Contraband (American Civil War)
Contraband was a term commonly used in the US military during the American Civil War to describe a new status for certain people who escaped slavery or those who affiliated with Union forces.
[1] By the end of the war, more than one hundred contraband camps were operating in the Southern United States, including the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina.
Fort Monroe, in Hampton Roads, Virginia, was a major Union stronghold which never fell to the Confederate States of America, despite its close proximity to their capital city, Richmond.
On May 24, 1861, three men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend, escaped enslavement by crossing Hampton Roads harbor at night from the Confederate-occupied Norfolk County, Virginia, and seeking refuge in Fort Monroe.
General Butler, who was an attorney, took the position that, if Virginia considered itself a foreign country, then the Fugitive Slave Act did not apply, and he was under no obligation to return the three men; he would hold them as "contraband of war".
President Abraham Lincoln did not — he did not recognize secession as legitimate — but he nevertheless had "Simon Cameron, the secretary of war, [telegraph] Butler to inform him that his contraband policy 'is approved.
[6] General Butler's written statements and communications with the War Department requesting guidance on the issue of fugitive slaves did not use the term "contraband.
[10] Three weeks later, the Union Army followed suit, paying male "contrabands" at Fort Monroe $8 a month and females $4, specific to that command.
[12] By the end of the war in April 1865, less than four years later, an estimated 10,000 people escaped slavery and applied to gain "contraband" status, with many living nearby.
[12][15] For most of the contrabands, full emancipation did not take place until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, was ratified on December 6, 1865.
Morning and evening, as he promenaded his spacious gallery, in all the glitter of military button and strap, he passed in review the living panorama before him, which was to furnish such valuable acquisitions to the confiscated plantations on the Lafourche and the coast.
In one place groups of human beings, with melancholy faces, were crouched on the earth around some decaying embers; in another, men, women and children were moving in some African dance to the discordant chant of a hundred voices; in another, crowds were reclining in listless idleness on the ground, in every attitude that betrays the vacant mind; in another, half clad men and women were feasting and rioting amidst peals and shouts of unearthly merriments; in another, awkward field hands, grotesquely dressed, were being taken through the exercises of squad drill and the manual of arms, while in the midst of all these scenes blue-coated officers and men were seen in amorous dalliance with the colored Aspasias of the town, exhibiting, in their degradation, a contempt for the commonest decencies of life.
From its sacred chancel a half-crazy negro, with the voice of a Stentor and the fire of Peter the Hermit, declaimed in a barbaric jargon to an auditory whose appreciation was manifested in wild shouts and screams.
The declamation of the preacher, in which the name of God was connected with ideas of heathen superstition, seemed to light up in the minds of his hearers the dormant spark of African barbarism which had smouldered for generations.
