During Reconstruction, Republicans in Congress wished to expand access to federal courts in order to protect freedpeople and Union officials from bias in state courts. As a result, Congress passed two statutes in succession that facilitated the removal of cases from state courts to federal courts based on diversity of citizenship. The first was the Separable Controversy Act of 1866, which allowed defendants to remove portions of cases specific to them if those portions could be resolved without the presence of the other defendants. The statute provided a method to defeat joinder – the practice by which a plaintiff added local defendants to the suit in order to eliminate complete diversity of parties and thereby thwart removal. In 1867, Congress followed up with the Local Prejudice Act, which amended the earlier statute by providing that any out of state party, whether plaintiff or defendant, could petition to remove a case in which they feared local prejudice in the state court.
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