners not just as opponents—let alone as the wayward brethren they had been just a few months earlier—but as enemies. The cold-blooded slaying of Ellsworth had given the nation a glimpse of the horrors to come. Many loyal Americans started asking themselves whether it was worth making such sacrifices simply to restore a Union that would still be committed to respecting slaveholders’ “rights,” and to fight an all-out war against the South while still trying to handle slavery with kid gloves. The old arguments against abolitionist troublemaking were already ringing hollow.

Two days after Ellsworth’s death—just as the second group of fugitives was arriving at Fortress Monroe—a Baptist minister in Albany, New York, gave a sermon about the young colonel’s slaying before an audience of Union volunteers. The Reverend J. D. Fulton began with a passage from the Old Testament about David’s lament over the death of Jonathan: “Thy love to me was wonderful—passing the love of woman.” Lincoln, the minister said, was like David, and Ellsworth was his Jonathan. When David spoke those words, Fulton noted, the Kingdom of Israel was riven by civil war. King Saul had anointed David as his successor but had then suddenly turned on him and had heaped up obstacles “in the path of the choice of the people and the favorite of Heaven.” Jonathan’s death, terrible as it was, had signaled the moment when David the former shepherd boy became King David, the monarch who reunited his kingdom and brought the Tablets of the Law to Jerusalem. Perhaps the death of Ellsworth would mark a similar rebirth for Lincoln, and for America. However, the preacher continued:

If it be the business of the North to squander her millions, and to give up her sons, simply that we can place the old flag-staff again in the hands of those who ask protection to slavery, then … you will see an inglorious termination to the campaign. But, if we are to fight for freedom; if we are to wipe out the curse that infects our borders; if we are to establish justice, teach mercy, and proclaim righteousness, then will our soldiers be animated by a heroic purpose that will build them up in courage, in faith, in honor, and they will come back to us respected and beloved.⁷³

Lincoln and his cabinet convened on Thursday, May 30—a week after the first three Hampton fugitives’ escape—to address Butler’s decision. Unfortunately, no detailed account of their deliberations survives. But a letter that Blair wrote to the general later that day suggests that they may have been fairly perfunctory. Previously the postmaster general had advised that he planned to argue for leaving the treatment of fugitive slaves up to Butler’s discretion—reminding him, however, that “the business you are sent upon … is war, not emancipation.” Needless to say, Fortress Monroe should not harbor any slaves belonging to pro-Union masters, or those not useful for military purposes. After the meeting Blair gloated, “I so far carried my point this morning about the negroes that no instructions will be given you for the present and I consider that I have in fact carried out my programme of leaving it to your discretion. I think this conclusion was arrived at by most from a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time”—a common enough desire in Washington, then as now. (Another account suggests that Seward’s deft hand may have helped coax his colleagues toward this nonresolution.)⁷⁴

By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children into the fort. With this in mind, Blair suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy: “I am inclined to think you might impose the code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the Secessionists to take care of the non working classes of these people.… You can … take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require.” As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that all the Negroes be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America—in fact, he was enclosing a speech that his brother Frank had once given in Congress about just such a plan. (The Blairs may have been rabid Unionists, but they had no more love of Negroes than the Herald—which, by the way, proposed that all the confiscated slaves should be held by the federal government and then eventually sold back to their owners, at half price, to finance the cost of the war.)⁷⁵

A week or so later, Blair wrote Butler again, somewhat more urgently: he had learned that even more fugitives had come into the fort, and thought the general really ought to start following up on that Haiti idea sooner rather than later. Maybe Butler could have a chat with “some of the most intelligent [Negroes], and see how they would like to go with their families to so congenial a clime”?⁷⁶

Perhaps Lincoln realized what Blair did not: developments were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. The president left no record of his own thoughts on the news from Fortress Monroe. But he might have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s recent words, had he known of them: The control of events has been taken out of our hands … we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.

At least one person grasped the full import of Butler’s little joke. Back at the fort, Theodore Winthrop, the general’s belletristic secretary, wrote a Latin tag from Horace in his notebook: Solvuntur risu tabulae.^* Then he added, in English: “An epigram abolished slavery in the United States.”⁷⁷

IN PEACETIME, the interior of Fortress Monroe was, and still is today, a serene enclosure. Winthrop might have called it a hortus conclusus; another visitor from the North thought it looked like a better-armed version of the Boston Common. Along its well-graveled paths, live oaks and magnolias spread themselves with aristocratic negligence, the tips of their lowest branches nearly brushing the clipped lawn. The officers’ quarters were less like barracks than summer cottages, each with a flower garden and double veranda. A happy posting, in the days of the Old Army; indeed, one end of the citadel’s moat was literally filled with oyster shells, tossed insouciantly from the casemate windows by several generations of military gourmands. General Scott himself paid loving tribute to those local mollusks almost every time someone brought up the subject of Fortress Monroe—which was quite often, of late.⁷⁸

The Chesapeake seafood still abounded, and demand for it had never been higher, but serenity was in short supply at Fortress Monroe in the spring and summer of 1861. Teams of workmen busied themselves everywhere. (One of General Butler’s first orders had been to clear those oyster shells from the moat.) War correspondents in search of the war arrived by the dozens. Draymen’s wagons rumbled incessantly to and fro, hauling barrels and bundles of supplies, provisions, and donations from well-meaning civilians back home, including far more pocket handkerchiefs than the Third Massachusetts knew what to do with. A self-appointed “aeronaut” named Professor La Mountain did mysterious things with silk bags and hydrogen before finally making the first successful balloon reconnaissance in American history, discovering a secret camp concealed behind the Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point. Deputations of clergymen from various denominations bustled about, anxious to ascertain that the Union’s defenders were marching off to battle untainted by profane thoughts or spiritous liquors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its parapets, like colonies of ants with the gleaming black corpses of enormous beetles. Scouts were dispatched to advance posts and returned the next day, usually “covered with wounds inflicted, not by the Secessionists, but by their allies the misquitoes, who swarm in the woods, and whom nothing can induce to secede.”⁷⁹

The Union’s foothold on Virginia soil had spread itself beyond the immediate vicinity of the fort; white tents by the thousands blossomed across the wheat fields, and U.S. flags flew triumphantly from President Tyler’s villa, from the cupola of Colonel Mallory’s house next door, and from Major Cary’s academy. Fresh regiments seemed to arrive daily. One morning in late May, the steam tug Yankee spilled forth the gaudy soldiers of the Fifth New York, Colonel Abram Duryee’s Zouaves, resplendent in white turbans and baggy red calico pants. Close on their heels came an all-German unit, the Turner Rifles, marching under both the Stars and Stripes and the black, red, and yellow banner of their homeland. Their picturesque colonel, Max Weber, his aggressively martial mustaches waxed needle-sharp, was one of Franz Sigel’s comrades-in-arms from Baden in ’48. (Weber ensconced himself in Tyler’s former study, delighted to find busts of Goethe and Schiller already there.) Each new regiment was like a troupe of costumed actors arriving in the wings of a theater: anxious and excited supernumeraries waiting for their cue to go onstage.⁸⁰

And then there were the Virginia Union Volunteers: less resplendent, perhaps, but equally picturesque.

That was the unofficial name—or one of them—given to the fugitive slaves who had taken refuge at the fort. “I wish you could see some of their clothes,” a New England soldier wrote home. “They are all patches, sewed together, and patches on that, sewed with cotton strings, and a hat that would be too poor for a hen’s nest.” Soon this was supplemented with bits and bobs of Union uniforms: cast-off caps, shirts, and trousers, and even the odd scrap of Confederate attire plucked nimbly from a master’s knapsack before departure. Almost all the Negroes came barefoot, and most remained that way. Yet each morning, dozens of the aptly named Volunteers lined up to pitch in with manual labor around the fort. Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.” A Northern visitor wrote:

I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day; a quiet, respectable, industrious … folk, with far more agreeable expressions than one could ever see in a low white laboring class. Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were the black Parcae disguised among us, and spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic. I think every one likes them.⁸¹

There was another nickname that caught on much more widely, one that evolved out of General Butler’s renowned legalism. Journalists across the country quipped relentlessly about the Negro “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The New York Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight”—until, within a week or two, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly crafted bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity. Were these blacks people, or property? Free, or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a whole host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook, by allowing the escaped Negroes to be all of those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment to-day. As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision as well, perhaps: William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery—and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had refused to concede any meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with black skin. Eventually, even many Negro leaders adopted it.⁸²

To a few people, the strange inscrutability of the word suggested somehow the uncertainty of the moment. “Where we are drifting, I cannot see,” wrote the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, “but we are drifting somewhere; and our fate, whatever it may be, is bound up with these … ‘contrabands.’ ”⁸³

In all events, the contrabands kept coming to Fortress Monroe, their numbers multiplying as the perimeter of the Union lines expanded. Only a couple of days after the first three fugitives’ flight, nearly all of Hampton’s white residents fled in turn as federal troops occupied the town. Some slaveholders simply left their Negroes behind, especially those too elderly or infirm to be of much use or value. Most tried to coax them to follow; some warned that the Yankees would eat them, or send them north to be processed into fertilizer, or sell them to a Cuban sugar plantation. But the blacks, not surprisingly, made themselves scarce, slipping off into the woods and fields until their masters were safely away. For some whites, who had considered their house servants almost (there was always an almost) like family, that day was a rude awakening. One white Hamptonian would later recall how his aunt and uncle “were particularly fond of a boy now perhaps 16 or 18 who had been in the house since he was a little child. He was a bright boy and very fond and considerate of them. This mulatto, though he had been raised almost like a son, was so ungrateful as not long after to break into the house with others and take all the money that this old couple had. The young rascal went off, and neither I nor anyone about here ever knew what became of him.”⁸⁴

By early June, some four or five hundred such “rascals” were within the Union lines. stampede among the negroes in virginia, proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women, and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”⁸⁵

Despite the stern counsels of the postmaster general, Butler was not turning away the “non working classes” of fugitives. Perhaps stretching the strict definition of militarily valuable contraband, he wrote to Blair, “If I take the able bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother must I not take the child?” In a letter to General Scott, he added: “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt. Of the political one, I have no right to judge.” Scott, judging both, let this enlargement of the original doctrine stand.⁸⁶

Abolitionists among the Union troops watched these developments with delight. Major Winthrop was at his desk in Butler’s office one evening when a local civilian, perhaps unaware of the latest permutations in contraband law, arrived seeking an audience with the general. He was an elderly, grave, pious-looking Virginian who, until extremely recently, had been the master of some forty slaves. He came bearing a tale of woe. By good fortune, he had managed to get half his slaves away to be sold in Alabama before they could run off to the Yankees. But then he had come home from church that Sunday to find that nearly all of the rest were gone. “Now, Colonel,” the man addressed General Butler, “I’m an invalid, and you have got two of my boys, young boys, sir, not over twelve—no use to you except perhaps to black a gentleman’s boots. I would like them very much, sir, if you would spare them. In fact, Colonel, sir, I ought to have my property back.”

The supplicant seemed so consumed with honest self-pity that Butler, Winthrop, and the other officers burst into uncontrollable guffaws. They sent him away empty-handed. Winthrop exulted that night in a letter to his sister. “By Liberty! but it is worth something to be here at this moment, in the center of the center! Here we scheme the schemes! Here we take the secession flags, the arms, the prisoners! Here we liberate the slaves—virtually.”⁸⁷

Winthrop, like most men at Fortress Monroe, had been a soldier for hardly over a month. (And the only secession flag captured so far had been one sad piece of flannel needlework that Colonel Duryee’s Zouaves had found at ex-President Tyler’s house.) In ordinary life, the slight, fair-haired thirty-two-year-old was a rising author with two travel books to his name—The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air—and a drawerful of unpublished poems and novels. His two closest friends were the writer George W. Curtis and the painter Frederic Church, who was also a hiking companion on rambles through the Adirondacks and along the coast of Maine (where the two had gone, improbably enough, to drum up votes for Frémont in the summer of 1856). Fresh out of Yale, Winthrop had been a tourist in Europe in 1848, and the revolutions there had left a lasting impression, a determination to find a life that would combine poetics and politics. Just after Sumter’s surrender, he marched down Broadway in the ranks of the dandyfied Seventh Regiment, whose members had pledged themselves to the defense of Washington for a not terribly generous thirty-day enlistment term. But Winthrop was under no illusion that the war would be a frolic. “I see no present end of this business,” he wrote Curtis shortly after his arrival in the capital. “We must conquer the South. Afterward we must be prepared to do its polic[ing] in its own behalf, and in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without precipitation, emancipate. We must hold the South as the metropolitan police holds New York. All this is inevitable. Now I wish to enroll myself at once in the ‘Police of the Nation,’ and for life, if the nation will take me.”⁸⁸

At the close of a brief and wholly bloodless campaign, the men of the Seventh had dispersed, leaving behind as their only casualties a thousand velvet-covered camp stools that had somehow gotten misplaced in transit. Winthrop remained, joining Butler’s staff. At Fortress Monroe, he was already witnessing the emancipation of the blacks, a bit more precipitately than he had envisioned. Appalled at the ragged condition of the fugitives, he began sending urgent appeals for decent clothing to his friends in the North.⁸⁹

He was also determined to write down what he saw happening around him. The Sunday that news came of Sumter’s surrender, he and Curtis had sat together late into the night on the porch of Curtis’s house on Staten Island, talking about the present and the future. Winthrop told his friend that he thought someone should keep a careful record of the quickly unspooling events: “for we are making our history hand over hand.”

While in Washington with the Seventh, he had written those brilliant accounts for The Atlantic—full of sly wit and vivid detail—of the troops bunking in the House chamber and the army’s march by moonlight over the Long Bridge into Virginia. Now, at Fortress Monroe, Winthrop began a new essay: “Voices of the Contraband,” he would call it.⁹⁰

Indeed, there were new voices, and new stories, to be heard every day at the fort. Some of the contrabands had led extraordinary lives.

One of the first fugitives to arrive was George Scott. He had originally been the field hand of a man in Hampton, but then through a complicated family transaction became the property of his original owner’s son-in-law, who planned to take him to his plantation in a different county, on the far side of the James. Worse yet, the new master, one A. M. Graves, was widely known as a brute who abused both his wife and his Negroes. Before Graves could gain possession of him, Scott slipped off into the woods outside town. For about two years he hid out in a cave, where a sympathetic and courageous young girl regularly brought him food. Many of the local whites sympathized, in fact, to the extent that they paid him to help with farmwork, even while he was on the lam: they, too, knew what Graves was made of. Still, Scott had plenty of tales about hairsbreadth escapes from the slave patrols. Once Graves himself had managed to corner him, brandishing a pistol and bowie knife. The agile, powerfully built Scott wrenched both weapons out of his hands before disappearing again into the woods. Now he was well armed, and his master, as well as the constables, became perceptibly less zealous in their attempts to recover him.

Scott came out of hiding almost as soon as the Union troops arrived. He quickly attached himself to the Zouave regiment. After two years as a fugitive, he knew every inch of the marshes, fields, and country lanes around Hampton, and became a valuable scout for the commanders at Fortress Monroe.⁹¹

In fact, rare was the group of contrabands that did not include at least one person with useful military intelligence, and it became standard practice to debrief them upon arrival at the Union lines. Montgomery Blair, who had grown up in a slaveholding Maryland family, advised Butler early on: “I have no doubt you will get your best spies from among them, because they are accustomed to travel in the night time and can go where no one not accustomed to the sly tricks they practice from infancy to old age could penetrate.” His prediction was already coming true.⁹²

Just after dawn on May 31, a young black man named Waddy Smith showed up at the Zouaves’ camp, having risked his life to get there and bringing some highly detailed information. Smith told the officers that he had escaped two days before from a Confederate camp near Yorktown, where he and 150 other slaves had been put to work building fortifications. He was ready to offer the Northerners a precise account of the enemy forces: how many men and cannons they had, where their camps were located, and what he had overheard the Southern commander telling another officer about plans for an attack. Smith’s owner had suspected that he might try to slip away; the officer who debriefed him wrote that “his master … told him ‘you’re mine and I’ll keep you or kill you’ and [Smith] said he thinks he would do so if he had a chance.” Colonel Duryee forwarded this report immediately to General Butler.⁹³

Even the contrabands with less dramatic stories than Scott’s and Smith’s shared tales that fascinated—and in some cases shocked—the Union soldiers. Many of the Northerners had never really spoken with a Negro before; some of the Vermont farm boys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home, unless you counted the blackface performers in a traveling minstrel show.

Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as an abstraction in speeches on Election Day. Mothers told of trying somehow to care for their children while laboring in the fields from sunup to sundown—and at harvesttime, sometimes even longer, husking corn well past midnight so that it could go early to market. They spoke of being left to forage somehow for themselves and their families, at times living on whatever roots and berries they could find. Some Negroes had been so ill supplied with clothing that they worked in the fields almost naked—and as for the children, certain masters routinely did not provide a stitch of clothing until they were old enough to work. Relatively few reported having been whipped, but those who did had some horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Most stories, though, were of the sorts of routine cruelties born of masters’ stinginess or carelessness, hardship or avarice. Almost all the Hampton fugitives spoke of loved ones sold away; indeed, the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as though their wives or children had simply died of some natural cause.

Perhaps most impressive of all—for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves—was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire of the slaves to be free.… Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.” They all wanted to learn to read, too (a few had been taught on the sly, as children, by their elders or white playmates), and before long, part of the Tyler villa was converted into a schoolroom for black youths.⁹⁴

Although no detailed account written by a black person of those early days at Fortress Monroe survives, the reports of white soldiers and journalists—and freedmen’s stories from later in the war—allow us to imagine both the exhilaration and the disorientation of the fugitives. The world that they had known their entire lives had vanished almost literally overnight. Their masters’ houses stood eerily empty; most of Hampton, one Northern visitor wrote in June, resembled “an above-ground Pompeii.” Nearly all the town’s whites had disappeared. In their place were seemingly boundless fields full of strangers, more and more of them each day: white men with harsh, uncouth accents (some did not even speak English), who stared at you curiously, often rudely, breaking into snorting guffaws at the oddest things. Some were kind; others, bored and restless after weeks in camp, tried to turn blacks into pets and playthings, making children scramble for pennies in the dust or playing practical jokes, sometimes cruel ones—and occasionally worse, as when one “particular favorite” Negro companion of a Zouave captain was beaten up when he imprudently ventured into the camp of the rival First New York.⁹⁵

They made you feel self-conscious in ways that Southern whites did not. And yet the most ordinary gestures became revolutionary: you could look these white men straight in the eye; you could shake their hand. (“Attended a prayer meeting,” a New York private wrote in his diary one day in July. “Got a good many heart[y] shake of the hand by the colored brothers.”) Even the obnoxious ones were often curious to learn your life story, whereas the Virginia whites never were; in fact, they seemed actively to avoid realizing that you had one. But now every visiting dignitary, every Northern newspaperman, wanted to meet General Butler’s famous contrabands. Whatever else they did, these Yankees never looked through you as if you were a table or a chair.⁹⁶

Far more important: you were free. Not officially, of course. But you were free of the past—and perhaps even free, more startlingly, of what had been your future. Free to decide when to come and go, and where; when to work; when to sleep; when to be with your family; when to be alone. Some of the contrabands chose not to remain in the fort, preferring to live more independently, despite the risk, in encampments of their own just beyond the Union lines. At least one tried to enlist as a Union soldier: an intrepid young man named Harry Jarvis, who had come from the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore, crossing thirty-five miles of open water alone in a canoe to reach Monroe. “I went to [Butler] an’ asked him to let me enlist, but he said it warn’t a black man’s war,” he later remembered. “I tol’ him it would be a black man’s war ’fore dey got fru.” Jarvis and many others stayed on to work as manual laborers for the garrison; they got army rations for themselves and their families in return. (Two years later he would get his wish, joining one of the Union’s first black regiments, the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts—and would lose a leg in the Battle of Folly Island.)⁹⁷

Back in April, as the military transport of the Third Massachusetts had lain at anchor off Boston, a small boat had unexpectedly come alongside, and a well-dressed young man, perched in its bow, hailed the officer on watch. Did the Third have room for one more volunteer? The Third did, and the stranger hopped aboard, satchel in hand. He was Edward L. Pierce, a thirty-two-year-old attorney with degrees from Brown and Harvard, highly placed connections in the Republican Party, and strong abolitionist convictions—who, by his own admission, had not handled a gun since he was a boy hunting squirrels in the woods near Milton. This was the man whom Butler appointed to superintend the black laborers at Fortress Monroe.⁹⁸

Each morning, Pierce rang the bell of the old courthouse, and several dozen of the Virginia Union Volunteers gathered in the front yard to be issued picks and shovels and sent off for a day’s work on the federal entrenchments. Soon these men felt almost like members of the garrison. A New York Times correspondent wrote:

Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns—the result of the native talent of imitation peculiar to the race. Going to and from their work, they do not straggle along in promiscuous crowds, but fall into regular files and columns, and with a step and regularity that would do credit to enlisted men, march with clearly defined pride, and sometimes to the tune whistled by one of their number who, while he has caught a chance-sight of the morning parade, has at the same time learned the music of the band. I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.⁹⁹

Pierce was a man of scholarly bent, and in his free time he sometimes wandered curiously among the empty streets of Hampton or paged through the records in the courthouse, which dated back deep into the seventeenth century. He explored the overgrown gardens and abandoned mansions—coming across, in one vacant house, a fine early edition of Paradise Lost. But it was the contrabands themselves, he felt, who best repaid his attention and study. “Broken as their language is, and limited as is their knowledge, they reason abstractly on their right to freedom as well as any white man,” Pierce wrote. “Indeed, Locke or Channing might have strengthened the argument for universal liberty by studying their simple talk.”¹⁰⁰

Locke and Channing aside, some of the black fugitives were working more directly to secure their people’s freedom. About two weeks after his arrival at Fortress Monroe, George Scott went on a dangerous mission to reconnoitre the enemy positions north of Hampton. “I can smell a rebel furderer dan I ken a skunk,” he promised before departing. He was right: near Big Bethel Church, about eight miles from town, Scott discovered several Confederate companies, defended by an artillery battery. He concealed himself in the bushes for a full twenty-four hours, observing what he could. A sentry finally caught sight of Scott, but he managed to escape, a rebel bullet grazing the sleeve of his jacket as he scrambled away, and reported to Butler’s staff on what he had seen.

Butler and Winthrop sat down almost immediately to draw up a plan of attack: “part made up from the General’s notes, part from my own fancies,” the major boasted that night in a letter to his mother. But Scott’s information was, a newspaper reported afterward, “the main spring of the operation.” It would be the garrison’s first significant advance against the enemy—indeed, the first real land battle anywhere in America between Union and Confederate troops. In the orders that Butler approved was a line of nearly as much historic significance: “George Scott is to have a revolver.” This was almost certainly the first time in the war that a federal officer put a gun into the hands of a black man.¹⁰¹

The Union force of some five thousand New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts men left on its mission at midnight, with Butler staying behind at the fort as Winthrop rode off near the head of the column, Scott riding at his side. Part of the attack’s objective was to drive off roving bands of Confederates that had been terrorizing some of the Negroes who were making their way toward the fort, rounding up the able-bodied men for hard labor in the trenches and in some cases sending the rest to the Richmond slave market.¹⁰²

As the soldiers left Fortress Monroe, contrabands thronged around to wish them well. “Oh,” one woman said, as tears streamed down her cheeks, “I hope and pray de Lord for dese sojers, and dat dey may go on from conquer to conquer!”¹⁰³

The Union troops did not conquer at Big Bethel. The Confederates, forewarned by a watchful civilian, were dug in behind their sturdy earthworks with cannons and rifles loaded and aimed. One of their officers was Colonel Mallory—posted, by coincidence, near the very spot where his Revolutionary forebear had fallen with the eleven (or was it nineteen?) bayonet wounds. The colonel fared better than his grandfather: the entire rebel force lost only one man, a teenage private from North Carolina. The Union troops were not so lucky. Panicking under fire, they never got near the first line of Confederate earthworks; the debacle became worse when one New York regiment mistakenly fired at another, whose men happened to be wearing gray militia uniforms. (Duryee’s brightly plumed Zouaves, meanwhile, proved easy targets for the rebel guns.) Eighteen were killed and dozens more wounded before the Yankees retreated through the woods in confusion back toward Fortress Monroe.¹⁰⁴

Among the fallen was Theodore Winthrop, killed while trying vainly to rally the New England troops. A Carolina rifleman had put a bullet through his chest. Back in his quarters at the fort, the young soldier-author had left a half-filled sheet of manuscript: the first few sentences of “Voices of the Contraband.”^*

FOR THE REST OF THE SUMMER, Butler’s men would fight only occasional small skirmishes with the enemy. But the most significant victory at Fortress Monroe had already been won, back in May, when three black men crossed the James River in the darkness. On the night the Union troops marched on Big Bethel, the soldiers would encounter another group of fugitives, who asked them for directions to “the freedom fort.”¹⁰⁵

The general from Massachusetts grew ever more steadfast in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old political associates. In July, when the Lincoln administration asked General Irvin McDowell to issue orders barring all fugitive Negroes from the Union lines in northern Virginia, Butler immediately fired off a letter to Washington, making it known that he planned to enforce no such rule around Hampton Roads. (By now there were a thousand contrabands in the fortress.) In a long missive to the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, Butler also took the opportunity to argue that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were—in a legal sense—no longer things, but people. He wrote:

Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? Is not every constitutional, legal, and normal requirement, [both] to the runaway master [and to his] relinquished slaves, thus answered? I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.

In a loyal state, I would put down a servile insurrection. In a state of rebellion I would confiscate that which was used to oppose my arms … and if, in so doing, it should be objected that human beings were brought to the free enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such objection might not require much consideration.¹⁰⁶

This time, however, Butler’s lawyerly arguments proved less effective. It would take another fourteen months, and tens of thousands more Union casualties, before the Lincoln administration was ready to espouse such a view.^*

“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to Edward Pierce in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right[?]… All these matters run through my head as I see the negro.”¹⁰⁷

True, Butler’s newfound zeal was not entirely selfless. Since the arrival of those first three contrabands, a steady stream of mail had come in—from old friends and total strangers—extolling him for having struck the first blow to free the Negro of his shackles. Butler had quickly warmed to this train of thought, especially now that he was no longer a state legislator from cotton-addicted Lowell. Emancipator of an entire race … why not?¹⁰⁸

Pierce, his three-month enlistment expired, left Fortress Monroe in mid-July. On his last evening, he assembled the Virginia Union Volunteers at the courthouse yard in Hampton to bid them good-bye. As the men and women gathered around him, he thanked them for their work and complimented them on their “industry and morals.” Then something further occurred to him: never before in American history had a Northern abolitionist found himself in a situation where he could speak freely before an audience of Southern slaves.

I said to them that there was one more word for me to add, and that was, that every one of them was as much entitled to his freedom as I was to mine, and I hoped they would all now secure it. “Believe you, boss,” was the general response, and each one with his rough gravelly hand clasped mine, and with tearful eyes and broken utterances said, “God bless you!” “May we meet in Heaven!” “My name is Jack Allen, don’t forget me!” “Remember me, Kent Anderson!” and so on.

“No,” Pierce wrote afterward, “I may forget the playfellows of my childhood, my college classmates, my professional associates, my comrades in arms, but I will remember you and your benedictions until I cease to breathe! Farewell, honest hearts, longing to be free!”¹⁰⁹

ON THE EVENING OF November 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of East Germans pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. They had come to cross over into freedom. But this epochal moment had begun with a bureaucratic snafu: that afternoon, a spokesman for the Communist regime, assigned to read a press release describing a gradual, orderly process by which the government planned to ease travel restrictions, misread the document and accidentally announced that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately.

An American reporter at the checkpoint that night watched as befuddled East German border guards surveyed the vast crowd from their command post. The captain in charge dialed and redialed his telephone, trying to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. Then he put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” the journalist would write. “Maybe he was simply fed up. Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’… ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open up,’ and the gates swung wide.”¹¹⁰

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, with the breach of a small segment of border in a single city. Many more walls would have to come down in the weeks and months ahead; there would be setbacks as well as advances in the years to come. But that night, watched by the world, was the moment when the possibility of cautious, incremental change in the old Soviet bloc—perestroika, glasnost, a slow and partial transition toward democracy—ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The Wall fell that night because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War—after Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend had breached their own wall, and Benjamin Butler shrugged—slavery’s iron curtain began falling, all across the South. John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of Lincoln, would say of the three slaves’ escape and Butler’s decision: “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”¹¹¹

Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fortress Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in northern Virginia, along the James, on the Mississippi, in Florida. A veritable “exodus” even from loyal slave states such as Maryland was said to be taking place. In southern Pennsylvania, until recently an area that fugitives had traversed with great caution, a couple of obvious runaways were observed strolling up Harrisburg’s Market Street at twilight, and according to a local newspaper, “they trudged along with their heavy bundles unmolested, and, in fact, almost unnoticed.” It is unclear how many of these escapees knew of Butler’s decision, but probably quite a few did. Edward Pierce marveled at “the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population,” though he was probably exaggerating just a bit when he continued: “Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be heard by his brethren on the Gulf.”¹¹²

Union officers in all these areas wrote to Washington, asking for instructions. The administration, punting once again, told them that decisions about sheltering runaways should be based on military necessity, but that they were left entirely to their own discretion how to determine this. (Congress endorsed this position in August in the Confiscation Act.) The result was that each commander ended up with his own policy. General George McClellan, entering western Virginia, proclaimed that his troops would interfere with slavery in no way whatsoever. Meanwhile, ColonelHarvey Brown, the new commandant at Fort Pickens, announced flatly, “I shall not send the negroes back as I will never be voluntarily instrumental in returning a poor wretch to slavery.”¹¹³

The confusion was compounded by the fact that no matter what the individual commander’s decree, his junior officers and enlisted men, having ideas of their own, might be unwilling to enforce it. In July 1861, a New York soldier wrote from northern Virginia:

A slight case of rebellion occurred in one of our camps a few evenings ago, when a young man on guard was ordered to arrest any slaves who undertook to pass. He promptly answered: “I can obey no such order; it was not to put down [Negro] insurrection that I enlisted but to defend my country’s flag! I am ready to bear the consequences, but never to have a hand in arresting slaves.”

The man’s superior decided to back off; “it was deemed politic not to try the temper of the men too hard.”

Sometimes the refusals were even more peremptory. In Missouri—where, since it was Union territory, all fugitives were supposed to be returned to their masters—a brigadier wrote to his commanding general, who had just ordered him to send back some runaways: “In answer to your note of this day I have this to say that I don’t give a fig about rank.… The institution of slavery must take care of itself.” And he added, even more bitterly: “I had a man cowardly shot in the woods to-day within sight of camp by the very men I have no doubt whose property you are so anxious to protect.”¹¹⁴

In August, Secretary Cameron tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking that Butler and other commanders collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and character, whether loyal or disloyal, of the master,” since, this, of course, was essential to determining whether the particular Negro counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system, Cameron said, would let the federal government assure that slaveholders’ “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union. But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master whom they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal—even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, such as fighting the war?

Butler’s contraband doctrine was utterly impossible almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so impossible: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice, and with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also, albeit inadvertently, a political masterstroke; it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection at the same time as being completely unworkable in real life. “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion,” Pierce noted. “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen, but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”¹¹⁵

Though an impractical way to adjudicate the fate of fugitives per se, the system was eminently practical in other terms. Not all the Union troops who harbored runaways were doing so out of the kindness of their hearts—most were not. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes, and dig latrines. (“Half the Federal officers now have negro servants,” a journalist reported from Monroe on June 12.) When Negro men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask any inconvenient questions—not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.¹¹⁶

Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fortress Monroe but throughout the South, it was they who provided the Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “in many … places, I found that my best source of information was the colored men.… I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” In a broader sense, they were often the only friends—indeed, the only Unionists—that the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory. “No where did we find any sign of kindly recognition,” one Northern soldier wrote from Virginia in August 1861, “except from the poor slaves, who are rapidly learning, through the insane hatred of their masters, to look upon our troops as [their] great Army of Deliverance.”¹¹⁷

The “enemy of my enemy” principle operated on whites, too, and not only on those at the front lines. Barely six weeks after Sumter, the Democratic New York World reported: “Whether it be deemed a good thing or not, the fact is unmistakable that the northern people are fast learning to hate slavery in a way unfelt before.… It comes home to every loyal man, with a force not to be resisted, that the sole cause of this most wicked treason the world ever saw, is SLAVERY; and, just in proportion as the treason itself is abhorred, in just that proportion do hatred and detestation attach to its cause.”¹¹⁸

Slaves were coming to seem not just players in the drama of the war but also, in a way, heroes. In July, New York’s Winter Garden theater staged a “new drama of the times,” a production laden with special effects, called “America’s Dream; or, the Rebellion of ’61.” The show opened with Sumter burning, the flames reportedly so realistic it seemed the theater might catch fire. There was a thrilling battle between the Baltimore street toughs and the brave boys of the Sixth Massachusetts—while poor Colonel Ellsworth was being vividly murdered at the other end of the stage. But the most unexpected and certainly most fanciful scene was a tableau in which, while “real bombshells” burst around them, a “small but resolute band of Northern contrabands” helpfully launched provisions out of a mortar into a besieged Union fort.¹¹⁹

Meanwhile, within the rebel South, the erosion of the peculiar institution was ever more palpable—even hundreds of miles away from where slaves were becoming contrabands. Union and Confederate newspapers alike reported an astonishing number of alleged insurrections. They were mostly very small scale. In Louisiana, Negroes were supposed to have torched a Confederate general’s house the night after Sumter was attacked. In Arkansas, a black preacher was hanged after using threatening language to his mistress. In Tennessee, at least five alarms were sounded in April and May alone. Whether these had any basis in fact almost does not matter; the panic was real. As Pinkerton observed after one of his reconnaissance missions, “The very institution for which these misguided men were periling their lives, and sacrificing their fortunes, was threatened with demolition; and the slaves who had so long and so often felt the lash of their masters, were now becoming a source of fear to the very men who had heretofore held them in such utter subjection.”¹²⁰

A telling fact: the price of slaves was already dropping precipitously. Numerous reports attest that by mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before. The “property” that slaveholders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable—perhaps, in a sense, less worth fighting for.¹²¹

Just as important was what did not happen: the long-expected and long-feared Negro uprising—the apocalypse when slaves would rise up, rape their mistresses, and slaughter their masters—never occurred. Indeed, even now it is remarkable to consider, given what the slaves had suffered and the turmoil in the South over the next four years, that they ended up committing so little violence against their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of blacks did not want vengeance; they simply wanted to be free, and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war.

This realization had enormous repercussions, not just in the South but in the North. For decades, abolitionist “agitators” had been vilified as traitors to their race for trying to bring about “another St. Domingo.” As the Democrats had sung in the 1860 presidential campaign: They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue. Even as stalwart a Unionist as Jessie Frémont sometimes felt torn between her loyalty to her country and her loyalty to her race and her sex. A few weeks after the attack on Sumter, she wrote to a friend, “When I think of the hideous [danger] the Southern states hold in themselves, I don’t know to which women the most sympathy belongs. Our side is great & noble & to die for it … is a great duty. But they have no such comfort & at their hearths is the black slave Sepoy element.”¹²² When it turned out that the South’s Negroes were not like St. Domingo’s revolutionaries or India’s Sepoy mutineers, Jessie Frémont’s dilemma vanished. She and millions of other white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution in Northern politics.

Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the enslaved Negroes themselves. Though they may not have known about the production at the Winter Garden, they knew that they had become actors on the stage of American history in a way that they had never been before. The bolder the blacks grew, the more fearful the whites grew—and when the whites grew more fearful, the blacks grew bolder yet. At first this typically took the form of blacks simply refusing to work as hard as they had before—easy enough with so many masters and overseers away in the rebel armies. But in time this would amount to a significant act of sabotage against the Confederate cause, especially after Southern troops began experiencing shortages of food, which happened as early as the autumn of 1861. And soon more and more Negroes were taking the boldest step of all, from slavery into freedom. Even before Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation, in the fall of 1862, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fortress Monroe had become a river of many thousands. “The Negroes,” a Union chaplain wrote, “flocked in vast numbers—an army in themselves—to the camps of the Yankees.… The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”^123*

On the September day of Lincoln’s proclamation, a Union colonel ran into William Seward on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an established fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the puzzled officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary of state replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”¹²⁴

ON AUGUST 6, 1861, Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder, commander of Confederate forces in southeastern Virginia, received intelligence—unfounded, as it would turn out—that enemy troops, having withdrawn from Hampton some weeks earlier, were about to reoccupy the town. And not only that: the Yankee Butler planned to house Negroes there. “As their masters had deserted their homes and slaves,” Magruder reported back to headquarters in Richmond, “he [would] consider the latter free, and would colonize them at Hampton, the home of most of their owners.” This could not be countenanced.

Although many of the rebel general’s troops had been busy on a mission to “scour the [surrounding] country” for fugitive blacks, Magruder immediately summoned his officers to a council of war. Steps must be taken at once to prevent the empty town from becoming once again a “harbor of runaway slaves and traitors.” The other Confederates, most of them residents of Hampton and its surrounding farms, agreed. And there was another motivation, too. It was time, some felt, for a grand and splendid gesture of renunciation. It was time to show the Yankees—to show the world—what Southern men would forfeit for their freedom. “A sacrifice,” one soldier said, “to the grim god of war.”¹²⁵

The following night, Union pickets from Colonel Weber’s regiment, who were standing watch just across the inlet, were surprised by noises from the direction of the darkened town. First there were shouts of alarm from some of the few civilians, black and white, who had remained in their homes. And then they heard the slow, deliberate tramp of marching feet. Two snakelike lines of yellow flame threaded their way among the houses, then broke apart, balls of light dancing wildly in every direction as hundreds of Confederates fanned out with torches through the streets. They knew the way; this was their town.

“Many a young man set fire to his own father’s house,” one Hamptonite would remember.

From their posts across the bridge, the Yankees watched in astonishment as first one building, then another, was engulfed. “The loud roar of the flames, the cries of the terrified negroes as they were being driven from their huts by the enemy and marched off under guard to their lines, all combined to make up a wild scene,” a soldier said.

Major Cary’s columned academy was the last building to catch fire. At first the federals thought it was being deliberately spared. But finally the youths of Hampton fell with a vengeance upon their former schoolhouse, soaking the desks and chairs with turpentine and camphene, hacking holes in the floors and ceilings so the flames could rise. It lit up, window by window, from within.

And so the old town burned. The ancient church; the Negro shanties; the courthouse with its whipping post and its bell; the fathers’ mansions—separate fires at first, then all consumed into one, an inferno reflected on the black waters of the James.

The Great Comet of 1861, from Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (1888) (photo credit 8.2)

*Contrary to popular belief, most freedmen did not automatically adopt the surnames of their masters, preferring to distance themselves from the bonds of slavery, and more often choosing the last name of a local family they admired, a famous name (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln), a name that they simply liked—or, sometimes, the name of a family to which they claimed kinship.

*“The tablets of law are erased with a laugh.”

*The following month, Confederate general D. H. Hill returned Winthrop’s gold pocket watch, taken from his corpse, to Butler, so that the Union commander could forward it to the dead man’s mother. The Confederate’s accompanying note read: “Sir, I have the honor herewith to send the Watch of Young Winthrop, who fell while gallantly leading a party in the vain attempt to subjugate a free people.” (D. H. Hill to Butler, July 5, 1861, Butler Papers.)

*George Scott went on a similar mission. He accompanied Colonel Duryee to Washington in July, saying that he “was going to plead with Pres. Lincoln for his liberties.” It is unclear if he was given a hearing. (Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, AMA Papers, Fisk University.)

*Exact estimates of the numbers of contrabands are rare. As of early January 1863, a Northern newspaper estimated that 120,000 fugitives had been received into the Union lines. (Utica Morning Herald, Jan. 6, 1863.) However, the means of arriving at this figure are unclear, and it does not account for the large numbers of fugitives who remained outside the Union encampments or continued north to the free states. Certainly by that point there were a number of Union bases (including Port Royal, South Carolina, and Fortress Monroe) that each had at least 5,000 or 10,000 contrabands.