Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

In a world that was anything but egalitarian, states were empowered to legalize a host of coercive practices designed to control and manage groups considered to be dangerous or destabilizing. Legislators wrote laws targeting the transient poor and allowing paupers and vagrants to be expelled from communities at will. They construed married women and children as dependents of their husbands and fathers, denying them rights and limiting their liberty. Most germane to the activists described in this book, they passed race-based regulations that not only legalized slavery itself but also targeted free Black people and Native Americans. People seeking to challenge such oppressions found little support in the first eight amendments to the Constitution, now known as the Bill of Rights. Although those amendments, adopted in 1791, enumerated a variety of individual rights, the prevailing view was that they were designed to limit the power of the federal government, not the states.