The ironclad Monitor on the James River, 1862 Library of Congress
By TAFT KISER May 16, 2012, 12:30 pm
In an 1862 letter to his wife, Anna, William Keeler described the moment he saw a slave became a free man. It was late at night on May 16, and he was below decks on the Monitor, the Union ironclad then on duty off City Point in Virginia’s James River, 15 miles southeast of Richmond and 70 miles inside hostile territory.
Suddenly he heard someone shout “boat ahoy,” followed by “boarders” and the crack of a rifle — at which point there was “a stampede from all the State rooms for the deck” as the crew and officers gathered to fend off the attackers. Joining them, Keeler “found a vast array of ‘Monitors’ armed to the teeth drawn up, confronting the enemy – a poor trembling contraband.”
The man, who Keeler said had escaped from a nearby plantation,
was pretty thoroughly frightened by being shot at by our guard and soon found his voice, crying at the pitch of his voice, “O, Lor’ Massa, oh don’t shoot, I’se a black man Massa, I’se a black man.”
Along with another ironclad, the Galena, the Monitor was on the James as part of the Navy’s contribution to the Peninsula Campaign, Gen. George B. McClellan’s enormous drive to take the Confederate capital in the spring of 1862. On May 15 the fleet had reached Drewry’s Bluff, a fortified site downriver from Richmond, and began furiously dueling with Confederate gun emplacements on shore.
Over the next four hours, they battered one another with everything from rifles to 11-inch cannonballs. The Galena took 44 hard hits, leaving her, Keeler recorded, “spattered with blood & brains & lumps of flesh.” Her corporal, John Mackie, stood in the storm and fought back with his rifle. Abraham Lincoln later congratulated Mackie and he received the Medal of Honor – the first awarded to a United States Marine. But despite the valor of Mackie and others, the fleet retreated at the end of the day, to City Point — where, the next evening, Keeler encountered the “contraband.”
It must have taken the man quite an effort to reach the Monitor; low to the waterline and thus vulnerable to attack, the ironclad would have been surrounded by larger, heavier ships, all with sentries posted overnight. The runaway would have to have passed undetected through that ring of sentries, perhaps by lying in the bottom of his boat and letting the tide carry him, then, at close range, manning his oars and rushed the Monitor — all told a mile of open water.
Though Keeler seemed to see the incident as little more than an opportunity for deploying minstrel-show stereotypes, there was much more to the man’s story. His name was Josiah (often shortened to “Siah”) Carter, a 24-year-old carpenter from the James River plantation of Shirley, not far from the Monitor’s anchorage.
The plantation, and Josiah Carter, were owned by a man named Hill Carter (traditionally, slaves used their master’s surname). Hill Carter was a cousin of Robert E. Lee’s, who often visited Shirley and whose wife, Mary Custis Lee, took refuge with Hill in 1861 after fleeing their home in Arlington, Va. Growing up, Josiah would have known the Lee’s and their children, a total of three future Confederate generals.
Despite reaching the Monitor, Carter was not necessarily free. After all, he wasn’t the first to seek shelter with the ship: on the Monitor’s way upriver, slaves had come to her, begging to enlist, and had been turned away. That’s because, officially, the Fugitive Slave Act remained the law of the land, and many soldiers and sailors opposed emancipation. Returning fugitives to slavery had just been forbidden, but when another escapee joined Carter, one of the crew, George Geer, commented: “I wish they would send every one of them back as fast as they came. I am down on this Nigger stealing.”
But the Monitor’s captain, William Jeffers, saw something in Josiah Carter and brought him on board as a “first class boy” — one of the Navy’s first enlisted contrabands. It may have been the Shirley-Carter tie: Jeffers knew Hill Carter’s son, Robert Randolph Carter, who had served 19 years in the Union Navy before “going South.” Enlisting Carter may have been a personal act of retribution.
Carter became the cook for the enlisted men. In a letter home, Geer remarked on Carter’s first week aboard:
This one I wrote you we had for a cook has gotten quite important already, and one of the saylors he had some lip to gave him a smack over the mouth, which for the present has learned him his place. He began to think him self as good as a white man, and I must say he does know as much as some of these Saylors.
Carter grew up in the Tidewater, where the eye could roam for miles. In his new universe, he and 50-odd strangers shared a partly submerged iron box that was 12 feet high, 36 feet wide, and 127 feet long. Flies and mosquitoes filled the stagnant air, while the temperature in his galley ran as high as 156 degrees. On deck in the shade it was 90 degrees and 125 degrees in the sun. Down below, the crew once recorded a temperature of 120 degrees.
Until the Monitor sailed away on Aug. 29, Carter was usually in sight of Shirley. Perhaps he caught glimpses of the girl he left behind, 17-year-old Eliza Tarrow. But by his own choice, he preferred his new life, even if it was in an iron coffin. That was the difference between freedom and slavery.
First in a series about the life of Josiah Carter.
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Sources: William Frederick Keeler, “Aboard the U.S.S. Monitor, 1862”; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of Rebellion; John M. Coski, “Capital Navy: The Men, Ships and Operations of the James River Squadron”; “Medal of Honor Men – John F. Mackie,” “Blue and Gray,” Vol. 3 No.1 (1894); Eugene D. Genovese, “A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South”; Mel Watkins, “On the Real Side”; William A. Dobak, “Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops”; Emory M. Thomas, “Robert E. Lee: A Biography”; National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System; Iver Bernstein, “The New York City Draft Riots”; Harold B. Gill and Joanne Young, “Searching for the Franklin Expedition”; Benjamin F. Butler, “Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler”; William Marvel, ed., “The Monitor Chronicles: One Sailor’s Account”; Barbara Brooks Tomblin, “Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy.”
Taft Kiseris an archaeologist and the author, with Charles Carter, of the forthcoming book “Struggling in the Tide: Robert E. Lee’s Shirley Cousins.”
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