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

by Kate Masur

By the time Congress convened on December 4, 1865, South Carolina had joined Mississippi in adopting new laws that explicitly denied African Americans basic protections. Congressional Republicans were outraged by white southerners’ lawlessness and well understood that African Americans’ subordinate status in state law heightened their vulnerability. President Johnson himself, addressing Congress on the first day of the session, seemed to sanction the idea that Congress should take steps to ensure freedpeople’s protection. Voting was a matter for the states, he said, but it was “equally clear that good faith requires the security of the freedmen in their liberty and their property, their right to labor, and their right to claim the just return of their labor.”