Like many northerners, Bradley was losing patience with the seemingly endless debate about the rights of black citizens. Echoing Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Bradley wrote that blacks needed to stop seeking “to be the special favorite of the laws” and be satisfied with having their rights protected in the same ways as other Americans. (Other Americans, of course, had not been slaves, nor did they constantly face the kind of humiliating treatment Sumner’s law was meant to end.)
