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sent regular dispatches (signed “P.”) to the Boston Traveller throughout his three-month stay at Monroe (April–July 1861); these frequently include material that did not make it into the Atlantic essay. Dozens of other newspaper and periodical correspondents converged upon Hampton Roads in the spring and summer of 1861, largely because people thought the first major battles of the war would be fought there—and when such battles failed to materialize, many of the reporters sent back copy about the contrabands. The archives of the American Missionary Association (housed at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and also available on microfilm) include letters from the missionaries who began arriving at Fortress Monroe in the autumn of 1861, some of which recount various contrabands’ life stories—although these should be used with care, since some of the missionaries were clearly seeking dramatic or shocking testimonies rather than representative ones.

The two best modern biographies of Benjamin F. Butler are Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1957), and Howard P. Nash, Stormy Petrel: The Life and Times of General Benjamin F. Butler, 1818–1893 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969). The general’s own memoir, Butler’s Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Maj.-Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co., 1892) is a small masterpiece of self-aggrandizement, certainly not without its charms. The general’s letters are collected in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Massachusetts: The Plimpton Press, 1917). Butler’s papers in the Library of Congress include far more extensive material from the war years, and provide virtually a day-by-day picture of his activities at Fortress Monroe.

For nineteenth-century Hampton, see Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (Fordham University Press, 2004). Marion L. Starkey’s The First Plantation: A History of Hampton and Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1607–1887 (n.p., 1936) offers a surprisingly honest, nuanced, and sympathetic (for its place and time) account of black life there during slavery, along with the recollections of the last few surviving people who remembered the antebellum town.

Other works give a broader picture of society and race relations in antebellum Virginia. Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1861) is the best analysis of Virginia’s economy and society by a period observer. Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) is a valuable community study. Steven Deyle’s Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press, 2005) situates often horrifying details within a larger context. Susan Dunn’s Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York: Basic Books, 2007) provides a subtle analysis of evolving racial attitudes amid rapid changes in the economy and society of the Upper South. Scot French’s The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) disentangles truth and myth.

For the larger picture of racial dynamics during and after the war, Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 1985–) provides a distillation of voluminous material uncovered by the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford University Press, 2006) offers an enlightening treatment of the contrabands within the larger story of slavery’s end in the Western hemisphere. James M. McPherson’s groundbreaking The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton University Press, 1964) traces the battle over race and slavery throughout the course of the war; Benjamin