“I do not anticipate a long war.”

On May 5, 1861, George H. Freeman wrote those words to his parents from Fort Monroe in Hampton Virginia, a strategically important position at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and a Union stronghold in Confederate territory

Remembered as the first man from Sandwich to enlist, Freeman had joined the New Bedford City Guards and carried this small diary through the opening months of the Civil War. He usually recorded the weather and his guard duty in his diary, along with the movement of troops and ships, cannon fire from Union vessels, and reports of fighting near Norfolk.

But on May 24th, 1861, Freeman recorded the arrival of three Black men, using a racist term common in his time but offensive today. They may have been Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend, enslaved men who had sought refuge at Fort Monroe the day before.

Two days later he wrote that “8 slaves came in for protection.”

In just a few words, Freeman’s diary records people seeking safety at the Union-held fort. When the enslaver of Baker, Mallory, and Townsend demanded their return, Fort Monroe’s commander, Benjamin Butler, refused. He argued that the men’s labor had been used to support the Confederate war effort and could therefore be withheld as “contraband of war.” Butler’s decision did not end slavery, but it opened a path to asylum at Fort Monroe. Many more people escaping slavery followed, and the fort became known as “Freedom’s Fortress.”

This week marks the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862. More than a year after Freeman predicted a short war, the Civil War was still raging and its outcome was uncertain. Freeman’s diary preserves a view from the war’s beginning; a soldier’s days of guard duty, drills, and watching the harbor and the actions of people who were changing the meaning of the war.

As we continue to mark America’s 250th, George Freeman’s diary asks us to look beyond the nation’s founding promise of liberty to the people who pressed it forward--to a moment when people escaping slavery sought freedom at Fort Monroe, and Benjamin Butler made the consequential decision to protect them rather than return them to their enslavers. Their actions and his response helped change the meaning of the war, and what the nation’s promise of liberty, would mean.