![]() For when other enslaved African Americans heard that three men had been granted refuge, they began flocking to Freedom’s Fortress, as they called Fort Monroe. Yet Mallory, Baker, and Townsend’s escape and the general’s clever gambit proved momentous, the repercussions heralding the beginning of slavery’s end. Lincoln let the decision stand Butler, after all, hadn’t challenged the status of enslaved people as property. Rather, in keeping with military law governing war between nations, he would seize the three runaways as contraband-property to be used by the enemy against the Union. So the general struck upon a politically expedient solution: Because Virginia had seceded from the Union, he argued, he no longer had a constitutional obligation to return the runaways. Why send them back and bolster that effort? They had been helping to construct a Confederate battery that threatened his fort. Nevertheless, Butler realized the absurdity of honoring the Fugitive Slave Law, which dictated that he return the three runaways to their owner. And Union policy on slavery was clear: President Abraham Lincoln maintained from the outset of hostilities that he had no intention of interfering with the “peculiar institution” rather, the Union’s aim was to crush the Southern rebellion. Benjamin Butler, was no abolitionist-he had voted for Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic National Convention. On the evening of May 23, as Confederate sympathizers celebrated Virginia’s decision to secede, the three men made their move, rowing a small boat across Hampton Roads to Fort Monroe, one of the only Union-controlled outposts in the South. They didn’t know that the consequences of their decision would mark the turning point in a war, long before the battles of Vicksburg or Gettysburg. They also knew that if they somehow persuaded the Union soldiers to offer them refuge, their families in Hampton might be harmed in retribution. They had a decision to make: Go with their master and aid the Confederate war effort? Or embark on a risky run for freedom by escaping to the Union stronghold at Fort Monroe? Mallory, Baker, and Townsend knew that if they were turned back at the fort, they would likely face whipping-or worse. Within days, they learned that their owner wanted to take them to North Carolina, where, separated from their families, they would be put to work constructing another rebel output. The three men were taken by their master to Sewell’s Point, near present-day Norfolk, and put to work building an artillery battery for the Confederacy. But their lives were forever changed after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Little evidence documents their existence as enslaved field hands on a farm near Hampton, Virginia, aside from a few scribbled notes in an overseer’s journal, listing them as property. Their names were Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend.
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