President Johnson Vetoed the Civil Rights Act Because Blacks Had Not Earned Citizenship

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law after Congress overrode a veto by President Andrew Johnson. In this article, I want to look at why Andrew Johnson was so opposed to the Civil Rights Act that he became the first president to veto a bill because he objected to its substance.

In his veto message, President Johnson questioned whether it “is sound policy to make our entire colored population…citizens of the United States.” He asked; “Can it be reasonably supposed that they possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States?”

He described newly freed slaves as akin to immigrants newly arrived in the United States, writing:

“Four millions of them have just emerged from slavery into freedom.…It may also be asked whether it is necessary that they should be declared citizens in order that they may be secured in the enjoyment of the civil rights proposed to be conferred by the bill. Those rights are, by Federal as well as State laws, secured to all domiciled aliens and foreigners, even before the completion of the process of naturalization; and it may safely be assumed that the same enactments are sufficient to give like protection and benefits to those for whom this bill provides special legislation. Besides, the policy of the Government from its origin to the present time seems to have been that persons who are strangers to and unfamiliar with our institutions and our laws should pass through a certain probation, at the end of which, before attaining the coveted prize, they must give evidence of their fitness to receive and to exercise the rights of citizens as contemplated by the Constitution of the United States.”

In other words, blacks might be able to earn naturalization in the same way immigrants could, but they should not simply be made citizens en masse by operation of law. In fact, Johnson claimed, that making blacks citizens immediately was a form of discrimination against immigrants! He wrote; “The bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the Negro…”

The African American, according to the president, “must of necessity, from his previous unfortunate condition of servitude, be less informed as to the nature and character of our institutions than he who, coming from abroad, has, to some extent at least, familiarized himself with the principles of a Government to which he voluntarily intrusts ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Yet it is now proposed, by a single legislative enactment, to confer the rights of citizens upon all persons of African descent born within the extended limits of the United States, while persons of foreign birth who make our land their home must undergo a probation of five years, and can only then become citizens upon proof that they are ‘of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.’” Here we find an easy willingness to play immigrants off against African Americans.

In his veto message, Johnson pulled out all of the racial prejudice stops. He understood that some Northerners might be willing to put their own biases aside in the case of making blacks citizens. 170,000 African Americans had, after all, joined the Union Army during the Civil War and helped secure the reunification of the United States. So he reminded Americans that blacks would not be the only beneficiaries of the Citizenship Clause of the Civil Rights Act. At the time, there was a national moral panic over the recent arrival of two small groups of immigrants, the Chinese and “gypsies,” or Roma. Johnson tried to exploit the fear of these groups among white Americans to rally support for his veto. Johnson wrote that the Civil Rights Act would make not only blacks citizens, but also “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color. Negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood.” He must have felt certain that even the least prejudiced white man could find someone to hate or fear on that list.

Johnson’s objection to the Civil rights Act extended beyond his objection to conferring immediate citizenship on United States-born non-white people. He was also deeply troubled by the prohibition in Section 1 of the Act prohibiting laws that discriminated based on race. Johnson wrote that in the Civil Rights Act “a perfect equality of the white and colored races is attempted to be fixed by Federal law in every State of the Union over the vast field of State jurisdiction covered by these enumerated rights. In no one of these can any State ever exercise any power of discrimination between the different races. In the exercise of State policy over matters exclusively affecting the people of each State it has frequently been thought expedient to discriminate between the two races.” He said that he particularly object to the elimination of laws banning blacks and whites from marrying. Intermarriage between the races was, he wrote, viewed as “revolting, and regarded as an offense against public decorum,” and was illegal in the former Confederate states as well as in some of the Northern states. Johnson believed that it was a state’s right to have laws that discriminate between the races.

In the next installment of this series on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, I will look at the other reasons Johnson gave for his veto.

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Author: Patrick Young

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