1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [202]
Each morning, Pierce rang the bell of the old courthouse, and several dozen of the Virginia Union Volunteers gathered in the front yard to be issued picks and shovels and sent off for a day’s work on the federal entrenchments. Soon these men felt almost like members of the garrison. A New York Times correspondent wrote:
Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns—the result of the native talent of imitation peculiar to the race. Going to and from their work, they do not straggle along in promiscuous crowds, but fall into regular files and columns, and with a step and regularity that would do credit to enlisted men, march with clearly defined pride, and sometimes to the tune whistled by one of their number who, while he has caught a chance-sight of the morning parade, has at the same time learned the music of the band. I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.99
Pierce was a man of scholarly bent, and in his free time he sometimes wandered curiously among the empty streets of Hampton or paged through the records in the courthouse, which dated back deep into the seventeenth century. He explored the overgrown gardens and abandoned mansions—coming across, in one vacant house, a fine early edition of Paradise Lost. But it was the contrabands themselves, he felt, who best repaid his attention and study. “Broken as their language is, and limited as is their knowledge, they reason abstractly on their right to freedom as well as any white man,” Pierce wrote. “Indeed, Locke or Channing might have strengthened the argument for universal liberty by studying their simple talk.”100
Locke and Channing aside, some of the black fugitives were working more directly to secure their people’s freedom. About two weeks after his arrival at Fortress Monroe, George Scott went on a dangerous mission to reconnoitre the enemy positions north of Hampton. “I can smell a rebel furderer dan I ken a skunk,” he promised before departing. He was right: near Big Bethel Church, about eight miles from town, Scott discovered several Confederate companies, defended by an artillery battery. He concealed himself in the bushes for a full twenty-four hours, observing what he could. A sentry finally caught sight of Scott, but he managed to escape, a rebel bullet grazing the sleeve of his jacket as he scrambled away, and reported to Butler’s staff on what he had seen.
Butler and Winthrop sat down almost immediately to draw up a plan of attack: “part made up from the General’s notes, part from my own fancies,” the major boasted that night in a letter to his mother. But Scott’s information was, a newspaper reported afterward, “the main spring of the operation.” It would be the garrison’s first significant advance against the enemy—indeed, the first real land battle anywhere in America between Union and Confederate troops. In the orders that Butler approved was a line of nearly as much historic significance: “George Scott is to have a revolver.” This was almost certainly the first time in the war that a federal officer put a gun into the hands of a black man.101
The Union force of some five thousand New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts men left on its mission at midnight, with Butler staying behind at the fort as Winthrop rode off near the head of the column, Scott riding at his side. Part of the attack’s objective was to drive off roving bands of Confederates that had been terrorizing some of the Negroes who were making their way toward the fort, rounding up the able-bodied men for hard labor in the trenches and in some cases sending the rest to the Richmond slave market.102
As the soldiers left Fortress Monroe, contrabands thronged around to wish them well. “Oh,” one woman said, as tears streamed down her cheeks, “I hope and pray de Lord for dese sojers, and dat dey may go on from conquer