1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [199]
Winthrop, like most men at Fortress Monroe, had been a soldier for hardly over a month. (And the only secession flag captured so far had been one sad piece of flannel needlework that Colonel Duryee’s Zouaves had found at ex-President Tyler’s house.) In ordinary life, the slight, fair-haired thirty-two-year-old was a rising author with two travel books to his name—The Canoe and the Saddle and Life in the Open Air—and a drawerful of unpublished poems and novels. His two closest friends were the writer George W. Curtis and the painter Frederic Church, who was also a hiking companion on rambles through the Adirondacks and along the coast of Maine (where the two had gone, improbably enough, to drum up votes for Frémont in the summer of 1856). Fresh out of Yale, Winthrop had been a tourist in Europe in 1848, and the revolutions there had left a lasting impression, a determination to find a life that would combine poetics and politics. Just after Sumter’s surrender, he marched down Broadway in the ranks of the dandyfied Seventh Regiment, whose members had pledged themselves to the defense of Washington for a not terribly generous thirty-day enlistment term. But Winthrop was under no illusion that the war would be a frolic. “I see no present end of this business,” he wrote Curtis shortly after his arrival in the capital. “We must conquer the South. Afterward we must be prepared to do its polic[ing] in its own behalf, and in behalf of its black population, whom this war must, without precipitation, emancipate. We must hold the South as the metropolitan police holds New York. All this is inevitable. Now I wish to enroll myself at once in the ‘Police of the Nation,’ and for life, if the nation will take me.”88
At the close of a brief and wholly bloodless campaign, the men of the Seventh had dispersed, leaving behind as their only casualties a thousand velvet-covered camp stools that had somehow gotten misplaced in transit. Winthrop remained, joining Butler’s staff. At Fortress Monroe, he was already witnessing the emancipation of the blacks, a bit more precipitately than he had envisioned. Appalled at the ragged condition of the fugitives, he began sending urgent appeals for decent clothing to his friends in the North.89
He was also determined to write down what he saw happening around him. The Sunday that news came of Sumter’s surrender, he and Curtis had sat together late into the night on the porch of Curtis’s house on Staten Island, talking about the present and the future. Winthrop told his friend that he thought someone should keep a careful record of the quickly unspooling events: “for we are making our history hand over hand.”
While in Washington with the Seventh, he had written those brilliant accounts for The Atlantic—full of sly wit and vivid detail—of the troops bunking in the House chamber and the army’s march by moonlight over the Long Bridge into Virginia. Now, at Fortress Monroe, Winthrop began a new essay: “Voices of the Contraband,” he would call it.90
Indeed, there were new voices, and new stories, to be heard every day at the fort. Some of the contrabands had led extraordinary lives.
One of the first fugitives to arrive was George Scott. He had originally been the field hand of a man in Hampton, but then through a complicated family transaction became the property of his original owner’s son-in-law, who planned to take him to his plantation in a different county, on the far side of the James. Worse yet, the new master, one A. M. Graves, was widely known as a brute who abused both his wife and his Negroes. Before Graves could gain possession of him, Scott slipped off into the woods outside town. For about two years he hid out in a cave, where a sympathetic and courageous young girl regularly brought him food. Many of the local whites sympathized, in fact,