Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.”
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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and a drawerful of unpublished poems and novels.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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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