Union Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler may not have the best soldier.
But when three escaped slaves sought asylum at Fort Monroe in late May 1861, the wily peacetime lawyer made a decision that affected the Civil War as much as victory in battle.
Meeting Confederate Maj. John B. Cary on horseback on the banks of Mill Creek, Butler rebuffed an attempt to reclaim the slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Then he turned Southern logic on its head, defining the men as property and confiscating them as "contraband of war."
The next day, Frank Baker, James Townsend and Shepard Mallory were followed by eight other slaves seeking protection. Nearly 50 appeared at the fort the day after that.
Within weeks, more than 900 slaves had found refuge at would become known as "Freedom's Fortress." Yet they were just the first in a vast wave that came from as far as Tennessee and South Carolina, and which — by war's end — totaled more than 13,500 people.
"If you look at Hampton today, you can still see that legacy in the black neighborhoods of Olde Hampton and along old Buckroe Road in Phoebus," Hampton History Museum curator J. Michael Cobb says.
"Of all the neighborhoods here, those two are unique. They were created because of the desire to be free."
Among the most defining parts of that desire was a hunger for education.
As the ranks of the contrabands grew, they overwhelmed two existing schools for blacks — including that of freeborn teacher Mary S. Peake — then spurred the building of new schools staffed by the zealous abolitionists of the American Missionary Association.
Following the war, the AMA joined former Union Gen. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, head of Hampton's Freedmen's Bureau, to create Hampton Normal & Agricultural Institute on a 120-acre farm on the Hampton River. The school produced hundreds of teachers in its first decades, spawning an educational revolution through such graduates as Booker T. Washington and helping create a black middle class.
"I went to Hampton in patches," wrote 1876 graduate Andrew Bassette, who went on to became a prominent Hampton educator, landowner and assistant commonwealth's attorney.
Bassette and other graduates joined with Hampton's contrabands to play a major role in rebuilding the town after the war. In addition to providing labor, the enterprising former slaves operated many businesses on Queen Street in the late 1800s. By 1896, some 600 blacks were listed as property owners.
"The period after the war was a remarkable triumph for both blacks and whites," says historian Robert Engs, author of "Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton 1861-1890."
"These people didn't love each other. But they worked together in a way that was seldom seen anyplace else — and which they wouldn't do later.
"Hampton was Reconstruction the way it was supposed to be — and that really made it different from the rest of the South."
Find out more about the contrabands at dailypress.com/ freedomsfortress.