1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [201]
Although no detailed account written by a black person of those early days at Fortress Monroe survives, the reports of white soldiers and journalists—and freedmen’s stories from later in the war—allow us to imagine both the exhilaration and the disorientation of the fugitives. The world that they had known their entire lives had vanished almost literally overnight. Their masters’ houses stood eerily empty; most of Hampton, one Northern visitor wrote in June, resembled “an above-ground Pompeii.” Nearly all the town’s whites had disappeared. In their place were seemingly boundless fields full of strangers, more and more of them each day: white men with harsh, uncouth accents (some did not even speak English), who stared at you curiously, often rudely, breaking into snorting guffaws at the oddest things. Some were kind; others, bored and restless after weeks in camp, tried to turn blacks into pets and playthings, making children scramble for pennies in the dust or playing practical jokes, sometimes cruel ones—and occasionally worse, as when one “particular favorite” Negro companion of a Zouave captain was beaten up when he imprudently ventured into the camp of the rival First New York.95
They made you feel self-conscious in ways that Southern whites did not. And yet the most ordinary gestures became revolutionary: you could look these white men straight in the eye; you could shake their hand. (“Attended a prayer meeting,” a New York private wrote in his diary one day in July. “Got a good many heart[y] shake of the hand by the colored brothers.”) Even the obnoxious ones were often curious to learn your life story, whereas the Virginia whites never were; in fact, they seemed actively to avoid realizing that you had one. But now every visiting dignitary, every Northern newspaperman, wanted to meet General Butler’s famous contrabands. Whatever else they did, these Yankees never looked through you as if you were a table or a chair.96
Far more important: you were free. Not officially, of course. But you were free of the past—and perhaps even free, more startlingly, of what had been your future. Free to decide when to come and go, and where; when to work; when to sleep; when to be with your family; when to be alone. Some of the contrabands chose not to remain in the fort, preferring to live more independently, despite the risk, in encampments of their own just beyond the Union lines. At least one tried to enlist as a Union soldier: an intrepid young man named Harry Jarvis, who had come from the Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore, crossing thirty-five miles of open water alone in a canoe to reach Monroe. “I went to [Butler] an’ asked him to let me enlist, but he said it warn’t a black man’s war,” he later remembered. “I tol’ him it would be a black man’s war ’fore dey got fru.” Jarvis and many others stayed on to work as manual laborers for the garrison; they got army rations for themselves and their families in return. (Two years later he would get his wish, joining one of the Union’s first black regiments, the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts—and would lose a leg in the Battle of Folly Island.)97
Back in April, as the military transport of the Third Massachusetts had lain at anchor off Boston, a small boat had unexpectedly come alongside, and a well-dressed young man, perched in its bow, hailed the officer on watch. Did the Third have room for one more volunteer? The Third did, and the stranger hopped aboard, satchel in hand. He was Edward L. Pierce, a thirty-two-year-old attorney with degrees from Brown and Harvard, highly placed connections in the Republican Party, and strong abolitionist convictions—who,