Troubled Refuge by Chandra Manning

Author:Chandra Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

Into the Wilderness

In the spring of 1865, Fort Monroe bustled as busily as ever. Over four years of war, the Union army had never left, and there was still no source of freshwater within the fortress, but in other ways things were utterly changed. Four years earlier, the city of Hampton had relied on slave labor to scrub its homes, move its trade, grow its food, and build and maintain its railroad. Now there was not a slave in or around the fort, but there were freedpeople everywhere. Many of those freedpeople still scrubbed, ferried, grew, and built. Frank Baker and James Townsend, two of the three men who first ran to the fort in May 1861 and prompted Butler’s famous “contraband decision,” worked as day laborers and would for the rest of their lives in and around Hampton Roads. Others did things that few people could have predicted in 1861. Shepard Mallory, the third of the three men who presented themselves to Butler, worked as a carpenter and was on his way to owning his own home at 260 Lincoln Street.1 Some worked as nurses in government hospitals under the supervision of Harriet Tubman, who had been appointed “Matron at the Colored Hospital” by the surgeon general of the United States.2 Others served in the army. Gaston Becton and the black men who had joined the Thirty-Sixth U.S. Colored Infantry in North Carolina (after Abraham Galloway extracted a series of promises from Union army recruiters) filed into the fort at the end of May.

The way was far from smooth for anybody. Harriet Tubman found so many abuses in the hospitals that she marched off to Washington, D.C., in July to advise the surgeon general personally about them. Becton, still in his teens, went on a growth spurt and outgrew his uniform by several inches. Many of his married comrades-in-arms were outraged to learn that back home on Roanoke Island authorities were cutting off rations, leaving the men’s families to go hungry because the regiment’s wages were delayed (as usual) and the soldiers could not send pay home to buy food. To top it off, the Thirty-Sixth U.S. Colored Infantry was heading to Texas, the last place the men had expected to go when they signed up in 1863.3 As the United States prepared to move from war to ostensible peace in 1865, things looked much different from how they had looked in 1861; they also looked different from how anyone had expected.

Richmond, Virginia, erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, certainly looked different. Explosions had rocked it on April 3, when the retreating Army of Northern Virginia blew up an ironclad and torched ammunition stockpiles on its way out of town. The city was rocked once again when black Union troops entered. The Thirty-Sixth U.S. Colored Infantry, the Twenty-Ninth Connecticut Infantry, the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, and more marched and “rode in triumph along the streets” while black Richmonders “cheered and cheered.” Back on Roanoke Island, when family members of the men of the Thirty-Sixth U.

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