General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Fort Monroe, declared that fugitive slaves reaching his command were contraband. This legal maneuver led to their freedom. Archaeology‘s Marion Blackburn has the story of Fort Monroe and how the city of Hampton, abandoned burned by the Confederates to prevent its use, instead gave the slaves free reign to build their own community:
In command at Fort Monroe was Major General Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal defense lawyer from Boston who had accrued a fortune by winning clients’ freedom on technicalities. Before the war, he had become known as something of a social activist for instituting a 10-hour workday—a reform at the time—in a mill he had purchased. Using his familiarity with legal loopholes, on May 24, 1861, Butler made what has come to be known legally as the “contraband” argument. Because the enemy considered slaves property, he reasoned, and because their labor was being used for the war effort, Butler concluded that runaway slaves were to be treated as any other illegal war goods would be—as contraband, subject to seizure by the Union, rendering them free.
Butler was “a lawyer first, and a general second,” says Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, adding, “He had the disposition to help people who were defenseless in many ways.” An agent for Charles King Mallory, [three escaped slaves’] owner, visited Fort Monroe to collect his “property,” and Butler explained that the law no longer applied in Virginia, which claimed to have seceded—but that he would return slaves to any owner who pledged loyalty to the Union.
“Butler’s fugitive slave law,” as it came to be known, drew thousands of slaves to Fort Monroe from as far away as North Carolina and Maryland, provided valuable Union labor, and represented a threat—real and existential—to local Confederate loyalists. Just months after Butler’s decision, on the order of Brigadier General John B. Magruder, the Confederate commander at Yorktown, the Confederates abandoned and burned Hampton. Their destruction of the city may have been intended as a provocation to the Union, but it had a different effect. It left a city’s worth of land and materials, albeit charred, for the newly freed people.
This was before the Emancipation Proclamation, making the legal maneuver all the more clever; it set an example that was emulated in more than 100 locations. Butler, however, was not without controversy and suffered military defeats, which may explain why he’s not remembered today. It’s a lovely article, and, judging from Wikipedia, Butler was quite the progressive.
