Betrayal at Fort Pickens: The Army Engineer Who Demanded the Fort He Built

On January 15, 1861, William Henry Chase walked up to Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor and demanded that the U.S. Army troops inside surrender. He knew the fort well: years before, as a U.S. Army engineer, he had supervised its construction. Now he came as an officer of the secessionist Florida militia. A lieutenant who watched the encounter later wrote it out as a play script. How Chase came to stand on the other side of his own walls is a story about slavery and money.

Fort Pickens, about 1860, in a Currier & Ives lithograph. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

A Northerner who became a planter

Chase was born and raised in what is now Maine, then part of Massachusetts. After West Point he joined the Army Corps of Engineers and moved south in 1819. He married Anne Mathews, of an extremely wealthy Southern family, and through the marriage came to own large plantations — the largest 6,000 acres, over nine square miles — worked by enslaved people.

Building with rented people

From 1829, Chase was superintending engineer at Pensacola Harbor, overseeing its defenses, and Fort Pickens was his first project there.

• Rented labor. With Army money he "rented" enslaved people from plantation owners to build the fort, as laborers and in skilled jobs such as mechanics. The owners were paid; the enslaved workers received nothing. Renting was common in the Army and Navy and was an enormous industry in Pensacola in the 1830s.
• "Gentleman's agreements." As abolitionists criticized the practice, Chase switched to verbal deals that left no written record. The Corps of Engineers kept renting enslaved people this way until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
• Buying from himself. Chase set up his own brick factories, worked by enslaved people, and used Army money to buy their bricks. He also ran banking, real estate and railroad businesses — all made more profitable by unpaid labor.

Choosing secession

After Abraham Lincoln's election in November 1860, slaveholding states began to secede, fearing he would abolish slavery. In October 1860 Chase wrote to the New York Express promoting the "benefits" of secession — cheaper shipping for the South and West, and a new union of twenty-four states leaving New England and the industrial North "to work out their salvation in their own way." When Florida seceded in January 1861, he was made an officer of its militia.

Fort Pickens today. Credit: NPS.

Lieutenant Adam Slemmer, commanding the fort, refused Chase's demands — by message and then in person. For two months Chase kept 1,700 troops facing the fort. Later in the war, under other Confederate officers, the two sides fought over Fort Pickens, but the United States never surrendered it.

Betrayal, or no surprise?

Seen one way, Chase betrayed his New England roots, the Army and the country. Seen another, it is not surprising at all: he had made himself a Southerner, and his whole career rested on the labor of enslaved people.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Betrayal at Fort Pickens," adapted by Talia Brenner and Katie McCarthy from the Teaching with Historic Places lesson "Fort Pickens and the Outbreak of the Civil War," from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Thomas Hulse, "Military Slave Rentals, the Construction of Army Fortifications, and the Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida, 1824–1863" (Florida Historical Quarterly, 2010), and David L. Walby, William Henry Chase: Uniquely American (2014).