Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.