Forever Free by Eric Foner

Author:Eric Foner [Foner, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83458-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Scenes outside the galleries of the U.S. House of Representatives during the passage of the Civil Rights Bill (Illustration Credit 4.5)

Johnson’s vetoes deployed arguments opposing federal action on behalf of African Americans that have been repeated ever since, including in our own time, by critics of civil rights legislation and affirmative action. He appealed to fiscal conservatism, raised the specter of an immense federal bureaucracy trampling on citizens’ rights, and insisted that self-help, not dependence on government handouts, was the surest path to individual advancement. Congress, he insisted, had neither the need nor the authority to protect the freedpeople’s rights. Assistance by the Freedman’s Bureau would encourage blacks to believe that they did not have to work for a living, thereby encouraging them to lead a “life of indolence.” Johnson called the civil rights measure a “stride toward centralization of all legislative powers in the national Government.” Although he did not use the modern term “reverse discrimination,” the president somehow persuaded himself that by acting to secure the rights of blacks, Congress would be discriminating against white Americans—“the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”

Johnson also delivered an intemperate speech to a crowd at the White House in February 1866 condemning the Radicals and hinting that they were responsible for Lincoln’s assassination. Singling out Stevens, Sumner, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips by name, he asked, “does not the murder of Lincoln appease the vengeance and the wrath of the opponents of this government?” But more significant than Johnson’s intemperate language, his vetoes ended all chance of cooperation with Congress. Although the Senate failed by a single vote to override the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill veto (another measure, enacted in July, extended the bureau’s life to 1870), Congress mustered the two-thirds majority to pass the Civil Rights Act. For the first time in American history, a significant piece of legislation became law over a president’s veto.

Johnson’s intransigence also impelled Republicans to devise their own plan of Reconstruction, and to write their understanding of the consequences of the Civil War into the Constitution, there to be secure from shifting electoral majorities. The result was the Fourteenth Amendment, approved by Congress in 1866 and ratified two years later. It enshrined for the first time in the Constitution the ideas of birthright citizenship and equal rights for all Americans. The amendment, Stevens told the House, gave a constitutional foundation to the principle that state laws “shall operate equally upon all.” “I can hardly believe,” he added, “that any person can be found who will not admit that … [it] is just.” Unlike the Civil Rights Act, which listed specific rights all citizens were to enjoy, the Fourteenth Amendment used far more general language. It prohibited states from abridging any citizen’s “privileges and immunities” or denying them “due process” or the “equal protection of the law.” This broad language opened the door for future Congresses and the federal courts to breathe meaning

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