1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [178]
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