Contraband (American Civil War)
On the night of the 24th of May, 1861, three men named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend rowed across Hampton Roads harbor in darkness. They had been forced to build an artillery battery at Sewell's Point, aimed directly at the Union fort they were now rowing toward. When they reached Fort Monroe in Virginia, they were not turned away. The commander who received them, Major General Benjamin Butler, was an attorney, and he had a legal argument ready. What happened next set in motion a policy that would reshape the relationship between the United States government and hundreds of thousands of people who had been enslaved. Who were the "contrabands," how did a legal loophole become official government doctrine, and what did the camps that sprang up across the South actually look like for the people living in them?
Major General Benjamin Butler faced a dilemma that the existing law had not anticipated. Under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the owners of enslaved people were legally entitled to demand their return as property. But Virginia had seceded from the United States. Butler reasoned that if Virginia claimed to be a foreign country, the Fugitive Slave Act simply did not apply. He declared Baker, Mallory, and Townsend "contraband of war" - captured enemy property - and refused to hand them back to the Confederate agent who came asking.
President Abraham Lincoln did not recognize secession as legitimate, which made Butler's logic awkward at the national level. Lincoln's own position implicitly rejected the premise that Virginia was a foreign state. Yet Secretary of War Simon Cameron still sent Butler a telegram confirming that his contraband policy was approved. The tension between those two stances - secession is illegitimate, but the contraband policy stands - would thread through the entire war.
Butler himself, in his written communications with the War Department on the matter of fugitive slaves, did not actually use the word "contraband." As late as the 9th of August, 1861, he continued to refer to the people at Fort Monroe as "slaves." The term entered the official military record on the 10th of August, 1861, when Acting Master William Budd of the gunboat USS Resolute used it in a formal document. From there, word spread fast - first through the press, then through policy, and finally through the enslaved communities of southeastern Virginia.
On the 25th of September, 1861, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles issued a directive setting wages for people of color in the employment of the Union Navy at ten dollars per month plus a full day's ration. Three weeks later, the Union Army followed with its own pay scale at Fort Monroe: eight dollars a month for men and four dollars for women. These were not freedom; they were wages for labor performed under a status that remained legally ambiguous.
The US Congress moved to harden the policy into law. In August of 1861 it passed the Confiscation Act, which declared that any property used by the Confederate military - including enslaved people - could be seized by Union forces. The following March, Congress went further with its Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves, which barred returning enslaved persons to Confederate enslavers, whether private citizens or military.
On the 1st of January, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed all persons held as slaves in states then in rebellion against the United States. Every contraband was formally freed by that proclamation. For most people still held under Confederate control, however, full emancipation did not arrive until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on the 6th of December, 1865, abolishing slavery except as punishment for a crime. The contraband policy, born from a single attorney-general's legal improvisation at a Virginia harbor crossing, had evolved over four years into the constitutional end of slavery in the United States.
The day after Butler's decision, people who had been enslaved in southeastern Virginia began arriving at Fort Monroe in larger numbers, having heard what had happened. The fort's interior could not hold them all, so they built housing outside the walls. Camp Hamilton rose first, a military encampment just beyond the fort's perimeter. When that too became overcrowded, a larger settlement grew in the ruins of the city of Hampton, which Confederate troops had burned after learning it would be used to house the contrabands.
The new settlement took the name Grand Contraband Camp. It acquired the informal nickname "Slabtown" because its structures were built from the remnants of Hampton's destroyed buildings. Tensions were not always peaceable. Union troops at various points evicted contraband residents so that soldiers could be quartered there, and men living in the camp were at times systematically pressured to enlist in the Union Army.
By the end of the war in April 1865, an estimated 10,000 people had escaped slavery and sought contraband status in and around Fort Monroe alone. Across the South, Union forces managed more than 100 contraband camps. Not all endured safely. The 1,500 contrabands sheltering behind federal lines at Harpers Ferry were kidnapped and re-enslaved when Confederate forces took the town, a reminder that the status of contraband offered protection only as long as Union armies held the ground.
Mary S. Peake was the first Black teacher hired by the American Missionary Association, and she began teaching adult and child contrabands inside the Grand Contraband Camp to read and write. Virginia law forbade educating enslaved people. Peake and other teachers held their classes outdoors, beneath a large oak tree, defying that prohibition in plain sight.
When President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud to the contrabands and free Black people gathered there in 1863, it was read under that tree. The oak was named the Emancipation Oak in recognition of that moment. The land where Peake taught in Elizabeth City County later became part of the campus of Hampton University, a historically Black college.
By 1863, the American Missionary Association had established four schools within the Grand Contraband Camp. One of them was set up in the former home of John Tyler, the disgraced former president of the United States. The Association also dispatched Northern white teachers across the South to work alongside free Black teachers during and after the war. The teachers consistently recorded the intensity of the desire among freed adults and children alike to learn to read.
A Florida soldier in the Confederate 3rd Florida Infantry Regiment named Jacob Rand wrote a furious letter to his colonel, William S. Dilworth, describing what his battalion commander had done. On the 21st of May, Major Benjamin B. Sample had taken around forty-one enslaved people, including women and small children, from a nearby farm owned by a Mr. Harrison. He put them to work building fortifications over a creek in the heat of the day while the troops rested. When the work was finished, Sample led the group to the creek for water, then pointed them toward Union lines and walked away.
Rand's letter called it treachery and theft. Sample paid Harrison in paper dollars, his own horse, his officer's sword, and his wedding ring for the people he had sent away. The men in the unit began calling Sample a derogatory name behind his back. Rand demanded swift disciplinary action. No disciplinary record was ever filed. Sample continued his service to the Confederate cause, and the forty-one people he directed toward Union lines were recorded as having reached Tennessee, confirming their status as contrabands.
A Confederate officer from St. Landry Parish, likely General John G. Pratt, filed a report on a temporary contraband camp that occupied the town square of Opelousas, Louisiana from April to the 10th of May, 1863. The account, published in 1865 in a report to Louisiana's Confederate governor Henry W. Allen, described the scene in contemptuous terms: groups sitting around embers with "melancholy faces," people dancing, field hands being drilled in military exercises. The officer who presided over the camp was identified as Colonel Chickering of the 41st Massachusetts regiment. The Confederate officer's hostility in the account did not obscure the underlying fact - that even in a town square held only briefly by Union forces, formerly enslaved people found a temporary space between bondage and the uncertain status of contraband.
From a camp on Roanoke Island that began in 1862, a Congregational chaplain named Horace James developed the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island, which ran from 1863 to 1867. Appointed by the Union Army, James worked alongside the freedmen to build a self-sustaining community on the island. At its height, approximately 3,500 formerly enslaved people lived and worked there.
By the end of the war, more than two hundred fifty contraband camps were operating across the Southern United States. The camps have been described by historians as simultaneously humanitarian crises and incubators for a new relationship between African Americans and the United States government. That phrase captures the contradiction at the heart of the contraband system: people who had been classified as property were now building schools, towns, and military units - yet their legal standing remained defined by the logic of capture rather than citizenship.
The Thirteenth Amendment closed the legal chapter. What the contraband camps had opened, the National Humanities Center notes, was something harder to quantify: of the many enslaved people who fled between the American Revolution and the Civil War, perhaps 100,000 reached freedom. In the four years of the contraband system alone, more than two hundred fifty camps sheltered and in some cases educated tens of thousands of people. Horace James's colony on Roanoke Island, which trained freedmen in trades and literacy for five years, points toward the work the Freedmen's Bureau would carry forward once the war was over.
Common questions
What did the term contraband mean during the American Civil War?
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.
Who were Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend?
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.
Who was Mary S. Peake and what did she do in the contraband camps?
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.
How many contraband camps existed by the end of the Civil War?
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.
What was the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island?
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.
When did the US government officially stop returning escaped enslaved people to Confederate owners?
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.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 2Contraband Camps and the African American Refugee Experience during the Civil WarChandra Manning — Oxford University Press — 2017-12-19
- 3NewsHow Slavery Really Ended in AmericaAdam Goodheart — 2011-04-01
- 5JournalInteractive Map of Contraband CampsAbigail Cooper — 2014-01-01
- 6NewsSpeech of Hon. Cassius M. ClayCassius M. Clay — October 8, 1862
- 8BookChristian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861-1890Joe M. Richardson — University of Alabama Press — 2009-01-20
- 9BookOfficial report relative to the conduct of federal troops in western Louisiana: during the invasions of 1863 and 1864News printing establishment, John Dickinson, proprietor — 1865