1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [187]
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
WAITING 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