1861
Page 43
The Union’s foothold on Virginia soil had spread itself beyond the immediate vicinity of the fort; white tents by the thousands blossomed across the wheat fields, and U.S. flags flew triumphantly from President Tyler’s villa, from the cupola of Colonel Mallory’s house next door, and from Major Cary’s academy. Fresh regiments seemed to arrive daily. One morning in late May, the steam tug Yankee spilled forth the gaudy soldiers of the Fifth New York, Colonel Abram Duryee’s Zouaves, resplendent in white turbans and baggy red calico pants. Close on their heels came an all-German unit, the Turner Rifles, marching under both the Stars and Stripes and the black, red, and yellow banner of their homeland. Their picturesque colonel, Max Weber, his aggressively martial mustaches waxed needle-sharp, was one of Franz Sigel’s comrades-in-arms from Baden in ’48. (Weber ensconced himself in Tyler’s former study, delighted to find busts of Goethe and Schiller already there.) Each new regiment was like a troupe of costumed actors arriving in the wings of a theater: anxious and excited supernumeraries waiting for their cue to go onstage.80
And then there were the Virginia Union Volunteers: less resplendent, perhaps, but equally picturesque.
That was the unofficial name—or one of them—given to the fugitive slaves who had taken refuge at the fort. “I wish you could see some of their clothes,” a New England soldier wrote home. “They are all patches, sewed together, and patches on that, sewed with cotton strings, and a hat that would be too poor for a hen’s nest.” Soon this was supplemented with bits and bobs of Union uniforms: cast-off caps, shirts, and trousers, and even the odd scrap of Confederate attire plucked nimbly from a master’s knapsack before departure. Almost all the Negroes came barefoot, and most remained that way. Yet each morning, dozens of the aptly named Volunteers lined up to pitch in with manual labor around the fort. Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.” A Northern visitor wrote:
I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day; a quiet, respectable, industrious … folk, with far more agreeable expressions than one could ever see in a low white laboring class. Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were the black Parcae disguised among us, and spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic. I think every one likes them.81
There was another nickname that caught on much more widely, one that evolved out of General Butler’s renowned legalism. Journalists across the country quipped relentlessly about the Negro “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The New York Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight”—until, within a week or two, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly crafted bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity. Were these blacks people, or property? Free, or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a whole host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook, by allowing the escaped Negroes to be all of those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment to-day. As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision as well, perhaps: William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery—and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had refused to concede any meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with black skin. Eventually, even many Negro leaders adopted it.82
To a few people, the strange inscrutability of the word suggested somehow the uncertainty of the moment. “Where we are drifting, I cannot see,” wrote the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, “but we are drifting somewhere; and our fate, whatever it may be, is bound up with these … ‘contrabands.’ ”83
In all events, the contrabands kept coming to Fortress Monroe, their numbers multiplying as the perimeter of the Union lines expanded. Only a couple of days after the first three fugitives’ flight, nearly all of Hampton’s white residents fled in turn as federal troops occupied the town. Some slaveholders simply left their Negroes behind, especially those too elderly or infirm to be of much use or value. Most tried to coax them to follow; some warned that the Yankees would eat them, or send them north to be processed into fertilizer, or sell them to a Cuban sugar plantation. But the blacks, not surprisingly, made themselves scarce, slipping off into the woods and fields until their masters were safely away. For some whites, who had considered their house servants almost (there was always an almost) like family, that day was a rude awakening. One white Hamptonian would later recall how his aunt and uncle “were particularly fond of a boy now perhaps 16 or 18 who had been in the house since he was a little child. He was a bright boy and very fond and considerate of them. This mulatto, though he had been raised almost like a son, was so ungrateful as not long after to break into the house with others and take all the money that this old couple had. The young rascal went off, and neither I nor anyone about here ever knew what became of him.”84
By early June, some four or five hundred such “rascals” were within the Union lines. stampede among the negroes in virginia, proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women, and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”85
Despite the stern counsels of the postmaster general, Butler was not turning away the “non working classes” of fugitives. Perhaps stretching the strict definition of militarily valuable contraband, he wrote to Blair, “If I take the able bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother must I not take the child?” In a letter to General Scott, he added: “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt. Of the political one, I have no right to judge.” Scott, judging both, let this enlargement of the original doctrine stand.86
Abolitionists among the Union troops watched these developments with delight. Major Winthrop was at his desk in Butler’s office one evening when a local civilian, perhaps unaware of the latest permutations in contraband law, arrived seeking an audience with the general. He was an elderly, grave, pious-looking Virginian who, until extremely recently, had been the master of some forty slaves. He came bearing a tale of woe. By good fortune, he had managed to get half his slaves away to be sold in Alabama before they could run off to the Yankees. But then he had come home from church that Sunday to find that nearly all of the rest were gone. “Now, Colonel,” the man addressed General Butler, “I’m an invalid, and you have got two of my boys, young boys, sir, not over twelve—no use to you except perhaps to black a gentleman’s boots. I would like them very much, sir, if you would spare them. In fact, Colonel, sir, I ought to have my property back.”
The supplicant seemed so consumed with honest self-pity that Butler, Winthrop, and the other officers burst into uncontrollable guffaws. They sent him away empty-handed. Winthrop exulted that night in a letter to his sister. “By Liberty! but it is worth something to be here at this moment, in the center of the center! Here we scheme the schemes! Here we take the secession flags, the arms, the prisoners! Here we liberate the slaves—virtually.”87
&nb
sp; Winthrop, like most men at Fortress Monroe, had been a soldier for hardly over a month. (And the only secession flag captured so far had been one sad piece of flannel needlework that Colonel Duryee’s Zouaves had found at ex-President Tyler’s house.) In ordinary life, the slight, fair-haired thirty-two-year-old was a rising author with two travel books to his name—The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air—and a drawerful of unpublished poems and novels. His two closest friends were the writer George W. Curtis and the painter Frederic Church, who was also a hiking companion on rambles through the Adirondacks and along the coast of Maine (where the two had gone, improbably enough, to drum up votes for Frémont in the summer of 1856). Fresh out of Yale, Winthrop had been a tourist in Europe in 1848, and the revolutions there had left a lasting impression, a determination to find a life that would combine poetics and politics. Just after Sumter’s surrender, he marched down Broadway in the ranks of the dandyfied Seventh Regiment, whose members had pledged themselves to the defense of Washington for a not terribly generous thirty-day enlistment term. But Winthrop was under no illusion that the war would be a frolic. “I see no present end of this business,” he wrote Curtis shortly after his arrival in the capital. “We must conquer the South. Afterward we must be prepared to do its polic[ing] in its own behalf, and in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without precipitation, emancipate. We must hold the South as the metropolitan police holds New York. All this is inevitable. Now I wish to enroll myself at once in the ‘Police of the Nation,’ and for life, if the nation will take me.”88
At the close of a brief and wholly bloodless campaign, the men of the Seventh had dispersed, leaving behind as their only casualties a thousand velvet-covered camp stools that had somehow gotten misplaced in transit. Winthrop remained, joining Butler’s staff. At Fortress Monroe, he was already witnessing the emancipation of the blacks, a bit more precipitately than he had envisioned. Appalled at the ragged condition of the fugitives, he began sending urgent appeals for decent clothing to his friends in the North.89
He was also determined to write down what he saw happening around him. The Sunday that news came of Sumter’s surrender, he and Curtis had sat together late into the night on the porch of Curtis’s house on Staten Island, talking about the present and the future. Winthrop told his friend that he thought someone should keep a careful record of the quickly unspooling events: “for we are making our history hand over hand.”
While in Washington with the Seventh, he had written those brilliant accounts for The Atlantic—full of sly wit and vivid detail—of the troops bunking in the House chamber and the army’s march by moonlight over the Long Bridge into Virginia. Now, at Fortress Monroe, Winthrop began a new essay: “Voices of the Contraband,” he would call it.90
Indeed, there were new voices, and new stories, to be heard every day at the fort. Some of the contrabands had led extraordinary lives.
One of the first fugitives to arrive was George Scott. He had originally been the field hand of a man in Hampton, but then through a complicated family transaction became the property of his original owner’s son-in-law, who planned to take him to his plantation in a different county, on the far side of the James. Worse yet, the new master, one A. M. Graves, was widely known as a brute who abused both his wife and his Negroes. Before Graves could gain possession of him, Scott slipped off into the woods outside town. For about two years he hid out in a cave, where a sympathetic and courageous young girl regularly brought him food. Many of the local whites sympathized, in fact, to the extent that they paid him to help with farmwork, even while he was on the lam: they, too, knew what Graves was made of. Still, Scott had plenty of tales about hairsbreadth escapes from the slave patrols. Once Graves himself had managed to corner him, brandishing a pistol and bowie knife. The agile, powerfully built Scott wrenched both weapons out of his hands before disappearing again into the woods. Now he was well armed, and his master, as well as the constables, became perceptibly less zealous in their attempts to recover him.
Scott came out of hiding almost as soon as the Union troops arrived. He quickly attached himself to the Zouave regiment. After two years as a fugitive, he knew every inch of the marshes, fields, and country lanes around Hampton, and became a valuable scout for the commanders at Fortress Monroe.91
In fact, rare was the group of contrabands that did not include at least one person with useful military intelligence, and it became standard practice to debrief them upon arrival at the Union lines. Montgomery Blair, who had grown up in a slaveholding Maryland family, advised Butler early on: “I have no doubt you will get your best spies from among them, because they are accustomed to travel in the night time and can go where no one not accustomed to the sly tricks they practice from infancy to old age could penetrate.” His prediction was already coming true.92
Just after dawn on May 31, a young black man named Waddy Smith showed up at the Zouaves’ camp, having risked his life to get there and bringing some highly detailed information. Smith told the officers that he had escaped two days before from a Confederate camp near Yorktown, where he and 150 other slaves had been put to work building fortifications. He was ready to offer the Northerners a precise account of the enemy forces: how many men and cannons they had, where their camps were located, and what he had overheard the Southern commander telling another officer about plans for an attack. Smith’s owner had suspected that he might try to slip away; the officer who debriefed him wrote that “his master … told him ‘you’re mine and I’ll keep you or kill you’ and [Smith] said he thinks he would do so if he had a chance.” Colonel Duryee forwarded this report immediately to General Butler.93
Even the contrabands with less dramatic stories than Scott’s and Smith’s shared tales that fascinated—and in some cases shocked—the Union soldiers. Many of the Northerners had never really spoken with a Negro before; some of the Vermont farm boys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home, unless you counted the blackface performers in a traveling minstrel show.
Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as an abstraction in speeches on Election Day. Mothers told of trying somehow to care for their children while laboring in the fields from sunup to sundown—and at harvesttime, sometimes even longer, husking corn well past midnight so that it could go early to market. They spoke of being left to forage somehow for themselves and their families, at times living on whatever roots and berries they could find. Some Negroes had been so ill supplied with clothing that they worked in the fields almost naked—and as for the children, certain masters routinely did not provide a stitch of clothing until they were old enough to work. Relatively few reported having been whipped, but those who did had some horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Most stories, though, were of the sorts of routine cruelties born of masters’ stinginess or carelessness, hardship or avarice. Almost all the Hampton fugitives spoke of loved ones sold away; indeed, the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as though their wives or children had simply died of some natural cause.
Perhaps most impressive of all—for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves—was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire of the slaves to be free.… Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.” They all wanted to learn to read, too (a few had been taught on the sly, as children, by their elders or white playmates), and before long, part of the Tyler villa was converted into a schoolroom for black youths.94
Although no detailed account written by a black person of those early days at Fortress Monroe survives, the reports of white soldiers and journalists—and freedmen’s stories from later in the war—allow us to imagine both the exhilaration and the disorientation of the fugitives. The world that they
had known their entire lives had vanished almost literally overnight. Their masters’ houses stood eerily empty; most of Hampton, one Northern visitor wrote in June, resembled “an above-ground Pompeii.” Nearly all the town’s whites had disappeared. In their place were seemingly boundless fields full of strangers, more and more of them each day: white men with harsh, uncouth accents (some did not even speak English), who stared at you curiously, often rudely, breaking into snorting guffaws at the oddest things. Some were kind; others, bored and restless after weeks in camp, tried to turn blacks into pets and playthings, making children scramble for pennies in the dust or playing practical jokes, sometimes cruel ones—and occasionally worse, as when one “particular favorite” Negro companion of a Zouave captain was beaten up when he imprudently ventured into the camp of the rival First New York.95
They made you feel self-conscious in ways that Southern whites did not. And yet the most ordinary gestures became revolutionary: you could look these white men straight in the eye; you could shake their hand. (“Attended a prayer meeting,” a New York private wrote in his diary one day in July. “Got a good many heart[y] shake of the hand by the colored brothers.”) Even the obnoxious ones were often curious to learn your life story, whereas the Virginia whites never were; in fact, they seemed actively to avoid realizing that you had one. But now every visiting dignitary, every Northern newspaperman, wanted to meet General Butler’s famous contrabands. Whatever else they did, these Yankees never looked through you as if you were a table or a chair.96