1861
Page 56
114. Winter, Civil War in St. Louis, p. 44; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 58; Anzeiger des Westens, May 9, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, p. 190.
115. Westliche Post, May 1 and 8, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 189, 202–03, 206. The following week, when the editors learned the full story of the artillery shipped to Camp Jackson, they were outraged that the steamer had not been intercepted on its way upriver by federal troops in Illinois, and blamed it on military disorganization: “Things are even worse here than with the Imperial Austrian Military High Command in Vienna.”
116. Francis Grierson, The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches (Boston, 1948), pp. 229–30.
117. Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York, 1990), pp. 155–56; Sherman, Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 200–01; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, p. 150; Anderson, A Border City, p. 96.
118. James W. Covington, “The Camp Jackson Affair: 1861,” Missouri Historical Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (April 1961), p. 206; Peckham, pp. 150–51.
119. Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 151–52; Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861.”
120. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, p. 227; Arenson, Great Heart, pp. 191–92; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Missouri Republican, May 12, 1861; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 153–35.
121. Missouri Republican, May 11 and 12, 1861; Sherman, Memoirs, pp. 201–02; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Engle, Yankee Dutchman, p. 59.
122. Sherman, Memoirs, p. 202; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri in 1861.”
123. Grierson, Valley of Shadows, p. 230.
124. Anderson, A Border City, pp. 106–07; Plattenburg, In St. Louis, pp. 19–20; Westliche Post, May 15, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, pp. 214–17; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, pp. 303–04; Missouri Republican, May 11 and 12, 1861; Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Peckham, Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, pp. 157–63; A. Fulkerson to Francis Preston Blair, Jr., May 15, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC.
125. Missouri Democrat, May 13, 1861; Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, p. 304.
126. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 291–92.
127. Grant, Memoirs, p. 155. For a highly critical account of Lyon, see Phillips, Damned Yankee. For a fascinating perspective on the events in St. Louis as the “second Baden revolution,” see Steven Rowan’s introduction to Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri.
128. Sandusky Daily Commercial Register, Oct. 31, 1861.
Chapter Seven: The Crossing
1. Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 13, 1861.
2. David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (New York, 2005), p. 299.
3. Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Garden City, N.Y., 1922), pp. 32–33.
4. Washington Star, May 6, 1861; Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 13, 1861.
5. “A Letter from One of Our Boys,” unidentified clipping [“The Leader,” May 1861] in 11th Infantry Regiment Civil War Newspaper Clippings file, New York State Military Museum; Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York, 2004), p. 87; Isaac Bassett, “A Senate Memoir,” unpublished manuscript, U.S. Senate Historical Office.
6. New York Times, May 3, 1861; Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1861.
7. [Theodore Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861.
8. George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside. A picture and a narrative of the origin, growth, excellencies, abuses, beauties, and personages of our governing city (Hartford, Conn., 1873), pp. 637–38.
9. Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), May 4, 1861.
10. Hay, May 2, 1861, in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill., 1999), p. 17.
11. Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington 1860–1865 (New York, 1941), pp. 61–62.
12. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 284–85; Currier & Ives, “The Lexington of 1861,” Prints & Photographs Division, LC.
13. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York, 1939), pp. 230.
14. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 325.
15. Mrs. Roger Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War (New York, 1904), pp. 3–4. A stalemate was achieved when the senator grabbed his adversary by both horns. “Let go, Mr. Clay, and run like blazes,” shouted one youthful onlooker. Clay heeded his advice, and sprinted up the avenue with the goat in hot pursuit.
16. Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Women Sees Them (Washington, D.C., 1873), p. 68; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 36; Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Ernest Samuels, ed. (Boston, 1973), p. 99.
17. Leech, Reveille in Washington, ch. 1–3, passim.
18. Washington Evening Star, May 3, 1861.
19. Ruth Painter Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: A Biography of Lincoln’s Friend and First Hero of the Civil War (Boston, 1960), pp. 239, 243.
20. New York Herald, May 4, 1861; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 215.
21. Washington Star, May 4, 1861; Milwaukee Morning Sentinel, May 8, 1861; Hay, May 7, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.
22. Cincinnati Press, n.d., quoted in Fayetteville Observer (N.C.), May 20, 1861.
23. Daily National Intelligencer, May 4, 1861.
24. Daily National Intelligencer, May 10, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 10, 1861; New York Times, May 11, 1861; Brooklyn Eagle, May 9, 1861; New York Herald, May 12, 1861; Philadelphia Press, n.d., quoted in Daily Cleveland Herald, May 11, 1861; Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1861.
25. New-York Tribune, May 8, 1861.
26. [John Hay] New York World, May 10, 1861. In Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864 (Carbondale, Ill., 1998), pp. 58–64.
27. Hay, “Ellsworth,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1861; Hay, May 2, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.
28. New-York Tribune, Apr. 30, 1861; Hay, May 12, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.
29. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 175, 233.
30. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York, 1890), vol. 4, p. 314; William O. Stoddard, The White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (Lincoln, Neb., 2000), pp. 9–10, 163–64.
31. The Mrs. Lincoln story appears in, among other sources, an interview with a Zouave veteran published many years later in the Washington Post, Sept. 22, 1907.
32. Washington Herald, n.d., cited in Charles A. Mills and Andrew L. Mills, Alexandria 1861–1865 (Charleston, 2008), p. 16.
33. Furgurson, Freedom Rising, p. 92; Donald G. Shomette, Maritime Alexandria: The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepot (Bowie, Md., 2003), pp. 152–53.
34. [Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp”; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.
35. New-York Tribune, June 1, 1861; May 26, 1861; “Harry Lorrequer” (pseud.), “Letter from the Fire Zouaves,” unidentified clipping, 11th Infantry Regiment Civil War Newspaper Clippings file, New York State Military Museum.
36. [Winthrop], “Washington as a Camp”; New York Times, May 26, 1861.
37. James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Lanham, Md., 2003), pp. 24–26.
38. New-York Tribune, May 28, 1861; May 25, 1861.
39. Lorrequer, “Letter from the Fire Zouaves.”
40. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.
41. New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; Shomette, Maritime Alexandria, pp
. 159–61.
42. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.
43. Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 256–57; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; interview with Henry Winser, Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884.
44. Life of James W. Jackson, the Alexandria Hero, the Slayer of Ellsworth, Martyr in the Cause of Southern Independence (Richmond, 1862), pp. 20–22, 12–13, 44.
45. Ibid., pp. 28–30.
46. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861.
47. Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884.
48. New York Times, May 26, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 25, 1861; Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 1884; Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 256–58.
49. David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps During the Civil War (New York, 1907), p. 8; New-York Tribune, May 29, 1861; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1861.
50. One such poetical effusion, in the Tribune of May 25, begins:
Hushed be each sorrowing murmur,
And let no tear be shed,
As in slow march, with drooping standards
Ye bear back the gallant dead.
Unfortunately, this is typical of the Ellsworth mortuary genre.
51. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, p. 178.
52. New York World, May 27, 1861.
53. Richmond Dispatch, May 18, 1861.
54. New York World, May 27, 1861; Richmond Enquirer, May 25, 1861, quoted in George B. Herbert, The Popular History of the Civil War in America (New York, 1884), p. 102.
55. Illinois State Journal, June 3, 1861, reprinted in Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 69; New-York Tribune, May 28, 1861.
56. Daily National Intelligencer, May 27, 1861; New York Herald, May 26, 1861; Randall, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, pp. 264–65.
57. New York Herald, May 27, 1861. In the days that followed, fire companies, militia regiments, and patriotic societies vied with one another in showering Brownell with gifts: a gold medal, a silver-mounted pistol, a jeweled dagger.
58. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), p. 94; Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (Armonk, N.Y., 2008), pp. 99–100.
59. New York World, May 25, 1861; New-York Tribune, May 30, 1861.
60. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1862. Such artifacts are still in public circulation: in 2010, I purchased on eBay a sliver of wood wrapped in nineteenth-century notepaper with the inscription “A Trace of the Stairs that Elsworth stood on, when he was shot dead by Rebel at Alexandrya Va.” (And Ellsworth’s relics are still commanding hefty prices; the bidding on the sliver closed at $105.49.)
61. David Detzer, Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861 (New York, 2004), pp. 357–68.
62. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, p. 164; John G. Nicolay, The Army in the Civil War, vol. 1: The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York, 1885), p. 114; Hay, “A Young Hero. Personal Reminiscences of Colonel E. E. Ellsworth.” McClure’s Magazine, March 1896.
63. Chicago Tribune, May 28, 1861.
64. Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, 177, quoting New York Mail and Express, Feb. 11, 1899.
65. Burlingame, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 356.
66. Chicago Tribune, July 16, 1872; New York World, May 25, 1861.
Chapter Eight: Freedom’s Fortress
1. Details of the strange and fascinating story of the first slave voyage to Virginia have only recently been unearthed. See Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August, 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 54, no. 2 (Apr. 1997), pp. 395–98; Tim Hashaw, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (New York, 2007); John Thornton, “The African Experience of the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3 (July 1998); Adam Goodheart, “Reaching Point Comfort,” The American Scholar, Winter 2005. These accounts make it clear that, contrary to the conventional version of the story, the slaves arrived at Point Comfort and not Jamestown, that the captain was English and not Dutch, and that the Africans on board were definitely slaves and not indentured servants. For tobacco and labor in early Virginia, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); and Russell R. Menard, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 84, no. 4 (Oct. 1976), pp. 401–10.
2. The official name was—and still is—Fort Monroe, but during the Civil War it was known almost universally as Fortress Monroe, which is therefore the name I use here.
3. Robert Anderson had also done a tour of duty at the fort, as had a young soldier who would not become famous for his military career: Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe.
4. Richard P. Weinert, Jr., and Robert Arthur, Defender of the Chesapeake: The Story of Fort Monroe, 3rd ed. (Shippensburg, Pa., 1989), chaps. 3–5; John V. Quarstein, “Union Bastion in the Old Dominion,” America’s Civil War, vol. 15, no. 4 (Sept. 2002). The order to reinforce Fortress Monroe was issued less than forty-eight hours after Secretary Floyd resigned from the War Department.
5. Benjamin Ewell to Robert E. Lee, May 16, 1861, in OR I, vol. 2, pp. 853–54; Clement Anselm Evans, ed., Confederate Military History, vol. 3 (Atlanta, 1899), p. 130; Lee Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg, Va., 1990), pp. 10–11. One of Mallory’s volunteer cavalrymen, a local doctor, actually rode across to the fort to demand of its commander: “By what right, sir, does your army cross that bridge and invade the sacred soil of Virginia?” The Yankee colonel roared in reply: “By God, sir, might makes right!”
6. C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, in Benjamin F. Butler Papers, LC; Philadelphia Press, June 1, 1861; Charles Carleton Coffin, Drum-Beat of the Nation: The First Period of the War of the Rebellion from Its Outbreak to the Close of 1862 (New York, 1888), p. 76.
7. [Edward Lillie Pierce], “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1861; Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Boston, 1892), p. 265; William C. Davis et al., eds, Virginia at War, 1864 (Louisville, Ky., 2009), p. 154.
8. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, BFB Papers, LC. The wives and children are mentioned in these two sources. According to both Butler and Pierce, the wife of one of the men was a free black woman in Hampton. Other information derives from data on the three men in the 1870 and later federal censuses. According to these, Baker would have been about twenty-five years old in 1861, Townsend about thirty-six, and Shepard Mallory (whose birth date varies considerably across the different census years) probably in his late teens. These ages square roughly with those of three of Colonel Mallory’s unnamed male slaves (out of a dozen or so total slaves) enumerated in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses, which possibly suggests that all three had been with Mallory for at least a decade. (Of the three, the data for Shepard Mallory are, again, the least conclusive.) Unfortunately, information on the Mallory household has not been located in the 1840 census. The 1860 census lists two nine-year-old boys and one seven-year-old boy among the Mallory slaves; the identities of their parents were not recorded.
9. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention (Richmond, Va., 1861). There are inconsistencies among the various accounts of how and whence the three fugitives arrived at Fortress Monroe. Butler states that they came at night by boat from Sewell’s Point, while Pierce says they walked into the Union lines that afternoon. For the original texts, visit the website for this book, www.1861book.com.
10. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB, Butler’s Book, p. 265; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861. Butler’s two accounts contradict each other slightly; in his 1892 autobiography, he recalls the slaves telling
him that the Sewell’s Point battery was “a trifling affair” that as yet held only two guns, while in his 1861 report to Scott, he describes the battery (without attributing this information to the slaves) as “a very strong one, mounting fifteen guns.” Perhaps Baker, Mallory, and Townsend described only the portion of the rebel works that they had worked on personally.
11. Howard P. Nash, Jr., Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin Butler, 1818–1893 (Rutherford, N.J., 1969), pp. 99–101; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861; Boston Traveller, May 28, 1861.
12. OR I, vol. 1, 195; Samuel W. Crawford Diary, Mar. 11, 1861, Crawford Papers, LC.
13. Fred A. Shannon, “The Federal Government and the Negro Soldier, 1861–1865,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1926), p. 566; OR II, vol. 1, p. 593.
14. Nash, Stormy Petrel, chaps. 1–3; Butler’s Book, pp. 75–77.
15. Murray M. Horowitz, “Ben Butler and the Negro: ‘Miracles Are Occurring,’ ” Louisiana History, vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 159ff.; Pittsfield Sun, Oct. 20, 1859; Boston Semi-Weekly Courier, Oct. 10, 1859.
16. John G. Gammons, ed., The Third Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Militia in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1863 (Providence, 1906), pp. 7–13; Theodore S. Peck, ed., Revised Roster of Vermont Volunteers and Lists of Vermonters Who Served in the Army and Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (Montpelier, Vt., 1892), pp. 5–9; New York Times, Feb. 3, 1885; James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans (New York, 1864), pp. 124–26; W. H. Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—IV,” The North American Review, vol. 166, no. 498 (May 1898), p. 623; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 411; Theodore Winthrop, The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop (New York, 1884), p. 284. Decades later, a soldier in the Third Massachusetts named Charles R. Haskins would claim that he had been the three contrabands’ original savior, but most contemporary accounts mention the Vermonters.