1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fortress Monroe but throughout the South, it was they who provided the Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “in many … places, I found that my best source of information was the colored men.… I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” In a broader sense, they were often the only friends—indeed, the only Unionists—that the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory. “No where did we find any sign of kindly recognition,” one Northern soldier wrote from Virginia in August 1861, “except from the poor slaves, who are rapidly learning, through the insane hatred of their masters, to look upon our troops as [their] great Army of Deliverance.”117

  The “enemy of my enemy” principle operated on whites, too, and not only on those at the front lines. Barely six weeks after Sumter, the Democratic New York World reported: “Whether it be deemed a good thing or not, the fact is unmistakable that the northern people are fast learning to hate slavery in a way unfelt before.… It comes home to every loyal man, with a force not to be resisted, that the sole cause of this most wicked treason the world ever saw, is SLAVERY; and, just in proportion as the treason itself is abhorred, in just that proportion do hatred and detestation attach to its cause.”118

  Slaves were coming to seem not just players in the drama of the war but also, in a way, heroes. In July, New York’s Winter Garden theater staged a “new drama of the times,” a production laden with special effects, called “America’s Dream; or, the Rebellion of ’61.” The show opened with Sumter burning, the flames reportedly so realistic it seemed the theater might catch fire. There was a thrilling battle between the Baltimore street toughs and the brave boys of the Sixth Massachusetts—while poor Colonel Ellsworth was being vividly murdered at the other end of the stage. But the most unexpected and certainly most fanciful scene was a tableau in which, while “real bombshells” burst around them, a “small but resolute band of Northern contrabands” helpfully launched provisions out of a mortar into a besieged Union fort.119

  Meanwhile, within the rebel South, the erosion of the peculiar institution was ever more palpable—even hundreds of miles away from where slaves were becoming contrabands. Union and Confederate newspapers alike reported an astonishing number of alleged insurrections. They were mostly very small scale. In Louisiana, Negroes were supposed to have torched a Confederate general’s house the night after Sumter was attacked. In Arkansas, a black preacher was hanged after using threatening language to his mistress. In Tennessee, at least five alarms were sounded in April and May alone. Whether these had any basis in fact almost does not matter; the panic was real. As Pinkerton observed after one of his reconnaissance missions, “The very institution for which these misguided men were periling their lives, and sacrificing their fortunes, was threatened with demolition; and the slaves who had so long and so often felt the lash of their masters, were now becoming a source of fear to the very men who had heretofore held them in such utter subjection.”120

  A telling fact: the price of slaves was already dropping precipitously. Numerous reports attest that by mid-1861 it had fallen to half or even a third of what it had been the year before. The “property” that slaveholders were fighting for was now not only less reliable (you never knew when it might run off in the night) but less valuable—perhaps, in a sense, less worth fighting for.121

  Just as important was what did not happen: the long-expected and long-feared Negro uprising—the apocalypse when slaves would rise up, rape their mistresses, and slaughter their masters—never occurred. Indeed, even now it is remarkable to consider, given what the slaves had suffered and the turmoil in the South over the next four years, that they ended up committing so little violence against their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of blacks did not want vengeance; they simply wanted to be free, and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war.

  This realization had enormous repercussions, not just in the South but in the North. For decades, abolitionist “agitators” had been vilified as traitors to their race for trying to bring about “another St. Domingo.” As the Democrats had sung in the 1860 presidential campaign: They love the nigger better than the red, white, and blue. Even as stalwart a Unionist as Jessie Frémont sometimes felt torn between her loyalty to her country and her loyalty to her race and her sex. A few weeks after the attack on Sumter, she wrote to a friend, “When I think of the hideous [danger] the Southern states hold in themselves, I don’t know to which women the most sympathy belongs. Our side is great & noble & to die for it … is a great duty. But they have no such comfort & at their hearths is the black slave Sepoy element.”122 When it turned out that the South’s Negroes were not like St. Domingo’s revolutionaries or India’s Sepoy mutineers, Jessie Frémont’s dilemma vanished. She and millions of other white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution in Northern politics.

  Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the enslaved Negroes themselves. Though they may not have known about the production at the Winter Garden, they knew that they had become actors on the stage of American history in a way that they had never been before. The bolder the blacks grew, the more fearful the whites grew—and when the whites grew more fearful, the blacks grew bolder yet. At first this typically took the form of blacks simply refusing to work as hard as they had before—easy enough with so many masters and overseers away in the rebel armies. But in time this would amount to a significant act of sabotage against the Confederate cause, especially after Southern troops began experiencing shortages of food, which happened as early as the autumn of 1861. And soon more and more Negroes were taking the boldest step of all, from slavery into freedom. Even before Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation, in the fall of 1862, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fortress Monroe had become a river of many thousands. “The Negroes,” a Union chaplain wrote, “flocked in vast numbers—an army in themselves—to the camps of the Yankees.… The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”123*

  On the September day of Lincoln’s proclamation, a Union colonel ran into William Seward on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

  Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an established fact.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the puzzled officer asked.

  “I mean,” the secretary of state replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”124

  ON AUGUST 6, 1861, Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder, commander of Confederate forces in southeastern Virginia, received intelligence—unfounded, as it would turn out—that enemy troops, having withdrawn from Hampton some weeks earlier, were about to reoccupy the town. And not only that: the Yankee Butler planned to house Negroes there. “As their masters had deserted their homes and slaves,” Magruder reported back to headquarters in Richmond, “he [would] consider the latter free, and would colonize them at Hampton, the home of most of their owners.” This could not be countenanced.

  Although many of the rebel general’s troops had been busy on a mission to “scour the [surrounding] country” for fugitive blacks, Magruder immediately summoned his officers to a council of war. Steps must be taken at once to prevent the empty town from becoming once again a “harbor of runaway slaves and traitors.” The other Confederates, most of them residents of Hampton and its surrounding farms, agreed. And there was another motivation, too. It was time, some felt, for a
grand and splendid gesture of renunciation. It was time to show the Yankees—to show the world—what Southern men would forfeit for their freedom. “A sacrifice,” one soldier said, “to the grim god of war.”125

  The following night, Union pickets from Colonel Weber’s regiment, who were standing watch just across the inlet, were surprised by noises from the direction of the darkened town. First there were shouts of alarm from some of the few civilians, black and white, who had remained in their homes. And then they heard the slow, deliberate tramp of marching feet. Two snakelike lines of yellow flame threaded their way among the houses, then broke apart, balls of light dancing wildly in every direction as hundreds of Confederates fanned out with torches through the streets. They knew the way; this was their town.

  “Many a young man set fire to his own father’s house,” one Hamptonite would remember.

  From their posts across the bridge, the Yankees watched in astonishment as first one building, then another, was engulfed. “The loud roar of the flames, the cries of the terrified negroes as they were being driven from their huts by the enemy and marched off under guard to their lines, all combined to make up a wild scene,” a soldier said.

  Major Cary’s columned academy was the last building to catch fire. At first the federals thought it was being deliberately spared. But finally the youths of Hampton fell with a vengeance upon their former schoolhouse, soaking the desks and chairs with turpentine and camphene, hacking holes in the floors and ceilings so the flames could rise. It lit up, window by window, from within.

  And so the old town burned. The ancient church; the Negro shanties; the courthouse with its whipping post and its bell; the fathers’ mansions—separate fires at first, then all consumed into one, an inferno reflected on the black waters of the James.

  The Great Comet of 1861, from Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (1888) (photo credit 8.2)

  * * *

  *Contrary to popular belief, most freedmen did not automatically adopt the surnames of their masters, preferring to distance themselves from the bonds of slavery, and more often choosing the last name of a local family they admired, a famous name (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln), a name that they simply liked—or, sometimes, the name of a family to which they claimed kinship.

  *“The tablets of law are erased with a laugh.”

  *The following month, Confederate general D. H. Hill returned Winthrop’s gold pocket watch, taken from his corpse, to Butler, so that the Union commander could forward it to the dead man’s mother. The Confederate’s accompanying note read: “Sir, I have the honor herewith to send the Watch of Young Winthrop, who fell while gallantly leading a party in the vain attempt to subjugate a free people.” (D. H. Hill to Butler, July 5, 1861, Butler Papers.)

  *George Scott went on a similar mission. He accompanied Colonel Duryee to Washington in July, saying that he “was going to plead with Pres. Lincoln for his liberties.” It is unclear if he was given a hearing. (Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, AMA Papers, Fisk University.)

  *Exact estimates of the numbers of contrabands are rare. As of early January 1863, a Northern newspaper estimated that 120,000 fugitives had been received into the Union lines. (Utica Morning Herald, Jan. 6, 1863.) However, the means of arriving at this figure are unclear, and it does not account for the large numbers of fugitives who remained outside the Union encampments or continued north to the free states. Certainly by that point there were a number of Union bases (including Port Royal, South Carolina, and Fortress Monroe) that each had at least 5,000 or 10,000 contrabands.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Independence Day

  And is this the ground Washington trod?

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  “The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)

  Washington, July 1861

  ONE SUNDAY NIGHT in early summer, James Ferguson, assistant astronomer of the United States Naval Observatory, was making a routine survey of the skies above Washington when he noticed an unusual ray of light pulsating just above the northern horizon. As the night was somewhat overcast, he was unable to determine the exact nature of this phenomenon, and decided that it was probably just a stray beam of the aurora borealis.1

  The following evening, the first night of July, a rainstorm swept the capital. Afterward, when Ferguson returned to the Observatory dome, he saw the same pale streak flickering in a slightly different place, once again half hidden amid drifting banks of heavy cloud. At last, just past midnight, the sky cleared and the mysterious object swam free into his view. Indeed, it soon glowed so bright that Ferguson pushed the telescope aside and simply stared in astonishment at the ball of luminescence that swelled and became more brilliant by the minute, soon outshining every star and planet. A pale brushstroke of light trailed behind, streaming higher and higher above the horizon, waxing like the flame of a lamp newly lit.

  Millions of people across the country saw the comet—indeed, half the world did. By the next night, its head looked as large as a three-quarters moon, and the tail traversed more than half the sky, seeming to one observer as if it were made of “infinitesimal specks of fire” that swayed from side to side. It cast a faint shadow, and reflected on the surface of the sea. Some even claimed they could see it by day.

  Scientists were as dazzled as the general public. They were accustomed to watching comets approach earth gradually, from a great distance; none had imagined that such a spectacular celestial body could loom up so unexpectedly. One overstimulated astronomer in Pittsburgh, confessing that the first glimpse made his hair “fairly [stand] up with wonder and excitement,” announced to the press: “I think by the cut of her jib she will probably be remembered, and also recorded, as one of the most extraordinary craft that has floated into our horizon in hundreds of years.”

  At Fortress Monroe, Edward Pierce observed the comet as it burst into full splendor just past dusk on July 2, its tail sweeping across the zenith of the sky like a second Milky Way. Thomas Starr King saw it in San Francisco and was reminded of the fiery dragon in the Book of Revelation. In Manhattan on the night of the 3rd, according to the New York Herald, one enterprising citizen set up a large telescope at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, the usually jaded city lining up to pay for a quick peep. Perhaps inevitably, the Herald, not fully satisfied with the news value of a mere cosmic event, dubbed the celestial apparition the “War Comet of 1861.”

  On the following night, the Fourth of July, the New York Fire Zouaves watched it from their camp in Alexandria. “While a grand pyrotechnic display was taking place throughout the loyal States,” one observer there wrote, “a still grander and more beautiful one took place in the heavens.”

  INDEPENDENCE DAY WAS CELEBRATED throughout the rebellious states as well as the loyal ones, it so happened. Early that morning, as the garrison at Fortress Monroe was busy preparing for its festivities—which were to include a speech by General Butler, a reading of the Declaration (postponed indefinitely, it would turn out, when no one could locate a copy), and then an opportunity for officers and men to get blind drunk—the Yankees were startled to hear artillery booming on the far side of the James, volley after volley in stately cadence. For a moment everyone thought it might be some sort of surprise attack. But it was only the enemy’s salute to the holiday.2

  In the latter years of the Civil War, most of the Confederacy would let the day go unobserved, or even openly scorn it. In 1861, however, the Fourth of July was one of the few things that the two halves of the sundered nation still kept in common—more or less, anyway.

  Across the South, editors and orators proclaimed their own region the true heir to the Revolutionary legacy. After all, what had the thirteen colonies done but secede from the mother country? Indeed, the Founding Fathers—led by Virginia’s immortal Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, slaveholders all—had established the very principles on which the Confederate states based their own claim to independence. Governments, the leaders of 1776 had said, derive their just power from the co
nsent of the governed, and the subjects of a despotic regime have not only the right but a sacred duty to take up arms against it. “The people of the Confederate States of the South,” wrote the editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, “alone remain loyal to the principles of the Revolution.… To them now belongs of right the custody of all the hopes of human progress, of which the Fourth of July is the symbol in history, and it is by their swords that it is to be saved for mankind.”3

  True, there was ambivalence in many Confederate quarters about certain aspects of the past. Jefferson, in particular, was a problem. Some of the fiercer secessionists called him a traitor to his state and to his race; Vice President Stephens, in his “cornerstone” speech a few months earlier, had stated flatly that the author of the Declaration had been “fundamentally wrong” when he wrote that all men were created equal. President Davis, more tactfully, had ignored Jefferson’s later statements against slavery and argued, in his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate, that the doctrine of universal equality applied only to “the men of the political community.”4

  The North had long harbored its own mixed feelings. Only the previous summer, Lincoln’s Republican Party had argued bitterly over whether to include the Declaration’s principles in its national platform, conservatives deeming this too inflammatory. Meanwhile, Frederick Douglass spoke for many black Americans and white abolitionists when in 1852 he extolled the Founding Fathers’ “sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom”—but railed in almost the same breath that American hypocrisy never seemed more “hideous and revolting” than it did each Fourth of July.

  Northerners’ response to the holiday in 1861 reflected new internal divisions, too. The editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer, in their office just down Chestnut Street from Independence Hall, exulted: “This day inaugurates a second war of Independence.… We shall look forward to the United States of the Future as a still closer approximation than the United States of the Past to that bright ideal of Government, the vision of which has ever haunted the Seers and Thinkers of mankind.” Other Americans, though, found little to celebrate. Some considered it a mockery that President Lincoln had chosen Independence Day, of all moments, to convene the national legislature for its emergency session in Washington. “What a melancholy contrast between the Congress of 1776 and the Congress of 1861,” a Democratic editor in Ohio wrote. “One was the Star of Bethlehem, the other the darkness which rent the [veil] of the Temple. The Christ and the Crucifixion.”5