Short answers, pulled from the story.
During the Civil War, contraband referred to enslaved people who escaped to Union lines and were reclassified as captured enemy property rather than being returned to Confederate owners. The policy originated at Fort Monroe in May 1861, when Major General Benjamin Butler refused to return three men under the legal argument that Virginia's secession voided the Fugitive Slave Act.
Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend were three enslaved men who escaped to Fort Monroe on the 24th of May, 1861, becoming the first people classified as contraband of war. They had been forced to construct a Confederate artillery battery at Sewell's Point before their escape across Hampton Roads harbor.
Mary S. Peake was the first Black teacher hired by the American Missionary Association and taught both adult and child contrabands to read and write at the Grand Contraband Camp near Fort Monroe. She held classes outdoors under a large oak tree, defying Virginia law that prohibited educating enslaved people. That tree was later named the Emancipation Oak after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was read there in 1863.
By the end of the war, more than two hundred fifty contraband camps were operating across the Southern United States. An estimated 10,000 people had sought contraband status near Fort Monroe alone, and Union forces managed more than 100 camps across the South.
The Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island was a self-sustaining community developed from 1863 to 1867 by Congregational chaplain Horace James, who was appointed by the Union Army. It grew from a camp established in 1862 and housed approximately 3,500 formerly enslaved people who worked to build an independent community on the island.
In August 1861, Congress passed the Confiscation Act, and the following March passed the Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves, which formally barred returning enslaved persons to Confederate enslavers. The Emancipation Proclamation on the 1st of January, 1863 freed all contrabands, and the Thirteenth Amendment ratified on the 6th of December, 1865 abolished slavery nationwide.