Emancipation Oak

In January 1863, under an oak tree here, newly freed African American students listened as the Emancipation Proclamation was read aloud. Union Gen. Benjamin Butler's 1861 "contraband of war" decision at Fort Monroe had anticipated that day by enabling hundreds of enslaved African Americans to reach freedom in the Union lines. As the number of "contrabands" camped here grew, schools were established, since antebellum slave codes had forbidden the education of slaves, and the freedmen showed "a great thirst for knowledge." Mary Peake, a free-born African American, had defied the law by teaching 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. Her death from tuberculosis in 1862 ended her work, but educational opportunities for contrabands continued. 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 observed that "parent and children are delighted with the idea of learning to read." The association established two schools here and appealed to Northerners to provide books, 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 in 1863, he used government funds to build the Butler School, a frame building in the shape of a Greek cross next to the Emancipation Oak that could accommodate 600 students.

Hampton, Virginia · United States