Enslavers illegally held district freed people in other states after emancipation

Evidence

Some enslavers in the district continued to ignore the 1862 Compensated Emancipation Act. In the summer of 1863, more than a year after the act was passed into law, Colonel William Birney discovered that “some unknown number of men, women, and children who were ‘entitled to their freedom in the District of Columbia’…were being held” against their will “in slave pens in Baltimore.” These people were moved to another state where the district law could not initially be enforced. Colonel Birney ultimately released this group of enslaved people from their captors and recruited many of the men to serve in the Union Army. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 113