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

by Kate Masur

With the Civil Rights Bill, Trumbull was looking to resolve questions that were pressing in the moment but that had also bedeviled civil rights activists in the free states for decades. His initial draft of the bill did not mention citizenship, but just before introducing it in the Senate, he added a provision designed to settle the longstanding question of whether free African Americans were citizens of the United States. The bill stated: “That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States without distinction of color.”19 The only groups of people excluded from birthright citizenship under this measure were children of foreign diplomats and Native Americans living on tribal land. With this provision in federal law, there could no longer be any doubt about the citizenship status of native-born African Americans.