1861 (53 page)

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report to General Scott before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fortress Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

F
ROM THE FORT’S PARAPET,
the black men could see the world they had left behind.
¹⁸

This was not the South of cotton fields and column-swagged mansions, of slaves toiling by the hundreds under the overseer’s lash. The land beyond the moat and the creek spread out low and flat, lagoons and marshes rising almost imperceptibly into a patchwork of small farms, each with its plain old-fashioned farmhouse, its orchard and vegetable patch, its woodlands and its field of wheat, now ripening from green into gold for the early-summer harvest. A few roads,
paved with oyster shells, crisscrossed the landscape like wavering lines of white chalk.

A mile or so off lay the town of Hampton, noble relic of an older Virginia. Along the waterfront, shaded by stands of slender cypresses, stood high-fronted brick mansions from colonial times, nearly all with neatly fenced gardens behind, bowers of peach trees, blueberry bushes, grapevines, and rambling roses. Owners of those houses were summoned to prayer each Sunday morning by the ancient bell of St. John’s Church, reputedly Virginia’s oldest place of
worship, where the pious lips of eight generations had brushed the silver rim of the communion chalice, a treasured relic of the first King James’s day. Hampton was a
place not just of inherited privileges but of inherited civilities; a place of wax-dimmed mahogany and dusty volumes of
The Spectator,
the legacies of one’s great-grandparents.

The old families, like all aristocrats, had been
nouveaux riches
once upon a time, back in the days when the
James River was the British Empire’s far West—when an inspector of His Majesty’s Customs presided over the busy port of Hampton, recording outbound cargoes of tobacco and wheat; rum and slaves and Old World luxuries coming in. The Revolution, although bravely fought by many local patriots, had left
little lasting mark. No one bothered to suggest renaming King and Queen Streets, Hampton’s two main thoroughfares. County and town continued to be governed by the same rules and same families as before—even as the latter grew both less
nouveaux
and less
riches
with every passing year. By 1861, it had been an age since a ship called at Hampton from Lisbon or Antigua. The harbor, half silted in, now saw few vessels larger than an oyster boat or a bay
schooner. Hampton’s more venturesome sons and daughters went westward to seek their fortunes, while their conservative brothers and sisters stayed behind to prune the rosebushes and polish the mahogany. Values passed from one generation to the next at the
Hampton Military Academy, whose principal—one
John Baytop Cary, possessed of the most desirable surname in the county—schooled his young
gentlemen beneath a painted sign: “Order is heaven’s first law.”
¹⁹

Colonel
Charles King Mallory, who held ownership rights to the three Negro fugitives at Fortress Monroe, was also a sprig on one of tidewater Virginia’s loftiest and most venerable family trees, just the slightest gradation beneath that of the Carys themselves. His ancestors had prospered here since the seventeenth century. A previous Colonel Mallory, his grandfather, had fallen in combat against the invading redcoats in 1781,
beside a nearby church known as Big Bethel. The family still reverently preserved this martyred ancestor’s buff waistcoat, pierced by British bayonets in no fewer than eleven places. (Over the years—thanks, perhaps, to the depredations of sacrilegious moths—the purported number of bayonet slashes would eventually grow to nineteen.)
²⁰

Slaves, too, were part of the ancestral legacy. Among the tattered folios in the county courthouse could be found a deed, dated at Hampton on the 18th of December, 1696, by which a certain
William Mallory—the present colonel’s great-great-great-grandfather—granted unto his son Francis “one negro Lad nam’d Will and one Gray Mare & their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.”
²¹

All through the pre-Revolutionary decades, slave ships called frequently at Hampton—sometimes dozens in a single year—almost all of them direct from the West Indies, often bringing just three or four Africans for sale, but now and then forty or fifty at a time. There had been occasional annoyances over the years—during the two wars against
Great Britain, local slaves had showed a disconcerting
eagerness to flock to the enemy, who had promised freedom to any cooperative bondsman. But the British departed, the overseas slave trade ceased, and by the eve of the Civil War, the county’s population remained more or less the same year after year: half black and half white; and, it so happened, half slave and half free, apart from a small community of free Negroes, some of whom had even won a degree of prosperity. Each of the town’s handsome old mansions had behind
it a little lean- to shanty where the slaves lived and where they did their masters’ cooking and washing.
²²

Slavery wore a more human face here than among the industrial-scale cotton and sugar plantations of the Gulf Coast, where each Negro man, woman, and child might be little more than an anonymous line in the absentee owner’s ledger book. Around Hampton, people knew one another. Even the largest planters rarely owned more than a couple of dozen slaves—Colonel Mallory possessed thirteen. The county had its old black families as well as old white ones. Indeed,
these were quite often intertwined. Outsiders noticed what the locals seemed not to: very few of the area’s so-called blacks were anything approaching black in color, and the physical resemblances to their white neighbors (and masters) could be striking. Occasionally, tangled relationships emerged into the open; forty years before the Civil War, a local white man left half his estate to the daughter he had conceived with a black woman, the slave of a close friend of his. Much
more often, things went unspoken. “Well, ah ain’t white an’ ah ain’t black, leastwise not so fur as ah know,” an octogenarian farmer named
Moble Hopson would tell an interviewer in the 1930s. “Fo’ de war dere warn’t no question come up ’bout et.”
²³

At least one of Colonel Mallory’s three fugitives was an instance of such ambiguity. Shepard Mallory was the only one described consistently as a mulatto; he was also the only one who claimed the colonel’s surname as his own, as he would continue doing for the rest of his long life. (It is unclear whether he used the Mallory name while still in slavery.) Shepard Mallory was born when Charles King Mallory was in his early twenties, either not long before
the colonel’s marriage or not long after it.
²⁴
Such facts hint at the possibility—intriguing even
if speculative—that in leaving his master, Shepard Mallory might also have been leaving his cousin, his uncle, or maybe even his father.
^*

In years to come, philanthropic Northerners would be surprised (perhaps in a few cases secretly disappointed) to learn that not all Hampton slaves were lashed daily—and, moreover, that quite a few spoke of their masters as decent, even kindly, people. Some slaves here, as in other places, were left to lead more or less independent lives, working aboard oyster boats on the Bay or practicing trades in town, and simply remitting most of their earnings to their
masters. The town’s location also offered them unusual access to information about the outside world. In the decades before the war, a summer resort called the Hygeia Hotel turned Hampton into a popular watering place for wealthy visitors, including men of national prominence. John Tyler,
Winfield Scott, and
Roger Taney, among others, became familiar faces. Indeed, Tyler and his family purchased a beachfront
villa right next door to the Mallory estate; when they arrived each summer they would erect a temporary cabin behind the house to accommodate their retinue of slaves. As these visiting blacks mingled with Hampton’s local Negroes, they must have confided a good deal of inside political news and high-class gossip that
James Gordon Bennett and
Horace Greeley would have given their eyeteeth to acquire.
²⁵

And yet Hampton’s picturesque, shabby-genteel exterior hid far shabbier, and far less picturesque, realities under its surface. One visiting Northerner, asking an elderly slave if she had a “good” master, was assured that the man was “a kind—a
werry
kind massa!” And then she added: “Why, bless de Lor’… he nebber put wires in his cowhides in all his life!” The woman, of course, was making a
larger point: a whip without metal wires woven into it is still a whip. There was no such thing as a “good” slaveholder; no such thing as a gentle version of bondage.
²⁶

In July 1850, an article titled “New Way of Raising
Pigs” appeared in a magazine called
The American Agriculturalist.
“Dr. Mallory, of Hampton,” it began, “has a new way of keeping both pigs and negroes out of mischief.” It went on to explain that the esteemed doctor—he was the colonel’s elder brother, Francis—made a practice of giving each of his slaves one or two
piglets every spring to tend and feed throughout the rest of the year. Then, at slaughtering time, half the
butchered hog would go to the master, the other half to the slave. It was an efficient way to fatten swine, the article noted—“and besides, it is contrary to negro nature to run away and leave a fat pig.”
²⁷

That was how slavery worked in Hampton. As beneficent as a master might be, he ultimately had to treat his Negroes as a type of livestock—a type, moreover, that could be damnably hard to keep from straying off. This was no small matter, as Virginia’s slaves were growing more and more valuable over time. With the Old Dominion’s best soil long since exhausted, its farmers could only gaze enviously southward at the bountiful fields of the
Cotton Kingdom. Yet the good fortunes of the Gulf States did not bypass Virginia entirely. The Chesapeake became America’s own Congo River, its new slave coast.
²⁸
The higher the price of cotton in New Orleans (and in Lowell and
Liverpool, for that matter), the higher the price of Negroes in
Richmond. Indeed, it was often said that black folk were Virginia’s only worthwhile cash crop.

The old fortunes of the tidewater stretched thinner and thinner with each new generation. Heirs multiplied; debts multiplied; a gentleman from even one of the finest bloodlines might easily find himself in financial embarrassment. Meanwhile his Negroes had multiplied, too—more mouths to feed; more backs to clothe; more hands to do the same amount of work.
Their Increse to him & his heirs for ever.
Then one heard about the most remarkable prices
being fetched: two thousand dollars for a prime male! It was beyond exorbitant—it was insane; it couldn’t last. It was also, by coincidence, the exact amount of the note of hand that one had imprudently signed two years ago, back when it had seemed, briefly, that grain prices must rise—the note of hand that would fall due next quarter, and nary a cent of cash to pay it with. The slaves’ rations had already been cut to bare subsistence; their annual
clothing allowance postponed; but still one’s balance sheet showed an appalling deficit. Perhaps, indeed, they would be better off with a master who could afford to feed and clothe them properly. Surely it would be no sin to sell just one or two, sparing at least the faithful house servants. And come to think, there
was
that strapping young fellow Billy, on Uncle Jack’s old farm … the one with the unpleasantly truculent look in his eye, as
if he were daring you, his master, to show him who was boss.…

And so came the discreet trip upriver, to shamefacedly answer one of those vulgar ads inside the Richmond papers:
CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES
! Well, better that, anyhow, than having one’s ancestral house on King Street—its roof a bit leaky these days, to be sure, but still a handsome old place—seized and auctioned by the sheriff at the courthouse door.

This was how it might have gone with a slaveholder of the very best intentions. There were many whose intentions were a good deal worse.

Back at the turn of the century, no less a Virginian than Thomas Jefferson had recognized the strong financial incentives for a planter to increase his yield of Negro children. The author of the Declaration was always half idealist, half scientist—the two halves often at war with each other. The idealist dreamt of universal
emancipation (someday), while the scientist could not help calculating that the offspring of a
“breeding woman” at Monticello were worth substantially more than her labor. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law—since, as he explained, “what she produces is an addition to capital.” (A few lines later, he went back to discussing his lofty schemes for the University of Virginia.) By the 1850s, this calculus had given rise to an
industry that each year converted tens of thousands of black Virginians into hard cash before sending them south. The Richmond firm of D. M. Pulliam & Co.—one of many competing dealers in the state capital—went so far as to classify its wares into twenty separate categories, from “No. 1
MEN
, Extra” down to “Scrubs,” a term for the elderly, the sickly, or the crippled.
²⁹

Rare indeed was the black family in Hampton that had not lost one of its members—a sister, a husband, a daughter, a father—to this ever-burgeoning trade. On local farms where slaves were expressly raised for sale, the common practice was to send children to market when they reached the age of eight: old enough to have survived the common diseases of infancy and to be useful in the fields.
³⁰

For those not sold, enslavement still often meant a life of sudden disruptions and separations. Hampton was neither quite as placid nor quite as stable as it appeared. The antebellum South had invested heavily in its self-image as a place of changeless order, but in truth, it could sometimes be almost as ruthlessly dynamic as a California gold field or a Manhattan slum. When the more ambitious scions of the old families decided to seek their fortunes in Arkansas or
Texas—or even just in another county—the slaves must be equitably divided according to their cash value. Many tidewater field hands, too, were “hired out” annually: slaveholders who possessed more Negroes than they needed rented them to planters short of labor. In Hampton, as in many other places, January 1 was when old rental contracts expired and slaves’ services were auctioned off for the year ahead, sending them to different, often far-flung,
plantations. One former slave would recall how each New Year’s Day, “the cries and tears of brothers, sisters, wives, and
husbands were heard in [Hampton’s] streets” as black families were separated—at least for twelve months, but possibly forever.
³¹