As long as the Revolution of 1776 – 1783 established the United States, the Civil War 1861 – 1865 determined the kind of nation they are going to be. The war gave resolutions to two cardinal questions that remained unresolved by the Revolution: whether the United States are going to be a confederation of sovereign states or an impartible nation with a sovereign federal government, and whether it will remain in being the largest slave-owner nation in the world nevertheless it is born of a declaration which proclaims that all people have equal rights to liberty.
When Abraham Lincoln won the election in 1860, he became the first Republican president declaring the end of slavery within the territories. Seven slave-owning states in the South separated and created a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The majority of the Northern people and the Lincoln administration refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the separatists. They were afraid of bringing the democracy in discredit and the creation of a vital precedent that would separate the country into several squabbling small countries. The war started with an event in Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861 and ended on May 10, 1865 with the capture of the confederate president Davis Jefferson in Georgia. A painful and long lasting process of rebuilding a country free of slaves began.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 is one of the most significant achievements in the American legislation after the end of the Civil War. Along with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution it gives a kind of a guarantee that the violence of the colored peoples’ civil rights will be enforced and the perpetrators will be punished. The protection of civil rights in the United States descends from the efforts that the United States Congress made to free the African Americans from slavery and further to protect them from discrimination. Because only the blacks were the subject of slavery, the endeavors of the government were directed towards preserving their civil rights. The civil rights’ history is not an upward trend and it includes some steps forward and backward through the time. The development of civil rights comprises three very substantial periods: The Reconstruction Era; The Segregation or “Jim Crow” period and The Modern Era.
The original Constitution supported slavery through several indirect clauses, comprising the clause about the fugitive slaves that forbids the northern states to recapture them and the well-known clause that indirectly recognizes slavery counting a slave for three-fifth of a person for the goals of apportionment to the congress. The first ten amendments to the Constitution restricted the power of the government. The term “civil rights” was understood as “state’s rights” and more specifically as “southern state’s rights’ what meant that the personal rights were protected only by the state if they were experiencing any protection at all. The Republican Party, that dominated the Congress, looked for the reintegration of the South back to the Union immediately after the Civil War, and took notice of the needs of the African Americans, or in other words - the former slaves. The Republicans passed through the Congress
three amendments to the United States Constitution and five civil rights laws to ensure the civil rights to the freedmen. This period is known as the Reconstruction era.
The thirteenth amendment that actually abolished slavery, ratified on December 18, 1865, declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (U. S. C., Thirteenth Amendment, Web) The Congress envisioned the right to issue special legislation through which to enforce the amendment. That was a revolutionary step at that time and asserted the supremacy of the federal government.
The new amendment did not overcome the traditional concepts and many of the southern states established their laws known as “Black codes”. That was the case with the prohibition of marriages between different races in Arkansas where the sponsor of that marriage taboo, John M. Bradley, said during the debates about the new Arkansas constitution that “the Civil War was fought not over slavery, but over the preservation of racial purity.” (Holder 156)
Actually, according to the Black codes the blacks were bowed down to slavery in all aspects besides the name. The Black codes provoked the Congress to adopt further legislation as the Civil Rights Act of 1866. As a predecessor of the Fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution, the act granted citizenship to ‘‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” {Civil Rights Act of 1866, Web) In this way it reversed the decision of the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that declared that blacks could not be citizens. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided also that blacks would acquire the same rights according the law as whites,
Including the right to sue and be sued, the right to possess property and the right to conclude contracts. The deprivation of a person of his/her rights was announced as a crime.
Discussed together with the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867 both acts serve to ban the forced labor through slavery or through other indirect methods. When the Black codes were announced to be out of law by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, hatred fulminated and all supporters of the civil rights, blacks and whites, became victims of severe terrorism.
Aiming to achieve the both goals, the equality of the blacks and the establishment of the supreme role of the federal government, the Republicans were looking for making the protection of the civil rights a permanent attribute to the United States Constitution. Thus the Fourteenth amendment to the U. S. constitution was established. Following the language and the meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 28, 1866, declares:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” {U. S. C., Fourteenth amendment, Web)
The Fourteenth Amendment was born during the discussions of the Joined Committee about the new legislation that had to be adopted and the apprehensions that the new accounting for the House representation would benefit the southern states, when the three-fifth for a slave per person calculations had to be eliminated, in increasing the voters’ number. So, they invented
new rules as education degree, tax payment ability, and other racial neutral criteria. In order to be consecutive, the members of the Committee decided to accept the proposal of the Representative John A. Bingham, a member of the joint committee, to spread out the “equal protection of life, liberty, and property” to all citizens. This was the essence of the Fourteenth Amendment that was expanded, discussed, revised and amended until it was accepted by the House and Senate.
The Fourteenth Amendment disappointed the women’s suffrage advocates since it concerned only the male citizens. That was the first time the word “male” appeared in the United States Constitution and was a great disappointment. Some people believed that the equality between the genders was sacrificed for the equality between races. But, others apprehended that the amendment had broader applications than its obvious goal of protecting the freedmen. They believed that the clause for equal protection would apply to women as it would apply to men, to immigrants and to Indians. They believed that the amendment would apply the guarantees, given by the Bill of Rights to the states as they were given to the federal government. The peremptory interpretation was left to the federal courts.
Later, in 1871, the terrorist actions that blacks endured were not on the decrease. It was obvious that the state authorities in the South had the possibility to intervene, but they refused to protect the freedmen. On April 20, 1871 the Congress passed, as a response, the Ku Klux Klan Act with a section that contemporary is codified as the Fifteenth amendment to the United States Constitution and it states:
‘Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States
or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.” (U. S. C., Fifteenth Amendment, Web)
The climax of the legislation during the Reconstruction era was the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It came into force on March 1, 1875. According to it, all places of public entertainments had to open for all citizens “within the jurisdiction of the United States” independently on their color, and “regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” (Civil Rights Act of 1875, Sec.1) Section 2 of the same act announced the violation of the law as a crime and gave the possibility to the injured party to receive corresponding compensations.
It follows as a logical consequence that the Reconstruction era legislation was a revolutionary one, but unfortunately it was quickly deserted.
In 1876, during the presidential disputes, the supporters of the candidate for President Samuel J. Tilden, a representative of the Democratic party and the supporters of the Republicans’ candidate Rutherford B. Hayes agreed on the issues that: Hayes would “win” the President post but in return he will employ at least one southerner in his cabinet and he will withdraw the troops that guaranteed the enforcement of civil rights legislation on the territory of the former Confederation. This agreement remained in the history under the name Hayes-Tilden Compromise. In this way Hayes became the nineteenth president of the United States and, as he promised, he withdrew the troops from the South. So the curtain of the Reconstruction era legislation was dropped.
Further the Supreme Court undermined the force of the civil rights laws with a number of decisions declaring that the civil rights legislation was unconstitutional. The states autonomy was affirmed by the decisions and the federal government was reprehended for overstepping its boundaries in their attempt to enforce the individual civil rights. In the case United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Supreme Court held that the federal government did not have any jurisdiction over individuals that had deprived African Americans of their civil rights. The Court declared that “blacks should look to state officials for protection.” Of course they were the same state officials that would be the last individuals who would help blacks. In the ironically called Civil Rights Cases of 1883 the Court denied the Congress the power to punish private persons for refusing the access for blacks to the places of public lodgings.
There were many discussions through the years between the Republicans, supporters of the civil rights and social equality, and the Democrats, opponents. Senator Willey from West Virginia, who gave his vote for the Fourteenth amendment, said the following: “Social relations cannot be regulated by law. They are beyond its power. They are not the legitimate subject of legal regulation. Social equality is a matter of taste, of feeling, of every man's unfettered sense of propriety.” (Avins 643)
In 1896, the Supreme Court with its decision placed the final sanction of constitutional endorsement of segregation, sponsored by the state, in Plessy v. Ferguson. In this case, Plessy who was seven eights Caucasian got on a train and took a place in a railway car for whites. The action took place in the state of Louisiana where there was established a law based on the separate-but-equal doctrine. The doctrine declared that separated facilities for whites and blacks
did not violate the Fourteenth amendment as long as they are quite equal. Therefore the segregation did not violate the requirements of the Fourteenth amendment. With its decision the Supreme Court gave the start of the Segregation era. The court went further stating that the Fourteenth amendment is not related to social equality but only political one.
Justice Harlan in his dissent in the Plessy case wrote: “The sure guarantee of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom and the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States.” (Harlan 3)
The question of social equality found relief many years later during the Modern era. A landmark case that is considered as a final of the Segregation era is Brown v. Board of education of Topeka where the issue was the question whether the segregation of children on the basis of “separate but equal” doctrine was constitutional. The famous Justice Warren represented the opinion and the decision of the court stating that: “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” (Encyclopedia.com 198) That was the end of Jim Crow era for the African American children.
In conclusion it may be said that it took decades of years before the real social equality to be achieved. Difficulties swarmed from everywhere. The African Americans, after hundreds of years of slavery, were not prepared for the new social relationships, for the new life. Being uneducated, they did not know how to build their new lives. They lost a lot of mental and physical energy in reunions instead of organizing the new reality.
The white masters were also confused with the new situation and filled with hate and irritation they hardly transformed themselves from owners of the slaves to their employers under the conditions of labor contracts. They had to learn how to consider the ex-slaves as normal human beings, to respect them and to build new social relationships with them.
Works Cited
Avins, Alfred, Social Equality and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Understanding, Huston Law Review, Vol. 4 (1967) 639, Print
Civil Rights Act of 1866, 39th Congress, Ch. 31, (1866), Web
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U. S. 393 (1857), Web
“Jim Crow”, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition, 2008, Encyclopedia.com, 9 Feb.2016, www.encyclopedia.com
Harlan, Justice Harlan’s Dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896) Web
Holder, Ann S., What’s Sex Got to Do with It? Race, Power, Citizenship, and “Intermediate Identities” in the Post-emancipation United States, The Journal of African American History, vol. 93, (2008), pp. 153 – 173, Print
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), Web
United States Constitution, The Thirteenth Amendment (1789), 18, U. S. C. section 242, Web, www.constitutioncenter.org
United States Constitution, The Fourteenth Amendment (1868), 18 U. S. C. par. 1581 – 88 and 42 U. S. C. par. 1994, Web www.constitutioncenter.org
United States Constitution, The Fifteenth Amendment, 42 U. S. C. par. 1983, Web www.constitutioncenter.org
