Fort Monroe

Listen first. Wind comes off the water from three directions here, and gulls call over the low grassy walls. Under your feet, old brick and granite hold the morning damp. A wide moat circles the stone. On a calm day it reflects the sky so clearly that the fort seems to float. This is Fort Monroe, at Old Point Comfort, the tip of the Virginia Peninsula in Hampton.

Look out past the walls and you can see why anyone would build here. This narrow point of land guards the entrance to Hampton Roads, a great natural harbour. Here the James, Elizabeth, and Nansemond rivers meet the Chesapeake Bay. Every ship heading for the inland ports had to pass this spot. For centuries, whoever held the point could watch, warn, and defend. That simple fact of geography shaped almost everything that happened here.

The story begins long before the stone fort. English colonists from Jamestown built a small wooden outpost on this point in the early seventeenth century, called Fort Algernon. Then, in 1619, a ship arrived carrying captive Africans. They were the first enslaved Africans recorded in the English colonies of North America. Today the site marks that arrival as the beginning of a long and painful history. Remember that date as you walk. It returns, in a different form, later in this story.

The fort you see now came after the War of 1812. During that war, British ships had sailed up the Chesapeake and burned Washington. The young United States decided it needed strong coastal defences. Construction here began in 1819, and the work took roughly fifteen years. The fort was named for James Monroe, the fifth president. When it was finished, it was the largest stone fort ever built in the United States. People called it the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. One of the army engineers who worked on these walls was a young lieutenant named Robert E. Lee. He served here in the early 1830s, long before he commanded Confederate armies. And a few years earlier, a young private served at the fort under a false name. He enlisted as Edgar A. Perry. History knows him better as Edgar Allan Poe. Two very different futures passed through the same gate.

Now look at the shape of the fort. It is not a simple square. It has seven sides, with pointed bastions projecting from the walls. A bastion is a thrusting corner that lets defenders fire along the face of the wall, so no attacker can hide beneath it. Inside the walls run casemates, which are vaulted brick chambers built into the thickness of the fort. Cannons once fired through their openings. Later, soldiers and their families lived in them.

Then came the Civil War, and the most important moment in the fort's history. Virginia joined the Confederacy in 1861, but Fort Monroe stayed in Union hands. That May, three enslaved men escaped across the water to the fort. Their names were Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend. Their enslaver demanded them back. The Union commander, General Benjamin Butler, refused.

Butler's reasoning was legal and practical. Virginia had declared itself out of the Union, he argued, so its claims under federal law no longer applied. He treated the men as contraband of war, meaning enemy property that the army could keep. The word sounds cold today. But the decision opened a door. Word spread fast. Over the following months and years, thousands of enslaved people came to the fort and the camps around it. This place became known as Freedom's Fortress.

Think about the two dates together. In 1619, near this point, slavery arrived in English Virginia. In 1861, at this same point, a crack opened in that system. Few places in America hold both the beginning and an early turning point of slavery's end. That is one reason why Fort Monroe became a national monument in 2011, after the army finally left. The proclamation recognised it as a place of both bondage and freedom.

The war left other marks here. In March 1862, the waters just offshore saw the Battle of Hampton Roads. It was the first clash between two ironclad warships, the Union Monitor and the Confederate Virginia. Their duel changed naval warfare around the world. That same spring, President Abraham Lincoln came to the fort himself to help direct operations nearby. Stand on the walls facing the water and picture smoke rising from those iron hulls.

After the war, the fort became a prison for a very famous captive. Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, was held here in 1865. He was kept for a time in one of the casemates. Today the Casemate Museum occupies part of these vaulted chambers, and you can see the space where he was confined. It is a quiet, low room. The thick brick walls hold the cool air even on hot summer afternoons.

For more than a century afterward, the fort remained an active army post. It became a centre for training coastal artillery, and later a headquarters for army education and doctrine. You can see that long working life in the buildings. Officers' houses with deep porches sit inside the walls. Just outside, the Old Point Comfort Lighthouse stands near the shore. It dates from the very early nineteenth century, older than the stone fort itself.

As you walk, notice how the place feels now. Joggers follow the moat. Families picnic on lawns where soldiers once drilled. Across the channel lies a small artificial island with a second fort, built to work with this one. Stop for a moment where the water meets the land. The same tide moved here in 1619 and in 1861. Look at the old stone around you, and carry these names with you when you leave.