1861
Page 57
17. Nash, Stormy Petrel, pp. 38–39; BFB to Mrs. Winthrop, n.d. (June 1861), BFB Papers, LC.
18. My description of the antebellum landscape of Hampton and its surrounding area is drawn from Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Marion L. Starkey, The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607–1887 (n.p., 1936); Gene Williamson, Of the Sea and Skies: Historic Hampton and Its Times (Bowie, Md., 1993); [George W. Curtis], “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861; G. P. Lewis, “Virginia Lands,” American Agriculturalist, vol. 4 (1845), pp. 118–19; Jacob Hellelfinger, Kecoughtan Old and New; Or, Three Hundred Years of Elizabeth City Parish (Hampton, Va., 1910); Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia (Hampton, Va., 1922); J. Michael Cobb and Wythe Holt, Images of America: Hampton (Charleston, S.C., 2008); Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York, 2004), esp. chap. 1; James T. Stensvaag, ed., Hampton: From the Sea to the Stars (Norfolk, Va., 1985); Parke Rouse Jr., ed., When the Yankees Came: Civil War and Reconstruction on the Virginia Peninsula, by George Benjamin West, 1839–1917 (Richmond, Va., 1987); Jane Eliza Davis, Round About Jamestown: Historical Sketches of the Virginia Peninsula (n.p., 1907); Thomas P. Southwick, A Duryee Zouave (n.p., 1930); Sarah Shaver Hughes, “Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810: The Economic and Social Structure of a Tidewater County in the Early National Years,” (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1975); as well as reports from the spring and summer of 1861 in the Boston Traveller, New York Times, New York World, New-York Tribune, and Philadelphia Inquirer. See also two detailed topographical maps of the vicinity by R. K. Sneden of the U.S. 3rd Army Corps, Mar. 8 and 10, 1862, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
19. Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 22. In 1857, a lecturer at the Academy assailed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, telling the students that since Southerners were “taught from youth to believe, and being better assured of it from the studies of our manhood, that the institution of slavery is divine in its origin,” it was their responsibility to create a new body of American literature to counter Mrs. Stowe’s book.
20. Henry Reed Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys of Virginia (Hartford, Conn., 1955); Robert Alonzo Brock, Virgil Anson Lewis, Virginia and Virginians, vol. 1 (Richmond, 1888), pp. 689ff.; “F.M.” [Francis Mallory], “Colonel Mallory,” The Virginia Historical Register, and Literary Companion, vols. 3–4 (1850), pp. 24ff; Memorial, Virginia Military Institute: Biographical Sketches of the Graduates and Élèves … Who Fell During the War Between the States (Philadelphia, 1875), pp. 352ff.
21. Mallory, Genealogy of the Mallorys, p. 15.
22. Walter Minchinton et al., eds., Virginia Slave Trade Statistics 1698–1775 (Richmond, 1984), passim; Starkey, pp. 34–36; U.S. Census data, Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1790–1860. One interesting case of a transition from slavery to freedom was that of Caesar Tarrant, a slave who served during the Revolution as a pilot for the Virginia Navy, aboard vessels with names like Patriot and Jefferson. Some years after the war, the General Assembly rewarded his valuable service by passing a special bill to purchase his freedom—with state funds, no less. Tarrant and his children went on to become fairly substantial landowners in the county.
23. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Starkey, The First Plantation, p. 38; WPA interview (1936) with Moble Hopson (born near Hampton in 1851) in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972), series 1, vol. 16, Virginia Narratives, pp. 31ff. Despite the persistent literary convention of writing blacks’ spoken words as “Negro” dialect, recent historians have suggested that at least in antebellum Virginia, the dialect of enslaved blacks was quite similar to that of poor whites. See Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s to the Civil War (New York, 2004).
24. Shepard Mallory census data, 1870–1920.
25. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, chap. 1, passim; Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John & Julia Gardiner Tyler (New York, 1963), p. 442.
26. New York World, June 11, 1861.
27. American Agriculturalist, vol. 11, no. 7 (July 1850), p. 203.
28. I’m grateful to Ned Sublette for permission to borrow his idea of the Chesapeake as America’s slave coast, the subject of an important book now in progress.
29. Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820. For the Virginia trade, see Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York, 1861), pp. 49–59; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), esp. chap. 4; Robert Edgar Conrad, ed., In the Hands of Strangers: Readings on Foreign and Domestic Slave Trading and the Crisis of the Union (University Park, Pa., 2001), esp. part 2. For more on Jefferson’s views, cf. Susan Dunn, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York, 2007), pp. 45–48.
30. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
31. L. C. Lockwood, “Decennial Report,” The American Missionary, vol. 15 (1871), pp. 196–97; former slave William Roscoe Davis in the New York Times, Jan. 14, 1862.
32. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, June 23, 1859 (Library of Virginia).
33. Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Nov. 26, 1859.
34. Ibid.
35. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005), pp. 329–33; see also Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York, 2009), pp. 55–56; Barton Haxall Wise, The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806–1876 (New York, 1899), p. 150. Wise would go on to be a Confederate general.
36. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), pp. xxxvi, xlvi–liii, 29, 153; DAB vol. 2, p. 57.
37. Dunn, Dominion of Memories, pp. 49–56; Elizabeth City County, Va., Minute Book, Jan. 24, 1861.
38. Federal troops from Fortress Monroe were sent to keep order in Southampton during the rebellion’s aftermath. (Personal communication with J. Michael Cobb, Hampton History Museum.)
39. Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston, 2004), introduction and pp. 279, 280–82; Russell, My Diary, p. 132. Turner’s skull was also kept as a local relic. It ended up in a museum at the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1866. After disappearing for several decades in the twentieth century, it was rediscovered in 2002 and donated to the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in Gary, Indiana.
40. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Harper’s Weekly, June 29, 1861.
41. Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry, p. 10. In response to the earlier message carried under flag of truce, Butler had arranged to meet the Confederate envoy at 3:30 that afternoon.
42. Butler’s Book, p. 258. According to the 1860 Census, Mallory’s real estate was worth $20,600 and his personal property $29,750, making him one of the wealthiest men in the county.
43. Portraits of both men are in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society.
44. Butler’s Book, p. 256. Butler and Cary each left two accounts of their parley, one contemporary and one written several decades after the fact. Cary’s are, respectively, a brief report to Col. J. B. Magruder, dated 7:15 p.m., May 24, 1861, immediately after the meeting (OR II, vol. 1, p. 753); and a letter to Butler, Mar. 9, 1891 (Butler, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 102–03). Butler’s accounts are in his report of May 24–25, 1861, to Winfield Scott (BFB Papers, LC); and Butler’s Book, his 1892 autobiography, pp. 256–66. These four versions substantially corroborate one another, and I relied on all of them for my account of Butler and Cary’s conversation. The dialogue where quoted directly is from Butler’s Book.
45. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
46. Nathaniel Morton to “Dear Friend,” May 29, 1861, quoted in J. Michael Cobb, “Rehearsing Reconstructi
on in Occupied Virginia: Life and Emancipation at Fort Monroe,” in Davis et al., Virginia at War, p. 141.
47. Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1861.
48. Quoted in James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J., 1964), p. 41.
49. New York Herald, May 5, 1861.
50. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, p. 58.
51. Sermon at Zion’s Church, April 27, 1861, in Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861.
52. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, in Autobiographies (New York, 1994), p. 452.
53. John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008), pp. 215–19; Douglass’ Monthly, May 1861.
54. Douglass’ Monthly, June 1861.
55. Ibid., May 1861.
56. New York Times, May 27, 1861.
57. New York World, May 29, 1861; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.
58. Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.
59. John Hay Diary, May 7, 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), pp. 19–20.
60. Orville H. Browning to AL, Apr. 30, 1861, AL Papers, LC.
61. Hay Diary, May 7, 1861, in Burlingame and Ettinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House.
62. For an eloquent discussion of Lincoln’s “cult of the law,” see Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York, 2009), pp. 57–60.
63. Richmond Dispatch, May 29 and June 1, 1861. Those “patriotic yellow men” in New Orleans switched sides to the Union Army, more or less en masse, after Benjamin Butler’s troops occupied the city in 1862.
64. Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1995), esp. chap. 10; Hopson interview in Rawick, The American Slave.
65. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 48.
66. New-York Tribune, February 20, 1861.
67. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 44.
68. William H. Lee to Jefferson Davis, May 4, 1861, in Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 2: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York, 1993), p. 282.
69. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 67.
70. Armstead Robinson, “In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861–1863,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 65, no. 4 (Autumn, 1980), p. 285.
71. John T. Washington and John H. Stuart to Daniel Ruggles, May 7, 1861, and Daniel Ruggles to R. S. Garnett, May 8, 1861, both in OR I, vol. 2, p. 820.
72. New York Herald, May 30, 1861; Springfield Republican, June 1, 1861; “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine,” Prints & Photographs Division, LC. The cartoon circulated as a “patriotic cover”—a decorative envelope often used by soldiers sending letters home from the front.
73. Rev. J. D. Fulton, “Funeral Sermon Commemorative of the Death of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth … Before the New York State Volunteers,” Albany Journal, May 28, 1861.
74. Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [sic], 1861, BFB Papers, LC; New York World, June 4, 1861. Since newspaper accounts all confirm that the meeting occurred on May 30, it is likely that Blair misdated his second letter. The next day’s New York Times summarized the meeting thus: “The Cabinet adjourned without disposing of Sambo—not a surprising fact, considering that Sambo has been on hand so long.”
75. BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC; Montgomery Blair to BFB, May 29 and 31 [sic], 1861, BFB Papers, LC; New York Herald, May 30, 1861.
76. Montgomery Blair to BFB, June 8, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.
77. Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861.
78. Butler’s Book, pp. 246–49; Russell, pp. 405–06; Boston Traveller, May 1, 1861. For Scott on seafood, see Butler’s Book and Boston Traveller, June 18, 1861.
79. My description of the activities at Fortress Monroe is drawn from reporting in the Boston Traveller, New York Times, New York World, and Atlantic Monthly, as well as the BFB Papers and Butler’s Book. For Professor La Mountain, see Frederick Stansbury Haydon, Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies (Baltimore, 1941). For the mosquitoes: New York Times, July 28, 1861.
80. New York Times, June 4 and 14, 1861; Alfred Davenport, Camp and Field Life of the Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryee Zouaves), (New York, 1879). Winslow Homer’s painting “The Briarwood Pipe” shows the Duryee Zouaves later in the war, sporting the red fezzes that they sometimes wore under their turbans. The Turner Rifles’ name came from the Turnverein, the German young men’s clubs that combined culture, nationalist politics, and physical fitness; the movement had come to America after 1848 and its adherents composed the bulk of the regiment’s recruits.
81. Boston Traveller, July 10, 1861; New York Times, June 2, 1861; BFB to Lewis Tappan, Aug. 10, 1861, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 200–01; The Independent, Aug. 8, 1861. Quite a number of Union accounts compared the “low white laboring class” unfavorably with the blacks. Major Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary in January 1862, while stationed in western Virginia: “Two more contrabands yesterday. These runaways are bright fellows. As a body they are superior to the average of the uneducated white population of this State. More intelligent, I feel confident. What a good-for-nothing people the mass of these western Virginians are! Unenterprising, lazy, narrow, listless, and ignorant. Careless of consequences to the country if their own lives and property are safe. Slavery leaves one class, the wealthy, with leisure for cultivation. They are usually intelligent, well-bred, brave, and high-spirited. The rest are serfs.” Charles Richard Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, vol. 2, (Columbus, 1922), p. 188.
82. New York Times, June 9, 1861; Kate Masur, “ ‘A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation’: The Word ‘Contraband’ and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States,” Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 4 (March 2007), p. 1051; Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 1861.
83. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), p. 171.
84. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 15–16; Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 54; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
85. Trenton Daily State Gazette and Republican, June 5, 1861; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 8, 1861; Douglass’ Monthly, July 1861.
86. BFB to Montgomery Blair, June 6, 1861, Blair Family Papers, LC; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 27, 1861, BFB Papers, LC.
87. Theodore Winthrop to Laura Winthrop Johnson, May 31, 1861, in Winthrop, Life and Poems, pp. 288–89. Parton, General Butler in New York, pp. 131–32, gives a similar version of the story as recollected several years later by some of the other officers present.
88. Winthrop, Life and Poems, passim; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop,” The Atlantic, November 1861.
89. Butler’s Book, p. 203; Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”
90. Curtis, “Theodore Winthrop.”
91. Lewis C. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” April 17, 1862, American Missionary Association Papers, Fisk University.
92. Blair to BFB, May 29, 1861, BFB papers.
93. C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, BFB Papers.
94. Lockwood to “Dear Brethren,” Mar. 26, 1862, AMA Papers; Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1955), p. 28; Boston Traveller, July 6, 1861; Lewis C. Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, the Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe (Boston, n.d.), p. 56. Vermont in 1860 had just 709 black inhabitants, or less than one quarter of one percent of its population (1860 census).
96. Eugene Goodwin, Civil War Diary, July 22, 1861, online at www.iagenweb.org.
97. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, pp. 18–19; M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, Hampton and Its Students (New York, 1874), pp. 109–14.
98. Gammons, Third Massachusetts Regiment, p. 194; New York Times, Sept. 8, 1897; Boston Traveller, May 10, 1861. Pierce wrote a series of dispatches to the Traveller between April and July, parts of which he eventually adapted into his article on the contrabands in the Atlantic.
99. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; New York Times, Oct. 4, 1861; Boston Traveller, July 15, 1861.
100. Boston Traveller, July 10, 1861.
101. New York Times, June 13, 1861; Charles P. Poland, Jr., The Glories of War: Small Battles and Early Heroes of 1861 (Bloomington, Ind., 2004), p. 208; Winthrop, Life and Poems, p. 291; Springfield Republican, June 29, 1861; E. W. Pierce to BFB, June 12, 1861, OR I, vol. 2, p. 83; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953), pp. 78–79.
102. Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 17, 1861; Winthrop, Life and Poems, p. 291; New York World, June 14, 1861; Poland, Glories of War, pp. 208–09.
103. New York World, June 14, 1861.
104. Poland, Glories of War, pp. 211–224.
105. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.”
106. BFB to Simon Cameron, July 30, 1861, in Letters, vol. 1, pp. 187–88.
107. BFB to Pierce, Aug. 15, 1861, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 216.
108. As just one example of Butler’s fan mail, an old college classmate wrote to him on May 31: “Do you recollect how often, when planning for the future in my room at college, you used to remark ‘Well Gray if you & I live, you will hear from me by & by?’ Your prophecy seems to be rapidly fulfilling.… You have already made several ‘happy hits’—but none that has met with more hearty response & indeed electrified the whole nation, like your nigger ‘contraband goods’ doct.!! Why shdnt the darkies dig trenches & throw breast works for us, as well as for the rebels? To know how best to dispose of them, when they come rushing to you by the 1000s, is the question. But you struck the right chord! Two or three such brilliant strokes, will put you in sight of the White House! The man who does the most towards removing the cause of this war, will be the next President of the U.S.! Mark the prophecy!” (E. H. Gray to BFB, May 31, 1861, BFB Papers.)