

Hampton archive: Slabtown: Hampton home of `Freedom's Fortress' legal loophole created sanctuary for slaves


When the Civil War erupted in April 1861, both North and South braced for violent struggle.

But neither side was prepared for the sort of trouble that sprang up a few weeks later when the conflict reached the sleepy backwater of Hampton.

Three slaves, moving in the wake of a patrol from Union-occupied Fort Monroe, slipped through the lines and asked Gen. Benjamin Butler for asylum. His controversial decision to grant them shelter sparked a war-long stampede of African-American refugees - and made the wily Massachusetts politician reviled throughout the South.

Eight more slaves asked for protection the next day, and 47 the day after that, according to Army reports. Within a few weeks, the number of blacks who had found refuge at "Freedom's Fortress" exceeded 900.

They were the first of what eventually would become thousands of slaves who fled to the lower Peninsula from as far away as Tennessee and South Carolina. By war's end, census takers found that the black population in the Hampton area alone had grown from 2,417 to more than 13,500. Many of them lived in a sprawling camp known as Slabtown.

"Most blacks in Hampton can trace their families back to Slabtown - because that's where they went to find refuge," says Debbie Lee Bryant, resident genealogist of the Virginia Society for African-American Genealogy and Family Research.

"There's a whole lot of families in York County and Newport News that made their way to Slabtown, too."

Northern newspapers crowed over Butler's action, noting that the fugitives had flocked to nearly the same spot where the first blacks in the English colonies landed in 1619.

They also depicted the onetime-lawyer's negotiations with Confederate Maj. John B. Cary, the former head of an academy in Hampton, as a battle of legal loopholes, wit and logic.

The general's own report describes the encounter, which took place on horseback along the banks of Mill Creek, as a legalistic wrangle in which Cary attempted to reclaim the runaways through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

But the clever Butler, noting that the South had rebelled against federal law, turned the officer's own arguments against him.

Agreeing that the slaves should be treated as property, he ordered them confiscated as enemy contraband - then offered to give their owner a receipt for their use if he would recant and pledge allegiance to the Union.

"Earlier on, many of the slaves had been turned back by Union soldiers," says Dennis Mroczkowski, head of the Casemate Museum at Fort Monroe.

"Butler found the legal loophole through which these people would not have to be returned."

As writer Theodore Winthrop noted in the Atlantic Monthly, Butler abolished slavery in the United States with a simple epigram - "Negroes are contraband."

But the man whom Southern newspapers subsequently branded as "Beast" Butler didn't foresee the complications his words and action created.

As Northern forces advanced up the Peninsula, thousands of slaves fled to Fort Monroe, seeking food and shelter as well as freedom. Butler himself soon described the overwhelming numbers as a "disaster."

One of his housekeepers, Lote Hildreth, recalled the flood of hungry, poorly clothed fugitives in a letter:

"Negroes come in everyday from the outside, and one day as many as 40 came into the backyard; of all ages, from babies up to old men and women," she wrote.

"It was a ludicrous and at the same time a sad sight to see the poor creatures, homeless, not knowing when or where they were going to get their next meal. We call them the `Virginia Volunteers'..."

Soon, the Army was feeding thousands of refugees every day and, after consulting Washington, putting hundreds to work as laborers in the engineering and quartermaster corps.

But it wasn't until Butler established the Bureau of Negro Affairs - and greeted the first members of the American Missionary Association later that year - that the swarming wilderness of tents outside the fort began to take some rational form.

A huge overflow camp called Slabtown - named for the rough pieces of lumber from which it was built - rose up on the other side of Mill Creek near what is now Old Buckroe Road in Phoebus.

Later, an even larger refugee colony - known as the Grand Contraband Camp - sprang up off newly named Lincoln and Union streets after the Confederates burned the town to keep it from falling into Union hands.

The missionaries and their allies, including a free black Hampton woman named Mary Peake, also founded a hospital and a series of schools, including one that held classes in the abandoned city courthouse.

Their hope was to educate the escapees so quickly that, no matter what the outcome of the war, few would be suited to life as slaves if they had to return.

"Hampton was one of the prime targets of the AMA," says Michael Cobb, curator of the city's museums.

The American Missionary Association "sent more than 50 people here, including 40 teachers, in the hopes of making Hampton the model of what could be done with the contrabands."

Despite such efforts, the blacks' faith in what they called the "Year of Jubilee" began disappearing long before the war was over.

Numerous investigations found that the contrabands who worked for the Army were routinely cheated out of their wages, while those who lived in the camps faced the constant danger of rape, robbery, impressment, even murder by roving bands of Union soldiers.

Conditions became so bad that, according to AMA letters compiled by University of Pennsylvania historian Robert Engs, several of the leading figures in the camps began talking about immigrating to Haiti.

Life only became worse with the end of the war, when more than 5,000 now-free blacks were laid off by the Army. Then the white landowners of Hampton and the surrounding area returned to reclaim the abandoned farms that the refugees had worked for food.

In the dark period of want and hardship that followed, Isabella Sourstan was only one of thousands of former slaves compelled to appeal to a former master.

"I am cramped here nearly to death and no one ceares [sic] for me here," she wrote.

"I don't care if I am free. I had rather live with you."

Still, those who survived the trials of Slabtown and the turmoil at war's end lived to establish some of the local black community's most enduring traditions.

Contraband leaders such as William Taylor, Thompson Walker, and William Thornton founded First Baptist Church, Zion Baptist Church and several other Hampton churches still active today. The United Order of Tents, a black women's organization, can trace its history to the camps, too, according to Engs.

By the 1880s and '90s, many of those same people had helped make Hampton a boomtown for black-owned business ventures. "These church people were real leaders," she says.

"And all that they did grew out of the Slabtowns down in Hampton."

QUOTE: "Would America have been America without her Negro people?" - W.E.B. Du Bois, educator

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