On this episode of Our American Stories, in May 1861, three enslaved men, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory, and James Townsend, escaped from Confederate labor at Sewell's Point, Virginia, and crossed to Union-held Fort Monroe. When their enslaver demanded their return, General Benjamin Butler faced a problem. Sending them back would mean returning three men to work on Confederate defenses aimed at his own fort.

Our regular contributor Jon Elfner and historian Kate Masur, author of Until Justice Be Done, share the story of how Butler's decision to hold the men as "contraband of war" helped open Union lines to hundreds, then thousands, of freedom seekers and pushed Congress, Abraham Lincoln, and the Union Army toward a new policy on slavery: ending it entirely.

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