Authors: Adam Goodheart
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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.”
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F
OR 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.”
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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?
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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!”
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O
N 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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, Colonel
Harvey 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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