1861 (51 page)

As for Lincoln, his young friend’s death affected him like no other soldier’s in the four years that followed. On the morning that the news reached the president, Senator
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and a companion, not yet aware of Ellsworth’s death, called at the White House on a matter of urgent business and found Lincoln standing alone beside a window in the library, looking out toward the Potomac.
He seemed unaware of the visitors’ presence until they were standing close behind him. Lincoln turned away from the window and extended his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I cannot talk.” Then suddenly, to the men’s astonishment, the president burst into tears. Burying his face in a handkerchief, he walked up and down the room for some moments before at last finding his voice:

Almost alone among the millions of mourners, perhaps, Lincoln could admit that Ellsworth’s death had not been glorious. Others might talk of his gallantry, might hail him as a modern knight cut down in the flower of youth. But for the president, preparing to send armies into battle against their brothers, the double homicide in a cheap hotel represented something else: the squalid brutality of civil war.
⁶⁴

Even close friends of the Lincoln family were afraid, for a long time afterward, to talk about Ellsworth in front of the president, who sometimes wept at the mention of his name. On the morning of the funeral, the East Room was crowded with dignitaries: generals, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors. At the end of the service, all rose to file past the open casket. Then the line suddenly stopped. Lincoln and his wife stood at length, looking down on the face of their dead
friend. Those standing nearest could hear the president lament: “My boy! My boy! Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?”
⁶⁵

M
ORE THAN A DECADE LATER,
a reporter named
Eli Perkins of the
New York Commercial Advertiser
happened to be passing through
Mechanicville, New York, and decided to stop and take a look. Perkins had known Ellsworth slightly in former days, and recalled that the legend’s boyhood home was in the village. Perkins found the dead soldier’s elderly parents still living
alone in the little wooden cottage. The front parlor was a kind of shrine to their son, its walls lined with the many lithographs and
cartes de visite
that had been published shortly after his death. But when Perkins walked up the hill behind the house in search of the fallen colonel’s tombstone, he was surprised to find that there was none.

“When Elmer fell,” old Mr. Ellsworth explained, “so many people and societies were going to put up a monument that I suppose they got it all mixed up. First the Chicago people were going to do it—then the regiment, and then the State. Then the citizens around here made an attempt, but still it remains undone.” The late war’s first great hero—the man whose name, one New York newspaper had proclaimed, “will not be
blurred so long as the record of our war of liberty survives”—still lay in an unmarked grave.
⁶⁶

The Marshall House in Alexandria has long since disappeared. On that corner today stands a Hotel Monaco. A bronze plaque on an outside wall, installed sometime in the last century, reads:

On a recent morning in Washington, I made an appointment with a curator at the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History to see something that had not been on display for a long time. I waited as she went to a metal filing cabinet and retrieved a small box, which she placed on the table in front of me. Inside were two artifacts: a scrap of red bunting and a small piece of nondescript oilcloth, its corner stained with
faded blood.

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

Fugitives fording the Rappahannock, Virginia, 1862 (
photo credit 8.1
)

T
HIS WAS WHERE IT HAD ALL BEGUN.

Here, where the river washed into the great bay: a place as freighted with the heavy past as anywhere in the still-young country; a place of Indian bones and deep-cellared manor houses and the armor of King James’s men rusting away beneath the dark soil.

Time itself seemed to move here like that tidal river, its ambivalent currents stirred first upstream, then down. By night, from the water, the sharp-edged silhouette of the federal fort might seem to soften and sink, becoming again the low palisades that the first colonists had raised on the same spot two and a half centuries ago. The navy steamship, moored in the fort’s lee, might raise its black hull into the form of a bygone man-of-war.

History recorded that late in the summer of 1619, a Dutch corsair under an English captain had come in from the south and anchored at
Point Comfort. On this promontory at the mouth of the James, thirty miles downstream from their fledgling capital, the Virginia colonists had built a lookout point and trading post that they called Fort Algernourne.
John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s widower, recounted the
ship’s arrival in a letter. The corsair, he wrote, “brought not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes.” These it had captured from a Portuguese slaver, bound to Veracruz from the coast of Angola. A strange and circuitous voyage, a strange cargo, and yet exactly what the colonists needed. A single pound of tobacco would fetch three shillings in London, but here
in Virginia there were never enough hands to tend and harvest the crop.
English men and women were lured across the ocean with false promises; stray boys were kidnapped on London streets and shipped off to be auctioned like calves at the Jamestown wharf. They worked the fields for a few months and then died, regretted but unmourned. These Negroes, cheaply bought, would be put to work in the tobacco fields, too.
¹

Two and a half centuries later, there were four million descendants of Africans held in slavery on these shores.

But now, on a spring night in 1861, three of them were making their way across those same waters, toward the fort at Point Comfort—and, this time, to freedom.

T
HIS IS HOW IT WOULD ALL END.

The three men who crossed the James River to the fort that night—Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and
James Townsend—had been enslaved field hands on a farm outside Hampton, a quiet county seat on the north bank of the river. Then the war came. Like so many other Americans at that moment, the men unexpectedly faced a new set of challenges and decisions.

The tranquil rural landscape they had known suddenly blazed with activity. Seemingly overnight, it emerged as one of the most strategically important regions in the entire Confederacy—especially since its shoreline bordered the expanse of water at the mouth of the James known as Hampton Roads. One of the greatest natural harbors on earth, this estuary commanded direct water routes to the capitals of both belligerents: the James, highway to Richmond; and the
Chesapeake Bay, highway to Washington. It would be repeatedly contested in the years to come, most famously in the 1862 naval battle between the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack.

As the war opened, Hampton Roads and its surroundings were dominated by one of the few military strongholds in the South that the federal government had managed to keep: Fortress Monroe, which sat at the tip of
Point Comfort, a mile or so from the town of Hampton.
²
The small peninsula had been occupied as a strategic point
not just by the Jamestown colonists but also by both British and French forces in turn during the Revolution. Construction of the massive stone citadel, designed to hold heavy armament and a large garrison, had begun after the
War of 1812—during which the British had secured Hampton Roads with embarrassing ease and spent the next two years raiding and burning towns and cities up and down the Chesapeake, including the nation’s capital.
The federal government was not about to let that happen again. Unlike such haphazardly designed coastal defenses as
Fort Sumter, Fortress Monroe had received loving attention from the nation’s best military engineers, among them a talented young lieutenant named
Robert E. Lee.
³
Once complete, it
became America’s most impregnable military installation. At the start of the secession crisis, the War Department quickly sent additional artillery pieces and hundreds of extra troops to the fort. Thousands more Union reinforcements arrived in the weeks after Sumter. Fortress Monroe was now poised to become a major base of operations in the heart of enemy territory.
⁴

The Confederates, too, were hurriedly marshaling forces in the area. And one of their leaders happened to be Colonel
Charles King Mallory: county judge, commander of the local militia, and master
of the three nocturnal fugitives, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend.

On May 13, the Union commander of Fortress Monroe sent a small squad of men across the narrow creek separating the fort from the mainland. Their job was to secure a well that lay on the far side, since the fort’s limited cisterns could not support all the new troops arriving continually by steamer. Although the federal soldiers had advanced merely a few yards into Virginia, and although the state had not yet officially ratified its secession, the vigilant Colonel
Mallory perceived nothing less than a Yankee invasion of the Old Dominion’s sacred soil. He immediately called up his troop, the
115th Virginia Militia.
⁵

Gallant as they may have been, these defenders of Southern rights and Southern homes were not exactly ready for a full-scale engagement with the enemy. (The militiamen’s previous duties had consisted largely of standing guard on local pilot boats to prevent fugitive Negroes from escaping.) Instead, they joined the several thousand other Virginia troops already dispersed throughout the area, busily setting up camps, digging entrenchments, and building gun
platforms.

Or rather: the Virginia militiamen were
supervising
the construction of entrenchments and gun platforms. The actual hard labor was being done by local slaves, pressed into service from surrounding plantations. Soon, indeed, Confederate authorities required every slaveholder in the three nearest counties to offer at least half his able-bodied hands for military use. “Our negroes will do the shovelling while our brave cavaliers will do the
fighting,” a Richmond newspaper said.
⁶

Baker, Mallory, and Townsend had accompanied their master across the James to
Sewell’s Point, where, directly opposite Fortress Monroe, the Confederates were constructing an artillery emplacement amid the dunes. The three men labored with picks and shovels beneath the regimental banner of the 115th Virginia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters,
GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH
.
⁷

After a week or so of this, however, they learned some deeply unsettling news: their master was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build Confederate fortifications in
North Carolina. They were bidding farewell to the area where they had spent most, if not all, of their lives. Moreover, two of them—probably Baker and Townsend, the elder members of the trio—had wives and children on the opposite side of
the river. If they went south, away from their master’s immediate supervision, into the hands of unknown military authorities, and in the direction that all slaves dreaded most, would they ever see their families again?
⁸