582 ★ CHAPTER 15 “What Is Freedom?”: Reconstruction
willing to take land from one group of owners and distribute it to others. Ste-
vens’s proposal failed to pass.
The Origins of Civil Rights
With the South unrepresented, Republicans enjoyed an overwhelming major-
ity in Congress. But the party was internally divided. Most Republicans were
moderates, not Radicals. Moderates believed that Johnson’s plan was flawed,
but they desired to work with the president to modify it. They feared that
neither northern nor southern whites would accept black suffrage. Moderates
and Radicals joined in refusing to seat the southerners recently elected to Con-
gress, but moderates broke with the Radicals by leaving the Johnson govern-
ments in place.
Early in 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois proposed two bills,
reflecting the moderates’ belief that Johnson’s policy required modification.
The first extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had originally
been established for only one year. The second, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866,
was described by one congressman as “one of the most important bills ever
presented to the House for its action.” It defined all persons born in the United
States as citizens and spelled out rights they were to enjoy without regard to
race. Equality before the law was central to the measure— no longer could
states enact laws like the Black Codes discriminating between white and
black citizens. So were free labor values. According to the law, no state could
deprive any citizen of the right to make contracts, bring lawsuits, or enjoy
equal protection of one’s person and property. These, said Trumbull, were the
“fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man.” The bill made no
mention of the right to vote for blacks. In constitutional terms, the Civil Rights
Bill represented the first attempt to give concrete meaning to the Thirteenth
Amendment, which had abolished slavery, to define in law the essence of
freedom.
To the surprise of Congress, Johnson vetoed both bills. Both, he said, would
centralize power in the national government and deprive the states of the
authority to regulate their own affairs. Moreover, he argued, blacks did not
deserve the rights of citizenship. By acting to secure their rights, Congress was
discriminating “against the white race.” The vetoes made a breach between the
president and nearly the entire Republican Party inevitable. Congress failed by
a single vote to muster the two- thirds majority necessary to override the veto
of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill (although later in 1866, it did extend the Bureau’s
life to 1870). But in April 1866, the Civil Rights Bill became the first major law
in American history to be passed over a presidential veto.