Grand Contraband Camp

Grand Contraband Camp was located in Elizabeth City County on the Virginia Peninsula near Fort Monroe during and immediately after the American Civil War. The area was a refuge for escaped slaves who the Union forces refused to return to their former Confederate masters, by defining them as "Contraband of War". The Grand Contraband Camp was the first self-contained black community in the United States and occupied the area of the downtown section of the present-day independent city of Hampton, Virginia.

When Virginia seceded from the United States in 1861, the US Army retained control of Fort Monroe at the eastern tip of the Virginia Peninsula. During much of the American Civil War, the commander at Fort Monroe was Brigadier General Benjamin Butler, a lawyer by profession and an opponent of slavery. When slaves began escaping to Union lines at the fort, General Butler took the position that, since the Confederate states considered slaves to be chattel ("property"), and that certain individuals were property obtained by the Union through war, his refusal to return escaped slaves to masters supporting the Confederacy amounted to classifying them as "Contraband of war".

The term "contraband" in referring escaped slaves first enters the Official Records in U.S. Navy correspondence on August 10, 1861 when Acting Master William Budd of the gunboat USS Resolute uses the term (Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I - Volume 4: page 604).

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