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“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the puzzled officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary of state replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”124

ON AUGUST 6, 1861, Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder, commander of Confederate forces in southeastern Virginia, received intelligence—unfounded, as it would turn out—that enemy troops, having withdrawn from Hampton some weeks earlier, were about to reoccupy the town. And not only that: the Yankee Butler planned to house Negroes there. “As their masters had deserted their homes and slaves,” Magruder reported back to headquarters in Richmond, “he [would] consider the latter free, and would colonize them at Hampton, the home of most of their owners.” This could not be countenanced.

Although many of the rebel general’s troops had been busy on a mission to “scour the [surrounding] country” for fugitive blacks, Magruder immediately summoned his officers to a council of war. Steps must be taken at once to prevent the empty town from becoming once again a “harbor of runaway slaves and traitors.” The other Confederates, most of them residents of Hampton and its surrounding farms, agreed. And there was another motivation, too. It was time, some felt, for a grand and splendid gesture of renunciation. It was time to show the Yankees—to show the world—what Southern men would forfeit for their freedom. “A sacrifice,” one soldier said, “to the grim god of war.”125

The following night, Union pickets from Colonel Weber’s regiment, who were standing watch just across the inlet, were surprised by noises from the direction of the darkened town. First there were shouts of alarm from some of the few civilians, black and white, who had remained in their homes. And then they heard the slow, deliberate tramp of marching feet. Two snakelike lines of yellow flame threaded their way among the houses, then broke apart, balls of light dancing wildly in every direction as hundreds of Confederates fanned out with torches through the streets. They knew the way; this was their town.

“Many a young man set fire to his own father’s house,” one Hamptonite would remember.

From their posts across the bridge, the Yankees watched in astonishment as first one building, then another, was engulfed. “The loud roar of the flames, the cries of the terrified negroes as they were being driven from their huts by the enemy and marched off under guard to their lines, all combined to make up a wild scene,” a soldier said.

Major Cary’s columned academy was the last building to catch fire. At first the federals thought it was being deliberately spared. But finally the youths of Hampton fell with a vengeance upon their former schoolhouse, soaking the desks and chairs with turpentine and camphene, hacking holes in the floors and ceilings so the flames could rise. It lit up, window by window, from within.

And so the old town burned. The ancient church; the Negro shanties; the courthouse with its whipping post and its bell; the fathers’ mansions—separate fires at first, then all consumed into one, an inferno reflected on the black waters of the James.

The Great Comet of 1861, from Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (1888) (photo credit 8.2)

* * *

*Contrary to popular belief, most freedmen did not automatically adopt the surnames of their masters, preferring to distance themselves from the bonds of slavery, and more often choosing the last name of a local family they admired, a famous name (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln), a name that they simply liked—or, sometimes, the name of a family to which they claimed kinship.

*“The tablets of law are erased with a laugh.”

*The following month, Confederate general D. H. Hill returned Winthrop’s gold pocket watch, taken from his corpse, to Butler, so that the Union commander could forward it to the dead man’s mother. The Confederate’s accompanying note read: “Sir, I have the honor herewith to send the Watch of Young Winthrop, who fell while gallantly