34 AMERICAN HISTORY
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ESday had been born in the United States. The Scott decision
flatly denied them citizenship. Nullifying that ruling would
be politically astute for the Republicans controlling Congress.
Citizenship begat suffrage and GOP leaders expected that
African-Americans would embrace the political party that
had freed them.
Trumbull, 52, was point man on the citizenship drive. A
moderate elected to the Senate in 1854, he had chaired the
powerful Senate Judiciary Committee since 1861.
The Illinois Republican was well-respected but aloof, lack-
ing “the warmth of temperament calculated to win personal
friendship,” a contemporary noted. The slim, 5’10’ Trumbull
bore “a cast of countenance which marks the man of thought”
and was a “clear and cogent reasoner” but not “gifted with
personal ‘magnetism.’”
Trumbull may have seen citizenship for freed slaves as a
matter of fairness, but he was a white man of his age. “Among
the strongest anti-slavery champions in the West” and known
in his lawyering days for representing slaves suing for free-
dom, he had as a senator drafted the 13th Amendment. Even
so, in an 1858 speech, he had declared, “I want to have noth-
ing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro.”
Introduced on January 5, 1866, Trumbull’s bill, now known
as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, initially sought to make birth-
right citizens of “persons of African descent born in the
United States.” Trumbull soon realized his bill’s language was
too restrictive, implying as it did that only African-Ameri-
cans qualified for jus soli. On January 30, 1866, he submitted
a rewrite to cover “(a)ll persons born in the United States, and
not subject to any foreign Power.”
Trumbull’s revised bill codified the long-held belief that
children born in the United States were American citizens.
“As a matter of law, does anyone deny here or anywhere that
“Where the Blame Lies”
In this 1891 cartoon, that is
the message to Uncle Sam
from a judge indicting
immigration as a
cause of woe.