Civil War
Contrabands were the slaves that escaped from the South to within the Union lines during the Civil War. When the Civil War began, the North’s main aim was to preserve the Union, not end the institution of slavery. Escaping slaves were often returned to their masters at the beginning of the conflict. According to Mooney, “some Union officers, especially Northern Democrats who doggedly insisted the war was being fought solely to save the Union, either refused to receive runaway slaves into their camps or returned them to Confederate owners.” 194 The Union officers who returned slaves to their masters often did this as they though the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 obliged them to do so. Slaves had been designated as private property by the Constitution, and the Fugitive Slave Act obligated anyone who saw fleeing slaves to capture them and return them to their masters. However, General Butler, a Union officer, held an alternate view and refused to hand over three runaway slaves who reached his lines. He saw the runaway slaves as contrabands of war used by the Confederacy to aid in the Civil War. The North began to realize the importance of runaway slaves in their lines and began to use them in the war effort. According to Mooney, “When Union commanders like Benjamin Butler put contrabands to work, they began slowly shifting the labor power of slavery from the South to the North.” 195 The defeat of Union forces at the first battle of Bull Run and the help of contrabands to Union forces showed the importance of slaves to the Confederacy war effort. Hence, this prompted Congress to enact Confiscation Acts that stipulated that slaves used for military purposes by the Confederacy could be seized by the Union and set free. According to historian Henry G. Pearson, “all slaves who had been employed by their disloyal masters in some form of work against the United States had been by the terms of the Confiscation Act of August, 1861, set free.” The next step in the string of emancipatory moves by the Union was the Emancipation Proclamation. Finkelman highlights that, on Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln promulgated the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which set the stage to free all slaves in territory controlled by Confederate forces.” The move was aimed at motivating enslaved African-Americans to leave their lives as slaves in the South to a life of freedom within Union lines.