Emancipation Oak

Emancipation Oak. "Thirst for knowledge". , Here, under an oak tree, newly freed African American students listened in January 1863 as the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud. Union Gen. Benjamin Butler's "contraband of war" decision at Fort Monroe in 1861 anticipated that day, enabling hundreds of enslaved African Americans to reach freedom in the Union lines. The rising number of "contrabands" camped here prompted the establishment of schools, antebellum slave codes had forbidden the education of slaves, and the freedmen exhibited "a great thirst for knowledge."

Mary Peake, a free-born African American, had disregarded the law and taught slaves to read in her home near the Hampton Academy. After her house and the town of Hampton were burned on August 7, 1861, she taught in an abandoned cottage next to the Chesapeake Baptist Female Seminary. Peake's death from tuberculosis in 1862 ended her outstanding work but did not end educational opportunities for contrabands. The American Missionary Association, a New York-based Christian philanthropic society, sent the Rev. Lewis Lockwood to Hampton in its first missionary endeavor of the war. When Lockwood arrived in September 1861, he noted that the "parent and children are delighted with the idea of learning to read." The association established two schools here and sent appeals to Northerners to underwrite books, other supplies, and missionary teachers. Additional schools were created at Fort Monroe, Camp Hamilton, and the burned-out Hampton courthouse, which missionaries and contrabands renovated together. When Butler returned here in 1863, he used government funds to construct a school that could accommodate 600 student. Known as the Butler School, it was a frame building constructed in the shape of a Greek cross that stood, appropriately enough, next to the Emancipation Oak.

[Captions:] , "Contrabands escaping." May 29, 1864, by Edwin Forbes. Many thousands of slaves emancipated themselves by fleeing to Union lines after Butler's "contraband of war" decision became Federal policy. , Library of Congress