1861 (54 page)

In short, enslaved Negroes bore witness to, and suffered, all the unbridled energy and restless change of entrepreneurial America, without ever reaping its benefits. Occasionally, perhaps, a slave might put aside a fistful of seeds at harvest time and plant a little garden behind the kitchen shed, tending and watering it each evening after her long day’s toil in the master’s fields, hoping to raise a few gourds and melons that she could send to
town—if she were permitted—on market days. Some pennies here, a silver dime or quarter there, and perhaps one day she might hoard enough to purchase her own freedom or her children’s. But then one morning the arbitrary hand of fate would intervene, dispatching her suddenly to another farm or to another state, leaving the young shoots to wither.

No wonder that so many dreamt of running away, of at last seizing command over their own destinies. Some succeeded; the kindly captain of a Providence schooner might sneak a stowaway aboard on the homeward voyage. But the price of failure could be steep. One June 23, 1859, the clerk of Hampton’s county court—a panel comprising a dozen leading citizens—penned a chilling entry in his minute-book:

Thus the hand of justice dealt with Negroes in antebellum Virginia—Negroes who had not even committed a crime but were simply believed to be considering one.

More surprising is another entry dated five months later, this one an indictment against a white man:

In making this statement, the court continued, Knottingham (or Nottingham) was implicitly “maintaining that owners have not the right of property in their slaves, to the manifest injury of the institution of slavery.”
³³

Sedition against the institution of slavery. A heinous offense in Virginia—or, indeed, anywhere in the South—just two weeks after
John Brown had come on his mission of divine retribution.

And yet Severn Knottingham—whose ultimate sentence, if there was one, is unrecorded—was not alone. Two other white men in the county faced similar criminal charges that day.
Jefferson Craven had been overheard saying “that he wished or would be glad if the insurrection would happen to-night.” Most shocking of all, a certain
Henry Hawkins had allegedly declared that
“he wished all the slaves would rise & kill the whites, & damn
Henry A. Wise [the governor of Virginia] & Harper’s Ferry.”
³⁴

Nor were Knottingham, Craven, and Hawkins the only white Virginians to feel this seemingly perverse sympathy with the fanatic who had invaded their state and tried to destroy the world they knew. Even Governor Wise himself, along with other Southern political leaders, had come to see Brown immediately after his capture and sat almost mesmerized for three hours as the old man, bleeding from a serious head wound, held forth about human rights, the curse of slavery, and
the inexorable judgment of eternity. Wise said afterward: “They are mistaken who take him to be a madman.… He is a man of clear head, of courage, fortitude, and simple ingenuousness. He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to say [that]… he inspired me with great trust in his integrity, as a man of truth.” Certainly Wise did not agree with Brown’s position on slavery, to say the least; he yielded to no one in his defense of the
peculiar institution. And yet some part of him seems to have responded not just to Brown’s courage but also to the stark grandeur of his moral message. “Black slaves make white slaves,” Wise had once confessed. This lament spoke for many of his fellow Virginians.
³⁵

The old Jeffersonian ambivalence about slavery had never disappeared: it had simply gone underground. Within their most private selves, many Southerners—even those with large investments in the institution—had secret thoughts that they would never have spoken aloud; thoughts that, if spoken, would have been crimes. Even in
South Carolina; even in the very heart of the rebellion.
Mary
Chesnut, the most penetrating gazer into the Southern soul, was married to a former United States senator and ardent Confederate, heir apparent
to more than five hundred family slaves. (Indeed, James Chesnut was one of the two adjutants who delivered Beauregard’s surrender demand to Fort Sumter.) Publicly, Mary supported her husband when, for instance, he declared on the Senate floor that “commerce, civilization, and Christianity” all went
hand in hand to sanctify Negro servitude. Privately, she wrote in her diary in March 1861: “I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. [Charles] Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true.” A few months later she confessed her belief that two-thirds of the slaveholders in the Confederate army inwardly “dislike slavery as much as Mrs. Stowe or Greeley.” And yet, she also recognized, they had just gone off to lay
down their lives for it.
³⁶

The last time any significant misgivings about slavery had been aired publicly in Virginia was thirty years earlier, in the wake of the terrifying 1831 Negro uprising led by
Nat Turner. A month after Turner’s execution—he was flayed, quartered, and beheaded—legislators gathered in Richmond to consider various plans that would have emancipated the state’s slaves and resettled them somewhere beyond the Old
Dominion’s borders. The governor, John Floyd (father of the Buchanan administration’s notorious secretary of war), went so far as to write in his diary: “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” But it soon evolved into the same classic debate that would reemerge, in different shapes and colors, at other moments in American history: when threatened from within, should the state reform itself, or clamp down on dissent? In the end, Virginians
chose to clamp down. And so
sedition laws and slave patrols became indispensible elements of Southern life. Northern publications expressing unorthodox sentiments on the peculiar institution were seized and destroyed by local postmasters. By 1861, the patrols around Hampton paid surprise visits at least weekly to every slave quarter in the county, making sure that no Negroes would “stroll from one plantation to another” or hold
“unlawful assemblies,” among other misdeeds. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen checked outbound vessels for fugitives. Order must be heaven’s first law.
³⁷

Memories of the Turner rebellion stayed fresh in Hampton. The calamity and its backlash had unfolded just across the
James River in Southampton County—formerly just another quiet old corner of the tidewater, another place of small farms and “kind” slaveholders.
³⁸
There, in a matter of hours, the
time-hallowed relationship between the races had devolved into a nightmare: white children with their brains dashed out, black men’s heads skewered on stakes along the road to deter other would-be conspirators. After that, who was to say
that such horrors might not occur without warning elsewhere in the Virginia tidewater—or, indeed, in any town or county of the slave states? This never-ending threat of black violence must be met with a never-ending,
and even more forceful, threat of white violence in return. Pieces of Turner’s body were distributed as talismans among the whites; one Southampton man made a change purse from its skin. Eternal vigilance would be the price of Southern liberties. Whites must learn, and must teach their children—as blacks had been doing for centuries—to bear a constant burden of fear. Perhaps even more difficult, they must learn to pretend that this fear did not exist.
“There is something suspicious,” noted the sharp-eyed William H. Russell, reporting this time from a South Carolina plantation, “in the constant never-ending statement that ‘we are not afraid of our slaves.’ ”
³⁹

Thus, even if on some deep level slavery was, as
Mary Chesnut said, a hated institution, it must be defended unequivocally, unambivalently. (All the more so, in fact, since the slightest crack in the façade, whites feared, might become an invitation to rebellion, to rape, and to murder.) Defended illogically, too: slaveholders must learn to insist that their slaves were happy and affectionate, while insisting in the same breath
that even the mildest abolition propaganda might spark a bloody massacre. Yankee voices must be silenced in the South. Negro voices, too, needless to say. Southern voices, meanwhile, became ever more stridently defensive, rising in an awful crescendo with secession.

Little wonder, then, that Mrs. Chesnut, by 1861, would come to call slavery the “black incubus.”

Little wonder, too, that in the front yard of Hampton’s quaint colonial courthouse stood the naked, wizened trunk of an old locust tree: a whipping post.
⁴⁰

W
AITING ON THE CAUSEWAY
before the front gate of Fortress Monroe was a man on horseback. He wore the blue-and-green uniform coat of the
115th Virginia Militia and the white-plumed hat of an officer.
⁴¹

He was Major
John Baytop Cary—in civilian life, the principal of Hampton Academy and promulgator of heavenly order among the local youth, but now commander of the Virginia Artillery company of the 115th. Colonel Mallory, he explained, was “absent,” and had sent Cary to represent him. In truth, Mallory himself probably could have found his way there if he had wished. After all, those three prime field hands
represented as much as 10 percent of his net worth.
⁴²
But it would have
been humiliating, going to beg these Yankees for something you knew was yours by law and by right. And the balding, purse-lipped Mallory would have looked more or less like what he was: a lawyer on horseback. The splendid Cary, on the other hand—silver-gray whiskers, erect
bearing, haughty tilt of chin—appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.
⁴³

Major Cary, moreover, knew General Butler slightly from before the war. Barely a year earlier, both had been delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, that ill-fated assembly where men like Butler had supported Jefferson Davis in the interests of national unity, but where, in the end, North and South had still failed to reach an understanding. Even so, the Virginian could address the Massachusetts man—painful though this might be—as
one gentleman to another.
⁴⁴

Butler, also on horseback and accompanied by two mounted adjutants, went out to meet Cary at the midpoint of the sandy causeway. The men rode, side by side, to the far bank of the creek—off federal property and into rebel Virginia.

After an exchange of pleasantries and a recollection of their previous acquaintance, Cary got down to business. “I have sought to see you for the purpose of ascertaining upon what principles you intend to conduct the war in this neighborhood,” he began stiffly.

First the major wished to know whether the Union fleet in
Hampton Roads would allow Virginia civilians safe passage from the area. General Butler replied that the naval blockade would hardly be much of one if it let any Southern ships through. Cary asked if they could go by land. Certainly, Butler replied—since all but a few square miles of Virginia were rebel territory anyhow, who was to stop them?

The two men had turned their horses and were riding together along a country road, with woodlands on one hand and fields on the other, sloping gently down to the creek. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Now Cary reached the third and most delicate question he had come to address.

“I am informed,” he said, “that three negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those negroes?”

“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

Here Cary reminded the general about the
Fugitive Slave Act: “Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Butler, dour though he usually seemed, must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever—even a rather witty—answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word, as declared in the ordinance of secession passed yesterday,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent scholar of jurisprudence, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize and hold any enemy property that was being used for belligerent purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, had been helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then—if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. In that
case, he had as much justification in confiscating Baker, Mallory, and Townsend as he would in intercepting a shipment of muskets or swords. Legally speaking, Butler’s position was unassailable.

There was, he admitted to Cary, one loophole: “If Colonel Mallory will come into the fort and take the oath of allegiance to the United States, he shall have his negroes.” The rebel officer was, to say the least, unlikely to do so.