Contraband Camps: Fort Monroe's Three Fugitives, Slabtown and Roanoke

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On May 24, 1861, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory and James Townsend escaped from Norfolk County, where they had been forced to build a Confederate battery at Sewell's Point, and crossed to Fort Monroe. When a Confederate agent demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act, Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts trial lawyer, argued that Virginia could not claim to be a foreign nation and still invoke federal law, and held the men as contraband of war. The War Department quietly approved, and a Thomas Nast illustration in June 1861 spread the new meaning of the word across the North.

Wage labor followed: Gideon Welles set Navy pay at $10 a month, while the Army at Fort Monroe paid men $8 and women $4. About 10,000 people eventually reached the fort, and after Confederates burned Hampton, refugees built the Grand Contraband Camp from salvaged wood, known as Slabtown. Union forces came to manage more than 250 camps. Residents also faced evictions by Union troops seeking winter quarters, forced conscription, and recapture, as at Harpers Ferry, where about 1,500 people were taken back into slavery.

Mary S. Peake, a free Black teacher, taught classes under the tree now called the Emancipation Oak at Hampton University.
The Emancipation Proclamation was read beneath that oak in 1863.
One American Missionary Association school operated in the former home of President John Tyler.
On Roanoke Island, chaplain Horace James helped 3,500 residents build sawmills, grist mills and planned avenues.
A hostile Confederate report from Opelousas, Louisiana, described Black men drilling with rifles in the town square.

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