Authors: Adam Goodheart
1.
Details of the strange and fascinating story of the first slave voyage to Virginia have only recently been unearthed. See Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August, 1619,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd series, vol. 54, no. 2 (Apr. 1997), pp. 395–98; Tim Hashaw,
The Birth of Black
America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown
(New York, 2007); John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,”
William and Mary Quarterly,
vol. 55, no. 3 (July 1998); Adam Goodheart, “Reaching Point Comfort,”
The American Scholar,
Winter 2005. These accounts make it clear that, contrary to the conventional version of the story,
the slaves arrived at Point Comfort and not Jamestown, that the captain was English and not Dutch, and that the Africans on board were definitely slaves and not indentured servants. For tobacco and labor in early Virginia, see Edmund Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(New York, 1975); and Russell R. Menard, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–1660,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
vol. 84, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), pp. 401–10.
2.
The official name was—and still is—Fort Monroe, but during the Civil War it was known almost universally as Fortress Monroe, which is therefore the name I use here.
3.
Robert Anderson had also done a tour of duty at the fort, as had a young soldier who would not become famous for his military career: Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe.
4.
Richard P. Weinert, Jr., and Robert Arthur,
Defender of the Chesapeake: The Story of Fort Monroe,
3rd ed. (Shippensburg, Pa., 1989), chaps. 3–5; John V. Quarstein, “Union Bastion in the Old Dominion,”
America’s Civil War,
vol. 15, no. 4 (Sept. 2002). The order to reinforce Fortress Monroe was issued less than forty-eight
hours after Secretary Floyd resigned from the War Department.
5.
Benjamin Ewell to Robert E. Lee, May 16, 1861, in
OR
I, vol. 2, pp. 853–54; Clement Anselm Evans, ed.,
Confederate Military History,
vol. 3 (Atlanta, 1899), p. 130; Lee Jensen,
32nd Virginia Infantry
(Lynchburg, Va., 1990), pp. 10–11. One of Mallory’s volunteer cavalrymen, a local doctor, actually rode across to the fort to
demand of its commander: “By what right, sir, does your army cross that bridge and invade the sacred soil of Virginia?” The Yankee colonel roared in reply: “By God, sir, might makes right!”
6.
C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, in Benjamin F. Butler Papers, LC;
Philadelphia Press,
June 1, 1861; Charles Carleton Coffin,
Drum-Beat of the Nation: The First Period of the War of the Rebellion from Its Outbreak to the Close of 1862
(New York, 1888), p. 76.
7.
[Edward Lillie Pierce], “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,”
Atlantic Monthly,
November 1861; Benjamin F. Butler,
Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler
(Boston, 1892), p. 265; William C. Davis et al., eds,
Virginia at War, 1864
(Louisville, Ky., 2009), p. 154.
8.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, BFB Papers, LC. The wives and children are mentioned in these two sources. According to both Butler and Pierce, the wife of one of the men was a free black woman in Hampton. Other information derives from data on the three men in the 1870 and later federal censuses. According to
these, Baker would have been about twenty-five years old in 1861, Townsend about thirty-six, and Shepard Mallory (whose birth date varies considerably across the different census years) probably in his late teens. These ages square roughly with those of three of Colonel Mallory’s unnamed male slaves (out of a dozen or so total slaves) enumerated in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses, which possibly suggests that all three had been with Mallory for at least a decade. (Of the
three, the data for Shepard Mallory are, again, the least conclusive.) Unfortunately, information on the Mallory household has not been located in the 1840 census. The 1860 census lists two nine-year-old boys and one seven-year-old boy among the Mallory slaves; the identities of their parents were not recorded.
9.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”;
Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention
(Richmond, Va., 1861). There are inconsistencies among the various accounts of how and whence the three fugitives arrived at Fortress Monroe. Butler states that they came at night by boat from Sewell’s Point, while Pierce says they walked into the Union lines that afternoon. For the original texts, visit the website for this book,
www.1861book.com
.
10.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB,
Butler’s Book,
p. 265; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861. Butler’s two accounts contradict each other slightly; in his 1892 autobiography, he recalls the slaves telling him that the Sewell’s Point battery was “a trifling affair” that as yet held only two guns, while in his
1861 report to Scott, he describes the battery (without attributing this information to the slaves) as “a very strong one, mounting fifteen guns.” Perhaps Baker, Mallory, and Townsend described only the portion of the rebel works that they had worked on personally.
11.
Howard P. Nash, Jr.,
Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin Butler, 1818–1893
(Rutherford, N.J., 1969), pp. 99–101; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861;
Boston Traveller,
May 28, 1861.
12.
OR
I, vol. 1, 195; Samuel W. Crawford Diary, Mar. 11, 1861, Crawford Papers, LC.
13.
Fred A. Shannon, “The Federal Government and the Negro Soldier, 1861–1865,”
Journal of Negro History,
vol. 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1926), p. 566;
OR
II, vol. 1, p. 593.
14.
Nash,
Stormy Petrel,
chaps. 1–3;
Butler’s Book,
pp. 75–77.
15.
Murray M. Horowitz, “Ben Butler and the Negro: ‘Miracles Are Occurring,’ ”
Louisiana History,
vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 159ff.;
Pittsfield Sun,
Oct. 20, 1859;
Boston Semi-Weekly Courier,
Oct. 10, 1859.
16.
John G. Gammons, ed.,
The Third Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Militia in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1863
(Providence, 1906), pp. 7–13; Theodore S. Peck, ed.,
Revised Roster of Vermont Volunteers and Lists of Vermonters Who Served in the Army and Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866
(Montpelier,
Vt., 1892), pp. 5–9;
New York Times,
Feb. 3, 1885; James Parton,
General Butler in New Orleans
(New York, 1864), pp. 124–26; W. H. Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—IV,”
The North American Review,
vol. 166, no. 498 (May 1898), p. 623; William Howard Russell,
My Diary North and South
(Boston, 1863), p. 411; Theodore Winthrop,
The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop
(New York, 1884), p. 284.
Decades later, a soldier in the Third Massachusetts named Charles R. Haskins would claim that he had been the three contrabands’ original savior, but most contemporary accounts mention the Vermonters.
17.
Nash,
Stormy Petrel,
pp. 38–39; BFB to Mrs. Winthrop, n.d. (June 1861), BFB Papers, LC.
18.
My description of the antebellum landscape of Hampton and its surrounding area is drawn from Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”;
Marion L. Starkey,
The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607–1887
(n.p., 1936); Gene Williamson,
Of the Sea and Skies: Historic Hampton and
Its Times
(Bowie, Md., 1993); [George W. Curtis], “Theodore Winthrop,”
Atlantic Monthly,
August 1861; G. P. Lewis, “Virginia Lands,”
American Agriculturalist,
vol. 4 (1845), pp. 118–19; Jacob Hellelfinger,
Kecoughtan Old and New; Or, Three Hundred Years of Elizabeth City Parish
(Hampton, Va., 1910); Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed.,
History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia
(Hampton, Va.,
1922); J. Michael Cobb and Wythe Holt,
Images of America: Hampton
(Charleston, S.C., 2008); Robert Francis Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890
(New York, 2004), esp. chap. 1; James T. Stensvaag, ed.,
Hampton: From the Sea to the Stars
(Norfolk, Va., 1985); Parke Rouse Jr., ed.,
When the Yankees Came: Civil War and Reconstruction on the Virginia Peninsula, by George Benjamin West,
1839–1917
(Richmond, Va., 1987); Jane Eliza Davis,
Round About Jamestown: Historical Sketches of the Virginia Peninsula
(n.p., 1907); Thomas P. Southwick,
A Duryee Zouave
(n.p., 1930); Sarah Shaver Hughes, “Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810: The Economic and Social Structure of a Tidewater County in the Early National Years,” (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1975); as well as reports from the spring
and summer of 1861 in the
Boston Traveller,
New York Times, New York World, New-York Tribune,
and
Philadelphia Inquirer.
See also two detailed topographical maps of the vicinity by R. K. Sneden of the U.S. 3rd Army Corps, Mar. 8 and 10, 1862, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
19.
Rouse,
When the Yankees Came,
p. 22. In 1857, a lecturer at the Academy assailed
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
telling the students that since Southerners were “taught from youth to believe, and being better assured of it from the studies of our manhood, that the institution of slavery is divine in its origin,” it was their responsibility to
create a new body of American literature to counter Mrs. Stowe’s book.
20.
Henry Reed Mallory,
Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia
(Hartford, Conn., 1955); Robert Alonzo Brock, Virgil Anson Lewis,
Virginia and Virginians,
vol. 1 (Richmond, 1888), pp. 689ff.; “F.M.” [Francis Mallory], “Colonel Mallory,”
The Virginia Historical Register, and Literary Companion,
vols. 3–4 (1850), pp.
24ff;
Memorial, Virginia Military Institute: Biographical Sketches of the Graduates and Élèves … Who Fell During the War Between the States
(Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 352ff.
21.
Mallory,
Genealogy of the Mallorys,
p. 15.
22.
Walter Minchinton et al., eds.,
Virginia Slave Trade Statistics 1698–1775
(Richmond, 1984), passim; Starkey, pp. 34–36; U.S. Census data, Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1790–1860. One interesting case of a transition from slavery to freedom was that of Caesar Tarrant, a slave who served during the Revolution as a pilot for the Virginia Navy,
aboard vessels with names like
Patriot
and
Jefferson.
Some years after the war, the General Assembly rewarded his valuable service by passing a special bill to purchase
his freedom—with state funds, no less. Tarrant and his children went on to become fairly substantial landowners in the county.
23.
Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation,
chap. 1, passim; Starkey,
The First Plantation,
p. 38; WPA interview (1936) with Moble Hopson (born near Hampton in 1851) in George P. Rawick, ed.,
The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography
(Westport, Conn., 1972), series 1, vol. 16, Virginia Narratives, pp. 31ff. Despite the persistent literary
convention of writing blacks’ spoken words as “Negro” dialect, recent historians have suggested that at least in antebellum Virginia, the dialect of enslaved blacks was quite similar to that of poor whites. See Melvin Ely,
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War
(New York, 2004).
24.
Shepard Mallory census data, 1870–1920.
25.
Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation,
chap. 1, passim; Robert Seager II,
And Tyler Too: A Biography of John & Julia Gardiner Tyler
(New York, 1963), p. 442.
26.
New York World,
June 11, 1861.
27.
American Agriculturalist,
vol. 11, no. 7 (July 1850), p. 203.
28.
I’m grateful to Ned Sublette for permission to borrow his idea of the Chesapeake as America’s slave coast, the subject of an important book now in progress.
29.
Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820. For the Virginia trade, see Frederick Law Olmsted,
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States
(New York, 1861), pp. 49–59; Steven Deyle,
Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life
(New York, 2005), esp. chap. 4; Robert Edgar Conrad, ed.,
In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on
Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union
(University Park, Pa., 2001), esp. part 2. For more on Jefferson’s views, cf. Susan Dunn,
Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia
(New York, 2007), pp. 45–48.
30.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
31.
L. C. Lockwood, “Decennial Report,”
The American Missionary,
vol. 15 (1871), pp. 196–97; former slave William Roscoe Davis in the
New York Times,
Jan. 14, 1862.
32.
Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, June 23, 1859 (Library of Virginia).
33.
Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Nov. 26, 1859.
34.
Ibid.
35.
David S. Reynolds,
John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
(New York, 2005), pp. 329–33; see also Adam Gopnik,
Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
(New York, 2009), pp. 55–56; Barton Haxall Wise,
The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia,
1806–1876
(New York, 1899), p. 150. Wise would go on to be a Confederate general.