PBS "little-known story"

Contrabands as emancipation "catalyst"

NOTE: This post continues from three others. "'Contrabands'? Obsolete term?” framed PBS filmmakers’ plans to tell the Hampton, Virginia, stories of descendants of the Civil War’s earliest self-emancipators—enterprising, spiritedly persevering slavery escapees to Fort Monroe, often called “contrabands.” "‘Contrabands’ recalled” reported on scholar Kate Masur’s 2007 survey of the connotations of contraband as a “‘keyword’ in the history of emancipation, race, and citizenship.” “Contrabands: 1861 view” revisited early national attention to the self-emancipation movement, as seen in The Atlantic‘s remarkable 1861 article “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe.” In 10,000 words, that article showed that freedom-striving, self-actualizing self-emancipators were among history’s most American of Americans.

Civil War slavery escapees “forced the fate of slavery onto the national political agenda,” says Columbia’s Eric Foner. Brent Leggs, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American heritage director, numbers them at a half million across the land by war’s end. He sees in those multitudes the “unknown story” of a “catalyst for emancipation” and an example of “uplift” that positions Black Americans “not just as spectators in history,” but as actors in it. It all started in May 1861, weeks after Fort Sumter, with numbers of these “contrabands” that quickly grew into the hundreds, then more, at the Union stronghold Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, now part of Hampton, Virginia. Filmmakers are preparing a PBS documentary about it: “THE GATE: The Untold Story of America’s First Contraband Community.”

In 1861, to call self-emancipating slavery escapees contrabands—confiscated property—meant avoiding the hypervolatile legal issue of emancipation. On a web page that offers a five-minute promotional trailer, the filmmakers say of Hampton contraband descendants that they “recount their ancestors’ dangerous escapes, wartime struggles, and post-war accomplishments. We’ll film them as they meet previously unknown white, mixed-race, and black relatives, tend to neglected burial sites, and broaden the meaning of family.” The documentarians hope to “ensure this little-known story becomes a lasting part of American history.”

Me too. Their ambition is a call to predict yet again, in the founding spirit of this Substack newsletter, that nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that Americans will eventually esteem the Civil War’s multitudes of freedom-striving, emancipation-forcing slavery escapees.

This film project also fortifies my hope that eventually I can stop appending “Just not yet” to that prediction. Consider a comically discouraging example of enduring national dimness about self-emancipators’ little-known story. A 2020 article in no less than The New Yorker—with its immense fact-checking pride—reported ludicrously that at Fort Monroe during the Civil War, “five hundred thousand slaves emancipated themselves.” In fact Civil War self-emancipations took place all across the South. To imagine them all at one place amounts to outright historical—and geographical—goofiness. A correction request to The New Yorker drew no response.¹

I hope this PBS film can bring light to the persistent dimness. Liza Rodman, who speaks for Hampton’s Contraband Historical Society, told me that “self-emancipation and returning agency to the history of the formerly enslaved is the overriding theme.”

Freedom’s first generation

The documentarians likely know all about the broad overlap of their historical material with that of the late University of Pennsylvania scholar Robert F. Engs’s Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861-1890. Bob Engs came from Tidewater and is remembered with esteem at William and Mary, where he led in the founding and advancement of the Lemon Project—a “multifaceted and dynamic attempt to rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” Others and I too cherished Engs for his contributions to the civic effort to limit parochial politicians’ overdevelopment of post-Army Fort Monroe. For me, a highlight of Fort Monroe activism was the gentle summer afternoon he and I spent out on my dock, drinking iced tea and talking about history. I learned a lot.

Freedom’s First Generation observes early on that Hampton constituted a unique dimension in the slavery-to-freedom transition. Fort Monroe saw the first mass escape of the enslaved; the Army there began learning how to deal with the eventual hundreds of thousands of escapees across the land; the first northern missionaries came there and began efforts to aid the formerly enslaved. Reconstruction started early in Hampton—1861, not 1865—and lasted years longer than elsewhere. Engs calls the Hampton contrabands “freedom’s first opportunists,” who over decades “would test freedom’s meaning with a determination and sophistication that at once surprised and dismayed many whites, including erstwhile allies.”

A passage from Engs’s epilogue typifies the overlap between the book’s and the filmmakers’ material:

Northern involvement in Hampton made black success possible, but it was the blacks’ own efforts that made success a reality. The antebellum experiences of both the original contraband and the black refugees to Hampton had provided a foundation on which they could build. They were the black men, women, and children who had learned enough about freedom to know that their masters would go to war rather than grant it to them, and who had fled when the war began in order to gain it. Once these blacks had achieved freedom they sought to put it to good use. They pursued the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other free Americans. In Hampton blacks learned that not even their Northern allies had intended full black equality in the emancipation of slaves. Nevertheless, they remained determined that something at least approximating equality would be their goal.

There’s broad overlap, but there’s also this challenging comment from Freedom’s First Generation’s bibliographic essay: “Sources about Civil War Hampton within the black community are few and difficult to locate. Oral history proved largely futile for this period because few stories of that period have been passed down among the identifiable descendants of the original freedmen. Those that exist are difficult to corroborate through other sources.” Still, historians and other researchers have sharpened their methods since the book appeared in 1979.

Presence of the past

A March 5 Saturday Evening Post history article declares that Hampton serves as a “living testament to the indomitable spirit” of its Black community. The article opens by invoking the Emancipation Oak (pictured below) as a symbol of the city’s pervasive presence of the past:

I’m standing under the magnificent canopy of branches from the Emancipation Oak, a historic southern live oak tree believed to be more than 200 years old in Hampton, Virginia. I’m in the midst of a two-day Black history tour of Hampton, a coastal city with historical roots that are part of the genesis of America, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in 1619 at Old Point Comfort to the self-emancipation of men and women who sought and found refuge at Fort Monroe during the Civil War. As I work to absorb the many stories of perseverance and triumph, I picture teacher Mary Peake sitting beneath the massive, outstretched branches of this hardwood to educate those formerly enslaved people, laying the foundations of Hampton University,² a historically Black university.

Hampton University, within easy walking distance of Fort Monroe on Point Comfort, evolved from Hampton Institute, which itself had evolved since the days of Mary Peake. A web page for a 2013 PBS miniseries elaborates:

[Series host Henry Louis Gates Jr.] visits the campus of Hampton University [where] many “contraband” slaves made attempts to educate themselves and become literate. The school’s origins lay with schoolteacher Mary Peake, an educated woman of color who had taught slaves in secret for years, but became capable of doing so publicly under the auspices of the Union. The contraband slaves were determined to learn, just as dedicated to “liberating the mind” as freeing themselves from bondage. Peake’s class grows quickly to over 900 students.

Outside Fort Monroe during the Civil War, the Grand Contraband Camp—a makeshift refuge for contrabands—grew quickly too. It came to contain thousands of self-emancipating refugees. In 2024, Preservation Virginia listed it among Virginia’s most endangered historic places. Attention to it is growing, including from the PBS filmmakers.

Fort Monroe is increasingly ranked alongside the likes of the Liberty Bell, Plymouth Rock, and Gettysburg. It didn’t actually fall within Hampton’s boundaries until 1952. Nevertheless Hampton’s place in world history dates to the universe’s quarter-millennium-long moral arc, 1619 to the Civil War at Point Comfort, that bent toward emancipation.

In May 1861, weeks after Fort Sumter and nearly 250 years after 1619, slavery escapees Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend started what University of Richmond president emeritus Edward L. Ayers—holder of the National Humanities Medal and former president of the Organization of American Historians—has called “the greatest moment in American history.” (Not just “a great.” “The greatest.”) They sought freedom on Point Comfort at Fort Monroe, the Union’s mighty, and mighty symbolic, bastion in Confederate Virginia. Gates declared this “the beginning of the end of slavery.” For James M. McPherson, the phrase was “the story of the end of slavery in America.”

That Chesapeake Bay landscape uniquely commemorates the struggle of the planet’s first nation to found itself on freedom. Stand on Point Comfort’s shoreline where the new African Landing Memorial is rising. It will commemorate the first captive Africans’ 1619 arrival via the Atlantic Ocean, visible on the horizon.

Then turn around and see the 1861 end of emancipation’s arc: the majestic, moated stone citadel. It attracted the freedom-striving Civil War slavery escapees who called it Freedom’s Fortress, and who started the movement historians increasingly call self-emancipation.

One prominent emancipation historian has called slavery’s eradication “probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.” In 2020, another prominent Civil War historian urged an “epic process” of “memorialization of emancipation.”

These filmmakers intend to contribute.

The Emancipation Oak on the Hampton University campus near Fort Monroe (Erik Soderstrom, Wikimedia Commons).

1. From my letter to The New Yorker: Re “The Fight to Preserve African-American History” (online, Jan. 27; in print Feb. 3 as “Rescue Work”): Fort Monroe, Virginia—called Point Comfort in 1619 when the first captive Africans arrived en route to Jamestown—could qualify as the premier landscape for remembering the Civil War’s self-emancipation movement, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. and others see as having forced the war’s transformation into a freedom struggle. But contrary to your reporting, that flat Gibraltar guarding the lower Chesapeake Bay never saw anything remotely like “five hundred thousand” self-emancipating Civil War slavery escapees—and even following last year’s 1619 commemorations, it’s hard to find evidence of anyone seriously “fighting to preserve and promote” it as a nationally important Black history site. Yet Fort Monroe does symbolize self-emancipation, thanks to events weeks after Fort Sumter that Edward L. Ayers has called “the greatest moment in American history.” As the Union’s mighty bastion in Confederate Virginia—as Freedom’s Fortress—it attracted thousands of forerunners of those hundreds of thousands who self-emancipated all across the land.

2. It’s too bad Hampton University didn’t exert its immense political influence concerning Black history and culture during the recent years when Fort Monroe’s post-Army fate was being decided. In 2005, when the Army began a six-year process of retiring the installation, overdevelopment-minded politicians began charting that future. They contrived a severely limited, bizarrely split, Potemkin national monument for parts of the post’s Chesapeake Bay waterfront. Most Virginians assumed this meant a sensible national park. It didn’t. The official vision remains today what it was in 2005, despite years of activists’ efforts to limit overdevelopment. An official web page proclaims the vision that Virginia’s leaders have consistently held since the Pentagon’s 2005 Fort Monroe retirement announcement: “to redevelop this historic property into a vibrant, mixed-use community.” The page never even mentions the national monument or the National Park Service. But there’s still potential for ameliorating some of that. Maybe the PBS contrabands film will help.