African Americans and Emancipation in the Civil War

Barely a month into the Civil War, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend transformed a war for Union into a war for emancipation. Baker, Mallory, and Townsend, all enslaved men, abandoned the Confederate fortifications for which their labor had been requisitioned, and presented themselves to Union officials at Fort Monroe. The United States army remained, as it had been at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, a defender of the pro-slavery status quo, but the Union commander at Fort Monroe, Benjamin Butler, saw an opportunity to weaken his enemy. He accepted the men into his camp and refused to surrender them when a Confederate official appeared the following day. Butler labeled the men “contraband of war” – a legal definition that applied to property seized from an enemy that could be put to military use – and created the term of art used by Union commanders who refused to send escaping slaves back to their masters. ¹ Butler was no saint. He frankly admitted that his order allowed him to “take all that property which constituted the wealth of that state, and furnished the means by which the war is prosecuted.” By continuing to regard enslaved people as “property” Butler appeared to do little on behalf of slaves themselves, but he also recognized that if by his order “human beings were brought to the free enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such objection might not require much consideration.” ²