Contraband of War

In 1861 white Virginians were at a crossroads. Would they remain in the United States or join most of their further south neighbors in seceding? After the 1860 election of President Abraham Lincoln, there had been a growing fear throughout the south that Northerners intended to interfere with the institution of slavery, and ultimately their economy and way of life. Not wanting to wait idly for that possibility to become a reality, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas all seceded between December 1860 and February 1861. Virginia hesitated.

The February 1861 Virginia Convention was called so that state delegates could vote on the decision. After initially voting to stay in the Union, the delegates reversed course after the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861. After the battle at Fort Sumter, President Lincoln began assembling a volunteer army of 75,000 troops from states in the Union. Shortly after, on April 17, the Virginia Convention officially voted to secede from the United States. On Thursday May 23, 1861 a statewide referendum for Virginians to confirm the delegates' decision took place, effectively joining the Confederacy.²⁰

On the very same evening of May 23, 1861, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend escaped from their enslaver, Colonel Charles Mallory, after hearing that they’d soon be taken to North Carolina to build a Confederate army outpost. They rowed a small boat from Sewell’s Point in modern day Norfolk to Fort Monroe in Hampton.²¹ They would be some of the first in a flood of formerly enslaved Black Virginians who would seek refuge in Union Army territory during the Civil War. Their encounter with Union Army Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler would take place just steps away from where the first Africans landed after being trafficked to America 242 years earlier.

With no channel of communication between the three men and their comrades, over the coming days they would soon be joined by dozens and then hundreds also fleeing their plantations in search of “Freedom Fort”. Edward L. Pierce, a private in the Union Army, was detailed to gather and assign duties to the formerly enslaved self-emancipators that made their way to Fort Monroe. In his November 1861 article “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe” for The Atlantic Monthly he explains, “Such is the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population. Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the Gulf."²²

Terminology

President Abraham Lincoln made it clear in his First Inaugural Address that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”²³ Moreover, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a mandate for federal officials to help retrieve and return escaped slaves anywhere in the United States, was still the law of the land.²⁴

Having no clear protocol, and even after receiving instruction not to harbor the fugitives, Union Army Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler declared the men “contraband of war”. In short, because Virginia voted to secede from the Union, General Butler argued that enslaved people could be seized just as any other property which would aid an enemy during wartime.²⁵

Edward Pierce captured the northern sentiment with regards to the freedom of this self-liberated group: “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion...The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen, but has no objection to their being declared contrabands...when Butler issues an order commanding it to be done because it is a military necessity."²⁶

Southern Persepective

“The institution of slavery in the South alone enables her to place in the field a force much larger in proportion to her white population than the North, or indeed any country which is dependent entirely on free labor. The institution is a tower of strength to the South, particularly at the present crisis, and our enemies will be likely to find that the ‘Moral Cancer’ about which their orators are so fond of prating, is really one of the most effective weapons employed against the Union by the South.”

— The Alabama Advertiser (1861) ²⁷

Southerners, in their arrogance and ignorance, expected that their loyal property would provide an advantage for the Confederacy during the war. The war was not expected to be long, and the day to day activities of the slave population were not expected to be significantly disturbed. Most in the South felt that their class of free laborers would allow the Confederacy to draft a sizable army of white men, while their slaves could continue agricultural production.

To be sure that Blacks in the South didn’t get the idea that the Union was coming to liberate them, southerners stoked fear in the hearts and minds of slaves through propaganda. Without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness, southern newspapers published stories of Yankees cutting off the ears of fugitive slaves, overworking and underpaying them, marrying their women, and selling the men to more violent slavery in the West Indies. Of course, rather than taking the untrustworthy word of their enslavers, “The Negroes of the cities, the Negroes who were being hired out, the Negroes of intelligence who could read and write, all began carefully to watch the unfolding of the situation” and relayed this intel throughout their communities.²⁸

Emancipation

In his 1935 work Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that slaves freed themselves. As an enslaved unpaid working class, he likens their decision to leave the plantation in the wake of the Civil War to a general strike. This decision simultaneously removed the class of labor that southerners had grown dependent on and provided the Union with enough support to tip the scales of the Civil War in their favor. When all was said and done “roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy”. And while Black women could not formally join the army they “nonetheless served as nurses, spies, and scouts”.²⁹ When we discuss the catalysts for emancipation of Black people in the United States, we must lead with the courageous individuals and collectives like those included in the Library of Virginia's “Runaway and Escaped Slaves Records”.