CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THREE: A LITTLE SOMETHING SPECIAL FOR THE HISTORY BUFFS

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 122^nd 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 18^th 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.