This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we're back with our American stories.

Abraham Lincoln's nickname is the great emancipator, but our regular contributor,

John Elfner, is about to tell us a story on how that's not quite the whole story. Here's John.

It was a beautiful spring evening in Norfolk, Virginia, the night of May 23, 1861.

Abraham Lincoln had recently been inaugurated, and by this night, 10 southern states,

including Virginia, had seceded from the Union. The scope of the Civil War was still not well

understood by most, but the Civil War had begun. Working along the banks of the James River were

three men, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend.

The men were finishing their assigned task of building a Confederate artillery battery just south of the James River in a location called Sewell's Point.

The artillery position was designed to assault a Union fort just across the James River.

The fort was called Fort Monroe. As evening approached, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend decided to

abandon the Confederate Post and crossed the James River to Fort Monroe. And when they

traveled that short distance from Sewell's point to the fort, they became fugitives.

You see, according to the laws of Virginia, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend were slaves.

They had run away with the hopes of finding their freedom within union lines.

Any casual student of American history would likely expect that the union soldiers would take them in.

After all, the soldiers commander-in-chief was Abraham Lincoln, who would eventually earn the nickname, the Great Emancipator.

But when the three arrived at Fort Monroe, the fort's commander, Major General

Benjamin Butler, was faced with a dilemma. He knew that he shouldn't be returning the

escapees based on Lincoln's public statements about the war. The general ethos at the beginning

of the war was, we're not here to get involved with slavery. We are here to try to persuade the

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