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

by Kate Masur

Although Bingham wanted to see the federal government protect people’s civil rights, he insisted that the Constitution gave Congress no authority to pass a law enforcing the privileges and immunities clause.23 Trumbull had an answer for people like that. The Civil Rights Bill, he also claimed, was authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment. The abolition of slavery would be meaningless if states were still permitted to “depriv[e] persons of African descent of privileges which are essential to freemen.” Non-slaveholding states had adopted antiblack laws “out of deference to slavery,” he said, but he had “no doubt” that, under the Thirteenth Amendment, “we may destroy all these discriminations in civil rights against the black man.”24 That position—that overturning antiblack laws in the states was part of Congress’s power under the Thirteenth Amendment—echoed antislavery activists’ longstanding arguments that the antiblack laws of the free states were ugly residuals of slavery. To truly eradicate slavery, it was necessary to abolish not only the chattel principle itself but all its nasty offspring. Knowing that the measure they were proposing, however justified from a moral and constitutional standpoint, represented a radical departure from the past, supporters of the bill regularly tried to downplay its significance. In addition to insisting that such a law would have been constitutional even before the war, they reminded their colleagues that it banned only race-based discrimi...