1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [198]
To a few people, the strange inscrutability of the word suggested somehow the uncertainty of the moment. “Where we are drifting, I cannot see,” wrote the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, “but we are drifting somewhere; and our fate, whatever it may be, is bound up with these … ‘contrabands.’ ”83
In all events, the contrabands kept coming to Fortress Monroe, their numbers multiplying as the perimeter of the Union lines expanded. Only a couple of days after the first three fugitives’ flight, nearly all of Hampton’s white residents fled in turn as federal troops occupied the town. Some slaveholders simply left their Negroes behind, especially those too elderly or infirm to be of much use or value. Most tried to coax them to follow; some warned that the Yankees would eat them, or send them north to be processed into fertilizer, or sell them to a Cuban sugar plantation. But the blacks, not surprisingly, made themselves scarce, slipping off into the woods and fields until their masters were safely away. For some whites, who had considered their house servants almost (there was always an almost) like family, that day was a rude awakening. One white Hamptonian would later recall how his aunt and uncle “were particularly fond of a boy now perhaps 16 or 18 who had been in the house since he was a little child. He was a bright boy and very fond and considerate of them. This mulatto, though he had been raised almost like a son, was so ungrateful as not long after to break into the house with others and take all the money that this old couple had. The young rascal went off, and neither I nor anyone about here ever knew what became of him.”84
By early June, some four or five hundred such “rascals” were within the Union lines. stampede among the negroes in virginia, proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women, and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”85
Despite the stern counsels of the postmaster general, Butler was not turning away the “non working classes” of fugitives. Perhaps stretching the strict definition of militarily valuable contraband, he wrote to Blair, “If I take the able bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother must I not take the child?” In a letter to General Scott, he added: “Of the humanitarian aspect I have no doubt. Of the political one, I have no right to judge.” Scott, judging both, let this enlargement of the original doctrine stand.86
Abolitionists among the Union troops watched these developments with delight. Major Winthrop was at his desk in Butler’s office one evening when a local civilian, perhaps unaware of the latest permutations in contraband law, arrived seeking an audience with the general. He was an elderly, grave, pious-looking Virginian who, until extremely recently, had been the master of some forty slaves. He came bearing a tale of woe. By good fortune, he had managed to get half his slaves away to be sold in Alabama before they could run off to the Yankees. But then he had come home from church that Sunday to find that nearly all of the rest were gone. “Now, Colonel,” the man addressed General Butler, “I’m an invalid, and you have got two of my boys, young boys, sir, not over twelve—no use to you except perhaps to black a gentleman’s boots. I would like them very much, sir, if you would spare them. In fact, Colonel, sir, I ought to have my property back.”
The supplicant seemed so consumed with honest self-pity that Butler, Winthrop, and the other officers burst into uncontrollable guffaws. They sent him away empty-handed. Winthrop exulted that