Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Beginning in 1861, the State Department, under the direction of William Seward, began issuing US passports to African Americans, and congressional Republicans pushed to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and eradicate the capital’s racially discriminatory laws. The next year, Attorney General Edward Bates of Missouri wrote an opinion on citizenship that explicitly contradicted the Dred Scott decision by concluding that free African Americans were US citizens. The Republican-dominated Congress also recognized Haiti and Liberia as independent countries, long a priority of antislavery activists. All this occurred before January 1, 1863, when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1864, Congress barred federal courts from allowing race-based discrimination in witness testimony; in 1865, it repealed a law prohibiting Black people from carrying the US mail.2