1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [176]
History recorded that late in the summer of 1619, a Dutch corsair under an English captain had come in from the south and anchored at Point Comfort. On this promontory at the mouth of the James, thirty miles downstream from their fledgling capital, the Virginia colonists had built a lookout point and trading post that they called Fort Algernourne. John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s widower, recounted the ship’s arrival in a letter. The corsair, he wrote, “brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes.” These it had captured from a Portuguese slaver, bound to Veracruz from the coast of Angola. A strange and circuitous voyage, a strange cargo, and yet exactly what the colonists needed. A single pound of tobacco would fetch three shillings in London, but here in Virginia there were never enough hands to tend and harvest the crop. English men and women were lured across the ocean with false promises; stray boys were kidnapped on London streets and shipped off to be auctioned like calves at the Jamestown wharf. They worked the fields for a few months and then died, regretted but unmourned. These Negroes, cheaply bought, would be put to work in the tobacco fields, too.1
Two and a half centuries later, there were four million descendants of Africans held in slavery on these shores.
But now, on a spring night in 1861, three of them were making their way across those same waters, toward the fort at Point Comfort—and, this time, to freedom.
THIS IS HOW IT WOULD ALL END.
The three men who crossed the James River to the fort that night—Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend—had been enslaved field hands on a farm outside Hampton, a quiet county seat on the north bank of the river. Then the war came. Like so many other Americans at that moment, the men unexpectedly faced a new set of challenges and decisions.
The tranquil rural landscape they had known suddenly blazed with activity. Seemingly overnight, it emerged as one of the most strategically important regions in the entire Confederacy—especially since its shoreline bordered the expanse of water at the mouth of the James known as Hampton Roads. One of the greatest natural harbors on earth, this estuary commanded direct water routes to the capitals of both belligerents: the James, highway to Richmond; and the Chesapeake Bay, highway to Washington. It would be repeatedly contested in the years to come, most famously in the 1862 naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack.
As the war opened, Hampton Roads and its surroundings were dominated by one of the few military strongholds in the South that the federal government had managed to keep: Fortress Monroe, which sat at the tip of Point Comfort, a mile or so from the town of Hampton.2 The small peninsula had been occupied as a strategic point not just by the Jamestown colonists but also by both British and French forces in turn during the Revolution. Construction of the massive stone citadel, designed to hold heavy armament and a large garrison, had begun after the War of 1812—during which the British had secured Hampton Roads with embarrassing ease and spent the next two years raiding and burning towns and cities up and down the Chesapeake, including the nation’s capital. The federal government was not about to let that happen again. Unlike such haphazardly designed coastal defenses as Fort Sumter, Fortress Monroe had received loving attention from the nation’s best military engineers, among them a talented young lieutenant named Robert E. Lee.3 Once complete, it became America’s most impregnable military installation. At the start of the secession crisis, the War Department quickly sent additional artillery pieces and hundreds of extra troops to the fort. Thousands more Union reinforcements arrived in the weeks after Sumter. Fortress Monroe was now poised to become a major base of operations in the heart of enemy territory.4
The Confederates, too, were hurriedly marshaling forces in the