Fort Monroe and the “Contrabands of War”: How Escaped Slaves Changed the Civil War

No one wanted war — least of all Abraham Lincoln. But he meant to secure the government's property and collect its taxes, and the Civil War began with those limited aims.

Reenactors portray Gen. Benjamin Butler's interview with freedom seekers Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend. NPS photo.

Lincoln's cautious start

During his 1860 campaign, Lincoln told a disbelieving South again and again that he had no intention of disturbing slavery where it already existed, whatever his personal views. When war came at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, he held firm: return to the Union on the old terms and all would be forgiven.

As months passed and the South stayed defiant, abolitionist officers chafed at this moderate policy:

Butler's solution

In the East, General Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe, Virginia, found a politically shrewder path. When a Virginia slaveholder demanded the return of three enslaved men — Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend — who had escaped to the fort, Butler refused: these people, whom the Confederacy considered property, were being used to wage war against the Union. He said nothing about emancipation. Such freedom seekers soon came to be called "contrabands of war," though Butler himself didn't use that phrase.

Congress endorsed the policy with the First Confiscation Act: if enslaved people were property, and their owner was in rebellion against federal authority, the military could deny him their use — so anyone taken from the Confederacy became, technically, the property of the U.S. government.

The floodgates open

Within days of Butler's decision, freedom seekers poured in. By the time Frémont was fired and Hunter reprimanded, hundreds were sheltering under Fort Monroe's guns. Returning them — or selling this "confiscated property" — soon became unthinkable. But then what?

Northern opinion began to shift. Would these people and their children remain federal property forever, or be freed to make their own way? By the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the North had decided: the war would be about more than taxes and public property. It would be about freedom.

Sources

Based on "Fort Monroe and the 'Contrabands of War,'" Fort Monroe National Monument, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.