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

by Kate Masur

Contemporaries well understood that the Civil Rights Bill was entirely unprecedented. Congress had never before asserted its power in states this way. How could it do so now? Trumbull offered several answers. He began by arguing that the bill would “carr[y] into effect” the “abstract truths and principles” of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Those principles were of little use if people did not have “some means of availing themselves of their benefits.” Turning to a closer reading of the Constitution itself, Trumbull made two central points. First, he insisted that the Civil Rights Bill was simply a measure to enforce the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. Referencing Samuel Hoar’s 1844 expulsion from Charleston, he argued that Congress had always had authority to require states to respect the rights of citizens of other states. Prevailing legal opinion, he argued, was that “a person who is a citizen in one State and goes to another” was “entitled to the great fundamental rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the right to travel, to go where he pleases.” All state citizens already had such rights, he said. The problem was that many states refused to recognize them. By declaring all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States and barring racial discrimination against everyone, Trumbull argued, Congress was merely exercising power that it had had all along.22