On June 19, 1862, the U.S. Congress enacted the Territorial Slavery Act, banning slavery in all current and future U.S. federal territories. The full abolition of slavery throughout the United States was later achieved with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
The act declared that slavery or involuntary servitude would not exist in any U.S. territories, except as punishment for a crime.
This action directly overturned the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which stated Congress couldn’t prohibit slavery in federal territories.
President Abraham Lincoln, by signing the law, fulfilled his 1860 campaign promise to curb the spread of slavery beyond the South, allowing it to eventually “die a natural death.”
Congress approved the legislation on June 9, 1862, and Lincoln signed it on June 19, 1862.
The June 19, 1862 law was one of several steps during the Civil War. Initially, slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C., with compensation to owners.
In June 1862, the ban extended to western territories like Utah, Nebraska, and Dakota. In January 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves in the Confederate states free.
In December 1865, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment finally ended slavery nationwide.
June 19 is symbolic in American history. Three years later, on June 19, 1865, Union troops reached Galveston, Texas, declaring the freedom of the last enslaved individuals in the South. Today, June 19 is celebrated as Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. The name, coined in the 1890s, combines June and nineteenth, referring to June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger enforced the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the Civil War.
Illustrative photo: pexels-krivitskiy-6665722
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