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Declared “contraband” of war, they were employed and paid wages according to the gendered norms prevalent in the North: the men building fortifications and hauling military supplies, the women cooking, washing and mending clothes for soldiers along with the multitude of others fleeing Southern plantations.

Historians have argued that Butler’s so-called contraband of war policy did not concern itself with the Black men’s humanity.

It was just months into the Civil War in 1861 when Union leaders declared that slaves who reached Union lines would not be returned to their Confederate owners and instead be considered “contraband” of war since they came from a self-proclaimed foreign land.

It witnessed the beginning of slavery but also the end: early in the civil war, three enslaved men seeking freedom escaped to Fort Monroe and were deemed by the commander as “contraband of war”, spurring thousands to seek sanctuary behind Union lines and ultimately a shift in government policy towards emancipation.

“He could not help but notice the large numbers of blacks, some already working, a few sleeping in the open air. In a little over a year, over eleven thousand freedmen and women, called ‘contraband of war,’ had flocked on the city, and another three thousand were housed at Alexandria.”