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1892 autobiography, he recalls the slaves telling him that the Sewell’s Point battery was “a trifling affair” that as yet held only two guns, while in his 1861 report to Scott, he describes the battery (without attributing this information to the slaves) as “a very strong one, mounting fifteen guns.” Perhaps Baker, Mallory, and Townsend described only the portion of the rebel works that they had worked on personally.

11. Howard P. Nash, Jr., Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin Butler, 1818–1893 (Rutherford, N.J., 1969), pp. 99–101; BFB to Scott, May 24, 1861; Boston Traveller, May 28, 1861.

12. OR I, vol. 1, 195; Samuel W. Crawford Diary, Mar. 11, 1861, Crawford Papers, LC.

13. Fred A. Shannon, “The Federal Government and the Negro Soldier, 1861–1865,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 11, no. 4 (Oct. 1926), p. 566; OR II, vol. 1, p. 593.

14. Nash, Stormy Petrel, chaps. 1–3; Butler’s Book, pp. 75–77.

15. Murray M. Horowitz, “Ben Butler and the Negro: ‘Miracles Are Occurring,’ ” Louisiana History, vol. 17, no. 2 (Spring 1976), pp. 159ff.; Pittsfield Sun, Oct. 20, 1859; Boston Semi-Weekly Courier, Oct. 10, 1859.

16. John G. Gammons, ed., The Third Massachusetts Regiment Volunteer Militia in the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1863 (Providence, 1906), pp. 7–13; Theodore S. Peck, ed., Revised Roster of Vermont Volunteers and Lists of Vermonters Who Served in the Army and Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion, 1861–1866 (Montpelier, Vt., 1892), pp. 5–9; New York Times, Feb. 3, 1885; James Parton, General Butler in New Orleans (New York, 1864), pp. 124–26; W. H. Russell, “Recollections of the Civil War—IV,” The North American Review, vol. 166, no. 498 (May 1898), p. 623; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston, 1863), p. 411; Theodore Winthrop, The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop (New York, 1884), p. 284. Decades later, a soldier in the Third Massachusetts named Charles R. Haskins would claim that he had been the three contrabands’ original savior, but most contemporary accounts mention the Vermonters.

17. Nash, Stormy Petrel, pp. 38–39; BFB to Mrs. Winthrop, n.d. (June 1861), BFB Papers, LC.

18. My description of the antebellum landscape of Hampton and its surrounding area is drawn from Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe”; Marion L. Starkey, The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607–1887 (n.p., 1936); Gene Williamson, Of the Sea and Skies: Historic Hampton and Its Times (Bowie, Md., 1993); [George W. Curtis], “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1861; G. P. Lewis, “Virginia Lands,” American Agriculturalist, vol. 4 (1845), pp. 118–19; Jacob Hellelfinger, Kecoughtan Old and New; Or, Three Hundred Years of Elizabeth City Parish (Hampton, Va., 1910); Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia (Hampton, Va., 1922); J. Michael Cobb and Wythe Holt, Images of America: Hampton (Charleston, S.C., 2008); Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (New York, 2004), esp. chap. 1; James T. Stensvaag, ed., Hampton: From the Sea to the Stars (Norfolk, Va., 1985); Parke Rouse Jr., ed., When the Yankees Came: Civil War and Reconstruction on the Virginia Peninsula, by George Benjamin West, 1839–1917 (Richmond, Va., 1987); Jane Eliza Davis, Round About Jamestown: Historical Sketches of the Virginia Peninsula (n.p., 1907); Thomas P. Southwick, A Duryee Zouave (n.p., 1930); Sarah Shaver Hughes, “Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810: The Economic and Social Structure of a Tidewater County in the Early National Years,” (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1975); as well as reports from the spring and summer of 1861 in the Boston Traveller, New York Times, New York World, New-York Tribune, and Philadelphia Inquirer. See also two detailed topographical maps of the vicinity by R. K. Sneden of the U.S. 3rd Army Corps, Mar. 8 and 10, 1862, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

19. Rouse, When the Yankees Came, p. 22. In 1857, a lecturer