Qualla: Fort Monroe

Fort Monroe: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Va editor 81, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the night of May 23, 1861, three enslaved men rowed a small boat across Hampton Roads and asked for sanctuary at the Union fort on Old Point Comfort. Their names were Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend, and they had been hired out by their Confederate owner to build a battery aimed at the very fort they now approached. The next morning, Major General Benjamin Butler did something no Union officer had done before. When a Confederate officer arrived under flag of truce to demand their return under the Fugitive Slave Act, Butler refused. Virginia, he said, claimed to be a foreign country. Fine. Then the men were contraband of war, and contraband did not go back. Within months, thousands of enslaved people would walk, ride, and row to Fort Monroe seeking the same answer.

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Image: Va editor 81 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fort Monroe: The Gibraltar of the Chesapeake

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Wiseman, CC BY 3.0. Captain Christopher Newport's expedition spotted Old Point Comfort in 1607 and immediately understood what they were looking at. The sandy hook at the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula commanded the narrow channel where the Chesapeake Bay funnels into Hampton Roads, the grea...

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Image: Andrew Wiseman | CC BY 3.0

Fort Monroe: Three Men in a Rowboat

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. Virginia seceded in April 1861, but Fort Monroe stayed Union because nobody in Richmond could figure out how to take it. By May, Major General Benjamin Butler commanded the garrison, a Massachusetts lawyer and politician with no military training and an unusually good instinct fo...

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Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain

Fort Monroe: The Flood

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Army, Public domain. Within weeks dozens of escaped families had reached the fort. By August they came by the hundreds. The Army threw up shelters outside the walls; that fall the Great Contraband Camp rose in nearby Hampton, the first of more than a hundred such settlements that would house formerly...

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Image: U.S. Army | Public domain

Fort Monroe: Ironclads and Imprisonment

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrStew82, CC BY-SA 4.0. In March 1862, just offshore from the fort, the Union ironclad USS Monitor fought the Confederate CSS Virginia to a stalemate at the Battle of Hampton Roads, ending the age of wooden warships in a single afternoon. Two months later, Major General George B. McClellan landed his Ar...

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Image: DrStew82 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fort Monroe: The Older Story

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Va editor 81, CC BY-SA 4.0. Long before Mallory, Baker, and Townsend rowed toward Old Point Comfort, another arrival had reshaped the continent. In August 1619, an English privateer called the White Lion put in at the same point and traded twenty and odd captive Africans, taken from a Portuguese slave ship,...

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Image: Va editor 81 | CC BY-SA 4.0