I meant War Between the States. WBTS.
I'm going to miss you.
In the Land o' Lincoln, after the WBTS, Illinois law required Blacks to post a $1,000 bond to enter the state or own property in the state. Assembling for the purpose of dancing or reveling carried a $20 fine.Prior to the WTBS, an 1853 Illinois law effectively barred Black people from residing in the state. Lincoln never spoke out against this law.
Ward Hill Lamon, friend of Lincoln, said the Illinois Black Code was "of the most preposterous and cruel severity, -- a code that would have been a disgrace to a Slave state, and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedeviling, and torturing Negroes, whether bond or free."
The Illinois Black Code said that any Black found without a certificate of freedom was considered a runaway slave and could be apprehended by any White and auctioned off by the sheriff to pay the cost of his confinement.
There is no record of any Lincoln dissent to any of these Black Codes in his home state.
Article XIV of the Illinois State Constitution adopted in 1848 stated:
The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free."The architect of "An Act To Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State" was John A. "Black Jack" Logan. Black Jack Logan was later named a Major General by Abraham Lincoln.
Lerone Bennett, Jr. documented how various newspapers condemned the Illinois laws. Frederick Douglass expressed his outrage. "What did Lincoln say? He didn't say a mumblin' word."