1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [259]
2. The official name was—and still is—Fort Monroe, but during the Civil War it was known almost universally as Fortress Monroe, which is therefore the name I use here.
3. Robert Anderson had also done a tour of duty at the fort, as had a young soldier who would not become famous for his military career: Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe.
4. Richard P. Weinert, Jr., and Robert Arthur, Defender of the Chesapeake: The Story of Fort Monroe, 3rd ed. (Shippensburg, Pa., 1989), chaps. 3–5; John V. Quarstein, “Union Bastion in the Old Dominion,” America’s Civil War, vol. 15, no. 4 (Sept. 2002). The order to reinforce Fortress Monroe was issued less than forty-eight hours after Secretary Floyd resigned from the War Department.
5. Benjamin Ewell to Robert E. Lee, May 16, 1861, in OR I, vol. 2, pp. 853–54; Clement Anselm Evans, ed., Confederate Military History, vol. 3 (Atlanta, 1899), p. 130; Lee Jensen, 32nd Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg, Va., 1990), pp. 10–11. One of Mallory’s volunteer cavalrymen, a local doctor, actually rode across to the fort to demand of its commander: “By what right, sir, does your army cross that bridge and invade the sacred soil of Virginia?” The Yankee colonel roared in reply: “By God, sir, might makes right!”
6. C. K. Warren to A. Duryee, May 31, 1861, in Benjamin F. Butler Papers, LC; Philadelphia Press, June 1, 1861; Charles Carleton Coffin, Drum-Beat of the Nation: The First Period of the War of the Rebellion from Its Outbreak to the Close of 1862 (New York, 1888), p. 76.
7. [Edward Lillie Pierce], “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1861; Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Boston, 1892), p. 265; William C. Davis et al., eds, Virginia at War, 1864 (Louisville, Ky., 2009), p. 154.
8. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, BFB Papers, LC. The wives and children are mentioned in these two sources. According to both Butler and Pierce, the wife of one of the men was a free black woman in Hampton. Other information derives from data on the three men in the 1870 and later federal censuses. According to these, Baker would have been about twenty-five years old in 1861, Townsend about thirty-six, and Shepard Mallory (whose birth date varies considerably across the different census years) probably in his late teens. These ages square roughly with those of three of Colonel Mallory’s unnamed male slaves (out of a dozen or so total slaves) enumerated in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses, which possibly suggests that all three had been with Mallory for at least a decade. (Of the three, the data for Shepard Mallory are, again, the least conclusive.) Unfortunately, information on the Mallory household has not been located in the 1840 census. The 1860 census lists two nine-year-old boys and one seven-year-old boy among the Mallory slaves; the identities of their parents were not recorded.
9. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention (Richmond, Va., 1861). There are inconsistencies among the various accounts of how and whence the three fugitives arrived at Fortress Monroe. Butler states that they came at night by boat from Sewell’s Point, while Pierce says they walked into the Union lines that afternoon. For the original texts, visit the website for this book, www.1861book.com.
10. Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; BFB, Butler’s Book, p. 265; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861. Butler’s two accounts contradict each other slightly; in his