Still, it cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways—perhaps even as traitors? Even if they were allowed to remain inside, might this leave their families exposed to Colonel Mallory’s retribution? How, and when, would they ever reunite with their loved ones?
But the choice was theirs to make, and they made it. Approaching the high stone walls, they hailed a uniformed picket guard, and were admitted within the gates of Fortress Monroe.
Next morning they were summoned to see the fort’s commanding general himself. The three fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. And however familiar Monroe’s peacetime garrison may have been to them, at least by sight, the officer who now awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen in their lives.
Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: low, balding forehead; slack jowls; and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity, had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh, like dark little jewels in a nest of tissue paper. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as though its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him.
These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory, and Townsend. The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? (This was not an auspicious start.) Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field Negroes or house Negroes? Did they have families? Why had they run away? What had they been doing at Sewell’s Point? Could they tell him anything about the fortifications they had worked on there? Their response to this last question—that the battery was still far from completion, with only two cannons, although the rebels planned to install many more—seemed to please him. Next, to be sure there had been no collusion to deceive him, he carefully interrogated each man privately, making sure that their stories did not conflict with one another. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate. But as terrifying as the general had initially appeared, something in his manner may have reassured them. Was there a hint of compassion, even, in that gruff Yankee voice?10
Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler had arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the three fugitive slaves—although unlike them, of course, he had been greeted at the esplanade by a thirteen-cannon salute and a squad of soldiers at parade attention. His new command was one of the most significant in the army: the Department of Virginia and North Carolina. Admittedly, that entire department now comprised, in practical terms, little more than the sixty-three acres within Fortress Monroe’s stout walls, but it might soon become the staging point for a major Union assault on Richmond. That morning, before the slaves were brought to his office, Butler had sat down to compose an all-important initial report to General Winfield Scott, detailing the garrison’s troop strength, supplies, and fighting readiness. Yet when an adjutant interrupted to inform him about the fugitive slaves, Butler immediately set down his pen. General Scott could wait. The three ragged Negroes waiting outside were a matter of even more pressing urgency.11
To many Union commanders in the spring of 1861, the runaways would have presented no dilemma whatsoever. The laws of the United States, of course, were perfectly clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The Founding Fathers had enshrined this concept in Article Four of the Constitution; Congress had reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land throughout the nation, including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it.
In fact, federal forces had already found occasions to prove as much. Back in March at Fort Sumter, a sentry standing watch one night had heard a splashing sound alongside the wharf, and looked down to see a slim, dark figure disappearing among the pilings. Finally the soldier persuaded the fugitive to come out. He was a young man who claimed to have been beaten almost to death by his master but had managed to escape and paddle across the harbor in a canoe, trusting the Northern “gem’men” of Sumter to shelter and protect him. Those Northern gentlemen promptly sent him back to his lawful owner.12 At Fort Pickens, meanwhile, the Union commander had sent back eight fugitives. And Butler himself, at his previous post in Maryland, had seemed as ready as anyone to do his constitutional duty. When rumors of “an insurrection of the negro population” began spreading around Annapolis in late April, he wrote immediately to the state’s governor to assure him of his readiness to put it down by force of arms.13
Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy, as every sentient American knew. President Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” the president said, quoting one of his own speeches from 1858. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” The same pledge had been reiterated in countless other Republican speeches, countless newspaper editorials.
Yet, to Fortress Monroe’s new commander, these three Negroes who had turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case, in several important respects. The fugitives had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. The enemy had been deploying them for offensive purposes—to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort, no less—and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a good sound beating. And circumstances had changed. The renditions at Sumter and Pickens had occurred before war was declared; Maryland, where he had so gamely offered to help enforce the law, was still loyal to the Union. But Virginia, as of twelve or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, marshaling all her resources to wage fratricidal war. (Indeed, on the far side of the state, at this very hour—though Butler was unaware—the Fire Zouaves were carrying their dead colonel’s body back across the Potomac.) Here were Butler’s men on their sixty-three acres, a tiny oasis of safety amid vast hostile territory. They needed all the help they could get, and they certainly could not afford to do anything that might help their opponents. He knew this much about military strategy, at least.
Despite his exalted rank, Major General Butler had been a professional soldier barely five weeks. In private life back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one, though he had grown up poor, the swamp-Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse for female factory workers in Lowell, the famous textile-mill town. Unlike Boston’s white-shoe attorneys, the self-made Butler could not attract clients through social connections or charm, so he became a grind, a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law, and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest tug. (At his bar examination, he liked to boast, he had corrected the presiding judge on a subtle but important legal point, causing the distinguished jurist to hurriedly reverse one of his recent verdicts.) By his early forties, at the beginning of the Civil War, Butler had offices in both Lowell and Boston and was earning the princely sum of eighteen thousand dollars a year. He had also built quite a successful political career, becoming a prominent state legislator, one of the leaders of the state Democratic Party, and its candidate for governor in 1860. Though he had lost, many people (not least Butler himself ) remained convinced that he had bright prospects.14
This, indeed, was the reason behind his dizzying military apotheosis. Lincoln, fearful of having his contest with the South branded a “Republican war,” had elevated a number of reliably Unionist Democrats to high rank. Benjamin Butler’s long service as a leader of the volunteer militia was
the least of his dubious qualifications; much more important, he was the last man anyone could accuse of being an abolitionist zealot. Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class Lowell constituents, and he had always been glad to toss healthy morsels of it in their direction. He had publicly endorsed the Dred Scott decision, and a central plank of his gubernatorial campaign was his fiercely sarcastic opposition to enlisting blacks in the state militia. (He also reminded his fellow citizens that “we buy and sell the products of slave labor”—no doubt with his hometown textile mills in mind.) In fact, when representing his district at the 1860 Democratic National Convention, Butler had cast his vote for Jefferson Davis as the party’s nominee—not once but on fifty-seven successive ballots, an extravagant blunder that would dog his political career for decades to come.15
A fellow officer once said that Butler was “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” And after barely twenty-four hours at Fortress Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of fresh but eager volunteers from New England, men who had flocked to the recruiting stations while the smoke of battle still hung over Fort Sumter. These were no Lowell mill hands, either. The Third Massachusetts hailed mainly from the starchy old Puritan settlements around Boston; there were many college men in its ranks—one entire company had formed at Cambridge. The soldiers of the First Vermont had marched off to war with evergreen sprigs pinned to their lapels, under the leadership of Colonel John W. Phelps, a West Pointer and Mexican War veteran and, as it happened, an abolitionist of the deepest dye. (The London Times’ ubiquitous William H. Russell, visiting the fort in July, would call him “an excellent type of the chief of a Puritan regiment”—and, on a later occasion, “one who places John Brown on a level with the great martyrs of the Christian world.”) The sentry who had brought Baker, Mallory, and Townsend into the fort belonged to the First Vermont; the tale of their bold escape from the rebels was no doubt spreading quickly through the regiment, if not the entire garrison. Finally, closest at hand among the bleeding hearts, there was Butler’s new military secretary, Theodore Winthrop, the poet-turned-private (elevated now to the rank of major) who had sent correspondence to The Atlantic from his makeshift bivouac in the Capitol. When Winthrop left for the war, he had written to his family: “I go to put an end to slavery.”16
How was Butler to win the confidence—or even obedience—of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor Negroes back into bondage?
And it was not only a matter of calculation. The general was a more complicated person than he at first appeared. His features were brutish, his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men—vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart. He had fought hard in the state legislature to win shorter workdays for the Lowell mill hands, a crusade informed to some degree by political self-interest, no doubt, but also by memories of the wan and sickly young women in his mother’s boardinghouse. Once, after the death in battle of a beloved junior officer, Butler wrote to the young man’s mother: “Although a stranger, my tears will flow with yours.” This was no mere formula—one hundred fifty years later, the rough draft of that letter, written in a tremulous hand, still bears the splash marks of his lachrymosity.17
Still … sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander-in-chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell as a mere civilian—and with another stroke, for that matter, send the Negroes back to Hampton as slaves.
Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report to General Scott before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fortress Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.
FROM THE FORT’S PARAPET, the black men could see the world they had left behind.18
This was not the South of cotton fields and column-swagged mansions, of slaves toiling by the hundreds under the overseer’s lash. The land beyond the moat and the creek spread out low and flat, lagoons and marshes rising almost imperceptibly into a patchwork of small farms, each with its plain old-fashioned farmhouse, its orchard and vegetable patch, its woodlands and its field of wheat, now ripening from green into gold for the early-summer harvest. A few roads, paved with oyster shells, crisscrossed the landscape like wavering lines of white chalk.
A mile or so off lay the town of Hampton, noble relic of an older Virginia. Along the waterfront, shaded by stands of slender cypresses, stood high-fronted brick mansions from colonial times, nearly all with neatly fenced gardens behind, bowers of peach trees, blueberry bushes, grapevines, and rambling roses. Owners of those houses were summoned to prayer each Sunday morning by the ancient bell of St. John’s Church, reputedly Virginia’s oldest place of worship, where the pious lips of eight generations had brushed the silver rim of the communion chalice, a treasured relic of the first King James’s day. Hampton was a place not just of inherited privileges but of inherited civilities; a place of wax-dimmed mahogany and dusty volumes of The Spectator, the legacies of one’s great-grandparents.
The old families, like all aristocrats, had been nouveaux riches once upon a time, back in the days when the James River was the British Empire’s far West—when an inspector of His Majesty’s Customs presided over the busy port of Hampton, recording outbound cargoes of tobacco and wheat; rum and slaves and Old World luxuries coming in. The Revolution, although bravely fought by many local patriots, had left little lasting mark. No one bothered to suggest renaming King and Queen Streets, Hampton’s two main thoroughfares. County and town continued to be governed by the same rules and same families as before—even as the latter grew both less nouveaux and less riches with every passing year. By 1861, it had been an age since a ship called at Hampton from Lisbon or Antigua. The harbor, half silted in, now saw few vessels larger than an oyster boat or a bay schooner. Hampton’s more venturesome sons and daughters went westward to seek their fortunes, while their conservative brothers and sisters stayed behind to prune the rosebushes and polish the mahogany. Values passed from one generation to the next at the Hampton Military Academy, whose principal—one John Baytop Cary, possessed of the most desirable surname in the county—schooled his young gentlemen beneath a painted sign: “Order is heaven’s first law.”19
Colonel Charles King Mallory, who held ownership rights to the three Negro fugitives at Fortress Monroe, was also a sprig on one of tidewater Virginia’s loftiest and most venerable family trees, just the slightest gradation beneath that of the Carys themselves. His ancestors had prospered here since the seventeenth century. A previous Colonel Mallory, his grandfather, had fallen in combat against the invading redcoats in 1781, beside a nearby church known as Big Bethel. The family still reverently preserved this martyred ancestor’s buff waistcoat, pierced by British bayonets in no fewer than eleven places. (Over the years—thanks, perhaps, to the depredations of sacrilegious moths—the purported number of bayonet slashes would eventually grow to nineteen.)20
Slaves, too, were part of the ancestral legacy. Among the tattered folios in the county courthouse could be found a deed, dated at Hampton on the 18th of December, 1696, by which a certain William Mallory—the present colonel’s great-great-great-grandfather—granted unto his son Francis “one negro Lad nam’d Will and one Gray Mare & their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.”21
All through the pre-Revolutionary decades, slave ships called frequently at Hampton—sometimes dozens in a single year—almost all of them direct from the West Indies, often bringing just three or four Africans for sale, but now and then forty or fifty at a time. There had been
occasional annoyances over the years—during the two wars against Great Britain, local slaves had showed a disconcerting eagerness to flock to the enemy, who had promised freedom to any cooperative bondsman. But the British departed, the overseas slave trade ceased, and by the eve of the Civil War, the county’s population remained more or less the same year after year: half black and half white; and, it so happened, half slave and half free, apart from a small community of free Negroes, some of whom had even won a degree of prosperity. Each of the town’s handsome old mansions had behind it a little lean- to shanty where the slaves lived and where they did their masters’ cooking and washing.22
Slavery wore a more human face here than among the industrial-scale cotton and sugar plantations of the Gulf Coast, where each Negro man, woman, and child might be little more than an anonymous line in the absentee owner’s ledger book. Around Hampton, people knew one another. Even the largest planters rarely owned more than a couple of dozen slaves—Colonel Mallory possessed thirteen. The county had its old black families as well as old white ones. Indeed, these were quite often intertwined. Outsiders noticed what the locals seemed not to: very few of the area’s so-called blacks were anything approaching black in color, and the physical resemblances to their white neighbors (and masters) could be striking. Occasionally, tangled relationships emerged into the open; forty years before the Civil War, a local white man left half his estate to the daughter he had conceived with a black woman, the slave of a close friend of his. Much more often, things went unspoken. “Well, ah ain’t white an’ ah ain’t black, leastwise not so fur as ah know,” an octogenarian farmer named Moble Hopson would tell an interviewer in the 1930s. “Fo’ de war dere warn’t no question come up ’bout et.”23
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