1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [204]
Pierce, his three-month enlistment expired, left Fortress Monroe in mid-July. On his last evening, he assembled the Virginia Union Volunteers at the courthouse yard in Hampton to bid them good-bye. As the men and women gathered around him, he thanked them for their work and complimented them on their “industry and morals.” Then something further occurred to him: never before in American history had a Northern abolitionist found himself in a situation where he could speak freely before an audience of Southern slaves.
I said to them that there was one more word for me to add, and that was, that every one of them was as much entitled to his freedom as I was to mine, and I hoped they would all now secure it. “Believe you, boss,” was the general response, and each one with his rough gravelly hand clasped mine, and with tearful eyes and broken utterances said, “God bless you!” “May we meet in Heaven!” “My name is Jack Allen, don’t forget me!” “Remember me, Kent Anderson!” and so on.
“No,” Pierce wrote afterward, “I may forget the playfellows of my childhood, my college classmates, my professional associates, my comrades in arms, but I will remember you and your benedictions until I cease to breathe! Farewell, honest hearts, longing to be free!”109
ON THE EVENING OF November 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of East Germans pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. They had come to cross over into freedom. But this epochal moment had begun with a bureaucratic snafu: that afternoon, a spokesman for the Communist regime, assigned to read a press release describing a gradual, orderly process by which the government planned to ease travel restrictions, misread the document and accidentally announced that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately.
An American reporter at the checkpoint that night watched as befuddled East German border guards surveyed the vast crowd from their command post. The captain in charge dialed and redialed his telephone, trying to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. Then he put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” the journalist would write. “Maybe he was simply fed up. Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’… ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open up,’ and the gates swung wide.”110
The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, with the breach of a small segment of border in a single city. Many more walls would have to come down in the weeks and months ahead; there would be setbacks as well as advances in the years to come. But that night, watched by the world, was the moment when the possibility of cautious, incremental change in the old Soviet bloc—perestroika, glasnost, a slow and partial transition toward democracy—ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The Wall fell that night because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.
In the very first months of the Civil War—after Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend had breached their own wall, and Benjamin Butler shrugged—slavery’s iron curtain began falling, all across the South. John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of Lincoln, would say of the three slaves’ escape and Butler’s decision: “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”111
Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fortress Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in northern Virginia, along the James, on the Mississippi, in Florida. A veritable “exodus” even from loyal slave states such as Maryland was said to be taking place. In southern Pennsylvania, until recently an area that fugitives had traversed with great caution, a couple of obvious runaways were observed strolling up Harrisburg’s Market Street at twilight, and according