Early in the Civil War on May 23, 1861, three men escaped enslavement and turned themselves over to the Union Army at Fort Monroe Virginia as refugees. Their names were Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend. Rather than turn them back as required by the “Fugitive Slave Law” of 1850 the fort’s commander General Benjamin Butler, who just happened to be a lawyer, refused, siting that he was under no obligation to return “materials of war” back to the enemy. The three men were confiscated as “contraband” under the articles of war and given their freedom. The Contraband Decision of 1861 encouraged the enslaved to flee the plantations and farms of the South in the tens of thousands to cross over the Union lines and turn themselves in. Fort Monroe would earn the nickname “Freedom’s Fortress”. By depriving the Confederacy of its primary labor force, it was this series of events that prompted Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st 1863.
https://www.nps.gov/fomr/index.htm
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Freedom's Fortress