Major Cary, moreover, knew General Butler slightly from before the war. Barely a year earlier, both had been delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, that ill-fated assembly where men like Butler had supported Jefferson Davis in the interests of national unity, but where, in the end, North and South had still failed to reach an understanding. Even so, the Virginian could address the Massachusetts man—painful though this might be—as one gentleman to another.44
Butler, also on horseback and accompanied by two mounted adjutants, went out to meet Cary at the midpoint of the sandy causeway. The men rode, side by side, to the far bank of the creek—off federal property and into rebel Virginia.
After an exchange of pleasantries and a recollection of their previous acquaintance, Cary got down to business. “I have sought to see you for the purpose of ascertaining upon what principles you intend to conduct the war in this neighborhood,” he began stiffly.
First the major wished to know whether the Union fleet in Hampton Roads would allow Virginia civilians safe passage from the area. General Butler replied that the naval blockade would hardly be much of one if it let any Southern ships through. Cary asked if they could go by land. Certainly, Butler replied—since all but a few square miles of Virginia were rebel territory anyhow, who was to stop them?
The two men had turned their horses and were riding together along a country road, with woodlands on one hand and fields on the other, sloping gently down to the creek. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.
Now Cary reached the third and most delicate question he had come to address.
“I am informed,” he said, “that three negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those negroes?”
“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.
Here Cary reminded the general about the Fugitive Slave Act: “Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”
Butler, dour though he usually seemed, must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever—even a rather witty—answer.
“I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”
“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.”
“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”
Ever the diligent scholar of jurisprudence, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize and hold any enemy property that was being used for belligerent purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, had been helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then—if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. In that case, he had as much justification in confiscating Baker, Mallory, and Townsend as he would in intercepting a shipment of muskets or swords. Legally speaking, Butler’s position was unassailable.
There was, he admitted to Cary, one loophole: “If Colonel Mallory will come into the fort and take the oath of allegiance to the United States, he shall have his negroes.” The rebel officer was, to say the least, unlikely to do so.
If anything could have flustered the courtly headmaster-major, surely this conversation must have. Cary rode back to the Confederate lines having accomplished none of the aims of his errand. Butler, for his part, returned to Fortress Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer with case law was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.
The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to General Scott. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to hereby submit.”
But before this missive could even reach the general-in-chief’s desk up in Washington, matters at Fortress Monroe would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were forty-seven, and not just young men now but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a three-month-old infant in her arms. There was an ancient Negro who had been born in the year of America’s independence.45
By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”46
“WHAT’S TO BE DONE WITH THE BLACKS?” asked a headline in the Chicago Tribune. It was a question that more and more white Americans—in both the North and the South—were starting to pose.47
Before the attack on Sumter, the answer had seemed clear to many. The Tribune’s rival paper, the Chicago Times, expounded it in no uncertain terms:
Let the South have her negroes to her heart’s content, and in her own way—and let us go on getting rich and powerful by feeding and clothing them. Let the negroes alone!—let them ALONE!… ABOLITION IS DISUNION. It is the “vile cause and the most cursed effect.” It is the Alpha and Omega of our National woes. STRANGLE IT!48
For many Northerners, the outbreak of armed hostilities did little to change this—at least initially. In early May, the New York Herald praised Lincoln’s “humane war policy”—by which it meant “his respect … for the rights of ‘property’ ” as opposed to the “lawless disorganizers” within his own party who urged “a war policy of extermination and confiscation against the South.” The paper’s position, in effect, conceded the premises on which the Confederates themselves had gone to war: Law and slavery were on the same side. So were slavery and union. Liberation of the slaves would be a confiscation of Southerners’ rightful property—and would mean the extermination of Southern society, perhaps even quite literally. The North’s struggle was simply one against a treasonous conspiracy, and for “the integrity of the Union.” In other words, Unionism was still a purely conservative cause.49
Even some of the Northerners who were considered radicals had deferred to what seemed the necessity of disavowing any abolitionist intentions. “Some people ask if this is to be a crusade of emancipation,” Henry Ward Beecher told his congregation. “No, it is not. I hate slavery intensely.… Liberty is the birthright of every man, yet ours is not an army of liberation. Why? Because the fifteen States of the South are guaranteed security in their property, and we have no right by force to dispossess them of that property.”50
For America’s small community of black intellectuals, the spring of 1861 was a disorienting time. “I have never spent days so restless and anxious,” Frederick Douglass confessed two weeks after Sumter. “Our mornings and evenings have continually oscillated between the dim light of hope, and the gloomy shadow of despair.”51
The past few years had been dispiriting and exhausting ones for Douglass, who had never ceased fighting for emancipation since his own escape from slavery in Maryland more than two decades earlier. In 1855, he closed the second edition of his autobiography with a ringing proclamation:
Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hindrances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my soul, that this anti-slavery cause will triumph.52
Of all the Negro abolitionists, Douglass had always been the one to insist, often to the derision of other black leaders, that Africans might one day also be
Americans, that the promise of freedom embedded in the Declaration might one day apply to them, too. He remembered when, as a boy clandestinely teaching himself to read, he had pored over a book of political oratory from the Revolution, deciphering the stirring words one letter at a time. He spurned those who sought an independent black republic in Africa or the Caribbean.
By 1861, however—after Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and John Brown—even Douglass’s rock-solid faith had been badly shaken. The final blow for him was the inauguration of the new Republican president. Douglass had campaigned for Lincoln. But the “double-tongued document” of the inaugural address, as he had called it, came as a shocking betrayal. If even such a leader as Lincoln would sacrifice four million Negroes to appease the South, then clearly all hope was lost. Blacks had no future in America. At the end of March, he booked passage to Haiti, planning to set sail from New Haven on April 25 and arrive in Port-au-Prince by May 1. If the island nation lived up to its promise—as a sun-kissed “city set on a hill” for former slaves—Douglass would move down there for good, and he would urge other black Americans to do the same.53
But at the last minute, ten days after the attack on Sumter and in the midst of his oscillations between hope and despair, Douglass changed his travel plans, staying behind in the chilly dampness of western New York State. On April 27, as the ship steamed toward Port-au-Prince without him, he gave a lecture at a church in Syracuse. It was one of only a few speeches that Douglass, usually a tireless orator, would deliver in the year ahead. At the most tumultuous moment of the national crisis, he seemed briefly to find the voice, by turns soaringly prophetic and frankly personal, that had moved audiences ever since his first public address in a Nantucket meetinghouse, many years before. Instead of trying to hide his doubts and uncertainties about the future, Douglass embraced them. “We cannot see the end from the beginning,” he confessed. “Our profoundest calculations may prove erroneous, our best hopes disappointed, and our worst fears confirmed.” He continued:
And yet we read the face of the sky, and may discern the signs of the times. We know that clouds and darkness, and the sounds of distant thunder, mean rain. So, too, we may observe the fleecy drapery of the moral sky, and draw conclusions as to what may come upon us. There is a general feeling amongst us, that the control of events has been taken out of our hands, that we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.54
“At any rate,” Douglass also wrote that week, “this is no time for us to leave the country.”55
WITHIN DAYS AFTER FRANK BAKER, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend crossed the James River in a stolen boat, their exploit—and their fate—were being discussed at the White House. Indeed, they were a topic of conversation throughout the entire nation.
Word of Butler’s decision on the three fugitive slaves hit the Northern press on Monday morning, May 27, not long after Scott received his dispatch; almost certainly Butler himself, never one to shy away from publicity, had leaked it to a correspondent. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a joke. “General Butler appears to be turning his legal education to good account,” a five-line report in The New York Times began. “We think the people of [Virginia] will find the General a match for them in more ways than one.” It was like a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling “F.F.V.,” as the Times described Major Cary. (This was short for First Families of Virginia, a term of chivalrous pride in the Old Dominion that had become the butt of widespread ridicule in the North.) In fairness, the paper’s readers badly needed something light that day, on the heels of a mournful weekend: the Butler item was wedged among long columns of type describing every detail of Colonel Ellsworth’s funeral cortege and its passage through the streets of Manhattan.56
Winfield Scott was also inclined at first to take the whole thing as a joke—for he, too, was in dire need of comic relief. The general-in-chief’s gout had flared up even worse than usual, forcing the Hero of Lundy’s Lane to spend his days prostrated on a sofa, his swollen feet propped up on a stack of pillows, as he gestured with a stick at a large wall map, barking commands at his scurrying bevies of secretaries and aides. (This scene of military grandeur, a correspondent wrote, “was one on which the pencil of a Leutze would dwell lovingly”—the acclaimed painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware had just been commissioned to paint a new mural at the Capitol.) On Wednesday morning, Lincoln met with Scott and found the old man chortling delightedly at what he called “Butler’s fugitive slave law.” Afterward, the president told Montgomery Blair that “he had not seen old Lundy as merry since he had known him.”
Of course, Scott also expected that Lincoln would instruct him to overrule Butler. And perhaps it was this prospect, even more than the joke itself, that cheered him: this greenhorn president had just been shown what could happen when you slapped a major general’s epaulettes onto the undeserving shoulders of a politician.57
But Lincoln was not so certain. “The President seemed to think it a very important subject,” Blair wrote after their conversation, “and one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Lincoln made it known that he would address the matter with his cabinet the following morning.58
By all appearances, nothing in the administration’s slavery policy had changed in the past three months. Lincoln had continued to avow, both publicly and privately, that he had no desire to interfere with the peculiar institution in either the rebellious or the loyal states. And yet one or two of those closest to him—closer, certainly, than the members of his own cabinet—had begun to notice that his position was slightly less absolute than his inaugural address would have it. They may even have known that the news from Fortress Monroe did not catch him entirely off guard.
On May 7, John Hay had gone into Lincoln’s office to brief him on some of the recent White House mail. He found the president contorted into a most unusual position: scrunched up in a chair with his boots braced against the windowsill and a large telescope balanced on the tips of his toes. He was apparently surveying some naval steamboats passing on the Potomac.59
Hay told the chief executive that several correspondents were suggesting the administration could quickly kill secession, present and future, by attacking the taproot of the South’s economy: slavery. Orville Browning, a leading Illinois Republican and a close friend of Lincoln’s for the past thirty years, had sent the most extraordinary letter urging him to “crush all rebel forces” without mercy, and let the Negroes, after having “avenge[d] the wrongs of ages,” turn the confiscated Cotton Belt into a republic of their own. Perhaps Hay even read some of the letter aloud:
Our armies must march into the rebel states, and the negroes will flock to our standard. What is to be done with them? We cant avoid considering and dealing with this question.… There is no escaping it. We must meet it, and solve it, and we had better do it in advance—before the emergency is upon us. When they come we cannot repulse them—we cannot butcher them, we cannot send them back to bondage. Heaven would blast us with its wrath if we did. We cannot incorporate them into our population in the free states. We cannot drive them into the sea—We cannot precipitate them upon any other country. What are we to do with them?60
Lincoln chuckled at this. Yes, he told Hay, some of his Northern friends seemed a bit “bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour.” Some of them appeared to think that the war—still less than a month old and practically bloodless—was going to result in the total abolition of slavery. One gentleman had even proposed—in earnest, it seemed—that he should enlist blacks in the army!
The young secretary persisted. Quite a few people were saying such things, he told Lincoln. Not just politicians, either, judging by the White House mailbag, but ordinary citizens, too.
Be
hind his boss’s back, Hay had recently given Lincoln a nickname: “the Tycoon.” This word had entered American slang within just the past year or so, as part of the fad for all things Japanese. Taikun was the title of the chief shogun, and suggested—at least to the Western mind—not just a wise and powerful ruler but a figure of deep oriental inscrutability. The Tycoon now made a reply worthy of his name. It impressed Hay so much that he copied it word for word that night into his diary; thirty years later, he would also copy it verbatim into his biography of Lincoln.
“For my own part,” the president began, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
So far this was clear enough. In fact it was classic, lambent Lincoln: in three simple sentences he had explained why secession represented not just the failure of democracy but the triumph of anarchy. Those sentences have been quoted in innumerable Civil War histories and Lincoln biographies. But it was also part of his genius with language to deploy words as camouflage, to reveal and mask himself at the same time, like a taikun behind a rice-paper screen—or like an Illinois lawyer in front of a jury. It was this Lincoln who spoke next, in oblique phraseology that would be quoted by very few historians or biographers besides Hay:
There may be one consideration used in stay of such final judgment, but that is not for us to use in advance. That is, that there exists in our case, an instance of a vast and far reaching disturbing element, which the history of no other free nation will probably ever present. That however is not for us to say at present. Taking the government as we found it we will see if the majority can preserve it.61
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