As soon as the 39th
Congress convened on December 4, 1865, Republicans proposed
numerous legal and constitutional remedies to curb the political
power of ex-Confederates and protect the civil rights of the
ex-slaves. The two most important pieces of legislation were
the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill.
Earlier in the year, on March 3, 1865, Congress had passed
the first Freedmen’s Bureau Act. It created the Bureau of
Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the
Freedmen’s Bureau, within the War Department. The new federal
agency provided relief to ex-slaves and other war refugees in
the form of temporary shelter, food, fuel, and other basic
provisions, assistance in labor-contract negotiation, the
establishment of schools, and similar services. The December
23, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly profiled the Freedmen’s
Bureau in Richmond, Virginia. The
article briefly
described the distribution of rations and the functioning of the
court. The last paragraph listed the offices in the building, a
sketch of which appeared on another page of the
issue.
However, Congress had provided the Freedmen’s Bureau with no
funding, which forced it to draw from the War Department’s
existing budget, and had set the agency to expire a year later
on March 3, 1866. Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull of
Illinois, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, devoted
time to reading reports on the situation in the post-war South
and to understanding the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau
through discussions with the agency’s commissioner, General
Oliver O. Howard. On January 5, 1866, Trumbull introduced a
bill to extend the life and expand the powers of the Freedmen’s
Bureau. It was referred to his Judiciary Committee, where an
amended version was
reported to the full Senate
six days later. The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill allocated direct
funding for the agency, granted its military courts the
authority to try all cases involving the denial of civil rights
“on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,”
and imposed penalties of a $1000 fine and/or a year in prison on
state officials who denied such civil rights. Those regulations
applied only to unreconstructed states of the former
Confederacy.
Trumbull’s Civil Rights Bill was also
reported from his Judiciary Committee to the full Senate on
January 11, 1866. It was the first legislative attempt to give
meaning to the freedom conferred by the Thirteenth Amendment’s
abolition of slavery, and was based on authority granted by the
Thirteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause (which Trumbull had
authored), “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by
appropriate legislation.” The proposed law made it a federal
crime, punishable by fine and imprisonment, to deprive any
person of his or her civil rights. Judicial authority over the
act was assigned to the federal courts. On February 1, Trumbull
successfully added a
citizenship clause to the
measure. The Civil Rights Bill granted citizenship to all
persons born or naturalized in the United States (except untaxed
Indians), and guaranteed them equal rights under the law. |