From Ibram X. Kendi on Twitter:
On this date in 1863, the Confederate Congress passed the Retaliatory Act. It said ALL captured Black Union soldiers won't be treated as prisoners of war, but as enslaved men in rebellion – that is, returned to slavery or executed. It didn't matter if Black soldiers had been born free.
Confederate law to treat all Black soldiers as enslaved men in rebellion prompted a response from Lincoln. He declared: for every Black US soldier enslaved, a Confederate POW would be sentenced to hard labor; every Black US soldier executed, a Confederate soldier would be too.
"To ... enslave any captured person, on account of his color, and for no offense against the laws of war, is ... a crime against the civilization of the age," President Lincoln wrote in an executive order on July 30, 1863.
This Retaliatory Act shows what Confederates stood for: slavery by any means necessary.
And these Confederates are still being celebrated. For the fourth straight year, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves proclaimed April Confederate Heritage Month.
Among other images, Kendi shared this engraving of the 55th Massachusetts Regiment marching on a street in Charleston, South Carolina, in February 1865:
Black soldiers kept fighting for the Union after the Retaliatory Act was passed. So they were fighting not just in the usual conditions of danger from battle and possible capture and becoming a POW, but with the additional threat of being enslaved or killed, most likely in extra-heinous ways.
Aside from learning about the Retaliatory Act today, I also learned that this piece of Civil Wary history does not have a Wikipedia page.
Here's a history website that does have a page about it.
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