1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [190]
And yet we read the face of the sky, and may discern the signs of the times. We know that clouds and darkness, and the sounds of distant thunder, mean rain. So, too, we may observe the fleecy drapery of the moral sky, and draw conclusions as to what may come upon us. There is a general feeling amongst us, that the control of events has been taken out of our hands, that we have fallen into the mighty current of eternal principles—invisible forces—which are shaping and fashioning events as they wish, using us only as instruments to work out their own results in our national destiny.54
“At any rate,” Douglass also wrote that week, “this is no time for us to leave the country.”55
WITHIN DAYS AFTER FRANK BAKER, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend crossed the James River in a stolen boat, their exploit—and their fate—were being discussed at the White House. Indeed, they were a topic of conversation throughout the entire nation.
Word of Butler’s decision on the three fugitive slaves hit the Northern press on Monday morning, May 27, not long after Scott received his dispatch; almost certainly Butler himself, never one to shy away from publicity, had leaked it to a correspondent. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a joke. “General Butler appears to be turning his legal education to good account,” a five-line report in The New York Times began. “We think the people of [Virginia] will find the General a match for them in more ways than one.” It was like a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling “F.F.V.,” as the Times described Major Cary. (This was short for First Families of Virginia, a term of chivalrous pride in the Old Dominion that had become the butt of widespread ridicule in the North.) In fairness, the paper’s readers badly needed something light that day, on the heels of a mournful weekend: the Butler item was wedged among long columns of type describing every detail of Colonel Ellsworth’s funeral cortege and its passage through the streets of Manhattan.56
Winfield Scott was also inclined at first to take the whole thing as a joke—for he, too, was in dire need of comic relief. The general-in-chief’s gout had flared up even worse than usual, forcing the Hero of Lundy’s Lane to spend his days prostrated on a sofa, his swollen feet propped up on a stack of pillows, as he gestured with a stick at a large wall map, barking commands at his scurrying bevies of secretaries and aides. (This scene of military grandeur, a correspondent wrote, “was one on which the pencil of a Leutze would dwell lovingly”—the acclaimed painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware had just been commissioned to paint a new mural at the Capitol.) On Wednesday morning, Lincoln met with Scott and found the old man chortling delightedly at what he called “Butler’s fugitive slave law.” Afterward, the president told Montgomery Blair that “he had not seen old Lundy as merry since he had known him.”
Of course, Scott also expected that Lincoln would instruct him to overrule Butler. And perhaps it was this prospect, even more than the joke itself, that cheered him: this greenhorn president had just been shown what could happen when you slapped a major general’s epaulettes onto the undeserving shoulders of a politician.57
But Lincoln was not so certain. “The President seemed to think it a very important subject,” Blair wrote after their conversation, “and one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Lincoln made it known that he would address the matter with his cabinet the following morning.58
By all appearances, nothing in the administration’s slavery policy had changed in the past three months. Lincoln had continued to avow, both publicly and privately, that he had no desire