1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [196]
A week or so later, Blair wrote Butler again, somewhat more urgently: he had learned that even more fugitives had come into the fort, and thought the general really ought to start following up on that Haiti idea sooner rather than later. Maybe Butler could have a chat with “some of the most intelligent [Negroes], and see how they would like to go with their families to so congenial a clime”?76
Perhaps Lincoln realized what Blair did not: developments were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. The president left no record of his own thoughts on the news from Fortress Monroe. But he might have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s recent words, had he known of them: The control of events has been taken out of our hands … 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.
At least one person grasped the full import of Butler’s little joke. Back at the fort, Theodore Winthrop, the general’s belletristic secretary, wrote a Latin tag from Horace in his notebook: Solvuntur risu tabulae.* Then he added, in English: “An epigram abolished slavery in the United States.”77
IN PEACETIME, the interior of Fortress Monroe was, and still is today, a serene enclosure. Winthrop might have called it a hortus conclusus; another visitor from the North thought it looked like a better-armed version of the Boston Common. Along its well-graveled paths, live oaks and magnolias spread themselves with aristocratic negligence, the tips of their lowest branches nearly brushing the clipped lawn. The officers’ quarters were less like barracks than summer cottages, each with a flower garden and double veranda. A happy posting, in the days of the Old Army; indeed, one end of the citadel’s moat was literally filled with oyster shells, tossed insouciantly from the casemate windows by several generations of military gourmands. General Scott himself paid loving tribute to those local mollusks almost every time someone brought up the subject of Fortress Monroe—which was quite often, of late.78
The Chesapeake seafood still abounded, and demand for it had never been higher, but serenity was in short supply at Fortress Monroe in the spring and summer of 1861. Teams of workmen busied themselves everywhere. (One of General Butler’s first orders had been to clear those oyster shells from the moat.) War correspondents in search of the war arrived by the dozens. Draymen’s wagons rumbled incessantly to and fro, hauling barrels and bundles of supplies, provisions, and donations from well-meaning civilians back home, including far more pocket handkerchiefs than the Third Massachusetts knew what to do with. A self-appointed “aeronaut” named Professor La Mountain did mysterious things with silk bags and hydrogen before finally making the first successful balloon reconnaissance in American history, discovering a secret camp concealed behind the Confederate batteries at Sewell’s Point. Deputations of clergymen from various denominations bustled about, anxious to ascertain that the Union’s defenders were marching off to battle untainted by profane thoughts or spiritous liquors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its parapets, like colonies of ants with the gleaming black corpses of enormous beetles. Scouts were dispatched to advance posts and returned the next day, usually “covered with wounds inflicted, not by the Secessionists, but by their allies the misquitoes, who swarm in the woods, and whom nothing can induce to secede.”79
The Union’s foothold on Virginia soil had spread itself beyond the immediate vicinity of the fort; white tents by the thousands blossomed across the wheat fields, and U.S. flags flew triumphantly