eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive.”
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed for the recapture and return to bondage of Blacks who escaped their enslavement, even if they made it to a state that outlawed slavery. Seven years after the act’ s passage, the U. S. Supreme Court issued its infamous“ Dred Scott” decision, which held that Black people could never be citizens of the United States.
The year 1860 was a pivotal one. Abraham Lincoln’ s election in 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861 sent Southern states over the edge. Just a month after Lincoln took office, South Carolina led 11 secessionist states in creating the Confederate States of America – and ushering in the Civil War on April 12, 1861.
Before the war broke out, Lincoln was willing to accept the continuation of slavery to keep the nation from splintering. But once the fighting was underway, influential abolitionists like Douglass gradually pressured Lincoln to support the abolition of slavery.
Hiram Revels, the first black U. S. senator
In a March 1863 speech,“ Men of Color, Call to Arms,” Douglass urged Black men to join the Union Army to defeat the Confederacy, saying,“ Liberty won by white men would lose half its luster. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even die free, than to live as slaves... I urge you to fly to arms, and smite with death the power that would bury the government and your liberty in the same hopeless grave.”
The Emancipation Proclamation was the stance Lincoln eventually took against slavery, and after more than 600,000 war casualties, freedom finally came to four million Black people with ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6,1865.
Lincoln didn’ t live to see this day. He was assassinated on April 15, 1865 – six days after the Civil War ended and eight months before the 13th amendment was ratified.
After the war and the death of Lincoln came Reconstruction, the Congressionally mandated plan for the rebuilding the United States – and reintegrating the South and its millions of freed slaves into a nation still smarting from war. Under Reconstruction, federal troops were stationed in the South to safeguard the newly freed slaves and to create opportunities for them to advance socially, economically and politically in a region of the country that had enslaved them for 246 years.
In 1868, the ratification of the 14th amendment guaranteed Blacks the full rights of citizenship and equal protection under the law. Two years later, Hiram Revels became the first Black man elected to the U. S. Senate, representing Mississippi, and Joseph Rainey was the first Black member of the House of Representatives, representing South Carolina. In all, 16 Black men served in Congress during Reconstruction.
The arc of this progress, however, was on a collision course with a power struggle between a Republican Party that was willing to cut a heinous deal to hold on to the White House, and a Democratic Party that would trade the presidency for an end to Reconstruction. n
Norris P. West is a former reporter and editorial writer who worked at the Baltimore Sun and newspapers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Editors of Freedom’ s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States
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