1861 (66 page)
Authors: Adam Goodheart
•
Charles King Mallory
remained in Confederate service until 1865. His eldest son, an eighteen-year-old midshipman in the rebel navy, was killed in the war. Mallory died in 1875; an account of his funeral in a local newspaper described it thus: “The procession, nearly three-quarters of a mile long, proceeded to the old family burying ground … eight miles from Hampton. The fact that a very large number of the colored citizens of
Hampton and the county walked the entire distance shows how much the deceased was loved and respected by all classes.” The
site of Colonel Mallory’s house, long since demolished, is part of the
Hampton University campus.
14
•
At the end of the war,
Mary Chesnut,
a refugee from her plantation and from her family’s ruined fortunes, greeted the demise of slavery with an emotion she described in her diary as “an unholy joy.”
15
•
After serving almost continuously as the site of a military base for more than four hundred years,
Fortress Monroe
is slated to be decommissioned in September 2011. As of this writing, its future is uncertain. The governor of Virginia has endorsed a “mixed-use” development of residential and commercial space combined with “historic preservation.” Some Hampton locals, led by African-Americans,
including descendants of the contrabands, are calling on the National Park Service to acquire the site.
16
At the end of the Civil War,
Jefferson Davis
was imprisoned in Fortress Monroe for two years before being released on bail; he was never brought to trial.
Today, the fort contains a Jefferson Davis Memorial Park. There is no memorial or monument to Benjamin Butler or the contrabands.
•
The three original contrabands all remained in the Hampton Roads area after the war.
Frank Baker
and
James Townsend
raised families and worked as day laborers; neither ever learned to read or write.
•
Shepard Mallory
was the last survivor among the significant characters in this book. He learned to read and write and became a prominent figure in Hampton’s black community. The former contraband apparently mended fences with his former master, who attended one of his weddings. (Mallory would marry at least four times; his last two wives were approximately forty and thirty years younger, respectively, than he was.) In the early twentieth century he
was working as a carpenter and school janitor and living in the house at 260 Lincoln Street that he owned, free and clear, for the last four decades of his life. Shepard Mallory last appears in the census records in 1920, aged about eighty and still working, self-employed.
17
The American Declaration of Independence Illustrated
, 1861 (
photo credit bm.1
)
OTES
Prologue: A Banner at Daybreak
1.
Abner Doubleday,
Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie
(New York, 1876), pp. 63–7; Samuel W. Crawford,
The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War
(New York, 1887), pp. 104–112; J. G. Foster to J. H. B. Latrobe, Jan. 10, 1861, in Frank F. White, Jr., ed., “The Evacuation of Fort Moultrie in 1860,”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine
, vol. 53, no. 1 (Jan. 1952), pp. 1–5; John Thompson to “Dear Father,” Feb. 14, 1861, in “A Union Soldier at Fort Sumter, 1860–1861,”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine
, vol. 67, no. 2 (Apr. 1966), pp. 99–104; J. G. Foster to R. E. De Russy, Dec. 27, 1860, in
Official Records [of the War of the Rebellion],
series I (hereafter
OR
I), vol. 1, pp.
108–9; James P. Jones, ed., “Charleston Harbor, 1860–1861: A Memoir from the Union Garrison,”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine
, vol. 62, no. 3 (July 1961), pp. 148–50;
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, Jan. 5 and Jan. 19, 1861. There are a few discrepancies among firsthand accounts of the departure from Fort Moultrie. Original texts can be found on the website for this book,
www.1861book.com
.
2.
Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” in
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
(New York, 1887), vol. 1, p. 41; Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
chap. 1.
3.
Dictionary of American Biography
(hereafter
DAB
) (New York, 1944), vol. 1, 274; George W. Cullum,
Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
(Boston, 1891), vol. 1, pp. 347–52.
4.
Fitz John Porter to Cooper, Nov. 11, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 71.
5.
Terry W. Lipscomb,
South Carolina Revolutionary War Battles: The Carolina Low Country, April 1775–June 1776, and the Battle of Fort Moultrie
(Columbia, S.C., 1994); Edwin C. Bearss,
The Battle of Sullivan’s Island and the Capture of Fort Moultrie: A Documented Narrative and Troop Movement Maps, Fort Sumter
National Monument, South
Carolina
(Washington, D.C., National Park Service, 1968).
6.
Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 40–41.
7.
James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” in
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,
vol. 1, pp. 50–51.
8.
David Detzer,
Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War
(New York, 2001), p. 53.
9.
Charles H. Lesser,
Relic of the Lost Cause: The Story of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession,
2nd ed. (Columbia, S.C., 1996), pp. 2–3.
10.
W. A. Swanberg,
First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter
(New York, 1957), p. 25.
11.
Roy Meredith,
Storm over Sumter: The Opening Engagement of the Civil War
(New York, 1957), p. 37.
12.
Anderson to Cooper, Dec. 1, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 81; Detzer,
Allegiance,
p. 63.
13.
Anderson to Cooper, Nov. 28, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 78–79.
14.
Cooper to Anderson, Dec. 14, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, pp. 92–93.
15.
Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 19, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 98.
16.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
ch. 3; Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41; Crawford,
History,
p. 66.
17.
Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 43.
18.
Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 71–72.
19.
Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41.
20.
Detzer,
Allegiance,
pp. 23–24.
21.
DAB,
I, p. 274; Cullum,
Biographical Register,
pp. 347–52.
22.
Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 42–43.
23.
Crawford,
History,
p. 95.
24.
Ibid., pp. 50–51.
25.
Ibid., p. 55.
26.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
p. 56.
27.
Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 21, 1860,
OR
I, vol. 1, p. 103.
28.
DAB,
Cullum,
Biographical Register,
pp. 347–52; Eba Anderson Lawton, ed.,
An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846–7: Letters of Robert Anderson,
Captain 3rd Artillery, U.S.A.
(New York and London, 1911), pp. 311–13.
29.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
pp. 60–61.
30.
Crawford,
History,
pp. 102–03.
31.
Doubleday,
Reminiscences,
pp. 61–67; Crawford,
History,
pp. 103–07.
32.
Charleston Mercury,
Dec. 28, 1860.
33.
The family correspondence of Colonel William Hemsley Emory is now part of the James Wood Poplar Grove Papers in the Maryland State Archives.
34.
David Brion Davis,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(New York, 2006), p. 10.
35.
Charleston Courier,
Dec. 28, 1860;
Baltimore Sun,
Dec. 28, 1860.
36.
Swanberg,
First Blood,
p. 145.
37.
This figure includes supplements that were published in the twentieth century. The original series totals 138,000 pages.
38.
For an illuminating discussion of Lincoln as both progressive and conservative, see Richard Striner,
Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power
(Lanham, Md., 2010).
39.
Guenter,
The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification
(Rutherford, N.J., 1990), pp. 57–87; Michael Corcoran,
For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag
(New York, 2002), pp. 78ff. Even though flags were now printed rather than individually stitched, that spring the cost of red, white, and
blue bunting increased from $4.75 to $28 per yard.
40.
Congress created the
Medal of Honor in 1862. Of the more than 1,500 that would be awarded for acts of heroism in the
Civil War, more than half involved a rescue of the American colors, or a capture of the enemy’s.
1.
C. W. Clarence,
A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill
(Boston, 1860);
Daily National Intelligencer,
July 18, 1860;
Boston Bee,
Oct. 9, 1860;
Boston Post,
Oct. 9, 1860.
2.
Quoted in James Elliot Cabot,
A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Boston, 1887–88), vol. 1, p. 91.
3.
“The Kansas Question,”
Putnam’s Monthly
[
Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art
], vol. 6, no. 34 (Oct. 1855).
4.
Webster and Adams both quoted in George B. Forgie,
Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age
(New York, 1979), pp. 67–68.
5.
“Procrustes, Junior,” “Great Men, A Misfortune,”
Southern Literary Messenger,
April 1860, p. 308.
6.
Clarence,
A Biographical Sketch;
Alan Taylor,
Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1765–1820
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).
7.
Massachusetts Historical Society, Ambrotype Collection, photo 2.16.
8.
Masao Miyoshi,
As We Saw Them: The First
Japanese Embassy to the United States
(
1860
) (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 10–15; [Masayiko Kanesaboro Yanagawa],
The First Japanese Mission to the United States
(Kobe, 1937), pp. 48–50, 69. Since Dutch traders had been going to Japan for centuries, a
number of educated Japanese spoke that language. Communications with English speakers usually required two translators: one of them Japanese to Dutch, the other Dutch to English.
9.
Robert Cellem,
Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to the British North American Provinces and United States, in the Year 1860
(Toronto, 1861), p. 372. When Ralph Farnham was told that the prince was about to arrive
in Boston, he responded, “I don’t want to see him.” Finally, however, he grudgingly deigned to call
on the royal personage, who had taken a suite on another floor in the same hotel. After a cordial exchange of pleasantries, the old revolutionary remarked slyly that in light of the enthusiastic reception given to George III’s great-grandson, he was worried his countrymen might be turning royalists again. The prince chose to laugh this off. (
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Oct. 12, 1860;
New York Herald,
Oct. 19, 1860.)
10.
Boston Daily Advertiser,
Oct. 9, 1860.
11.
New York Herald,
Dec. 31, 1860.
12.
Reinhard H. Luthin,
The First Lincoln Campaign
(Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 169–70; Earl Schenck Miers, ed.,
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865
(Washington, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 282–84. No less a sage than
William Cullen Bryant advised Lincoln: “Make no speeches, write no letters as
a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises.” Bryant to Lincoln, June 16, 1860, quoted in Gil Troy,
See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 61–62; Michael Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
(Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, p. 656.
13.
Troy,
See How They Ran,
pp. 64–66;
The Ripley
[Ohio]
Bee,
Aug. 16, 1860;
Freedom’s Champion
[Atchison, Kansas], Sept. 1, 1860; Wayne C. Williams,
A Rail Splitter for President
(Denver, 1951), pp. 36–37.
14.
Lincoln remained very disconcerted by the experience. “I was afraid of being caught and crushed in that crowd,” he wrote afterward. “The American people remind me of a flock of sheep.” Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, p. 651; Williams,
A Rail Splitter,
pp. 109–110;
New York Herald,
Aug. 14,
1860.
15.
Joshua Wolf Shenk,
Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness
(Boston, 2005), p. 3.
16.
Wayne C. Temple, “Lincoln’s Fence Rails,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society,
vol. 47 (1954), pp. 21–28; Mark A. Plummer,
Lincoln’s Rail-Splitter: Governor Richard J. Oglesby
(Urbana, Ill., 2001), pp. 44–45.
17.
Williams,
A Rail Splitter,
p. 50.
18.
Gary Kulik, “The Worm Fence” in
Between Fences,
ed. Gregory K. Dreicer (Princeton, N.J., 1996), pp. 20–22; John Stilgoe,
Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845
(New Haven, 1982), pp. 321–23. Interestingly, many friends and family members who had known Lincoln in his youth said he’d hated physical labor. “Abe
was awful lazy,” one farmer who’d employed him told an interviewer in 1865.
John Hanks’s own brother Charles said publicly during the 1860 campaign that “jumping and wrestling were his only accomplishments. His laziness was the source of many mortifications to me; for as I was an older boy than either Abe or John, I often had to do Abe’s work at uncle’s, when the family were
sick … and Abe would be rollicking about the country neglecting them.” (Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, pp. 77, 667.)
19.
Williams,
A Rail Splitter,
pp. 158–59;
New York Herald,
Sept. 29, 1860.
20.
Contrary to what some have assumed, the Democrats’ split did not directly bring about Lincoln’s victory. Even if the party, and the Constitutional Unionists, for that matter, had united behind a single candidate, Lincoln would still have won enough electoral votes to give him the presidency.
21.
Quoted in the
Daily Ohio Statesman,
Jan. 28, 1860.
22.
Troy,
See How They Ran,
p. 65.
23.
Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War,
2nd ed. (New York, 1995), pp. 216–19; Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, p. 669.
24.
See, e.g.,
New-York Tribune,
Oct. 28, 1860.
25.
See Foner,
Free Soil,
esp. chaps. 1–2.
26.
James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo,
The Antebellum Period
(Westport, Conn., 2004), p. 68.
27.
F. H. Sangborn and William Harris, eds.,
A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy
(Boston, 1893), vol. 1, pp. 145–46; Geraldine Brooks, “Orpheus at the Plough,”
The New Yorker,
Jan. 10, 2005, p. 58.
28.
William Carlos Martyn,
Wendell Phillips: The Agitator
(Boston, 1890), p. 149;
Boston City Directory for 1855
(Boston, 1855);
Boston City Directory for 1865
(Boston, 1865).
29.
Oscar Sherwin,
Apostle of Liberty: The Life and Times of Wendell Phillips
(New York, 1958), pp. 323–33; Henry Mayer,
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
(New York, 1998), pp. 440–42.
30.
Mayer,
All on Fire,
pp. 443–45; Ralph Korngold,
Two Friends of Man: The Story of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Their Relationship with Abraham Lincoln
(Boston, 1950), p. 249.
31.
Mayer,
All on Fire,
p. 510; Korngold,
Two Friends of Man,
pp. 269–70.
32.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, p. 664;
San Antonio Ledger and Texan,
July 28, 1860.
33.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, p. 664. The newspaper’s editors were perhaps unaware that Washington had died childless and that Lafayette’s descendants all lived in France.
34.
Ibid. p. 665;
New York Herald,
Oct. 24, 1860.
35.
New York Herald,
Oct. 5, 1860.
36.
Council Bluffs
[Iowa]
Bugle,
Oct. 31, 1860.
37.
New York Herald,
July 12, 1860.
38.
Osborn H. Oldroyd,
Lincoln’s Campaign: Or the Political Revolution of 1860
(Chicago, 1896), pp. 104–05;
New York Herald,
Sept. 10 and 19, 1860;
The Mississippian
[Jackson], Sept. 28, 1860; Jon Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’: The
Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860
Campaign,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 96, no. 2 (Sept. 2009), pp. 357–78. Grinspan’s recent article is the only in-depth account of the Wide Awakes that has ever been published.
One variation on the Hartford story had it that the five shop clerks were attacked en route to the hotel by a burly Democrat who tried to throw one
of them to the ground. He was laid low by a swing of the young clerk’s torch. (
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly,
Oct. 13, 1860.)
39.
New York Herald,
Sept. 19 and 26, 1860.
40.
Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’ ”; Ulysses S. Grant,
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
(New York, 1999), p. 114.
41.
Milwaukee Daily Sentinel,
Aug. 1, 1860; Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War.’ ” One enlistee in Boston was the young
Charles Francis Adams, Jr.
42.
Daily Cleveland Herald,
Sept. 17, 1860;
New York Herald,
Oct. 4, 1860.
43.
New York Herald,
Sept. 26, 1860.
44.
Milwaukee Daily Sentinel,
Sept. 10, 1860.
45.
My account of the “Texas troubles” of 1860 is drawn largely from the only scholarly book on the subject,
Donald E. Reynolds’s carefully researched
Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South
(Baton Rouge, 2007). It is difficult to estimate the number of lynchings,
since most of the period sources are anecdotal, and some killings doubtless went unreported. The range I have given is from Reynolds’s book.
46.
Georgia Chronicle,
n.d., reprinted in the
Daily Cleveland Herald,
Oct. 23, 1860;
Semi-Weekly Mississippian
[Jackson], Oct. 16, 1860.
47.
Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’ ”;
New York Herald,
Nov. 5, 1860.
48.
Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War,’ ” thinks the real total was probably closer to 100,000, but notes that even this figure “would be the equivalent of about 1 million Wide Awakes in the current population of the United States.”
49.
Ibid.
50.
James Russell Lowell, “The Election in November,”
Atlantic Monthly,
Oct. 1860.
51.
Bangor Daily Whig and Courier
[Maine], Oct. 20, 1860.
52.
Boston Evening Transcript, Boston Post, Boston Evening Traveler;
all Oct. 17, 1860.
53.
The Liberator,
Oct. 19, 1860; Mayer,
All on Fire,
p. 513.
54.
Walter C. Clephane, “The Local Aspect of Slavery in the District of Columbia,”
Records of the Columbia Historical Society,
vol. 3 (1900), pp. 253–54.
55.
Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln,
vol. 1, pp. 676–77; Harold Holzer,
Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861
(New York, 2008), pp. 22–31.
56.
James M. McPherson,
The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in Civil War and Reconstruction
(Princeton, 1964), p. 223. Blacks could also vote in New York if they owned $250 in property.
57.
Boston Evening Transcript, Boston Post, Boston Evening Traveler, Boston Daily Advertiser;
all Nov. 7, 1860.