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Jefferson Davis was prepared neither to “fort up” all the Negroes nor to put them in the Confederate army. He simply let whites like Lee continue fearing for their lives, which dampened military enlistment, since many men were unwilling to leave their wives and children unguarded with the slaves. (The following year the Confederate Congress would reluctantly vote to exempt owners of twenty or more slaves from conscription, exacerbating Southern complaints that the conflict was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”) Some state governments even refused to turn over their arms stockpiles or dispatch all their troops to the Confederate authorities, afraid of being left helpless when the Negroes rose up to butcher their masters. They cited “local defense” as their justification, and the authorities in Richmond—committed as they were to the doctrine of states’ rights—found it difficult to overrule.70

And in many places, rebel troops quickly found themselves facing exactly the kind of two-front battle that Mary Chesnut had predicted. The heavenly order of slave society—enforced for so long by the constant threat of white Southern violence—began to crumble as soon as Southern violence needed to be directed externally, against the North, instead of just internally, against the slaves. Colonel Mallory’s militiamen were no longer chasing fugitives; they were aiming cannons at the Yankees. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.

On May 8, Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles, commanding Confederate forces at Fredericksburg, Virginia, reported to General Lee’s headquarters that he had sent his cavalry off in pursuit of Negroes. The day before, he wrote, a local planter named John T. Washington—great-great-nephew of the late president, as it happened—had noticed that five of his slaves seemed to have disappeared. Hastening off to nearby plantations in search of them, Washington discovered that almost all of his neighbors were missing some Negroes as well, and they alerted the military authorities. General Ruggles told headquarters that he had immediately dispatched mounted troops “to intercept and recover the slaves supposed to have escaped, but thus far without satisfactory results.”71

In other words, the Confederates were fighting Negroes on Virginia soil weeks before they fought even a single Yankee.

Northerners, of course, delighted in such tales. Even those who loathed the thought of abolition loved the idea of traitorous rebels scurrying helter-skelter across the countryside in pursuit of mischievous blacks. The New York Herald, certainly no friend of the slave, welcomed Butler’s “contraband of war” decision, noting that the ruling “meets with universal approbation of the supporters of the Union cause throughout the country”—as a clever military tactic, it meant. (The Herald was also glad to praise a good solid Democrat like Butler; no radical, he.) The Springfield Republican reported: “The entire country laughed at the exquisite humor of the transaction.” A cartoon captioned “The (Fort) Monroe Doctrine” began circulating widely. It showed a grinning Negro standing outside the citadel as a Southern planter (broad-brimmed hat, stringy goatee) chases him with a whip, yelling, “Come back you black rascal.” The black man points toward the fort with one hand and thumbs his nose with the other. “Can’t come back nohow massa,” he says. “Dis chile’s contraban.” Meanwhile, behind the planter’s back, dozens more fieldhands dash toward the walls of Monroe.72

There was, however, a serious undertone to such humor. By the end of May, Northerners were starting to accept the idea of Southerners not just as opponents—let alone as the wayward brethren they had been just a few months earlier—but as enemies. The cold-blooded slaying of Ellsworth had given the nation a glimpse of the horrors to come. Many loyal Americans started asking themselves whether it was worth making such sacrifices simply to restore a Union that would still