THE MAKING OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION ★^587Boundaries of Freedom
Reconstruction redrew the boundaries of American freedom. Lines of exclu-
sion that limited the privileges of citizenship to white men had long been
central to the practice of American democracy. Only in an unparalleled crisis
could they have been replaced, even temporarily, by the vision of a republic
of equals embracing black Americans as well as white. That the United States
was a “white man’s government” had been a widespread belief before the Civil
War. It is not difficult to understand why Andrew Johnson, in one of his veto
messages, claimed that federal protection of blacks’ civil rights violated “all our
experience as a people.”
Another illustration of the new spirit of racial inclusiveness was the Burl-
ingame Treaty, negotiated by Anson Burlingame, an antislavery congressman
from Massachusetts before being named American envoy to China. Other trea-
ties with China had been one- sided, securing trading and political advantages
for European powers. The Burlingame Treaty reaffirmed China’s national sov-
ereignty, and provided reciprocal protection for religious freedom and against
discrimination for citizens of each country emigrating or visiting the other.
When Burlingame died, Mark Twain wrote a eulogy that praised him for “out-
grow[ing] the narrow citizenship of a state [to] become a citizen of the world.”
Reconstruction Republicans’ belief in universal rights had its limits. In
his remarkable “Composite Nation” speech of 1869, Frederick Douglass con-
demned prejudice against immigrants from China. America’s destiny, he
declared, was to transcend race by serving as an asylum for people “gathered
here from all corners of the globe by a common aspiration for national liberty.”
A year later, Charles Sumner moved to strike the word “white” from natural-
ization requirements. Senators from the western states objected. At their insis-
tence, the naturalization law was amended to make Africans eligible to obtain
citizenship when migrating from abroad. But Asians remained ineligible. The
racial boundaries of nationality had been redrawn, but not eliminated. The jux-
taposition of the amended naturalization law and the Fourteenth Amendment
created a significant division in the Asian- American community. Well into
the twentieth century, Asian immigrants could not become citizens, but their
native- born children automatically did.
The Rights of Women
“The contest with the South that destroyed slavery,” wrote the Philadelphia
lawyer Sidney George Fisher in his diary, “has caused an immense increase in
the popular passion for liberty and equality.” But advocates of women’s rights
encountered the limits of the Reconstruction commitment to equality. Women
What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction?