GROUPS BARRED FROM TAKING OATH OF LOYALTY 1865 FREE

Sangston was also released unconditionally and without explanation, however, some his fellow prisoners eventually did sign the oath. Lawrence Sangston, one of many Maryland state legislators also imprisoned with Howard, kept a prison diary, Bastilles of the North, and published it during the war. In 1863, he published a memoir of his prison experience, scathingly condemning Lincoln and his administration. He was eventually released unconditionally with no explanation given for his imprisonment or his release. Howard spent fourteen months in prison and never signed the oath. He was removed from his state and carted off to various military prisons, including the infamous Fort Lafayette in New York. Frank Key Howard, the grandson of the famous Francis Scott Key, worked as a newspaper editor in Baltimore and was snatched from his home in a midnight raid by Lincoln’s secret police and imprisoned at Fort McHenry along with numerous other Baltimore citizens. Some of Lincoln’s political prisoners flat out refused to sign the oath, since they reasoned that their signature constituted an admission of guilt when they weren’t guilty of anything other than exercising their Constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. On top of that, the Englishmen were reluctant to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States government because they were afraid that they might lose their English citizenship. The English sailors were literally kept in ankle chains, were expected to sleep on the bare stone floors with no bedding and in some cases no blankets or jackets or shoes, and were denied medical treatment. In some cases the sailors were treated even worse than the Northern political prisoners and Confederate POWs housed in the same prison. English sailors were pulled from English ships trying to run the blockade and sent to military fortresses now doubling as prisons. In some cases, even foreign nationals were cajoled into signing the oath, with the threat of longer stretches in a military prison.

GROUPS BARRED FROM TAKING OATH OF LOYALTY 1865 FREE

Perhaps the most notorious incident of the Northern oath inflicted upon Confederate citizenry occurred during Benjamin “Beast” Butler’s reign over the city of New Orleans.ĭefeated Confederate soldiers were also expected to sign the Oath of Allegiance to the very government they just fought desperately to be free from. Between 18, for example, about a thousand adult residents of occupied Alexandria, Virginia signed the Oath of Allegiance. As the Northern military invasion spread across the Southern states, Confederate citizens were also required to take an oath to a now foreign government. With Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus (in violation of the Constitution, since that power resides only in Congress and only under specified circumstances) thousands of civilian political prisoners from the Northern as well as the Border states were rounded up and tossed into prison and they too were expected to sign the oath. Early in the war, Northerners in the military or in the civil service were required to take the oath.

During the War between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America and in the days following the war, the Lincoln administration and the subsequent administration coerced a significant number of Americans into signing an Oath of Allegiance also known as a Loyalty Oath or the Ironclad Oath.

Groups barred from taking oath of loyalty 1865