1861 (76 page)

36.
C. Vann Woodward, ed.,
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
(New Haven, 1981), pp. xxxvi, xlvi–liii, 29, 153;
DAB
vol. 2, p. 57.

37.
Dunn,
Dominion of Memories,
pp. 49–56; Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Jan. 24, 1861.

38.
Federal troops from Fortress Monroe were sent to keep order in Southampton during the rebellion’s aftermath. (Personal communication with J. Michael Cobb, Hampton History Museum.)

39.
Scot French,
The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory
(Boston, 2004), introduction and pp. 279, 280–82; Russell,
My Diary,
p. 132. Turner’s skull was also kept as a local relic. It ended up in a museum at the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1866. After disappearing for several decades in the twentieth century, it was rediscovered in
2002 and donated to the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in Gary, Indiana.

40.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”;
Harper’s Weekly,
June 29, 1861.

41.
Jensen,
32nd Virginia Infantry,
p. 10. In response to the earlier message carried under flag of truce, Butler had arranged to meet the Confederate envoy at 3:30 that afternoon.

42.
Butler’s Book,
p. 258. According to the 1860 Census, Mallory’s real estate was worth $20,600 and his personal property $29,750, making him one of the wealthiest men in the county.

43.
Portraits of both men are in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society.

44.
Butler’s Book,
p. 256. Butler and Cary each left two accounts of their parley, one contemporary and one written several decades after the fact. Cary’s are, respectively, a brief report to Col. J. B. Magruder, dated 7:15 p.m., May 24, 1861, immediately after the meeting (
OR
II, vol. 1, p. 753); and a letter to Butler, Mar. 9, 1891 (Butler,
Letters,
vol. 1, pp. 102–03). Butler’s accounts are in his report of May 24–25,
1861, to Winfield Scott (BFB Papers, LC); and
Butler’s Book,
his 1892 autobiography, pp. 256–66. These four versions substantially corroborate one another, and I relied on all of them for my account of Butler and Cary’s conversation. The dialogue where quoted directly is from
Butler’s Book.

45.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

46.
Nathaniel Morton to “Dear Friend,” May 29, 1861, quoted in J. Michael Cobb, “Rehearsing Reconstruction in Occupied Virginia: Life and Emancipation at Fort Monroe,” in Davis et al.,
Virginia at War,
p. 141.

47.
Chicago Tribune,
June 5, 1861.

48.
Quoted in James M. McPherson,
The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Princeton, N.J., 1964), p. 41.

49.
New York Herald,
May 5, 1861.

50.
McPherson,
The Struggle for Equality,
p. 58.

51.
Sermon at Zion’s Church, April 27, 1861, in
Douglass’ Monthly,
June 1861.

52.
Frederick Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom,
in
Autobiographies
(New York, 1994), p. 452.

53.
John Stauffer,
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
(New York, 2008), pp. 215–19;
Douglass’ Monthly,
May 1861.

54.
Douglass’ Monthly,
June 1861.

55.
Ibid., May 1861.

56.
New York Times,
May 27, 1861.

57.
New York World,
May 29, 1861; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

58.
Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

59.
John Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds.,
Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay
(Carbondale, Ill., 1999), pp. 19–20.

60.
Orville H. Browning to AL, Apr. 30, 1861, AL Papers, LC.

61.
Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger,
Inside Lincoln’s White House.

62.
For an eloquent discussion of Lincoln’s “cult of the law,” see Adam Gopnik,
Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
(New York, 2009), pp. 57–60.

63.
Richmond Dispatch,
May 29 and June 1, 1861. Those “patriotic yellow men” in New Orleans switched sides to the Union Army, more or less en masse, after Benjamin Butler’s troops occupied the city in 1862.

64.
Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.,
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia
(Charlottesville, Va., 1995), esp. chap. 10; Hopson interview in Rawick,
The American Slave.

65.
Woodward,
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War,
p. 48.

66.
New-York Tribune,
February 20, 1861.

67.
Woodward,
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War,
p. 44.

68.
William H. Lee to Jefferson Davis, May 4, 1861, in Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867,
series 1, vol. 2:
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South
(New York, 1993), p. 282.

69.
Steven Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 67.

70.
Armstead Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861–1863,”
Journal of Negro History,
vol. 65, no. 4 (Autumn, 1980), p. 285.

71.
John T. Washington and John H. Stuart to Daniel Ruggles, May 7, 1861, and Daniel Ruggles to R. S. Garnett, May 8, 1861, both in
OR
I, vol. 2, p. 820.

72.
New York Herald,
May 30, 1861;
Springfield Republican,
June 1, 1861; “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine,” Prints & Photographs Division, LC. The cartoon circulated as a “patriotic cover”—a decorative envelope often used by soldiers sending letters home from the front.

73.
Rev. J. D. Fulton, “Funeral Sermon Commemorative of the Death of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth … Before the New York State Volunteers,”
Albany Journal,
May 28, 1861.

74.
Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [
sic
], 1861, BFB Papers, LC;
New York World,
June 4, 1861. Since newspaper accounts all confirm that the meeting occurred on May 30, it is likely that Blair misdated his second
letter. The next day’s
New York Times
summarized the meeting thus: “The Cabinet adjourned without
disposing of Sambo—not a surprising fact, considering that Sambo has been on hand so long.”

75.
BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [sic], 1861, BFB Papers, LC;
New York Herald,
May 30, 1861.

76.
Montgomery Blair to BFB, June 8, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

77.
Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,”
Atlantic Monthly,
August 1861.

78.
Butler’s Book,
pp. 246–49; Russell, pp. 405–06;
Boston Traveller,
May 1, 1861. For Scott on seafood, see
Butler’s Book
and
Boston Traveller,
June 18, 1861.

79.
My description of the activities at Fortress Monroe is drawn from reporting in the
Boston Traveller,
New York Times, New York World,
and
Atlantic Monthly,
as well as the BFB Papers and
Butler’s Book.
For Professor La Mountain, see Frederick Stansbury Haydon,
Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies
(Baltimore, 1941). For the mosquitoes:
New York Times,
July 28, 1861.

80.
New York Times,
June 4 and 14, 1861; Alfred Davenport,
Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryee Zouaves),
(New York, 1879). Winslow Homer’s painting “The Briarwood Pipe” shows the Duryee Zouaves later in the war, sporting the red fezzes that they sometimes wore under their turbans. The Turner Rifles’ name came from the
Turnverein,
the German young men’s clubs that combined culture,
nationalist politics, and physical fitness; the movement had come to America after 1848 and its adherents composed the bulk of the regiment’s recruits.

81.
Boston Traveller,
July 10, 1861;
New York Times,
June 2, 1861; BFB to Lewis Tappan, Aug. 10, 1861,
Letters,
vol. 1, pp. 200–01;
The Independent,
Aug. 8, 1861. Quite a number of Union accounts compared the “low white laboring class” unfavorably with the blacks. Major Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary in January 1862, while stationed in western Virginia: “Two more contrabands yesterday. These runaways are bright
fellows. As a body they are superior to the average of the uneducated white population of this State. More intelligent, I feel confident. What a good-for-nothing people the mass of these western Virginians are! Unenterprising, lazy, narrow, listless, and ignorant. Careless of consequences to the country if their own lives and property are safe. Slavery leaves one class, the wealthy, with leisure for cultivation. They are usually intelligent, well-bred, brave, and high-spirited.
The rest are serfs.” Charles Richard Williams, ed.,
Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States,
vol. 2, (Columbus, 1922), p. 188.

82.
New York Times,
June 9, 1861; Kate Masur, “ ‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 93, no. 4 (March 2007), p. 1051;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
July 1, 1861.

83.
Eric Foner,
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
(New York, 2010), p. 171.

84.
Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation,
pp. 15–16; Rouse,
When the Yankees Came,
p. 54; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

85.
Trenton Daily State Gazette and Republican,
June 5, 1861;
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
June 8, 1861;
Douglass’ Monthly,
July 1861.

86.
BFB to Montgomery Blair, June 6, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.

87.
Theodore Winthrop to Laura Winthrop Johnson, May 31, 1861, in Winthrop,
Life and Poems,
pp. 288–89. Parton,
General Butler in New York,
pp. 131–32, gives a similar version of the story as recollected several years later by some of the other officers present.

88.
Winthrop,
Life and Poems,
passim; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,”
The Atlantic,
November 1861.

89.
Butler’s Book,
p. 203; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”

90.
Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”

91.
Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, American Missionary Association Papers, Fisk University.

92.
Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB papers.

93.
C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, BFB Papers.

94.
Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” Mar. 26, 1862, AMA Papers; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.,
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia
(Charlottesville, Va., 1955), p. 28;
Boston Traveller,
July 6, 1861; Lewis C. Lockwood,
Mary S. Peake, the Colored Teacher at Fortress
Monroe
(Boston, n.d.), p. 56. Vermont in 1860 had just 709 black inhabitants, or less than one quarter of one percent of its population (1860 census).

95.
New York Times,
June 15, 1861;
Philadelphia Inquirer,
July 16, 1861; Davenport,
Camp and Field Life,
pp. 76–80.

96.
Eugene Goodwin, Civil War Diary, July 22, 1861, online at
www.iagenweb.org
.

97.
Engs,
Freedom’s First Generation,
pp. 18–19; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow,
Hampton and Its Students
(New York, 1874), pp. 109–14.

98.
Gammons,
Third Massachusetts Regiment,
p. 194;
New York Times,
Sept. 8, 1897;
Boston Traveller,
May 10, 1861. Pierce wrote a series of dispatches to the
Traveller
between April and July, parts of which he eventually adapted into his article on the contrabands in the
Atlantic.

99.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”;
New York Times,
Oct. 4, 1861;
Boston Traveller,
July 15, 1861.

100.
Boston Traveller,
July 10, 1861.

101.
New York Times,
June 13, 1861; Charles P. Poland, Jr.,
The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861
(Bloomington, Ind., 2004), p. 208; Winthrop,
Life and Poems,
p. 291;
Springfield Republican,
June 29, 1861; E. W. Pierce to BFB, June 12, 1861,
OR
I, vol. 2, p. 83; Benjamin Quarles,
The Negro in the Civil War
(Boston, 1953), pp. 78–79.

102.
Weekly Anglo-African,
Aug. 17, 1861; Winthrop,
Life and Poems,
p. 291;
New York World,
June 14, 1861; Poland,
Glories of War,
pp. 208–09.

103.
New York World,
June 14, 1861.

104.
Poland,
Glories of War,
pp. 211–224.

105.
Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”

106.
BFB to Simon Cameron, July 30, 1861, in
Letters,
vol. 1, pp. 187–88.

107.
BFB to Pierce, Aug. 15, 1861, in
Letters,
vol. 1, p. 216.