One consideration. Disturbing element. Where Browning had conjured images of fire and blood, the president declined even to breathe the words slavery or slave. In speaking of a “stay of … final judgment,” however, he was using legalese—Lincoln the attorney talking to Hay the law clerk in unmistakable terms. Hay understood the startling import of what he was hearing: Lincoln had just admitted, for the very first time, that a decree of emancipation might become necessary in the course of the war. It would be the Union’s last appeal, to the universe’s highest court, for a stay of execution. (This was not the last time Lincoln would conjure a vision of Providence as supreme tribunal: in his second inaugural address, he described more explicitly a God who sat in impartial judgment of North and South, master and slave.) Lincoln’s choice of language revealed something else, besides: when the day of jubilee did come, judgment would not be hurled down from Sinai amid wrathful blasts of brimstone, as Browning would have had it. Rather, the slaves would have to be released from bondage by mundane legalese—perhaps even allowed to slip out through a legal loophole. Legalese, Lincoln knew, was the language of democracy itself: the rule of law, whether civil or military, came down to the power of words to compel. Had not the Founding Fathers framed their declaration of independence as a last-ditch political “necessity” to which they must reluctantly “acquiesce” in the face of tyranny? Decrees by fire and brimstone were a version of anarchy, just like secession.62
It is somewhat ironic: anarchy was what both Lincoln and the South feared most.
In his conversation with Hay, the president had characterized slavery as a “vast and far reaching disturbing element”: a great structural crack in the edifice of the old Union. Here Lincoln reiterated what many other Americans—notably Jefferson—had been saying ever since the nation’s founding. (He was also echoing his own famous “House Divided” speech.) Meanwhile the edifice of the new Confederacy had been, in the words of its vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, “founded upon exactly the opposite” of Jefferson’s idea: “Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” By using this metaphor, Stephens was not simply saying that he and other Confederate founding fathers believed profoundly in the rightness of slavery and white supremacy. He was also confessing that their new Southern republic would stand or fall depending on the solidity of its peculiar institution. In this perverse way, the very architecture of the Confederacy relied on blacks, no less than Colonel Mallory’s gun platforms at Sewell’s Point.
But by late May of 1861, some Southerners were already starting to realize that their war to defend the institution of slavery was actually undermining the foundations of slavery—in all sorts of alarming and unexpected ways—before even a single federal regiment had marched onto rebel territory.
In the first months of the war, Southern newspapers often boasted of slaves’ loyalty to the Confederate cause. The Richmond Dispatch, under the headline “Negro Heroism,” told its readers about some black men in North Carolina who—under the direction of local whites—had collected a thousand pounds or so of scrap iron to be molded into cannonballs. The Negroes, according to the editors, “express themselves highly pleased with the preparations that are being made to kill up the Black Republicans. Wonder what Greeley will say to that?” Another report spoke of fifteen hundred “patriotic yellow men” in New Orleans—members of the free mulatto community—who had offered to defend their city if necessary.63
Yet the slaveholders’ confident public declarations were belied, as usual, by their private confessions.
It is true that some Confederate officers had enough faith in certain trusted slaves to bring them along to war and even put guns in their hands. This occurred especially at the beginning of the war, in tight-knit local militia units, including those around Hampton. It is also true that some free blacks, especially those of mixed race, voluntarily—perhaps even enthusiastically—joined up. Human nature is a complicated thing. Later history would show, moreover, that such support of their oppressors was not entirely irrational. Moble Hopson, a very light-skinned mixed-race man near Hampton, would recall that when he was a boy before the war, no one mentioned his race, and local authorities even looked the other way when he attended a tiny church school with the white children. But as soon as the war ended, he was summarily thrown out of that school. He and his family would henceforth be classed as Negroes and lumped together with the masses of destitute (and now dangerous) black freedmen, their past privileges revoked.64
The “black Confederates”—a misleading term, since the Confederacy never accepted Negro enlistments—have received a great deal of attention from present-day apologists for the Lost Cause. Far more widespread throughout the South in early 1861, though, were signs of white fear and black rebellion.
On April 13, as her Charleston mansion trembled with the shock waves of bombs falling on Sumter, and with her husband away at the Confederate fortifications, Mary Chesnut had found herself studying the faces of her black house servants. James Chesnut’s valet, Laurence, sat by the door, apparently “as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent” as ever. The other Negroes wore similar expressions. But, the canny Mrs. Chesnut observed, “they carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, even though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”65
For her, as for many slaveholders, that question answered itself. As early as November, towns and counties across the South had begun stepping up slave patrols, worried that Lincoln’s election would inspire Negroes to rebel. One unsettling story told of a Georgia slave who suddenly refused to chop wood for his master and mistress, telling them that “Lincoln was elected now, and he was free.” The black man, according to a newspaper, “after being sent to the whipping-post, gained new light on the subject of Lincoln and Slavery, and returned to his duty.” Many of the first Southern militia companies that formed that winter, the reporter added, “had quite as much to do with fighting niggers as with repelling Abolitionists.”66
When war became inevitable, Mary Chesnut herself predicted that Southerners would have to deal “with Yankees in front and negroes in the rear.”67 Many whites shared this expectation. On May 4, a farmer in Alabama named William H. Lee wrote to warn Jefferson Davis: “the Negroes is very Hiley Hope up that they will soon Be free so i think that you Had Better order out All the Negroe felers from 17 years oald up Ether fort them up or put them in the army and Make them fite like good fells for wee ar in danger of our lives hear among them.”68
Southerners tried in vain to keep their slaves from learning any information that might put the wrong sorts of ideas into their heads. William Henry Trescot, the wealthy Charlestonian who had acted more or less as a double agent within Buchanan’s State Department, took to speaking about current affairs only in French when a Negro was present. This was not a widely applicable precaution, however. (It would likely not have worked in William Lee’s case, for instance.)69
Jefferson Davis was prepared neither to “fort up” all the Negroes nor to put them in the Confederate army. He simply let whites like Lee continue fearing for their lives, which dampened military enlistment, since many men were unwilling to leave their wives and children unguarded with the slaves. (The following year the Confederate Congress would reluctantly vote to exempt owners of twenty or more slaves from conscription, exacerbating Southern complaints that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”) Some state governments even refused to turn over their arms stockpiles or dispatch all their troops to the Confederate authorities, afraid of being left helpless when the Negroes rose up to butcher their masters. They cited “local defense” as their justification, and the a
uthorities in Richmond—committed as they were to the doctrine of states’ rights—found it difficult to overrule.70
And in many places, rebel troops quickly found themselves facing exactly the kind of two-front battle that Mary Chesnut had predicted. The heavenly order of slave society—enforced for so long by the constant threat of white Southern violence—began to crumble as soon as Southern violence needed to be directed externally, against the North, instead of just internally, against the slaves. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen were no longer chasing fugitives; they were aiming cannons at the Yankees. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.
On May 8, Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles, commanding Confederate forces at Fredericksburg, Virginia, reported to General Lee’s headquarters that he had sent his cavalry off in pursuit of Negroes. The day before, he wrote, a local planter named John T. Washington—great-great-nephew of the late president, as it happened—had noticed that five of his slaves seemed to have disappeared. Hastening off to nearby plantations in search of them, Washington discovered that almost all of his neighbors were missing some Negroes as well, and they alerted the military authorities. General Ruggles told headquarters that he had immediately dispatched mounted troops “to intercept and recover the slaves supposed to have escaped, but thus far without satisfactory results.”71
In other words, the Confederates were fighting Negroes on Virginia soil weeks before they fought even a single Yankee.
Northerners, of course, delighted in such tales. Even those who loathed the thought of abolition loved the idea of traitorous rebels scurrying helter-skelter across the countryside in pursuit of mischievous blacks. The New York Herald, certainly no friend of the slave, welcomed Butler’s “contraband of war” decision, noting that the ruling “meets with universal approbation of the supporters of the Union cause throughout the country”—as a clever military tactic, it meant. (The Herald was also glad to praise a good solid Democrat like Butler; no radical, he.) The Springfield Republican reported: “The entire country laughed at the exquisite humor of the transaction.” A cartoon captioned “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine” began circulating widely. It showed a grinning Negro standing outside the citadel as a Southern planter (broad-brimmed hat, stringy goatee) chases him with a whip, yelling, “Come back you black rascal.” The black man points toward the fort with one hand and thumbs his nose with the other. “Can’t come back nohow massa,” he says. “Dis chile’s contraban.” Meanwhile, behind the planter’s back, dozens more fieldhands dash toward the walls of Monroe.72
There was, however, a serious undertone to such humor. By the end of May, Northerners were starting to accept the idea of Southerners not just as opponents—let alone as the wayward brethren they had been just a few months earlier—but as enemies. The cold-blooded slaying of Ellsworth had given the nation a glimpse of the horrors to come. Many loyal Americans started asking themselves whether it was worth making such sacrifices simply to restore a Union that would still be committed to respecting slaveholders’ “rights,” and to fight an all-out war against the South while still trying to handle slavery with kid gloves. The old arguments against abolitionist troublemaking were already ringing hollow.
Two days after Ellsworth’s death—just as the second group of fugitives was arriving at Fortress Monroe—a Baptist minister in Albany, New York, gave a sermon about the young colonel’s slaying before an audience of Union volunteers. The Reverend J. D. Fulton began with a passage from the Old Testament about David’s lament over the death of Jonathan: “Thy love to me was wonderful—passing the love of woman.” Lincoln, the minister said, was like David, and Ellsworth was his Jonathan. When David spoke those words, Fulton noted, the Kingdom of Israel was riven by civil war. King Saul had anointed David as his successor but had then suddenly turned on him and had heaped up obstacles “in the path of the choice of the people and the favorite of Heaven.” Jonathan’s death, terrible as it was, had signaled the moment when David the former shepherd boy became King David, the monarch who reunited his kingdom and brought the Tablets of the Law to Jerusalem. Perhaps the death of Ellsworth would mark a similar rebirth for Lincoln, and for America. However, the preacher continued:
If it be the business of the North to squander her millions, and to give up her sons, simply that we can place the old flag-staff again in the hands of those who ask protection to slavery, then … you will see an inglorious termination to the campaign. But, if we are to fight for freedom; if we are to wipe out the curse that infects our borders; if we are to establish justice, teach mercy, and proclaim righteousness, then will our soldiers be animated by a heroic purpose that will build them up in courage, in faith, in honor, and they will come back to us respected and beloved.73
Lincoln and his cabinet convened on Thursday, May 30—a week after the first three Hampton fugitives’ escape—to address Butler’s decision. Unfortunately, no detailed account of their deliberations survives. But a letter that Blair wrote to the general later that day suggests that they may have been fairly perfunctory. Previously the postmaster general had advised that he planned to argue for leaving the treatment of fugitive slaves up to Butler’s discretion—reminding him, however, that “the business you are sent upon … is war, not emancipation.” Needless to say, Fortress Monroe should not harbor any slaves belonging to pro-Union masters, or those not useful for military purposes. After the meeting Blair gloated, “I so far carried my point this morning about the negroes that no instructions will be given you for the present and I consider that I have in fact carried out my programme of leaving it to your discretion. I think this conclusion was arrived at by most from a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time”—a common enough desire in Washington, then as now. (Another account suggests that Seward’s deft hand may have helped coax his colleagues toward this nonresolution.)74
By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children into the fort. With this in mind, Blair suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy: “I am inclined to think you might impose the code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the Secessionists to take care of the non working classes of these people.… You can … take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require.” As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that all the Negroes be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America—in fact, he was enclosing a speech that his brother Frank had once given in Congress about just such a plan. (The Blairs may have been rabid Unionists, but they had no more love of Negroes than the Herald—which, by the way, proposed that all the confiscated slaves should be held by the federal government and then eventually sold back to their owners, at half price, to finance the cost of the war.)75
A week or so later, Blair wrote Butler again, somewhat more urgently: he had learned that even more fugitives had come into the fort, and thought the general really ought to start following up on that Haiti idea sooner rather than later. Maybe Butler could have a chat with “some of the most intelligent [Negroes], and see how they would like to go with their families to so congenial a clime”?76
Perhaps Lincoln realized what Blair did not: developments were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. The president left no record of his own thoughts on the news from Fortress Monroe. But he might have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s recent words, had he known of them: The control of events has been taken out of our hands … 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.
At least one person grasped the full import of Butler’s little joke. Back at the fort, Theodore Winthrop, the general’s belletristic secretary, wr
ote a Latin tag from Horace in his notebook: Solvuntur risu tabulae.* Then he added, in English: “An epigram abolished slavery in the United States.”77
IN PEACETIME, the interior of Fortress Monroe was, and still is today, a serene enclosure. Winthrop might have called it a hortus conclusus; another visitor from the North thought it looked like a better-armed version of the Boston Common. Along its well-graveled paths, live oaks and magnolias spread themselves with aristocratic negligence, the tips of their lowest branches nearly brushing the clipped lawn. The officers’ quarters were less like barracks than summer cottages, each with a flower garden and double veranda. A happy posting, in the days of the Old Army; indeed, one end of the citadel’s moat was literally filled with oyster shells, tossed insouciantly from the casemate windows by several generations of military gourmands. General Scott himself paid loving tribute to those local mollusks almost every time someone brought up the subject of Fortress Monroe—which was quite often, of late.78
The Chesapeake seafood still abounded, and demand for it had never been higher, but serenity was in short supply at Fortress Monroe in the spring and summer of 1861. Teams of workmen busied themselves everywhere. (One of General Butler’s first orders had been to clear those oyster shells from the moat.) War correspondents in search of the war arrived by the dozens. Draymen’s wagons rumbled incessantly to and fro, hauling barrels and bundles of supplies, provisions, and donations from well-meaning civilians back home, including far more pocket handkerchiefs than the Third Massachusetts knew what to do with. A self-appointed “aeronaut” named Professor La Mountain did mysterious things with silk bags and hydrogen before finally making the first successful balloon reconnaissance in American history, discovering a secret camp concealed behind the Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point. Deputations of clergymen from various denominations bustled about, anxious to ascertain that the Union’s defenders were marching off to battle untainted by profane thoughts or spiritous liquors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its parapets, like colonies of ants with the gleaming black corpses of enormous beetles. Scouts were dispatched to advance posts and returned the next day, usually “covered with wounds inflicted, not by the Secessionists, but by their allies the misquitoes, who swarm in the woods, and whom nothing can induce to secede.”79
1861 Page 42
