We are discussing the veto of the first Civil Rights Act (1866) by Andrew Johnson. Johnson found something to complain about for each of the nine sections of the Act. He was particularly annoyed that white public officials who engaged in unlawful racial discrimination would now face fines or imprisonment for their action. Johnson characterized the protections of the new law as “evil.” In his veto message he argued that if left alone, white and black Southerners would work things out, ignoring the brutal campaign of terror then being waged in the South against the freed former slaves.
Johnson wrote:
To me the details of the bill seem fraught with evil. The white race and the black race of the South have hitherto lived together under the relation of master and slave capital owning labor. Now, suddenly, that relation is changed, and as to ownership capital and labor are divorced. They stand now each master of itself. In this new relation, one being necessary to the other, there will be a new adjustment, which both are deeply interested in making harmonious. Each has equal power in settling the terms, and if left to the laws that regulate capital and labor it is confidently believed that they will satisfactorily work out the problem. Capital, it is true, has more intelligence, but labor is never so ignorant as not to understand its own interests, not to know its own value, and not to see that capital must pay that value. This bill frustrates this adjustment. It intervenes between capital and labor and attempts to settle questions of political economy through the agency of numerous officials whose interest it will be to foment discord between the two races, for as the breach widens their employment will continue, and when it is closed their occupation will terminate.
This is a claim that would be made for years by white supremacists: The source of racial discord in the South was not slavery or Jim Crow, it was the meddling of Federal officials, outsiders, whose jobs depended on stirring up trouble between the races.
Johnson charged that by protecting the civil rights of blacks, the Act was itself discriminatory against whites. He wrote that the Civil Rights Act would “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”
Johnson was the first American president to claim that equality for African Americans represented discrimination against whites.
Johnson’s veto would be almost immeadiately overridden by the House and Senate.
This is the final article in the Deep Dive into the Civil Rights Act of 1866 series.
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Quite an amazing article, it is hard to understand how Abraham Lincoln got stuck Johnson as his vice president. No comparison level of intelligence and understanding at what was actually going on in the country at that time. It is a shame that he Johnson was not both impeached and arrested for stupidity and for complicity with the white Southerners. Now it’s totally understandable iy the reconstruction f a i l e d. Thank you for posting this it’s very informative and also very Illuminating on what is wrong with this country both then and now.