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By Root 1800 0

from President Tyler’s villa, from the cupola of Colonel Mallory’s house next door, and from Major Cary’s academy. Fresh regiments seemed to arrive daily. One morning in late May, the steam tug Yankee spilled forth the gaudy soldiers of the Fifth New York, Colonel Abram Duryee’s Zouaves, resplendent in white turbans and baggy red calico pants. Close on their heels came an all-German unit, the Turner Rifles, marching under both the Stars and Stripes and the black, red, and yellow banner of their homeland. Their picturesque colonel, Max Weber, his aggressively martial mustaches waxed needle-sharp, was one of Franz Sigel’s comrades-in-arms from Baden in ’48. (Weber ensconced himself in Tyler’s former study, delighted to find busts of Goethe and Schiller already there.) Each new regiment was like a troupe of costumed actors arriving in the wings of a theater: anxious and excited supernumeraries waiting for their cue to go onstage.80

And then there were the Virginia Union Volunteers: less resplendent, perhaps, but equally picturesque.

That was the unofficial name—or one of them—given to the fugitive slaves who had taken refuge at the fort. “I wish you could see some of their clothes,” a New England soldier wrote home. “They are all patches, sewed together, and patches on that, sewed with cotton strings, and a hat that would be too poor for a hen’s nest.” Soon this was supplemented with bits and bobs of Union uniforms: cast-off caps, shirts, and trousers, and even the odd scrap of Confederate attire plucked nimbly from a master’s knapsack before departure. Almost all the Negroes came barefoot, and most remained that way. Yet each morning, dozens of the aptly named Volunteers lined up to pitch in with manual labor around the fort. Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.” A Northern visitor wrote:

I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day; a quiet, respectable, industrious … folk, with far more agreeable expressions than one could ever see in a low white laboring class. Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were the black Parcae disguised among us, and spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic. I think every one likes them.81

There was another nickname that caught on much more widely, one that evolved out of General Butler’s renowned legalism. Journalists across the country quipped relentlessly about the Negro “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The New York Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight”—until, within a week or two, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly crafted bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity. Were these blacks people, or property? Free, or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable, for answering them would have raised a whole host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook, by allowing the escaped Negroes to be all of those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment to-day. As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision as well, perhaps: William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery—and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had refused