{"id":1289,"date":"2015-06-14T10:51:22","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T15:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2015-06-14T10:51:22","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T15:51:22","slug":"a-forgotten-hero-of-the-american-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/06\/14\/a-forgotten-hero-of-the-american-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"A Forgotten Hero of the American Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Fort Monroe<\/a>, declared that fugitive slaves reaching his command were contraband.\u00a0 This legal maneuver led to their freedom.\u00a0 Archaeology<\/strong><\/em>‘s Marion Blackburn has the story<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

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\u2019 freedom on technicalities. Before the war, he had become known as something of a social activist for instituting a 10-hour workday\u2014a reform at the time\u2014in 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 \u201ccontraband\u201d 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\u2014as contraband, subject to seizure by the Union, rendering them free.<\/p>\n

Butler was \u201ca lawyer first, and a general second,\u201d says Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, adding, \u201cHe had the disposition to help people who were defenseless in many ways.\u201d An agent for Charles King Mallory, [three escaped slaves’] owner, visited Fort Monroe to collect his \u201cproperty,\u201d and Butler explained that the law no longer applied in Virginia, which claimed to have seceded\u2014but that he would return slaves to any owner who pledged loyalty to the Union.<\/p>\n

\u201cButler\u2019s fugitive slave law,\u201d 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\u2014real and existential\u2014to local Confederate loyalists. Just months after Butler\u2019s 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\u2019s worth of land and materials, albeit charred, for the newly freed people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 Butler, however, was not without controversy<\/a> and suffered military defeats, which may explain why he’s not remembered today.\u00a0 It’s a lovely article, and, judging from Wikipedia, Butler was quite the progressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

General Benjamin F. Butler, commander of Fort Monroe, declared that fugitive slaves reaching his command were contraband.\u00a0 This legal maneuver led to their freedom.\u00a0 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 \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1290,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions\/1290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}