Civil War-era Legal Status of Fugitive Slaves
See also: Emancipation ProclamationWith the beginning of the Civil War, the legal status of the slave was changed by his masters being in arms. Benjamin Franklin Butler, in May 1861, declared black slaves contraband of war. A confiscation bill was passed in August 1861 discharging from his service or labor any slave employed in aiding or promoting any insurrection against the government of the United States. By an act of July 17, 1862, any slave of a disloyal master who was in territory occupied by Northern troops was declared ipso facto free. But for some time the Fugitive Slave Law was considered still to hold in the case of fugitives from masters in the border states who were loyal to the Union government, and it was not until June 28, 1864 that the Act of 1850 was repealed.
Read more about this topic: Fugitive Slave Laws
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“Is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
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—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
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—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)