What was the goal of many laws congress passed in the lead-up to the civil war?

By Stanley B. Burns, MD 

Editor’s Note: This essay series is written by Mercy Street's Medical, historical and technical advisor, Stanley B. Burns, MD of The Burns Archive. 

For many, the Civil War was about only one issue: slavery. For others, it was about preserving the Union. It must not be forgotten that there were slave-holding states in the Union. John Brown and other radical abolitionists wanted a war to free the slaves and instigate insurrection. Thousands of abolitionists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Frederick Douglass worked for decades to show that slavery was wrong. President Abraham Lincoln noted:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

The decision to free enslaved people would come slowly and from many sides.

According to the census of 1860, the total population of the thirty-four states and eight territories was close to 31,500,000. There were no slaves in nineteen states, and only two in Kansas and fifteen in Nebraska. Four million slaves inhabited 15 states and territories. Delaware held 1,798; Maryland held 87,189; and Virginia the most with 490,865 slaves, owned by 52,128 slaveholders. There were 3,181 slaves in Washington, D.C. Generally, it has not been recognized that in Southern states, along with the 4 million slaves, there were about 400,000 free African Americans. While they did not have equal rights, many were successful business people and some were extensive slaveholders themselves.

Freeing enslaved people was not an easy undertaking. Many in the government and politics hemmed and hawed over the process and implementation. In 1861, General Benjamin Franklin Butler, while in Command at Fort Monroe, a Union stronghold at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, did not want to return three slaves that presented themselves at the fort. Butler, an attorney before the war, decided the three slaves were “contraband of war” and refused to return them to bondage. All over the battlefront, runaway slaves began presenting themselves to Union forces. The Union instituted a policy of hiring, and using them in the war effort. In August, the US Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1861 making legal the status of runaway slaves. It declared that any property used by the Confederate military, including slaves, could be confiscated by Union forces. To put teeth into the act, Congress passed a law in March 1862 prohibiting the return of slaves. By war’s end, the Union had set up over 100 contraband camps in the South.

Union officers took the initiative to actually free slaves. General John C. Fremont in August 1861 declared that the slaves owned by Confederates in his conquered territory in Missouri were free. The order was negated by Lincoln, and Fremont was fired. He was replaced by General David Hunter. In May 1862, Hunter, who by now was in charge of a larger southern geographical area, abolished slavery in the area under his command. Lincoln negated that order as well. However, in June 1862 Congress started the process by abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. September 22, 1862, five days after the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), as Union forces drove the Confederates out of Maryland, President Lincoln, using an executive order, issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It stipulated that if the Southern states did not cease their rebellion by January 1, 1863, then the slaves in those states would be free, as the Proclamation would go into effect. When the Confederacy did not yield, President Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. The Proclamation freed only the slaves in the states in rebellion against the Federal government. It did not free the slaves held in Union states. At the end of the war on December 6, 1865 the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery through the United States.

Mercy Street is set in the spring of 1862 and depicts African Americans at a critical time when laws and ideas are changing regarding slavery, slave ownership and freemen. Like many African Americans, the Philadelphia freeman Samuel Diggs went south to help in the war effort; enlisting in the army was still not an option. He found employment at the Mansion House Hospital. Also working there is Aurelia Johnson, a contraband who had escaped slavery from North Carolina.

Belinda and others held by Alexandria, Va. owners are at the cusp of freedom, as they live behind Union lines; if they ask, they can be freed and considered contraband. However, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is still enforceable. It requires that officials and even citizens of free states aid in the capture and return of escaped slaves. Only ardent states rights pro-slavery activists enforced this law. This complicates the situation of slaves who have successfully escaped to Virginia. This is a time of deep feelings regarding slavery and freedom. 

In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of "equal protection of the laws" expected the president, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment. In response, all three branches of the federal government--as well as the public at large--debated a fundamental constitutional question: Does the Constitution's prohibition of denying equal protection always ban the use of racial, ethnic, or gender criteria in an attempt to bring social justice and social benefits?

In June 1963, President John Kennedy asked Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill, induced by massive resistance to desegregation and the murder of Medgar Evers. After Kennedy's assassination in November, President Lyndon Johnson pressed hard, with the support of Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, to secure the bill's passage the following year. In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the nation's benchmark civil rights legislation, and it continues to resonate in America. Passage of the Act ended the application of "Jim Crow" laws, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court held that racial segregation purported to be "separate but equal" was constitutional. The Civil Rights Act was eventually expanded by Congress to strengthen enforcement of these fundamental civil rights.

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Introduction

In the 1930s, the United States Government enacted a series of laws designed to prevent the United States from being embroiled in a foreign war by clearly stating the terms of U.S. neutrality. Although many Americans had rallied to join President Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world “safe for democracy” in 1917, by the 1930s critics argued that U.S. involvement in the First World War had been driven by bankers and munitions traders with business interests in Europe. These findings fueled a growing “isolationist” movement that argued the United States should steer clear of future wars and remain neutral by avoiding financial deals with countries at war.

First Neutrality Act

By the mid-1930s, events in Europe and Asia indicated that a new world war might soon erupt and the U.S. Congress took action to enforce U.S. neutrality. On August 31, 1935, Congress passed the first Neutrality Act prohibiting the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” from the United States to foreign nations at war and requiring arms manufacturers in the United States to apply for an export license. American citizens traveling in war zones were also advised that they did so at their own risk. President Franklin D. Roosevelt originally opposed the legislation, but relented in the face of strong Congressional and public opinion. On February 29, 1936, Congress renewed the Act until May of 1937 and prohibited Americans from extending any loans to belligerent nations.

Neutrality Act of 1937

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the rising tide of fascism in Europe increased support for extending and expanding the Neutrality Act of 1937. Under this law, U.S.citizens were forbidden from traveling on belligerent ships, and American merchant ships were prevented from transporting arms to belligerents even if those arms were produced outside of the United States. The Act gave the President the authority to bar all belligerent ships from U.S. waters, and to extend the export embargo to any additional “articles or materials.” Finally, civil wars would also fall under the terms of the Act.

The Neutrality Act of 1937 did contain one important concession to Roosevelt: belligerent nations were allowed, at the discretion of the President, to acquire any items except arms from the United States, so long as they immediately paid for such items and carried them on non-American ships—the so-called “cash-and-carry” provision. Since vital raw materials such as oil were not considered “implements of war,” the “cash-and-carry” clause would be quite valuable to whatever nation could make use of it. Roosevelt had engineered its inclusion as a deliberate way to assist Great Britain and France in any war against the Axis Powers, since he realized that they were the only countries that had both the hard currency and ships to make use of “cash-and-carry.” Unlike the rest of the Act, which was permanent, this provision was set to expire after two years.

Neutrality Act of 1939

Following Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Roosevelt suffered a humiliating defeat when Congress rebuffed his attempt to renew “cash-and-carry” and expand it to include arms sales. President Roosevelt persisted and as war spread in Europe, his chances of expanding “cash-and-carry” increased. After a fierce debate in Congress, in November of 1939, a final Neutrality Act passed. This Act lifted the arms embargo and put all trade with belligerent nations under the terms of “cash-and-carry.” The ban on loans remained in effect, and American ships were barred from transporting goods to belligerent ports.

In October of 1941, after the United States had committed itself to aiding the Allies through Lend-Lease, Roosevelt gradually sought to repeal certain portions of the Act. On October 17, 1941, the House of Representatives revoked section VI, which forbade the arming of U.S. merchant ships, by a wide margin. Following a series of deadly U-boat attacks against U.S. Navy and merchant ships, the Senate passed another bill in November that also repealed legislation banning American ships from entering belligerent ports or “combat zones.”

Overall, the Neutrality Acts represented a compromise whereby the United States Government accommodated the isolationist sentiment of the American public, but still retained some ability to interact with the world. In the end, the terms of the Neutrality Acts became irrelevant once the United States joined the Allies in the fight against Nazi Germany and Japan in December 1941.