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

by Kate Masur

Johnson for his signature.36 Republican efforts to moderate the Civil Rights Act evidently mattered little to President Johnson, who issued a stinging veto on March 27. Sounding much like Stephen Douglas in the 1850s, and echoing Democrats and conservative Republicans in Congress, Johnson spoke for the many Americans who believed that states were entitled to discriminate based on race, and he rejected Republican efforts to nationalize the principle of racial equality in civil rights. The president also denounced the act’s recognition of African American citizenship, arguing that people who had just emerged from slavery ought to go through a probationary period before becoming citizens. He condemned Congress’s incursion into what he believed was the rightful domain of the states and their police powers. “Every subject embraced in the enumeration of rights contained in this bill has been considered as exclusively belonging to the States,” he argued. “They all relate to the internal police and economy of the respective States” and were “matters which in each State concern the domestic condition of its people.” If Congress could “repeal all State laws discriminating between whites and blacks in the subjects covered by this bill,” the president warned, then it could do similarly when it came to suffrage, landholding, and other matters. The law would “sap and destroy our federative system of limited powers and break down the barriers which preserve the rights of the States,” he ...