The Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves was a law passed by the United States Congress during the American Civil War forbidding the military to return escaped slaves to their owners. As Union armies entered Southern territory during the early years of the War, emboldened slaves began fleeing behind Union lines to secure their freedom. Some commanders put the slaves to work digging entrenchments, building fortifications, and performing other camp work. Such slaves came to be called "contraband," a term emphasizing their status as captured enemy property. Other Army commanders—particularly Democrats—returned the slaves to their owners. Congress reacted by approving on March 13, 1862 an act prohibiting the military from sending escaped slaves back into slavery.
Read more about Act Prohibiting The Return Of Slaves: Text of The Act
Famous quotes containing the words act, prohibiting, return and/or slaves:
“Mothers who are strong people, who can pursue a life of their own when it is time to let their children go, empower their children of either gender to feel free and whole. But weak women, women who feel and act like victims of something or other, may make their children feel responsible for taking care of them, and they can carry their children down with them.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“There’s no law against taking off a spaceship. It’s never been done so they haven’t gotten around to prohibiting it.”
—Rip Van Ronkel, and Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)