The Civil Rights
Act became law on April 9, 1866, but other issues remained
unsettled. At that point, the proposed constitutional amendment
ensuring federal civil rights had been tabled in both chambers
of Congress; the proposed constitutional amendment on
apportionment of federal representation had received a
two-thirds majority in the House, but failed to gain the same in
the Senate; resolutions to disfranchise former Confederates and
prohibit them from holding public office had been referred to
the Joint Committee on Reconstruction; and the proposed
constitutional amendment protecting the national debt and
rejecting Confederate debt had passed the House with a
two-thirds majority, but had not been considered in the Senate.
At a meeting of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction on April 21, 1866, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens
introduced a plan for combining the various proposals into one
amendment. It comprised a section dealing with each of the four
topics for which resolutions had been submitted previously,
along with a fifth section to allow Congress to enforce the
constitutional amendment with “appropriate legislation.”
Section Five was based on the enforcement clause of the
Thirteenth Amendment. A week later, after discussion and
changes were made, the committee endorsed the proposed
Fourteenth Amendment, 12-3, and ordered it reported to
Congress. On April 30, it was introduced into the Senate by
Senator William Fessenden, chairman of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, and into the House by Congressman Stevens,
ranking House member of the committee. The House began debating
the Fourteenth Amendment on May 8.
The initial version of Section Three, which
disfranchised and prohibited former Confederates from holding
public office, proved to be the most controversial in the House,
including with mainstream Republicans. Congressman James Blaine
feared that if the amendment overrode the President’s pardons,
then the federal government would be open to the charge of
making promises in bad faith. Congressman John Bingham, author
of Section One, worried that opposition to Section Three might
torpedo passage of the entire amendment. Congressmen Stevens
insisted, however, that Section Three was the most important
part of the proposed amendment because it was necessary to keep
the Southern state governments in loyal hands during
Reconstruction.
Section Four, securing the national debt
and prohibiting assumption of Confederate debt, was so generally
agreeable that it provoked little comment and only token
opposition from Border State congressman complaining about the
ban on compensation to former slaveowners.
The House
passed the
Fourteenth Amendment on May 10 by more than the required
two-thirds majority, 128-37, sparking applause in the House
galleries as well as on the floor. The five negative Republican
votes were congressmen from the Border States of Kentucky,
Maryland, and West Virginia. Although most supporters and
opponents agreed that Section One incorporated the substance of
the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution, the Fourteenth
Amendment as initially passed by the House did not include a
clause defining national citizenship. House participants may
have assumed that the citizenship clause in the Civil Rights Act
was sufficient to affirm that blacks were citizens.
Debate on the proposed Fourteenth Amendment
opened in the Senate on May 23. Because Senator Fessenden was
absent due to illness, Senator Jacob Howard represented the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction by opening the debate and
steering the Fourteenth Amendment through the Senate. On May
29, Howard moved to amend Section One by adding a citizenship
clause to read, “all persons born or naturalized in the United
States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
the United States and of the States wherein they reside.” In
addition, the Senate Republican Caucus decided to strike the
disfranchisement clause from Section Three, and Senator Howard
presented a substitute with that omission, which was
approved
by the full Senate, 32-10, on May 31.
Senate opponents unsuccessfully attempted
to thwart passage of the Fourteenth Amendment by dividing it
once again into separate amendments. On June 8, the Senate
passed the Fourteenth Amendment by a two-thirds
majority of those present, 33-11 (five senators were absent and
one seat was vacant). On June 13, the House approved the
Senate’s version of the Fourteenth Amendment (with the
citizenship clause and without the disfranchisement clause),
120-32, with all Republican voting in the affirmative. The June
30, 1866 issue of Harper’s Weekly (published June 20)
reported Congressman Stevens’s displeasure with
the Senate version, which removed the disfranchisement clause.
Although accepting it as the best that could be accomplished at
that time, he predicted the necessity of the federal government
securing voting rights for black men (which later would be
embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment).
On June 16, 1866, the proposed Fourteenth
Amendment was presented to Secretary of State William Henry
Seward, who then submitted it to the states for ratification or
rejection. When Congress received
notification
from President Johnson on June 22 of the secretary’s action, the
chief executive made it clear that he had not approved the
proposed constitutional amendment. Harper’s Weekly
editor Curtis
reacted in the July 7 issue
(published June 27), expressing regret for the president’s
disapproval and disagreeing with Johnson’s contention that the
Fourteenth Amendment did not represent public sentiment. The
editor explained that presidents are not directly involved in
the process of amending the constitution. (Curtis mentioned the
exception of Lincoln signing of the Thirteenth Amendment, which
abolished slavery. The editor was apparently unaware that in
March 1861, a day before leaving office, President James
Buchanan had signed the original pro-slavery Thirteenth
Amendment, which was subsequently not ratified by the states.
For more information, visit HarpWeek’s
Thirteenth Amendment
website.) |