1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [203]
The Union troops did not conquer at Big Bethel. The Confederates, forewarned by a watchful civilian, were dug in behind their sturdy earthworks with cannons and rifles loaded and aimed. One of their officers was Colonel Mallory—posted, by coincidence, near the very spot where his Revolutionary forebear had fallen with the eleven (or was it nineteen?) bayonet wounds. The colonel fared better than his grandfather: the entire rebel force lost only one man, a teenage private from North Carolina. The Union troops were not so lucky. Panicking under fire, they never got near the first line of Confederate earthworks; the debacle became worse when one New York regiment mistakenly fired at another, whose men happened to be wearing gray militia uniforms. (Duryee’s brightly plumed Zouaves, meanwhile, proved easy targets for the rebel guns.) Eighteen were killed and dozens more wounded before the Yankees retreated through the woods in confusion back toward Fortress Monroe.104
Among the fallen was Theodore Winthrop, killed while trying vainly to rally the New England troops. A Carolina rifleman had put a bullet through his chest. Back in his quarters at the fort, the young soldier-author had left a half-filled sheet of manuscript: the first few sentences of “Voices of the Contraband.”*
FOR THE REST OF THE SUMMER, Butler’s men would fight only occasional small skirmishes with the enemy. But the most significant victory at Fortress Monroe had already been won, back in May, when three black men crossed the James River in the darkness. On the night the Union troops marched on Big Bethel, the soldiers would encounter another group of fugitives, who asked them for directions to “the freedom fort.”105
The general from Massachusetts grew ever more steadfast in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old political associates. In July, when the Lincoln administration asked General Irvin McDowell to issue orders barring all fugitive Negroes from the Union lines in northern Virginia, Butler immediately fired off a letter to Washington, making it known that he planned to enforce no such rule around Hampton Roads. (By now there were a thousand contrabands in the fortress.) In a long missive to the secretary of war, Simon Cameron, Butler also took the opportunity to argue that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were—in a legal sense—no longer things, but people. He wrote:
Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? Is not every constitutional, legal, and normal requirement, [both] to the runaway master [and to his] relinquished slaves, thus answered? I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.
In a loyal state, I would put down a servile insurrection. In a state of rebellion I would confiscate that which was used to oppose my arms … and if, in so doing, it should be objected that human beings were brought to the free enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such objection might not require much consideration.106
This time, however, Butler’s lawyerly arguments proved less effective. It would take another fourteen months, and tens of thousands more Union casualties, before the Lincoln administration was ready to espouse such a view.*
“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to Edward Pierce in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right[?]… All these matters run through my head as I see the negro.”107
True, Butler’s newfound zeal was not entirely selfless. Since the arrival of those first three contrabands, a steady stream of mail had come in—from old friends and total strangers—extolling him for having struck the first blow to free the Negro of his shackles. Butler had quickly warmed to this train of thought, especially now that he was no longer a state legislator from cotton-addicted