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Virginia was the first English colony to which slaves were brought in the early seventeenth century. However, the “beginning of the end” of slavery was also in Virginia. In May 1861, a month after the outbreak of the Civil War, in which 11 states of the slaveholding South opposed the industrial North, three Virginia slaves belonging to the Confederate Army escaped to Fort Monroe, a military fortress at Hampton Harbor that was under the control of the federal government.
The slaves asked the Federation Army for asylum. General Benjamin Franklin Butler, commander in chief, declared the fugitive slaves “war booty” of Federation forces, an inhumane term at first glance, and allowed the fugitives to be retained and assisted.
Thus thousands of African Americans who had fled from the South to Fort Monroe during the war gained their freedom. It was this event that set the stage for the subsequent abolition of slavery.
In early 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, an edict abolishing slavery nationwide. All “persons held as slaves” in the Confederate states were declared free men. The final abolition of slavery occurred with the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment, passed in 1866, granted all former slaves U.S. citizenship.
In September 2011, Fort Hampton ceased to exist as a defense facility as the Pentagon removed the fort from its balance sheet to save money. Two months later, President Barack Obama – son of a Kenyan native and an American woman of European descent – listed Fort Monroe as a National Historic Landmark.
