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On May 24, 1861, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory and James Townsend escaped from Norfolk County, where they had been forced to build a Confederate battery at Sewell's Point, and crossed to Fort Monroe. When a Confederate agent demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act, Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts trial lawyer, argued that Virginia could not claim to be a foreign nation and still invoke federal law, and held the men as contraband of war. The War Department quietly approved, and a Thomas Nast illustration in June 1861 spread the new meaning of the word across the North.

Wage labor followed: Gideon Welles set Navy pay at $10 a month, while the Army at Fort Monroe paid men $8 and women $4. About 10,000 people eventually reached the fort, and after Confederates burned Hampton, refugees built the Grand Contraband Camp from salvaged wood, known as Slabtown. Union forces came to manage more than 250 camps. Residents also faced evictions by Union troops seeking winter quarters, forced conscription, and recapture, as at Harpers Ferry, where about 1,500 people were taken back into slavery.

• Mary S. Peake, a free Black teacher, taught classes under the tree now called the Emancipation Oak at Hampton University.
• The Emancipation Proclamation was read beneath that oak in 1863.
• One American Missionary Association school operated in the former home of President John Tyler.
• On Roanoke Island, chaplain Horace James helped 3,500 residents build sawmills, grist mills and planned avenues.
• A hostile Confederate report from Opelousas, Louisiana, described Black men drilling with rifles in the town square.

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Raphael Semmes, born in Maryland in 1809, entered the U.S. Navy as a midshipman in 1826 and studied law on the side until he was admitted to the bar. During the Mexican-American War his ship, the USS Somers, capsized in a squall off Veracruz and 37 sailors drowned, so he joined the landing forces and marched inland to Mexico City. When Alabama seceded in 1861 he joined the Confederate Navy, turned the steamer Habana into the CSS Sumter, broke the blockade at New Orleans and captured 18 U.S. merchant ships before a coal embargo at Gibraltar and the arrest of his paymaster in Tangier forced him to sell the ship.

Commanding the British-built CSS Alabama from August 1862 to June 1864, Semmes sailed from the Atlantic to the East Indies, captured 65 merchant ships and sank the USS Hatteras, refueling under the 24-hour neutral port rule. Off Cherbourg the USS Kearsarge, its hull hung with chain armor hidden behind wood panels, sank the Alabama, and a British yacht carried Semmes to England. He returned to command the James River Squadron, scuttled his ironclads, led sailors as a Naval Brigade, and insisted his surrender parole list both his naval and army ranks, which shielded him from piracy charges.

• The Tangier incident saw Semmes argue neutrality law through diplomatic channels to free his arrested paymaster.
• The Alabama's powder and fuses had decayed after two years at sea, and many shots failed to explode.
• Semmes threw his sword into the sea rather than surrender it to Captain John Winslow.
• After the war he taught moral philosophy at Louisiana State University for five months, edited a Memphis paper, and died in 1877 after eating bad shrimp.
• Jules Verne compared the Nautilus to the Alabama in a letter, and the Alabama's Liverpool backers worked out of Nautilus House.

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Albert Woolson was born in Antwerp, New York, to Willard and Caroline Woolson. His father was badly wounded at Shiloh and taken to an Army hospital in Windom, Minnesota, where Albert and his mother followed and stayed until he died. On October 10, 1864, Albert enlisted as a drummer for Company C of the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery. His company never saw combat, and he was discharged on September 7, 1865. He gave his birth date as February 11, 1847, but the 1850 census lists him as a newborn, so he was about 14 when he joined.

He spent decades as a carpenter in Duluth, raised eight children, and stayed in the Grand Army of the Republic, which admitted only Union veterans. In 1949, at 99, he marched in New York's Memorial Day parade with another 99-year-old former drummer boy to lay a wreath at Grant's Tomb. He became senior vice commander-in-chief in 1953 and the last member by 1956. He died in Duluth on August 2, 1956, at 106. The GAR dissolved, President Eisenhower issued a tribute, and Life gave him a seven-page spread.

• James Hard, who died in 1953, is recognized as the last Union veteran who saw combat.
• Three men claimed to be Confederate veterans who outlived him: William Lundy, Walter Williams and John Salling.
• One of those claims was disproven by census records, and the other two remain unverified.
• A monument to the Grand Army of the Republic with his likeness was put up at Gettysburg in 1956.
• A twin statue stands at the St. Louis County Depot in Duluth, where his artifacts are kept.

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In October 1864 the Scottish-built tea clipper Sea King left London listed for Bombay while the steamer Laurel slipped out of Liverpool carrying guns and Confederate officers. Off Madeira, Commander James Iredell Waddell, a North Carolinian with decades in the U.S. Navy, mounted 8-inch smoothbores and Whitworth rifles and commissioned the ship as the CSS Shenandoah on October 19. With fewer than half the men he needed, he crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans capturing Union merchant ships, then put into Melbourne, where 40 stowaways appeared and enlisted once the ship cleared British waters.

In the Bering Sea the Shenandoah captured 20 of 58 Yankee whalers. On June 27, 1865, Waddell read a San Francisco paper reporting Lee's surrender alongside Jefferson Davis's call to fight on, and the next day he took 10 whalers in seven hours. On August 3 the British ship Barracuda confirmed the war was over. Facing piracy charges, he struck the guns below, sailed around Cape Horn, and surrendered at Liverpool on November 6, 1865.

• The ship covered 58,000 miles, took 38 vessels and nearly 1,000 prisoners, and caused over $1.4 million in damage without a combat death.
• Captured captains signed bonds pledging payment to the Confederacy and carried prisoners to San Francisco.
• At Liverpool not one crewman admitted to being British, and the authorities paroled them all.
• Waddell farmed in Argentina, returned in 1875, and later commanded Maryland's oyster police.
• The Sultan of Zanzibar bought the ship as El Majidi, and it sank in the Gulf of Aden in 1879.

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On June 9, 1863, near Brandy Station in Culpeper County, Virginia, about 20,500 men fought for ten hours in the largest cavalry battle on American soil. Robert E. Lee was preparing to invade the North, and J.E.B. Stuart's 9,500 troopers were screening the army. Stuart staged a grand review on June 5 and repeated it on June 8 because Lee had missed the first. Across the Rappahannock, Alfred Pleasonton gathered about 11,000 men under Joseph Hooker's orders to break up the Confederate cavalry, sending John Buford across Beverly's Ford and David McM. Gregg across Kelly's Ford.

Buford struck at 4:30 a.m. in fog, and Grumble Jones's troopers rode out half-dressed and bareback. Colonel Benjamin F. Davis was killed, and Robert Beckham's horse artillery held near St. James Church. Gregg reached Brandy Station around 11 a.m. and found Fleetwood Hill nearly empty, held by Major Henry B. McClellan and one howitzer with faulty ammunition. Confederate reinforcements reached the crest in time, and Pleasonton withdrew at sunset. McClellan later wrote that the battle made the Federal cavalry.

• The 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry took the highest regimental losses of the day in its charge on Beckham's guns.
• Rooney Lee, Robert E. Lee's son, was badly wounded in the thigh.
• Colonel Alfred N. Duffie's division got lost and missed the fight for Fleetwood Hill.
• Union losses were 907 and Confederate losses 523, and the Richmond Examiner mocked Stuart's puffed up cavalry.
• Developers proposed an office park and a Formula One track, and the field joined a state park in June 2024.

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Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865 under the War Department, gave it no initial funding, and expected it to last one year after the war. Commissioner Oliver O. Howard organized it into lands, records, financial affairs and medical branches, but agents soon faced the Black Codes and President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed its renewal in 1866 before Congress overrode him. The Bureau handed out 15 million rations to Black Southerners and 5 million to white Southerners, though in Alabama four times as many white people as Black people received aid.

Agents pressed freedwomen back into the fields under labor contracts, yet they also formalized thousands of marriages and helped reunite families sold apart. Howard directed $5 million to education, and 90,000 students enrolled by the end of 1865. As Klan violence grew and budgets were cut in 1869, Northern support faded, and Congress ended the Bureau in 1872 while Howard was out West. Its schools grew into HBCUs, and its papers now help families trace ancestors past the 1870 census.

• In Bossier and Caddo Parishes, Louisiana, insurgents from Arkansas killed more than 150 Black Americans while a lone agent was cut off.
• About half of Bureau teachers were Southern whites, a third were Black, and only a sixth were Northern whites.
• Bureau textbooks paired the alphabet with lessons on hard work, forgiveness and the life of Lincoln.
• George Ruby served the Bureau as a teacher, administrator and traveling inspector.
• Howard, Hampton and Fisk are among roughly 25 colleges established with Bureau support.

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In May 1988 Ken Deardorff received the last land patent issued under a law Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862. This episode traces how the Homestead Acts moved about 160 million acres, nearly 10 percent of the country, to 1.6 million claimants. Earlier laws such as the Preemption Act of 1841 and Oregon's Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 set the stage, but Southern Democrats blocked a general homestead law, and President James Buchanan vetoed one in 1860. Secession removed the opposition. Settlers paid a $10 filing fee, lived on and improved 160 acres for five years, paid a final fee, and needed two neighbors to vouch for them.

Claimants included Exodusters in Kansas, Russian Jews in North Dakota, Lebanese Muslim settlers in Ross, North Dakota, who built the first mosque in the United States, and Latino settlers in Colorado, while Asian Americans were largely excluded until Wong Kim Ark in 1898. The land came largely from Native nations, and reservation holdings fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million by 1934. Later laws pushed farming onto marginal Plains land, and the plowing contributed to the Dust Bowl. Homesteading ended in 1976, except in Alaska until 1986.

• The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 targeted freedpeople, and by 1900 about a quarter of Southern Black farmers owned their farms.
• The Indian Homestead Act of 1875 required Native claimants to give up tribal identity and relations.
• The Kinkaid Act of 1904 offered 640 acres in Nebraska's Sand Hills, and the 1909 act 320 acres for dryland farming.
• In 1984 the last woman to prove up a claim in her own name took 116 acres near Big Delta, Alaska.
• An estimated 93 million Americans descend from homesteaders.

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Daniel Sickles, born in New York City in 1819, rose through the printer's trade and the law into New York politics. In 1852 he married Teresa Bagioli, then 15 or 16, and as secretary of the U.S. legation in London he presented Fanny White to Queen Victoria under the surname of a political rival. As a congressman in 1859 he shot and killed U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key, in Lafayette Square across from the White House. Defended by Edwin Stanton, he was acquitted using temporary insanity for the first time in American law, then drew more outrage by forgiving Teresa than for the killing.

As the only Union corps commander without a West Point education, he moved his Third Corps a mile forward to the Peach Orchard at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, without orders, and James Longstreet's attack wrecked it. A cannonball took his right leg, and he puffed a cigar on the stretcher. Back in Washington ahead of George Meade, he blamed Meade in the press. Later came Reconstruction command, a stormy post as minister to Spain during the Virginius affair, a Medal of Honor 34 years after Gettysburg, and his ouster from the New York Monuments Commission over missing funds.

• He kept his pistol in jail and received congressmen, senators and a note from the president.
• He leaked Teresa's written confession to the newspapers after the judge excluded it.
• In the occupied South he banned discrimination on public transport and gave laborers first lien on crops.
• He donated his leg bones to the Army Medical Museum and reportedly visited them on the anniversary.
• He fenced Gettysburg National Military Park with iron fencing taken from Lafayette Square.

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John F. Reynolds was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1820, nominated to West Point by family friend James Buchanan, and commissioned into the artillery in 1841. At Buena Vista his guns helped stop a Mexican cavalry flank, earning him brevets. He was Commandant of Cadets at West Point by 1860, and before the war he was secretly engaged to Katherine Hewitt, a Catholic; they agreed she would enter a convent if he died. In the Seven Days Battles of 1862, after two days without sleep, he slept through his own unit's retreat in Boatswain's Swamp and woke a prisoner, brought before his old friend D.H. Hill.

Exchanged from Libby Prison, he led a rearguard stand on Henry House Hill at Second Bull Run. On June 2, 1863, Lincoln offered him command of the Army of the Potomac, and he declined unless freed from the interference of Edwin Stanton and Henry Halleck; the job went to George Meade. On July 1 he joined John Buford at Gettysburg, committed his infantry, and was shot near Herbst's Woods. He was buried in Lancaster on July 4, and Katherine Hewitt entered a convent.

• Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin had him drilling militia during the Battle of Antietam.
• At Chancellorsville he cast a proxy vote to fight and woke to learn Joseph Hooker had retreated anyway.
• He grabbed the colors at Henry House Hill and ordered his men to give them the steel.
• His orderly, Sergeant Charles Henry Veil, gave changing accounts of the fatal shot.
• Theories on his death include a Tennessee volley, a sharpshooter and friendly fire.

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Irvin McDowell, born in Ohio in 1818, studied at the College de Troyes in France and graduated from West Point in 1838 alongside P.G.T. Beauregard. After serving as an aide-de-camp and earning a brevet at Buena Vista in the Mexican War, he spent 1848 to 1861 as a staff and supply officer in the adjutant general's department. Backed by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, he was made a brigadier general in May 1861 and given the Army of Northeastern Virginia, though he protested that he was a staff officer and his volunteers were untrained. Under the cry On to Richmond, he was sent into battle anyway.

His complex flanking plan at First Bull Run in July 1861 broke down with green troops and ended in a rout. He went on to fail against Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley and to lose again at Second Bull Run under John Pope, then testified against Fitz John Porter and sat two years without an assignment. In the West he commanded the Department of the Pacific and enforced neutrality during the French intervention in Mexico. An 1879 review board cleared Porter and blamed McDowell. He retired in 1882 and became San Francisco's park commissioner.

• Some contemporaries reportedly called him Squash McDowell.
• His soldiers at Second Bull Run came to believe he was secretly working with the Confederates.
• He and Pope despised each other, and their orders contradicted one another.
• The 1879 board cited his failure to pass along intelligence on James Longstreet's position.
• He laid out drives with views of the Golden Gate in the Presidio before his death in 1885.