1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [206]
Though an impractical way to adjudicate the fate of fugitives per se, the system was eminently practical in other terms. Not all the Union troops who harbored runaways were doing so out of the kindness of their hearts—most were not. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes, and dig latrines. (“Half the Federal officers now have negro servants,” a journalist reported from Monroe on June 12.) When Negro men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask any inconvenient questions—not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.116
Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fortress Monroe but throughout the South, it was they who provided the Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “in many … places, I found that my best source of information was the colored men.… I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” In a broader sense, they were often the only friends—indeed, the only Unionists—that the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory. “No where did we find any sign of kindly recognition,” one Northern soldier wrote from Virginia in August 1861, “except from the poor slaves, who are rapidly learning, through the insane hatred of their masters, to look upon our troops as [their] great Army of Deliverance.”117
The “enemy of my enemy” principle operated on whites, too, and not only on those at the front lines. Barely six weeks after Sumter, the Democratic New York World reported: “Whether it be deemed a good thing or not, the fact is unmistakable that the northern people are fast learning to hate slavery in a way unfelt before.… It comes home to every loyal man, with a force not to be resisted, that the sole cause of this most wicked treason the world ever saw, is SLAVERY; and, just in proportion as the treason itself is abhorred, in just that proportion do hatred and detestation attach to its cause.”118
Slaves were coming to seem not just players in the drama of the war but also, in a way, heroes. In July, New York’s Winter Garden theater staged a “new drama of the times,” a production laden with special effects, called “America’s Dream; or, the Rebellion of ’61.” The show opened with Sumter burning, the flames reportedly so realistic it seemed the theater might catch fire. There was a thrilling battle between the Baltimore street toughs and the brave boys of the Sixth Massachusetts—while poor Colonel Ellsworth was being vividly murdered at the other end of the stage. But the most unexpected and certainly most fanciful scene was a tableau in which, while “real bombshells” burst around them, a “small but resolute band of Northern contrabands” helpfully launched provisions out of a mortar into a besieged Union fort.119
Meanwhile, within the rebel South, the erosion of the peculiar institution was ever more palpable—even hundreds of miles away from where slaves were becoming contrabands. Union and Confederate newspapers alike reported an astonishing number of alleged insurrections. They were mostly very small scale. In Louisiana, Negroes were supposed to have torched a Confederate general’s house the night after Sumter was attacked. In Arkansas, a black preacher was hanged after using threatening language to his mistress. In Tennessee, at least five alarms were sounded in April and May alone. Whether these had any basis in fact almost does not matter; the panic was real. As Pinkerton observed after one of his reconnaissance missions,