When Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler decided to give three runaway slaves refuge at Fort Monroe as "contraband" of war in May 1861, he barely described the incident in his daybook.
But by 1863, the epic consequences of his landmark order could be seen in the thousands of cabins and tents that straddled camps stretching from the gates at Old Point Comfort to the charred ruins of Hampton.
Arriving first in small groups — then in long lines of towed boats that carried as many as 1,200 from outlying counties — this exodus surged to more than 20,000 men, women and children by the war's end, writes Robert F. Engs in "Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia 1861-1890."
And though regimented and policed by the army from the start, this teeming mass posed a political, racial and human problem which had no easy answer.
That's one reason why just months after the Emancipation Proclamation President Abraham Lincoln signed a contract for the transport of 500 contrabands from the docks of Fort Monroe to a new home on the Ile a Vache off Haiti.
But less than a year after the Ocean Ranger departed on April 13, the experiment designed to absorb 5,000 refugees ended in failure.
"The military was making decisions ahead of the executive branch, and what emerges is a problem that no one had thought about and which — once unleashed — was mostly uncontrollable. Nothing was the same after Butler's contraband decision," Hampton History Museum curator J. Michael Cobb says.
"What Lincoln turned to was an old solution that goes back to Jefferson. People didn't know what to with blacks who had been freed except to separate them and send them away."
Like many of Lincoln's often baffling responses to issues of race, his interest in colonization reflected the politics of the war.
He saw the resettlement efforts as a way to sweeten the pill of emancipation for conservatives in the North as well as the slave-owning border states. He also wanted to appease Northerners worried about an uncontrollable deluge of black labor spilling above the Mason-Dixon line.
Lincoln wasn't the only one looking at Haiti and Central America, however, as solutions to the problem spawned by Butler's contraband decision.
"People don't think of Lincoln and colonization — especially after the Emancipation Proclamation," says Robert Bray of Illinois Wesleyan University.
"But there were many like him — including African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass — who looked at Haiti as a good place for contraband slaves to go because they doubted that whites and blacks could live together."
Resettlement appealed to inmates in the contraband camps, too, where rape, looting and pillaging by Federal soldiers was common through the summer of 1862, then followed by an oppressive regime in which refugees were routinely cheated of wages, rations and clothing.
Even after Butler's return to Fort Monroe and the creation of the Bureau of Negro Affairs in 1863, some of Hampton's black residents were so embittered they wanted to leave for Haiti.
"The Ile a Vache company didn't have any trouble recruiting," Bray says, "because the camps didn't give blacks many options."
Within hours of leaving Old Point behind, however, the would-be settlers were forced to sign contracts foreshadowing the abusive post-war system of sharecropping. And when they arrived at Ile a Vache, the food, clothing and shelter they had been promised were nowhere to be seen.
Instead the hapless blacks struggled under the rule of Bernard Kock, an American planter who intended to grow cotton and timber the island through cheap contraband labor.
Armed white guards and the threat of the stocks kept the ex-slaves in line, as did Kock's insistence they pay for food and water with the worthless personal currency he printed to pay their wages.
Not until June 1863 did the American consul hear about the miserable conditions and force his way onto the island. His reports led the embarrassed Lincoln administration to send a special agent who faced down the oppressors and summoned a rescue ship.
When the U.S. naval transport Marcia C. Day returned to the Potomac River on March 20, 1864, it landed within sight of the White House, Bray says.
But no more than 365 survivors stepped off.
"The whole thing was a confidence game blackened by bad faith and entrepreneurial greed," Bray says.
"And it shows what was happening to many African-Americans as the country was struggling to decide what to do about race."
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