Contraband (American Civil War)

Contraband was a term commonly used in the United States military during the American Civil War to describe a new status for certain escaped slaves or those who affiliated with Union forces. The Army (and the United States Congress) determined that the US would not return escaped slaves who went to Union lines and classified them as contraband. They used many as laborers to support Union efforts and soon began to pay them wages. The former slaves set up camps near Union forces, and the Army helped support and educate both adults and children among the refugees. Thousands of men from these camps enlisted in the United States Colored Troops when recruitment started in 1863. At war's end, more than 100 contraband camps existed in the South, including the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island, where 3500 former slaves worked to develop a self-sufficient community.

The status of southern-owned slaves after Confederate states had engaged in the American Civil War became an issue early in 1861, not long after hostilities began. At Fort Monroe in Virginia's Hampton Roads, Major General Benjamin Butler, commander, learned that three slaves had made their way across Hampton Roads harbor from Confederate-occupied Norfolk County, and presented themselves at Union-held Fort Monroe. General Butler refused to return the escaped slaves to slaveholders who supported the Confederacy. This amounted to classifying them as "contraband," although the first use of that terminology in military records appears to have been by another officer. (see below).

The three slaves, Frank Baker, James Townsend and Sheppard Mallory, had been leased by their masters to the Confederate Army to help construct defense batteries at Sewell's Point, across the mouth of Hampton Roads from the Union-held Fort Monroe. They escaped at night and rowed a skiff to Old Point Comfort, where they sought asylum at Fort Monroe.

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