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Circumventing the Dred Scott Decision: Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, and the Citizenship of African Americans Edited by James P. McClure, Leigh Johnsen, Kathleen Norman, and Michael Vanderlan In August 1863, Brig. Gen. George F. Shepley, military governor of Louisiana , returned from Washington with authority to register African Americans as voters in the selection of delegates for a state constitutional convention. His instructions directed him to register "all the loyal citizens of the United States" in each parish. He also brought from Washington printed copies of an opinion by Attorney General Edward Bates that declared, as summarized rather freely by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, "that all free persons born in the United States or naturalized ofwhatever color, are citizens ofthe United States." According to Chase, Shepley's instructions, written by Secretary ofWar Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln, "have been framed with this opinion in view."1 Chase confessed that he had no "reason to believe that the instructions were intended to establish any imperative rule of registration," and that "I do not know whether public sentiment will admit the application of this doctrine in 1 The War ofthe Rebellion: A Compilation ofthe Official Records ofthe Union and Confederate Annies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880-1901), ser. 1, vol. 26, 1:694-95; Salmon P. Chase to Benjamin F. Flanders, Aug. 26. 1863, Dartmouth College Library; and Chase to Robert Dale Owen, Sept. 6, 1863, Chase Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. These letters, along with those from Chase to Thomas J. Durant, Abraham Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Opdyke et al., and lohn C. Hamilton cited in the notes below, will appear in volumes 4 and 5 of lohn Niven, lames P. McClure, and Leigh Iohnsen, eds., The Salmon P. Chase Papers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1993-). The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a branch ofthe National Archives (NA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency, provide financial support for the Salmon P. Chase Papers, directedby lohn NivenatThe Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Civil War History, Vol. XLin No. 4 © 1997 by The Kent State University Press 280CIVIL WAR HISTORY Louisiana."2 In fact, as Louisiana's Unionists held their constitutional convention and framed terms for the state's reorganization, black voters did not receive the franchise. Beyond the immediate context of the instructions to Shepley, however, Chase relied on Bates's opinion as an official declaration thatAfrican Americans had the rights of citizens. "You will remember, doubtless," Chase prompted Lincoln in the spring of 1865, "that the first order ever issued for enrollment with a view to reconstruction went to General Shepley & directed the enrollment of all loyal citizens; and I suppose that, since the opinion of Attorney General Bates, no one, connected with your administration, has questioned the citizenship of free colored men more than that of free white men." And a few months earlier in a letter to Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, Chase cited Bates's "well considered opinion" and asserted: "In my judgment negroes as men have the same natural rights as other men."3 The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, finally resolved the issue of citizenship for African Americans. Until then Chase had to rely on other means to assert the notion that blackAmericans were citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court, and especially Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, had declared to the contrary in Scott v. Sandford, the famous Dred Scott case of 1857. Chase did more than cite Bates's opinion—he had actually elicited it. On September 15, 1862, Chase noted in his journal that he "Called on AttorneyGeneral about citizenship of colored men. Found him averse to expressing official opinion."4 On September 24, two days after Lincoln presented the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, Chase formally requested Bates's official opinion on a citizenship case. Two months later the reluctant Bates replied in the form of a long letter to Chase (see Documents 5 and 6 below). Although his name did not appear either in Chase's official request to Bates or in the attorney general's opinion, a key figure in the test...

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