With the beginning of the Civil War the legal status of the slave was changed by his master's being in arms. General B.F. Butler, in May 1861, declared negro slaves contraband of war. A confiscation bill was passed in August 1861 discharging from his service or labour any slave employed in aiding or promoting any insurrection against the government of the United States. By an act of the 17th of July 1862 any slave of a disloyal master who was in territory occupied by northern troops was declared _ipso facto_ free. But for some time the Fugitive Slave Law was considered still to hold in the case of fugitives from masters in the border states who were loyal to the Union government, and it was not until the 28th of June 1864 that the Act of 1850 was repealed.
See J.F. Rhodes, _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850_, vols. i. and ii. (New York, 1893); and M.G. M'Dougall, _Fugitive Slaves, 1619-1865_ (Boston, 1891).
[1] The precise amount of organization in the Underground Railroad cannot be definitely ascertained because of the exaggerated use of the figure of railroading in the documents of the "presidents" of the road, Robert Purvis and Levi Coffin, and of its many "conductors," and their discussion of the "packages" and "freight" shipped by them. The system reached from Kentucky and Virginia across Ohio, and from Maryland across Pennsylvania and New York, to New England and Canada, and as early as 1817 a group of anti-slavery men in southern Ohio had helped to Canada as many as 1000 slaves. The Quakers of Pennsylvania possibly began the work of the mysterious Underground Railroad; the best known of them was Thomas Garrett (1789-1871), a native of Pennsylvania, who, in 1822, removed to Wilmington, Delaware, where he was convicted in 1848 on four counts under the Fugitive Slave Law and was fined $8000; he is said to have helped 2700 slaves to freedom. The most picturesque figure of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman (c. 1820), called by her friend, John Brown, "General" Tubman, and by her fellow negroes "Moses." She made about a score of trips into the South, bringing out with her 300 negroes altogether. At one time a reward of $40,000 was offered for her capture. She was a mystic, with remarkable clairvoyant powers, and did great service as a nurse, a spy and a scout in the Civil War. Levi Coffin (1798-1877), a native of North Carolina (whose cousin, Vestal Coffin, had established before 1819 a "station" of the Underground near what is now Guilford College, North Carolina), in 1826 settled in Wayne County, Ohio; his home at New Garden (now Fountain City) was the meeting point of three "lines" from Kentucky; and in 1847 he removed to Cincinnati, where his labours in bringing slaves out of the South were even more successful. It has been argued that the Underground Railroad delayed the final decision of the slavery question, inasmuch as it was a "safety valve"; for, without it, the more intelligent and capable of the negro slaves would, it is asserted, have become the leaders of insurrections in the South, and would not have been removed from the places where they could have done most damage. Consult William Still, _The Underground Railroad_ (Philadelphia, 1872), a collection of anecdotes by a negro agent of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and of the Philadelphia branch of the Railroad; and the important and scholarly work of Wilbur H. Siebert, _The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom_ (New York, 1898).