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 .