On June 19, 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Territorial Slavery Act, which outlawed slavery in all present and future federal territories of the United…
On June 19, 1862, the U.S. Congress passed the Territorial Slavery Act, which outlawed slavery in all present and future federal territories of the United States. The complete and final abolition of slavery in the United States was later achieved through the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
The act explicitly stated that slavery or involuntary servitude would not exist in any of the U.S. territories (the lands not yet stateless, mainly in the West) except as punishment for a proven crime.
This move directly overturned the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. The court then ruled that Congress did not have the constitutional right to prohibit slavery in federal territories.
By signing the law, President Abraham Lincoln fulfilled a key promise from his 1860 campaign—to stop the spread of slavery outside the South so that it could gradually “die a natural death.”
Congress voted and passed the legislation on June 9, 1862, and Lincoln officially signed it on June 19, 1862.
The June 19, 1862 law was just one of many interim steps during the American Civil War. Slavery was first abolished in the federal capital of Washington, D.C., through a program of financial compensation to owners.
In June 1862, the ban extended to the western territories (such as Utah, Nebraska, and Dakota). In January 1863, Lincoln’s historic Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, declaring slaves in the seceded southern states (the Confederacy) free.
In December 1865: Slavery was finally and completely abolished throughout the country with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The date June 19 is symbolic in American history. Three years after this law was passed – on June 19, 1865 – Union troops reached Galveston, Texas, to declare and enforce the freedom of the last remaining black slaves in the South. Today, June 19 is celebrated as an official federal holiday in the United States, called Juneteenth (officially Juneteenth National Independence Day – a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. The holiday’s name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War).
Illustrative photo: pexels-krivitskiy-6665722
