Varina(76)

Fortress Monroe


1865–1867


THE WILLIAM P. CLYDE ANCHORED OFF OLD POINT COMFORT in that convolution of water and scraps of land where the Atlantic becomes the Chesapeake, and the Bay becomes Hampton Roads, where three rivers empty. Fortress Monroe squatted huge and bristling with black cannons just past the shoreline, among them the Lincoln gun, largest in the world. A fort had stood on that strategic spot since Pocahontas convinced her father not to bash John Smith’s brains out with a big wooden mallet. The first fort would have been a small enclosure of earth berms and log palings, but the current one was an enormous, brutal piece of masonry architecture surrounded by a moat. Its final stages of construction had been supervised by Robert E. Lee when he was a young U.S. Army engineer. Also, Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619. History loves irony, V thought.

She stood on the deck of the Clyde, studying the view and making an effort to believe that ten minutes of sunshine and salt air in fine spring weather might stop her trembling. She breathed and tried not to imagine how her life would go even a few hours into the future, not to wonder what the next loss might be. Directly in front of her, the brutal Fortress. Off to the side, across the mouth of the Bay, Cape Henry and Cape Charles, and beyond those two points of land, the Atlantic Ocean began and the whole world unfolded. She tried to picture a globe. A straight line across the Atlantic from where she stood would make landfall in France or Spain.


ALL THE WAY UP THE COAST and for a day after they arrived, the children hardly left their bunks, so terrorized that Jimmie had been taken and fearing they might be next. Small boats came and went exchanging messages with Washington. What to do with the prisoners?

Since Irwinville, their group had enlarged to include old friends Clement Clay and his wife, Virginia, and even the postmaster general, Reagan. Also former Vice President Stephens, who weighed even less than usual. His skin crinkled like dried corn husks, and he had spent most of the trip in his tiny cabin nursing his slave, Robert, who had been felled by seasickness.

Old Point Comfort, the Fortress, and history’s love of irony drove V back into memory. During the war between Brierfield and The Hurricane, one evening under the big tree, Pemberton told her about the finale of the Black Hawk War, back when Jeff was a young lieutenant in the northern wilderness. Pemberton had been there by Jeff’s side as always. Except the war was more a protest or an uprising over failures to honor treaties than a full-on war. The terrible enemy of the United States amounted to about five hundred people, all ages and sexes. The army quickly killed a bunch of men, women, and children and ended the matter. Jeff and Lincoln—both in their twenties—attended that conflict, and might have met briefly. After the army captured Chief Black Hawk, Jeff was put in charge of taking him down the river on his way to prison back east. Pemberton remembered Black Hawk as a man of sixty-four, beat and tired of living. Every river town they docked at, people crowded in, trying to see the famous conquered warrior. But Jeff refused to drag him out on deck for a show. The old chief, who spoke English, thanked him. Said the young chief—meaning Jeff—treated the old chief like he understood what it would be like to swap places. Pemberton remembered that along the way two of Black Hawk’s men got sick, fixing to die. Jeff put them off the boat in heavy woods and told Black Hawk they should pass to the hunting grounds together. At Saint Louis, a huge crowd at the dock demanded to see Black Hawk, but Davis stood in front of them and shouted that he wasn’t there to give them a show, a lion stuffed with straw, or some mummy king from Egypt. And the irony part was that at the end of his journey, the prison where Black Hawk ended up was right there—Fortress Monroe. And Black Hawk’s vision of Jeff swapping places with him was about to become prophetic.


GENERAL MILES, the twenty-five-year-old officer in charge—he’d been a shop clerk before wartime brevet promotions elevated him—had made the announcement. Jeff and Clement were to go straight into Fortress Monroe. Burton to Old Capitol Prison in the shadow of the Capitol dome in Washington, where Mary Surratt and the other assassination conspirators awaited trial and hanging, and Stephens to Fort Warren on an island in Boston Harbor. Burton looked terrified, and Stephens seemed dazed, as if the announcement had been made in a foreign language. All V could do was look at Burton with tears in her eyes and touch her lips as he was taken away.

Jeff and Clement Clay were frog-marched down a narrow wood dock to a shoreline where crowds of onlookers, jeerers, scofflaws, and journalists waited. A soldier walked by Jeffy and said, Oh, stop crying, baby. I doubt they’ll kill your father. Jeffy wiped his eyes and said, When I grow up I’m killing every Yankee I see.

Next day the papers said Jeff’s manner remained haughty throughout the public part of the ordeal. What did they expect? Contrition? Little General Miles took him not through the main gate to the Fortress but over the moat into a little side door through the thick walls and into the casemates. Jeff’s cell was a sort of burial between wide-spaced stone walls and beneath twenty feet of soil growing grass, all supported by subterranean low brick arches seeping moisture and growing mold. A dim meditative space suitable for penance. That or digging deep into self-absolution and bloody-eyed self-righteousness.

All the servants—enslaved black, free black, white—were taken away, and Miles wouldn’t say where they were going and wouldn’t let her write a letter to General Saxton to ask about Jimmie. Wouldn’t let her write to anyone. When they took Ellen away, she and V wept, and the children pleaded uselessly with Miles not to separate them from Ellen.