CHAPTER
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THREE: A LITTLE SOMETHING SPECIAL FOR THE HISTORY BUFFS
It’s
the last day of May, 2014, and we’re in Solomons Maryland at the Calvert
Marina. Next week Slow Motion gets hauled out at Spring Cove Marina (just
across the creek from Calvert), and we get to see what kind of food the
manatees, sheepshead and shrimp were ripping off her bottom. About the shrimp
feasting on our boat algae, there is an alternative explanation for their
incessant ratatat- tatting sound: Gallivant’s owner Don said that this sound is
the male love call in mating season, as the male shrimp whacks its tail rapidly
against a boat’s hull. That makes me feel so much better. It’s not the hungry
shrimp, but rather the lovesick shrimp who are destroying our boat’s bottom.
Who would begrudge any species its efforts to find true love? Not I – unless
the shrimp are making huge dents in the fiberglass hull when they whip their
tails against it. That’s where I draw the line. We’ll know next week what
damage their mating exercises have caused. That’s assuming we can distinguish
between the gnawing marks of the munching manatees, the scratches of the
sibilant sheepshead, and the tail banging gouges of the shrimpies. This haul
out should be enlightening. The Admiral is positive we will have to paint the
bottom this year. Last year when Slow Motion was hauled out, the bottom looked
perfect – much to our amazement. Slow Motion had been attacked by manatees,
sheepshead and shrimp for months before last year’s haul out. So it’s still a
mystery why we saw no signs of their nefarious activities. Spring Cove boatyard
manager Don (another Don) says we will not be so lucky this year. If we need a
paint job, pray for no rain for a week, so we can get ‘er done.
As
the Admiral and I look back on the month of May, we marvel at the number of
historical places we were able to visit, mostly in day trips from the Atlantic
Yacht Basin in Chesapeake, Virginia. I just wrote about the Jamestown
Settlement and the U.S. Life-Saving Service in the 122nd Blog. Now
it’s time to tell you about the Yorktown Battlefield, Fort Monroe and the
Wright Brothers First Flight Monument. We visited the Dismal Swamp too, and
there is a lot of history there also, I guess, but it’s just so…dismal. You’ll
have to research that area on your own. Same for the Mariners’ Museum –
definitely worth a visit, but I was in a very bad mood while there and did not
appreciate it – but this is the place to go if you’re dying to know more about
the USS Monitor, the Union’s ironclad ship that battled the South’s CSS
Virginia (aka USS Merrimack) to a draw in the Civil War. I know what you’re
thinking – “she’s a grown up; she should be able to set aside her bad mood for
the sake of history.” But I can’t and I won’t. So there. If you have ever been
in a bad mood – and who hasn’t? – you know it’s not conducive to enjoying a
museum visit, or much of anything else.
But
today, June 3, my brother’s birthday, I’m in a good mood. And I’m ready to open
the book on the Yorktown Battlefield of the Revolutionary War. For this
excursion back nearly two and one half centuries to 1781, I had the best guide in
the whole wide world of American history. She strode out to the battlefield
with about 10 of us in tow, then proceeded to describe every piece of artillery
used in the battle and recited quotes of soldiers engaged in the battle – by
memory! She gave us a blow by blow of the advancement of the Continental troops
upon the British encampment. It was almost like being there, except no one was
hurt in the verbal re-enactment. A guide like this is priceless. If she was not
a history teacher in a past life, she deprived thousands of school kids of the
best teaching experience ever. Here is how she brought the Siege of Yorktown to
life:
By
the spring of 1781 the British had decided to concentrate on winning battles in
the southern colonies, inasmuch as their war efforts in the North had been inconclusive
or unsuccessful. In May 1781 General Charles, Lord Cornwallis (Eton, Cambridge)
moved his army of about 8000 north from the Carolinas to Virginia where he
hoped to score a major victory. His troops were doing quite well against the small
contingent of Continental soldiers commanded by the Marquis de Lafayette. They
won a small skirmish on July 6 near Jamestown – the Battle of Green Spring.
Cornwallis thought he had Lafayette’s number and couldn’t wait to go after him
again. However, as he later claimed (after the war was over), his commander,
Sir Henry Clinton, had ordered him to set up a base at Yorktown in order to
give the British a port for their naval ships to enter and leave. Cornwallis
hated Clinton – you didn’t know that? Oh my, yes – Cornwallis was above Clinton
in rank before the war – he always referred to him as “that damn colonel”, but
Clinton kept buying influence throughout his military career and eventually
succeeded General Howe as the leader of all the British troops in the colonies.
Clinton thereby leapfrogged over Major General Cornwallis, who became his
second in command. That chafed Cornwallis no end. Anyway, Cornwallis blamed
Clinton for the ill-fated decision to isolate his troops at Yorktown, and
Clinton – no surprise – blamed Cornwallis for this colossal mistake.
What
made the Yorktown decision so terrible for the British was a little thing
called the French Navy, which sent a group of ships to the Chesapeake Bay under
Admiral de Grasse to engage the British fleet. Prior to the Battle on the Bay,
De Grasse dropped off 3000 French troops in Virginia to aid the Continentals on
land. On September 5 1781 his ships defeated the British in the Battle of the Capes
– and Cornwallis had no way out, but to fight through the Continental Army on
land. His sea escape route was closed. Unbeknownst to Cornwallis – because his
superior (in name only), General Clinton, was asleep at the wheel, General Washington
and Comte de Rochambeau were stealthily leading a combined American/French Army
through New Jersey on their way to beef up Lafayette’s troops and tackle the
British at Yorktown. That sly devil Washington had created enough diversions in
the New York area to lead Clinton to believe, mistakenly, that the Americans
were going to attack his British troops in New York. Clinton was so steadfast
in this false belief that he had ordered Cornwallis to send some of his troops
North to help protect their New York stronghold. De Grasse put an end to any
idea of Cornwallis obeying that wrongheaded order.
And
so the stage was set. Cornwallis and 8300 British troops were hunkered down in
their Yorktown encampment. Washington and Rochambeau joined Lafayette and his
Continental solders, as well as the newly arrived French troops, forming an
army of more than 17,000 soldiers. This included Continentals, state militia
fighters (not so well trained) and French soldiers (perhaps the best trained of
the lot). While de Grasse enforced an effective blockade on the water around
Yorktown, the Allied army marched on Yorktown on September 28 to begin their
Siege. Does anyone know in which army Lafayette was commissioned? He was a
Continental Army officer, according to our excellent guide (you could look it
up) and so he led American troops. I still can’t believe he was only 20 years
old. Okay, I looked it up – he was born in 1757, so he was 20 in 1777, and he
was already serving with distinction. In 1781 when he was a key component of
the Victory at Yorktown, he was 24. Washington was 49, twice his age. All
credit goes to Washington for recognizing Lafayette’s genius and not letting
age alone dictate rank or degree of responsibility. But I digress.
On
October 6, 1781 the Allied Army built its first siege line, about one half mile
from the British fortifications. The Americans had bigger, better guns than the
British, with greater distance and accuracy, so they proceeded to bombard the
British, focusing on a few targeted areas, rather than spreading out their
firepower. Washington, Rochambeau and Lafayette designed a plan to take British
redoubts 9 and 10, the outermost defense posts. They were going to send French
troops to dismantle both of them, but whose Revolution was this anyway?
Lafayette convinced his leaders that he should lead an American force to take
over one of the redoubts. He did so, and his troops took control of their
redoubt in 10 minutes. Lafayette scribbled a note – on the battlefield – to his
French counterpart, letting him know that they had succeeded in this mission in
10 minutes – had the French completed their task? This was a bit cheeky,
especially since lives were lost in that quick takeover. However, the French
gained control of their redoubt in about 20 minutes. Both teams had used only
muskets with bayonets – no gunpowder – the combat was necessarily mano a mano,
and the French lost 15 men in Redoubt 9, the Americans lost 9 men in Redoubt
10. Eighteen British soldiers were killed in Redoubt 9. The Allied forces sent
400 soldiers to each Redoubt. The British had 120 soldiers to defend Redoubt 9
and 45 soldiers to defend Redoubt 10.
With
the capture of these two redoubts, the Allied troops built a second siege line
closer to the British camp. This meant using shovels under cover of darkness on
October 11 and 12, 1781 to dig a trench hundreds of feet long, from which they
could shoot at the British troops. They used their artillery effectively from
this second line, which was just 360 yards away from the British – point blank
range. The trench itself was a work of art. This is the description from the
battlefield marker for the Second Siege Line: “Following this 1762
French-military textbook method, in complete silence 750 soldiers dug the
trench. One group of men broke the earth, while another threw the dirt into
gabions – sturdy woven baskets – tracing the line. As the trench grew deeper,
fascines – bundles of brushwood – were staked into the gabions, and all were
covered with earth.”
After
days of relentless bombardment, which leveled the town of Yorktown, on October
17 General Cornwallis asked for a cease fire to discuss surrender terms. He had
already tried to escape across the York River, where another contingent of
British troops was camped, but that escape had failed. Two days later, on
October 19, 1981, Cornwallis surrendered his army. “That damn colonel”, he
muttered.
“Why
did Washington decide to take his troops south to engage Cornwallis at
Yorktown”? you may ask. Historians differ on this a bit. But the version we
were fed at the Yorktown Battlefield by Superguide is that Washington got word
that the French Navy was sending ships to the Chesapeake to take on the British
fleet. This gave him the brilliant idea to move his troops south to surprise
the British troops on land, while their ships were fully engaged at sea. To
maintain the element of surprise, he did everything he could think of to lead
General Clinton to believe he was planning to attack the British troops in New
York, while all the time he was quietly taking most of his troops south. It
wasn’t until Washington and Rochambeau and their men were in southern New
Jersey that Clinton realized he had been fooled – and by that time his mighty
British Navy had been vanquished in the Chesapeake Bay. The die was cast for
poor old Cornwallis and his trapped troops. It was only a matter of time before
he had to raise the white flag. Naturally, “Colonel” Clinton had promised to
cover Cornwallis’s back – he had promised to send ships and troops, but neither
materialized. That damn colonel.
Yorktown
was the last major battle of the Revolutionary Way. The French troops stayed in
the Yorktown area during the winter of 1781-82 and most of the American troops
headed back to New York, expecting more clashes with the British troops in the
North. General Washington kept the Continental Army together for two more
years, until the war officially ended in September 1783 with the Treaty of
Paris. The Battle of Yorktown took its human toll: The Allied Army sustained 72
deaths and 180 wounded. The British losses were 156 killed, 326 wounded and
7,018 men taken prisoner. Another source says that the British suffered 500
casualties, the French 200 and the Americans 80. General Washington imposed the
same terms of surrender on Cornwallis that the British generals had forced upon
the American troops under Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln at Charleston the year
before. General Cornwallis did not attend the formal surrender meeting; he was
“ill”. Always ready with ironic wit, even in the most somber moments, the
British troops marched out to surrender as their band played “The World Turned
Upside Down.”
What
did the British do with their horses during the siege of Yorktown? This is not
covered well at the Battlefield museum, nor did our Superguide discuss the
horses. All I can find out is that the British had nearly 800 horses at
Yorktown, many of which had been captured by African Americans, who had fled
enslavement and were put to work finding food, supplies and horses for the
British troops. As the Siege of Yorktown wore on during October 1781, many of
the British and their freed slave assistants got sick with smallpox. They used
up their food and medicine supplies. In the darkest hour, General Cornwallis
ordered the slaughter of 400 horses, apparently not for food. The horses were
killed and their bodies dragged into the water, only to have the bloated
carcasses float back to shore. I assume the British had no food for the horses
either, but wasn’t releasing them an alternative to the mass killing? If you
know more about this sordid episode, please enlighten us with a Blog comment. Suffice
it to say, between the Jamestown Settlement and the Yorktown Siege, the Brits
did not have a good track record with horses.
Not
every museum offers you a guide, and in most cases, the Admiral prefers to go
through the exhibits unhindered by a guide yakking away to a restless group of
tourists. At Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, we spent a good hour
self-guiding our way through the exhibit rooms, and trying to stay at least two
rooms ahead of a very loud man who was dragging a younger man around the
museum. The building that houses the exhibits is a “casemate”, the very casemate
or fortification where Jefferson Davis was held as a prisoner at the end of the
Civil War. Each passageway from room to room is 5 feet eight inches high – the
average height of most Americans was less than that when the casemate was
built. If you’re not careful, your forehead is hitting the bricks and you will
develop a headache of historic proportions. For the most part, we were careful,
even as we fled from the nattering narcissist and his captive audience.
Fort
Monroe packs a punch. It covers events in American history from before the
Revolution until the recent (2005) Base Realignment and Closure Commission’s
recommendation to close Fort Monroe, which was indeed deactivated in 2011. According to a museum worker, there may be a
few TRADOC military employees still at Fort Monroe trying to hold on, but the
rest of the military is gone. And Fort Monroe is for rent! There are brick
houses and apartment buildings, ostensibly in good shape, available for rent by
private parties – you and me – at the rate of one dollar per square foot –
major utilities provided. This is a beautiful location with lots of open space
and hiking trails, not to mention the former “homes” of Robert E. Lee and
Jefferson Davis. Lee was one of the designers of the Fort, upon which Davis and
his Confederates had designs.
But
let’s go back to the beginning of Fort Monroe. Before there was Fort Monroe,
the largest stone fort in the United States, there were several other forts at
the same strategic location, known as Old Point Comfort since colonial times.
While the Jamestown colonists were taken by Captain Christopher Newton up the
James River to establish their first settlement, before they landed at their
final destination, Captain Newton had landed at what is now Cape Henry on April
26, 1607. They anchored out for a few days and at that time they named this
area “Point Comfort” for the safety it provided their ships. This is the point
where the James River runs into the Atlantic Ocean at the entrance to the
Chesapeake Bay. It is about 25 miles from the Jamestown settlement. In 1608, as
part of his exploration of the area around the settlement, Captain John Smith
re-visited Point Comfort and decided that it was a great place to build a fort
to provide a coastal defense for the settlers. The shipping channel leading the
entrance of the James River is only a mile wide at this point, and so it was an
excellent place to build a fort to protect the settlement from attack by sea.
At that time both the Spanish and the Dutch had their claws in the “new world”,
and they were likely to come after the English settlers by water. Captain Smith
thought that Point Comfort was a “little Isle fit for a Castle”. As it turned
out, he oversaw the building of the first English fort, Fort Algernourne, at
this site. The fort held 40 to 50 men and 7 cannon, not nearly enough to ward of
the Spanish or the Dutch, but the idea of having a fort in this location was a
good one.
Fort
Algernourne’s deficiencies were not exploited by either power before it
accidentally (oh really?) burned down in 1612. According to the museum
narrative, it was rebuilt quickly, but just a few years later it had
deteriorated badly. A major effort was undertaken in 1630 to build a much
stronger fort, and the English followed through and completed Point Comfort
Fort in 1632, funding it with taxes on cargoes and immigrants coming into the
colony. Nevertheless, Point Comfort Fort had pretty much fallen apart by 1664
and in 1665 the English abandoned it as indefensible. This was at a time when
they really could have used a strong fort in that location, as they were at war
with the Dutch, whose warships made it easily up the James River in 1667 and
captured some British warships. The Dutch continued to do damage to the British
in this area; in 1673 a Dutch man-of-war went up the James River again and
wreaked havoc with British shipping.
The
Dutch had previously delivered a major blow to freedom when their ship, the
White Lion, showed up off the coast of Old Point Comfort in 1619 with 30
Africans captured from a slave ship, Sao Joao Bautista. The Dutch traded these
Africans to the English for supplies. This group of captured Black men (from
Angola) was the first group brought to English-occupied land in the New World.
And so slavery began in America. Thank you, Holland.
It
was not until the early 18th century that another effort was made to
build a strong fort at Point Comfort. In 1728 the House of Burgesses in the
colony of Virginia authorized funding of a new fort. This one was sturdier,
made of masonry not wood. It was named Fort George – the monarch at the time
was George 2. Mother Nature took a major toll on Fort George: in 1749 a
hurricane destroyed the fort entirely. Seventy more years passed before Fort
Monroe was finally built in 1819, giving Point Comfort its first real permanent
fortifications.
Okay,
we just skipped over the period of the Revolutionary War. And this is why:
Remember Lord Cornwallis? He opined that Point Comfort was “poorly situated for
defense”, and so he moved his army to Yorktown. Good choice. How did that work
out for you, Lord? The French thought this was a dandy place to occupy during
the Siege of Yorktown, and it worked well for them. But when the Siege was
over, the French abandoned this site.
The
British and the French kept fighting, long after the colonists signed a peace
treaty with England in 1783. And the British were still seething about their
loss to the upstart Americans. It was only a matter of time before the British
started messing with our young country’s trading ships and made it clear that
the Atlantic Ocean was still dominated by them. They had the strongest navy in
the world, at a time when the leaders in the newly minted United States were
still debating what kind of a military we should have. Thomas Jefferson, right
on so many issues, foolishly supported the idea of state militias for the new
country’s defense. Even as war with England became more imminent during his
Administration, he relied on the poorly trained militias for defense. Jefferson
was among the Founders who considered a standing army as a threat to democracy.
The standing army totaled 3,359 officers and soldiers in 1800. In 1808 the size
of the army was tripled to a total of 9,921. And in 1812 the federal government
increased the number – on paper – to 35,603. How many actual bodies were in
uniform? According to the Fort Monroe museum narrative, “only 6,686 men” were
“under arms” in the U. S. Army when the War of 1812 started. The state militias
were still the weak backbone of the nation’s defense. And their performances
were spotty, at best. While the militia soldiers fought valiantly at Fort
McHenry to keep Baltimore out of British hands, they caved in at the nation’s
capital, as Washington, D.C. was overrun by British troops. And they performed
poorly on the Canadian frontier.
One
of the biggest lessons learned by the U.S. Government from the War of 1812 was
that our armed forces needed a lot of improvement. And our coastal defenses
were a mess. In 1816 a board of military officers was tasked with examining the
entire coastal defense system and coming up with recommendations for fortifying
our coastal defense. This board noted the importance of Old Point Comfort to
protecting Hampton Roads and the communities up the James and Elizabeth Rivers.
They were well aware of the British assault on the town of Hampton on June 25
1813, in retaliation for their defeat at the hands of American troops at Craney
Island and Norfolk three days before. The British attack on Hampton, which was
defended by the town’s 400 militia men, led to “three days of ‘rape, murder,
and pillage,’”, according to the Fort Monroe museum narrative. Clearly, this
area needed more protection from any foreign invader. This board came up with a
strong recommendation to build much bigger, better, more defensible coastal
forts, called the Third System of fortifications. That recommendation was
adopted in 1818, and the Third System of coastal forts was begun in 1819 with
the construction of Fort Monroe. Are you still with me? You knew that sooner or
later we would move from Fort Algernourne to Point Comfort Fort to Fort George
to Fort Monroe, right? Well, here we are!
About
thirty more forts joined Fort Monroe as the Third System of coastal
fortifications. Examples of First System forts were/are Fort McHenry, built
around 1800 to protect Baltimore Harbor, and Fort Mifflin, built between 1798
and 1803 to defend Philadelphia. Two of the Second System forts were/are Fort
Columbus (now Fort Jay), located on Governor’s Island and Castle Clinton,
located on Manhattan Island, built in 1806 and 1807, respectively to protect
New York City. Besides Fort Monroe, Third System forts included Fort Pulaski,
located on Cockspur Island near Savannah, built over many years from 1829 to
1850; Fort Sumter, located on a manmade island in the harbor of Charleston,
South Carolina, built between 1829 and 1860; and Fort Hamilton, located in
Brooklyn along the Narrows at the entrance to the New York City Inner Harbor,
built between 1825 and 1831.
Fort
Monroe attracted the best and the brightest from West Point to oversee its
construction, starting in 1819. This may be hard to believe today, but at that
time the Army branch with the most prestige was the Corps of Engineers, which
the top West Point graduates joined en masse. The four hotshots who are singled
out at the Fort Monroe museum are Charles Gratiot, Andrew Talcott, Rene Edward
Debussy and Robert E. Lee. Yes, the one and only, and the future leader of
Confederate troops. But from 1831 to 1834 Lee was the Assistant Engineer assigned to work on Fort Monroe’s
design and construction, under the tutelage of Chief Engineer, Captain Andrew
Talcott.
I’m
chomping at the bit to write about Fort Monroe’s role in the Civil War, but I
can’t just overlook this fort’s role in U.S. Army’s conflicts with various
Native American tribes which the frontier settlers were trying to push farther
and farther West. One of these armed conflicts, called the Black Hawk War,
began in May 1832. Fort Monroe sent a battalion to the Great Lakes area, under
the command of Lt. Col. Ichabod B. Crane. Of the 220 men in this group, 55 died
of cholera in the Buffalo area, and the rest returned to Fort Monroe without
being engaged in the conflict. As it turns out, this battalion wasn’t needed to
defeat Black Hawk’s followers and to force him to surrender. Black Hawk had about
500 Sauk warriors and 600 non-combatants in his tribe. The opposition numbered
6000 militia men, 630 Army regulars and more than 700 Native Americans
(Menominee and Dakota), who supported the U.S. Army because they had their own
conflicts with Black Hawk and his allies. It was really no contest with those
odds. At the end of the short “war”, 450-600 members of Black Hawk’s tribe (and
allied tribes) were killed, with only 77 casualties (soldier and non-combatant
alike) on the other side.
According to Wikipedia, it is not clear
whether Black Hawk was seeking any violent confrontation at all ( meaning that
he wasn’t), when he crossed the Mississippi River from Iowa into Illinois in
April 1832 in order to resettle on tribal lands. The tribal lands had been
taken away under the disputed 1804 Treaty of St. Louis. But U.S. officials
convinced themselves that Black Hawk was taking hostile actions and so they
organized a frontier militia and opened fire on Black Hawk’s delegation on May
14, 1832. This started it, and Black Hawk retaliated by attacking the militia
at the Battle of Stillman’s Run. Then he and his warriors retreated to an area
in southern Wisconsin. (Short aside: Abraham Lincoln was in the group of Illini
militia volunteers summoned to fight Black Hawk and his warriors – he never saw
action.) Even though Black Hawk had removed his tribe to Wisconsin, the U.S.
Army, under General Henry Atkinson, followed him and killed most of his tribe
at the Battle of Wisconsin Heights and the Battle of Bad Axe. Black Hawk
escaped, but later surrendered, and guess who escorted him to Jefferson
Barracks in St. Louis, Missouri? You’ll never get this, unless you’re an
American history wonk: Jefferson Davis. Black Hawk was in Davis’ custody on a
steamer in Galena, Illinois. A lot of people wanted to stare at him, but Davis
would not allow gawking. Black Hawk wrote favorably about this: “The war chief
(Davis) would not permit them to enter the apartment where we were – knowing
from what his own feelings would have been, if he had been placed in a similar
situation, that we did not wish to have a gaping crowd around us.”
And
Jefferson Davis brings us back to Fort Monroe, where he was in a similar
“surrender” situation at the end of the Civil War. But before Davis spent two years
(May 22, 1865 – May 11, 1867) imprisoned at Fort Monroe, this fortification was
a hotbed of activity from the very beginning of the Civil War to its
conclusion, when Jefferson Davis became its most notorious “guest”. Recognizing
the importance of keeping Fort Monroe in Union hands, the U.S. Government
increased the number of soldiers stationed there from 400, when the Civil War
began, to 6000. Fort Monroe was never captured by Southern troops.
According
to the museum narrative, the commander at Fort Monroe in 1861, Benjamin Butler,
played a key role in advancing the abolition of slavery as a primary goal of
the War. This was not expected of him, since he had supported Jefferson Davis
for president at the 1860 convention and refused to back Stephen Douglas, when
he won the Democratic nomination. He was also suspected to hold secession
sentiments by President Lincoln, who transferred him from Baltimore, where he
had declared himself the military leader, to Fort Monroe. So with this
background who knew that he would become a champion of freeing slaves? This is
how it happened:
On
May 23, 1861 three slaves “belonging” to Colonel Charles Mallory of Hampton,
Virginia, escaped to Fort Monroe. We don’t know how they escaped or why they
sought sanctuary at Fort Monroe. But the next morning, when Major General
Butler found out about them and learned that they were going to be used to
build fortifications for the Confederate Army, he figured out an ingenious way
to prevent them from doing so. When Colonel Mallory’s agent came calling to
pick up the three runaway slaves, citing the Fugitive Slave Act, General Butler
said “Not so fast. How can you try to
enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, when you’re not even a part of this country anymore?”
Butler declared that the three self-freed African Americans were “contraband of
war” and should not be returned to slavery. While “contraband of war” was not a
particularly humanizing term (how about “prisoner of war”?), the bottom line
was that if you succeeded in escaping from slavery in a Confederate State to
Fort Monroe, you would not have to go back. It did not take long for hundreds
of fugitives from slavery to show up at Fort Monroe seeking asylum. They even
started calling this place “Freedom Fort.” I seriously doubt that General
Butler intended these consequences, but he gets the credit for emancipating
slaves a few years before Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation (January
1, 1863). It’s really his greatest achievement, since he lost almost every
battle he fought during the Civil War (One victory: capture of Confederate forts at Cape Hatteras, August
1861). His “contraband of war” principle is referred to by some sources as the “Fort
Monroe Doctrine.”
General
Butler’s “contraband of war” decision “propelled slavery to the forefront as a
wartime concern”, according to the Fort Monroe museum narrative. Once more and
more African Americans escaped to Fort Monroe and began working for the Union
forces, it became clear what an asset they could be to the Northern cause, as
well as how much weaker the Confederacy became without this forced labor. And
so, the U.S. Congress adopted “An Act to Confiscate Property Used for
Insurrectionary Purposes” on August 6, 1861, putting its stamp of approval on
Butler’s decision. “Property”? Obviously, we still had a long way to go before we
started calling African Americans people and began treating them like fellow
citizens. But this was the “first step” (museum’s words) to enlisting thousands
of African American men into the Union Army and to pressuring President Lincoln
into issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Offering
refuge to thousands of escaped African American slaves was not the only
exciting event at Freedom Fort during the Civil War – but it was indeed the
most uplifting. Next in order of excitement was the battle of the two ironclad
ships, USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (aka USS Merrimack), on March 9, 1862, in
the waters of Hampton Roads. The occupants of Fort Monroe had front row seats
to this titanic water fight. While both sides claimed victory, this was a draw
for the two protagonists. But they changed the nature of naval warfare forever.
According to the Fort Monroe museum narrative, “Not only did it [battle of the ironclads) render every wooden
ship obsolete, it also made it easier for ironclad ships to engage coastal
fortifications such as Fort Monroe…The battle in Hampton Roads signaled the
need to develop better armament, improved ordnance, and stronger
fortifications.” Bye Bye, wooden hulls; Hello, steel. Fiber glass? Not even a
gleam in a young inventor’s eye.
Meanwhile,
the land war was heating up around Fort Monroe. General Butler had left his
Freedom Fort only to return in 1864 as head of the Union Army of the James. His
troops from Fort Monroe were engaged in the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-1865. General
Grant, the guy in charge of all the Union troops, needed Butler to keep control
of Hampton Roads at Fort Monroe and Fort Wool so that the Union Navy would be
able to provide him necessary support in the Siege. And Grant believed,
correctly, that if Petersburg fell, so too fell the Confederate Capital,
Richmond. Sure enough, Petersburg succumbed to the Union Army and Richmond was
evacuated by the Confederate Government and Army on the night of April 2-3, 1865.
Jefferson Davis escaped first to Danville, then to North Carolina and was
eventually captured on May 10 near Irwinville, Georgia. General Lee surrendered
the remains of the Confederate Army a week later at Appomattox Court House. Excuse
me, but where did Davis think he was going? Did he really expect to get away? I’m
sure there are a lot of history books about this part of his life – his reasons
for fleeing and leaving Lee to surrender the troops. But in the end, he might
as well have escaped. After two years of imprisonment at Fort Monroe, after his
capture, he walked out of that place a free man, on $100,000 bail, put up by
the likes of Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt. This is saying a lot for
a man who was charged with plotting the assassination of President Lincoln, mistreatment
of Union prisoners of war, and treason. Funny thing about those charges – the U.S.
Government ultimately decided that it had insufficient evidence to prove any of
them and dismissed them all two years later.
Moral
of the story: You can lead a revolt against your country, lead thousands of
men, women and children to their death fighting for your rebellious government,
and walk away with a clean record. But maybe, just maybe, you can’t sleep at
night because your conscience isn’t so clear. However, there is no indication
that Davis had a conscience when it came to slavery, which he defended to his
bitter end. It is widely acknowledged that he was a very poor leader of the
Confederacy. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia: “His preoccupation with detail,
reluctance to delegate responsibility, lack of popular appeal, feuds with
powerful state governors, favoritism toward old friends, inability to get along
with people who disagreed with him, neglect of civil matters in favor of
military ones, and resistance to public opinion all worked against him.” And
with his hateful, wrong-headed belief that Black people are inferior to White
people – which he carried to the grave – Jefferson Davis was a very poor human
being as well. So, my southern friends, stop naming schools, streets, parks and
buildings after this troglodyte! Even as we walked the grounds of Fort Monroe,
we saw an iron archway with the words “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park”. Enough
already! Can we please change that to “Harriet Tubman Memorial Park” to honor a
true American hero? Yes, Harriet Tubman has a connection to Fort Monroe: In
July 1865 she received permission from the War Department to go to Fort Monroe,
and from there she went to the nearby “contraband hospital” to work as a nurse
for three months. It was one of the few hospitals which treated Blacks, still
referred to as “contraband” since Butler’s Fort Monroe Doctrine. For that work
alone, Ms. Tubman should have a Memorial Park at Fort Monroe, not the other
guy.
All
righty, then. It’s time to close this chapter on our visits to Yorktown and
Fort Monroe. Thanks for encouraging me to write these historical blogs. They
are extremely time-consuming, but so informative and enlightening – for me, anyway.
I hope you get something out of it too. For those of you who are only
interested in our adventures aboard Slow Motion, tune in to Chapter 124 to find
out if we need to Break Out Another Thousand (BOAT) to fix her bottom and
props.
