Civil War Begins: Enslaved People's Freedom at Stake

Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, beginning the Civil War. For the four million enslaved people in the South, the war immediately represented a potential path to freedom. Within weeks, enslaved men began escaping to Union lines. General Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe, Virginia, declared escaped enslaved people "contraband of war" in May 1861 — a legal fiction that began de facto emancipation before any official policy existed.