1861 (60 page)

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.”
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*

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.”
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O
N 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
)