1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [179]
In fact, federal forces had already found occasions to prove as much. Back in March at Fort Sumter, a sentry standing watch one night had heard a splashing sound alongside the wharf, and looked down to see a slim, dark figure disappearing among the pilings. Finally the soldier persuaded the fugitive to come out. He was a young man who claimed to have been beaten almost to death by his master but had managed to escape and paddle across the harbor in a canoe, trusting the Northern “gem’men” of Sumter to shelter and protect him. Those Northern gentlemen promptly sent him back to his lawful owner.12 At Fort Pickens, meanwhile, the Union commander had sent back eight fugitives. And Butler himself, at his previous post in Maryland, had seemed as ready as anyone to do his constitutional duty. When rumors of “an insurrection of the negro population” began spreading around Annapolis in late April, he wrote immediately to the state’s governor to assure him of his readiness to put it down by force of arms.13
Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy, as every sentient American knew. President Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” the president said, quoting one of his own speeches from 1858. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” The same pledge had been reiterated in countless other Republican speeches, countless newspaper editorials.
Yet, to Fortress Monroe’s new commander, these three Negroes who had turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case, in several important respects. The fugitives had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. The enemy had been deploying them for offensive purposes—to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort, no less—and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a good sound beating. And circumstances had changed. The renditions at Sumter and Pickens had occurred before war was declared; Maryland, where he had so gamely offered to help enforce the law, was still loyal to the Union. But Virginia, as of twelve or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, marshaling all her resources to wage fratricidal war. (Indeed, on the far side of the state, at this very hour—though Butler was unaware—the Fire Zouaves were carrying their dead colonel’s body back across the Potomac.) Here were Butler’s men on their sixty-three acres, a tiny oasis of safety amid vast hostile territory. They needed all the help they could get, and they certainly could not afford to do anything that might help their opponents. He knew this much about military strategy, at least.
Despite his exalted rank, Major General Butler had been a professional soldier barely five weeks. In private life back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one, though he had grown up poor, the swamp-Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse for female factory workers in Lowell, the famous textile-mill town. Unlike Boston’s white-shoe attorneys, the self-made Butler could not attract clients through social connections or charm, so he became a grind, a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law, and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest tug. (At his bar examination, he liked to boast, he