1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [181]
Still … sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander-in-chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell as a mere civilian—and with another stroke, for that matter, send the Negroes back to Hampton as slaves.
Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report to General Scott before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fortress Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.
FROM THE FORT’S PARAPET, the black men could see the world they had left behind.18
This was not the South of cotton fields and column-swagged mansions, of slaves toiling by the hundreds under the overseer’s lash. The land beyond the moat and the creek spread out low and flat, lagoons and marshes rising almost imperceptibly into a patchwork of small farms, each with its plain old-fashioned farmhouse, its orchard and vegetable patch, its woodlands and its field of wheat, now ripening from green into gold for the early-summer harvest. A few roads, paved with oyster shells, crisscrossed the landscape like wavering lines of white chalk.
A mile or so off lay the town of Hampton, noble relic of an older Virginia. Along the waterfront, shaded by stands of slender cypresses, stood high-fronted brick mansions from colonial times, nearly all with neatly fenced gardens behind, bowers of peach trees, blueberry bushes, grapevines, and rambling roses. Owners of those houses were summoned to prayer each Sunday morning by the ancient bell of St. John’s Church, reputedly Virginia’s oldest place of worship, where the pious lips of eight generations had brushed the silver rim of the communion chalice, a treasured relic of the first King James’s day. Hampton was a place not just of inherited privileges but of inherited civilities; a place of wax-dimmed mahogany and dusty volumes of The Spectator, the legacies of one’s great-grandparents.
The old families, like all aristocrats, had been nouveaux riches once upon a time, back in the days when the James River was the British Empire’s far West—when an inspector of His Majesty’s Customs presided over the busy port of Hampton, recording outbound cargoes of tobacco and wheat; rum and slaves and Old World luxuries coming in. The Revolution, although bravely fought by many local patriots, had left little lasting mark. No one bothered to suggest renaming King and Queen Streets, Hampton’s two main thoroughfares. County and town continued to be governed by the same rules and same families as before—even as the latter grew both less nouveaux and less riches with every passing year. By 1861, it had been an age since a ship called at Hampton from Lisbon or Antigua. The harbor, half silted in, now saw few vessels larger than an oyster boat or a bay schooner. Hampton’s more venturesome sons and daughters went westward to seek their fortunes, while their conservative brothers and sisters stayed behind to prune the rosebushes and polish the mahogany. Values passed from one generation to the next at the Hampton Military Academy, whose principal—one John Baytop Cary, possessed of the most desirable surname in the county—schooled his young gentlemen beneath a painted sign: “Order is heaven’s first law.”19
Colonel Charles King Mallory, who held