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1861

Page 49

by Adam Goodheart


  The following year, an attempt was made to reconstitute it under the command of a new colonel, Henry O’Brien. Not long after O’Brien began enlisting fresh Zouave recruits from among the fire b’hoys, the New York draft riots broke out, and he was among those murdered by the mob, tortured and hanged from a lamppost. Ellsworth’s unlucky regiment was never resurrected again.

  •

  In September 1861, Jessie Benton Frémont traveled alone by train from St. Louis to Washington to meet with President Lincoln. Ten days earlier, her husband, as the Union military commander in Missouri, had issued an edict summarily liberating all slaves in the state belonging to masters who aided the rebel cause. When news reached the president, he had immediately asked General Frémont to rescind the order.

  Mrs. Frémont, hoping she could stay Lincoln’s hand, went immediately to the White House. She found the president adamant in his position; he annoyed her still further when he said condescendingly, “You are quite a female politician.” Lincoln told John Hay afterward that Mrs. Frémont had pressed him so hard that it was all he could do to avoid having an open quarrel with her.

  (Mrs. Frémont, hearing of this many years later, wrote: “Strange, isn’t it, that when a man expresses a conviction fearlessly, he is reported as having made a trenchant and forceful statement, but when a woman speaks thus earnestly, she is reported as a lady who has lost her temper.”)

  His emancipation order revoked, John C. Frémont’s career in public life abruptly ended soon after, but Jessie Frémont was just beginning a prolific and successful career of her own as a writer. Her first work, an account of the early months of the Civil War in Missouri, appeared in 1863. It included a passage in which Mrs. Frémont said she hoped readers would not think it “unwomanly” of her to publish a book, but, she added, “the restraints of ordinary times do not apply now.”

  During the financial crisis of the 1870s, the Frémonts lost what remained of their once vast fortune. Throughout the next two decades, as they struggled on the edge of poverty, Jessie kept them afloat with the income from her many books and magazine articles. After John’s death in 1891, newspapers ran articles about the Great Pathfinder’s widow, now living in destitution.

  Embarrassed, the California legislature voted her a pension, and some Los Angeles women raised money to build a house for her in their city. Jessie Frémont died there on December 27, 1902, her death mourned as the passing of a vanished West.9

  •

  The house and gardens at Black Point were seized by the federal government during the Civil War and demolished to build earthworks and an artillery battery. The Frémonts, still on the East Coast, were not informed, and Jessie learned only when a Union officer she met at a party happened to mention it in casual conversation. (“Your boys’ room was so pretty I hated to put soldiers in it,” he said, “still more to tear down the walls, where you had pasted pictures of ships and horses and written verses.”) Throughout the rest of her life she tried unsuccessfully to recover the property, which became part of Fort Mason. For more than a century, no trace of her gardens was thought to survive, but in 2010, horticultural experts identified a rosebush that is believed to date from the Frémonts’ occupancy.10

  •

  The “Gray Eagle,” Senator Edward D. Baker, was killed at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, in October 1861, at the head of the First California Regiment.

  •

  Thomas Starr King continued working tirelessly for the Union cause in California. Beginning in the autumn of 1861, he became a leading organizer and fund-raiser for the United States Sanitary Commission, a government agency that organized citizen volunteers, especially women, in aiding wounded and sick Union soldiers. (It later inspired the founding of the American Red Cross.) King spent nearly all his time on the lecture circuit giving patriotic speeches and soliciting money for the commission; he is said to have been personally responsible for more than one and a half million dollars in contributions from the West Coast. Exhausted by these labors, he died of diphtheria in San Francisco on March 4, 1864, at the age of thirty-nine.

  He and Jessie Frémont had never seen each other again. At her request, telegraphed from New York, a small bouquet of violets was placed on his chest at the funeral.

  In 1931, the state of California placed a statue of King in the U.S. Capitol, thus honoring him as one of the two heroes permitted to be enshrined there by each of the fifty states. In 2009, his statue was removed and replaced with one of Ronald Reagan.11

  •

  Nathaniel Lyon was killed on August 10, 1861, at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in southwestern Missouri, the first Union general to die in the Civil War.

  •

  In 1862, Benjamin Butler, then commanding Union forces in occupied New Orleans, became one of the first Union commanders to enlist Negro troops, which he did without authorization from the Lincoln administration. He fought (unsuccessfully) to secure equal treatment, including equal pay, for black soldiers, as well as to protect them from the Confederate policy of reenslaving them when captured as prisoners of war. When his colored troops fought with conspicuous gallantry in the assault on Richmond, he personally designed medals for the men, to be struck in silver at his own expense. These bore the Latin inscription Ferro iis libertas perveniet: “Their freedom will be won by the sword.”

  Butler’s harshness in maintaining order and quashing pro-Confederate sentiment in New Orleans—along with his unbending support for black civil rights—made him hated throughout most of the South. The general’s enemies nicknamed him “Beast Butler” and “Spoons Butler,” the latter because of a false rumor that he had stolen silver spoons from the house of a rebel commander.

  After the war, Butler reentered politics as a radical Republican and was instrumental in passing the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875, which mandated equal treatment for blacks in all public accommodations, including restaurants, hotels, and trains. The law was never enforced in the South, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883. Its provisions did not become part of federal law again until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.12

  •

  Over the course of the war, Hampton, Virginia, became home to thousands of black contrabands, who officially became freedmen and freedwomen when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year’s Day, 1863. The liberated slaves built houses and makeshift shelters among the burned-out ruins of the old town, and turned the brick shell of the former courthouse into a school and church. The classes taught by Northern abolitionists and missionaries under General Butler’s auspices eventually evolved into Hampton University, one of the leading historically black institutions in the country.13

  •

  Charles King Mallory remained in Confederate service until 1865. His eldest son, an eighteen-year-old midshipman in the rebel navy, was killed in the war. Mallory died in 1875; an account of his funeral in a local newspaper described it thus: “The procession, nearly three-quarters of a mile long, proceeded to the old family burying ground … eight miles from Hampton. The fact that a very large number of the colored citizens of Hampton and the county walked the entire distance shows how much the deceased was loved and respected by all classes.” The site of Colonel Mallory’s house, long since demolished, is part of the Hampton University campus.14

  •

  At the end of the war, Mary Chesnut, a refugee from her plantation and from her family’s ruined fortunes, greeted the demise of slavery with an emotion she described in her diary as “an unholy joy.”15

  •

  After serving almost continuously as the site of a military base for more than four hundred years, Fortress Monroe is slated to be decommissioned in September 2011. As of this writing, its future is uncertain. The governor of Virginia has endorsed a “mixed-use” development of residential and commercial space combined with “historic preservation.” Some Hampton locals, led by African-Americans, including descendants of the contrabands, are calling on the National Park Service
to acquire the site.16

  At the end of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis was imprisoned in Fortress Monroe for two years before being released on bail; he was never brought to trial.

  Today, the fort contains a Jefferson Davis Memorial Park. There is no memorial or monument to Benjamin Butler or the contrabands.

  •

  The three original contrabands all remained in the Hampton Roads area after the war. Frank Baker and James Townsend raised families and worked as day laborers; neither ever learned to read or write.

  •

  Shepard Mallory was the last survivor among the significant characters in this book. He learned to read and write and became a prominent figure in Hampton’s black community. The former contraband apparently mended fences with his former master, who attended one of his weddings. (Mallory would marry at least four times; his last two wives were approximately forty and thirty years younger, respectively, than he was.) In the early twentieth century he was working as a carpenter and school janitor and living in the house at 260 Lincoln Street that he owned, free and clear, for the last four decades of his life. Shepard Mallory last appears in the census records in 1920, aged about eighty and still working, self-employed.17

  The American Declaration of Independence Illustrated, 1861 (photo credit bm.1)

  NOTES

  Prologue: A Banner at Daybreak

  1. Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (New York, 1876), pp. 63–7; Samuel W. Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War (New York, 1887), pp. 104–112; J. G. Foster to J. H. B. Latrobe, Jan. 10, 1861, in Frank F. White, Jr., ed., “The Evacuation of Fort Moultrie in 1860,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 53, no. 1 (Jan. 1952), pp. 1–5; John Thompson to “Dear Father,” Feb. 14, 1861, in “A Union Soldier at Fort Sumter, 1860–1861,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 67, no. 2 (Apr. 1966), pp. 99–104; J. G. Foster to R. E. De Russy, Dec. 27, 1860, in Official Records [of the War of the Rebellion], series I (hereafter OR I), vol. 1, pp. 108–9; James P. Jones, ed., “Charleston Harbor, 1860–1861: A Memoir from the Union Garrison,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 62, no. 3 (July 1961), pp. 148–50; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Jan. 5 and Jan. 19, 1861. There are a few discrepancies among firsthand accounts of the departure from Fort Moultrie. Original texts can be found on the website for this book, www.1861book.com.

  2. Abner Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1887), vol. 1, p. 41; Doubleday, Reminiscences, chap. 1.

  3. Dictionary of American Biography (hereafter DAB) (New York, 1944), vol. 1, 274; George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. (Boston, 1891), vol. 1, pp. 347–52.

  4. Fitz John Porter to Cooper, Nov. 11, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 71.

  5. Terry W. Lipscomb, South Carolina Revolutionary War Battles: The Carolina Low Country, April 1775–June 1776, and the Battle of Fort Moultrie (Columbia, S.C., 1994); Edwin C. Bearss, The Battle of Sullivan’s Island and the Capture of Fort Moultrie: A Documented Narrative and Troop Movement Maps, Fort Sumter National Monument, South Carolina (Washington, D.C., National Park Service, 1968).

  6. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 40–41.

  7. James Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. 1, pp. 50–51.

  8. David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), p. 53.

  9. Charles H. Lesser, Relic of the Lost Cause: The Story of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, 2nd ed. (Columbia, S.C., 1996), pp. 2–3.

  10. W. A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957), p. 25.

  11. Roy Meredith, Storm over Sumter: The Opening Engagement of the Civil War (New York, 1957), p. 37.

  12. Anderson to Cooper, Dec. 1, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 81; Detzer, Allegiance, p. 63.

  13. Anderson to Cooper, Nov. 28, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, pp. 78–79.

  14. Cooper to Anderson, Dec. 14, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, pp. 92–93.

  15. Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 19, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 98.

  16. Doubleday, Reminiscences, ch. 3; Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41; Crawford, History, p. 66.

  17. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 43.

  18. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 71–72.

  19. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” p. 41.

  20. Detzer, Allegiance, pp. 23–24.

  21. DAB, I, p. 274; Cullum, Biographical Register, pp. 347–52.

  22. Doubleday, “From Moultrie to Sumter,” pp. 42–43.

  23. Crawford, History, p. 95.

  24. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  25. Ibid., p. 55.

  26. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 56.

  27. Floyd to Anderson, Dec. 21, 1860, OR I, vol. 1, p. 103.

  28. DAB, Cullum, Biographical Register, pp. 347–52; Eba Anderson Lawton, ed., An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846–7: Letters of Robert Anderson, Captain 3rd Artillery, U.S.A. (New York and London, 1911), pp. 311–13.

  29. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 60–61.

  30. Crawford, History, pp. 102–03.

  31. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 61–67; Crawford, History, pp. 103–07.

  32. Charleston Mercury, Dec. 28, 1860.

  33. The family correspondence of Colonel William Hemsley Emory is now part of the James Wood Poplar Grove Papers in the Maryland State Archives.

  34. David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006), p. 10.

  35. Charleston Courier, Dec. 28, 1860; Baltimore Sun, Dec. 28, 1860.

  36. Swanberg, First Blood, p. 145.

  37. This figure includes supplements that were published in the twentieth century. The original series totals 138,000 pages.

  38. For an illuminating discussion of Lincoln as both progressive and conservative, see Richard Striner, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power (Lanham, Md., 2010).

  39. Guenter, The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Rutherford, N.J., 1990), pp. 57–87; Michael Corcoran, For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag (New York, 2002), pp. 78ff. Even though flags were now printed rather than individually stitched, that spring the cost of red, white, and blue bunting increased from $4.75 to $28 per yard.

  40. Congress created the Medal of Honor in 1862. Of the more than 1,500 that would be awarded for acts of heroism in the Civil War, more than half involved a rescue of the American colors, or a capture of the enemy’s.

  Chapter One: Wide Awake

  1. C. W. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill (Boston, 1860); Daily National Intelligencer, July 18, 1860; Boston Bee, Oct. 9, 1860; Boston Post, Oct. 9, 1860.

  2. Quoted in James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1887–88), vol. 1, p. 91.

  3. “The Kansas Question,” Putnam’s Monthly [Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art], vol. 6, no. 34 (Oct. 1855).

  4. Webster and Adams both quoted in George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979), pp. 67–68.

  5. “Procrustes, Junior,” “Great Men, A Misfortune,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1860, p. 308.

  6. Clarence, A Biographical Sketch; Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1765–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).

  7. Massachusetts Historical Society, Ambrotype Collection, photo 2.16.

  8. Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States (1860) (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 10–15; [Masayiko Kanesaboro Yanagawa], The First Japanese Mission to the United States (Kobe, 1937),
pp. 48–50, 69. Since Dutch traders had been going to Japan for centuries, a number of educated Japanese spoke that language. Communications with English speakers usually required two translators: one of them Japanese to Dutch, the other Dutch to English.

  9. Robert Cellem, Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to the British North American Provinces and United States, in the Year 1860 (Toronto, 1861), p. 372. When Ralph Farnham was told that the prince was about to arrive in Boston, he responded, “I don’t want to see him.” Finally, however, he grudgingly deigned to call on the royal personage, who had taken a suite on another floor in the same hotel. After a cordial exchange of pleasantries, the old revolutionary remarked slyly that in light of the enthusiastic reception given to George III’s great-grandson, he was worried his countrymen might be turning royalists again. The prince chose to laugh this off. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 12, 1860; New York Herald, Oct. 19, 1860.)

  10. Boston Daily Advertiser, Oct. 9, 1860.

  11. New York Herald, Dec. 31, 1860.

  12. Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Gloucester, Mass., 1964), pp. 169–70; Earl Schenck Miers, ed., Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865 (Washington, 1960), vol. 2, pp. 282–84. No less a sage than William Cullen Bryant advised Lincoln: “Make no speeches, write no letters as a candidate, enter into no pledges, make no promises.” Bryant to Lincoln, June 16, 1860, quoted in Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 61–62; Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore, 2008), vol. 1, p. 656.

  13. Troy, See How They Ran, pp. 64–66; The Ripley [Ohio] Bee, Aug. 16, 1860; Freedom’s Champion [Atchison, Kansas], Sept. 1, 1860; Wayne C. Williams, A Rail Splitter for President (Denver, 1951), pp. 36–37.

  14. Lincoln remained very disconcerted by the experience. “I was afraid of being caught and crushed in that crowd,” he wrote afterward. “The American people remind me of a flock of sheep.” Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 1, p. 651; Williams, A Rail Splitter, pp. 109–110; New York Herald, Aug. 14, 1860.

 

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