One day the representative of Colonel Mallory, a Virginia planter, came into the Union lines at Fortress Monroe and demanded three field-hands who, he asserted, were at that time in the camp. General B. F. Butler, who was in command, replied that, as Virginia claimed to be a foreign country, the fugitive-slave law could not possibly be in operation there, and declined to surrender the negroes unless the owner would take the oath of allegiance to the United States. A newspaper correspondent, in reporting this incident, took the ground that, as the Confederate commanders were using negroes as laborers upon fortifications, under international law they were clearly contraband of war. A new word was coined. From that moment, and until the struggle was over, escaped negroes were known as "contrabands," and public opinion in the North decided that they were subject to release or confiscation by military right and usage. General Butler always assumed the credit of formulating that doctrine, and insisted that the correspondent had adopted a suggestion overheard at the mess-table; but, however it originated, it had more influence upon the solution of the problem than volumes of argument might have had. When it became known among the negroes in Virginia that the Union troops would not send them back to slavery, the plantations were deserted and the Northern camps were crowded with men, women, and children of all ages, who had to be clothed and fed. General Butler relieved the embarrassment by sending the able-bodied men to work upon the fortifications, by utilizing the women as cooks and laundresses, and by permitting his officers to employ them as servants. After a time the exodus spread to Washington, and the slaves in that city began to find their way across the Potomac into the military camps, which caused a great deal of dissatisfaction and seemed to have an unfavorable effect upon the political action of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri; so that President Lincoln was appealed to from all sides to order the execution of the fugitive-slave law in States which he was trying to keep in the Union. He believed that public sentiment was growing and would ultimately furnish a solution. He quoted the Methodist presiding elder, riding about his circuit at the time of the spring freshets, whose young companion showed great anxiety as to how they should cross Fox River, then very much swollen. The elder replied that he had made it the rule of his life never to cross Fox River until he came to it.