1861 (57 page)

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

I
N 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:

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
some
where; 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.”
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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.”