Michelle Coles

Happy ! 🖤💚❤️💛 To celebrate, I’m sharing facts about the Reconstruction Era, which is the period right after the Civil War when 4.4 million Black people were emancipated from slavery and became citizens.

26. Did you know that in 1872, Congress issued a general amnesty of Confederates, which allowed them to hold office once again after previously being barred for acts of treason?

Many of the leaders of the Confederate States of America previously served as U.S. Congressmen and Senators before resigning their seats and declaring war on their country. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, for instance, had served as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi from 1847-1861.

In an effort to exclude people who had betrayed the USA from holding a position of public trust again, Congress included in the 14th Amendment Section 3, which prohibited the election or appointment to any federal or state office of any person who had previously held federal offices and then engaged in insurrection, rebellion, or treason. But the section also provided that Congress could override this limitation with a two-thirds vote by the House and Senate. In 1872, Congress did just that and passed the Amnesty Act, which paved the way for former Confederate leaders to gain office where they predictably used the levers of power to ensure the continued oppression of Black people.

The Amnesty Act forgave 150,000 former Confederate troops who had taken part in the American Civil War. In keeping with the spirit of the Amnesty Act, President Ulysses S. Grant also ordered that pending charges be dismissed against the insurrectionists and pardoned all but 500 former top Confederate leaders.

After the January 6 insurrection, which incidentally was the 1st time the Confederate flag flew in the U.S. Capitol, courts debated whether the Amnesty Act also removed disabilities that the 14th Amendment would otherwise impose for subsequent insurrections or if those political consequences still applied.

Read to learn more about the fascinating and remember .

Happy ! 🖤💚❤️💛 To celebrate, I’m sharing facts about the Reconstruction Era, which is the period right after the Civil War when 4.4 million Black people were emancipated from slavery and became citizens.

25. Did you know that Congress passed the D.C. Compensated Emancipation Act which abolished slavery in D.C. on April 16, 1862 and compensated slaveholders but not the enslaved?

While the United States aka the Union was fighting a war in which the core area of dispute was the status of slavery, i.e. whether it should be allowed in new territories as the country expanded westward, phased out gradually or abolished altogether, the capital city, Washington D.C., was home to thousands of enslaved people.

The Compromise of 1850 outlawed the sale of enslaved people in D.C., but it didn’t prohibit their ownership. Following the departure of most southern legislators who resigned their Congressional seats to form the Confederacy, Congress took action to abolish slavery in D.C. outright.

On April 16, 1862 (“D.C.’s Emancipation Day”), nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln signed “An Act for the Release of certain Persons held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia,” which freed 3,185 people. This Act also set forth a process to compensate slaveholders who were loyal to the Union for the loss of their “property,” but made no attempt to compensate the people who had spent their entire lives in bo***ge toiling without end against their will for no pay. It did, however, offer to pay the formerly enslaved $100 if they chose to leave the United States for places such as Haiti or Liberia.

While this was the only compensated emancipation plan enacted in the United States, Britain enacted a similar scheme that was still paying the family of enslavers until a few years ago.

Read Black Was the Ink to learn more about the fascinating and remember .

Happy ! 🖤💚❤️💛 To celebrate, I’m sharing facts about the Reconstruction Era, which is the period right after the Civil War and before Jim Crow when 4.4 million Black people were emancipated from slavery and became U.S. citizens for the first time.

21. Did you know that in 1874 Robert Elliott, a Black Congressman from S.C. eviscerated the former VP of the Confederacy in a debate on the House floor about proposed civil rights legislation

Referencing Congressman Alexander Stephens’ (GA) speech in which he admitted that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition,” Congressman Elliott countered: “Sir, it is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized word by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone. The progress of events has swept away that pseudo-government which rested on greed, pride, and tyranny; and the race who he then ruthlessly spurned and tramped on are here to meet him in debate, and to demand that the rights which are enjoyed by their former oppressors  - who vainly sought to overthrow a Government for which they could not pr******te to the base uses of slavery – shall be accorded to those who even in the darkness of slavery kept their allegiance to freedom and the Union. Sir, the gentleman from Georgia has learned much since 1861; but he is still a laggard.”

After several mins of verbal annihilation, Elliott concluded, “The rights contended for in this bill are among the sacred rights of mankind, which are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records, because they are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

The Civil Rights Act Elliott supported passed in 1875 but the Supreme Court struck it down in 1883. The rights Elliott insisted upon weren’t enforced in the U.S. until nearly a century later.

Chap 42 of Black Was the Ink covers this powerful speech in full!