The Virginian-Pilot
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REPRINT: Order a color booklet containing all eight chapters.
SUMMER 1861
As the steamships carrying thousands of his soldiers made their way out of Hampton Roads and up the Chesapeake toward Baltimore, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler finally had time to think.
He’d been crippled by the sudden order to send four regiments north. The unexpected loss of men forced him to put off planned expeditions to Yorktown and Virginia’s Eastern Shore. More dispiriting was his troops’ hasty retreat from the town of Hampton, which they’d occupied for two months.
But what was most on the general’s mind on July 30, 1861, wasn’t battle plans or troop movements. It was the status of more than 900 former slaves who’d been forced to flee Hampton alongside his soldiers.
Old and young, men and women, crying babies and wide-eyed children, they had bolted awake and set off in the middle of the night, following the Yankee soldiers back to the secure waterfront fort. After a few weeks of freedom, or something like it, they did not risk lingering where they might be captured and returned to bondage.
Butler considered the crowd. Children and teens made up about half the group; among the adults were almost 300 men and about 175 women.
Butler’s lawyerly mind couldn’t help venturing beyond the challenges posed by where and how this flood of newcomers would live. Deeper questions gnawed at him.
“Are these men, women and children slaves? Are they free? Is their condition that of men, women and children, or of property, or is it a mixed relation?” he wrote to Simon Cameron, the secretary of war. “What has been the effect of a rebellion and a state of war upon that status?”
Two months earlier, shortly after arriving at Fort Monroe, Butler had decided that three slaves who had escaped after being forced to work for the Confederate cause were contraband – no different than rebel gunpowder or muskets or horses – who could be put to work for the Union Army.
It had been a snap decision, a shortcut around a thorny political issue.
But the women and children ...
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In May 1861, three Virginia slaves approached the new Union commander at Fort Monroe and asked for asylum. What happened next changed the course of history.
This special color reprint contains the story, originally published in eight parts, written by Kate Wiltrout. The series ran in The Virginian-Pilot from July 18-25, 2010.
Order a booklet containing all eight chapters. Individual copies are $7 each, which includes tax and shipping. For bulk or educational orders (10 or more copies), the rate is $5 apiece.
CHAPTER 1: Loosening slavery's bonds plus an interactive map showing Fort Monroe in the 1860's
CHAPTER 2: Slaughter plus a a photo gallery
Of all the sources used in researching this story, a few stand out: The correspondence of Benjamin Butler during his time as an Army general, published 24 years after his death; a monthly publication of the American Missionary Association that described the challenges facing the contraband population in Virginia and correspondence from people sent to assist; and the digital archives of The New York Times from 1861 through 1864.
Another article set the scene in Hampton and at Fort Monroe during the first few chaotic months of the war. “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe ” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1861. It was written by Edward L. Pierce, a soldier tapped by Butler to oversee the contraband community for three months.
Historians at Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum, the Hampton History Museum, and Norfolk State University also provided valuable expertise.
Pick up the paper or order the reprint for a full list of published materials referenced in this series.
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