Faced
with the defeated South poised to regain voting rights and seats in
Congress, the Republican party desperately needed dependable voters and
it created a new category of black citizenship to attain this. Armed
with a newly enacted law, the terrorist wing of the party, the Union
League, was unleashed on the South with instructions to enlist freedmen
and intimidate white voters from the polls.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Revolutionizing Citizenship of the United States
“
. . . [T]he provision of the [Civil Rights] bill [of 1866] appeared out
of all relation to our constitutional system. Never before had Congress
been known to arrogate to itself the power to regulate the civil status
of the inhabitants of a State . . . , [the jurisdiction of disputes
relating to contracts and property and even criminal actions, and it]
seemed like a complete revelation of that diabolical spirit of
centralization, of which only the cloven hoof had been manifested
heretofore.
In
addition to the definition of “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,”
the Civil Rights Bill undertook to fix the precise meaning of the phrase
“citizen of the United States.” For general practical purposes, exact
determination of the scope of citizenship had not been found necessary
[previous to the War].
Where any opinion at all had been pronounced, it
had in most cases been in relation to the status of free Negroes.
The
weight of authority on this point was adverse to the claim of
citizenship for the blacks. “No person,” said Attorney-General
[William] Wirt in 1821, “is included in the description of citizen of
the United States, who has not the full rights of a citizen in the State
of his residence.”
This
principle had been in general the basis of the government’s practice in
all the departments. For native-born persons living within a State,
citizenship of the State was the prerequisite for citizenship of the
United States; for persons of foreign birth, naturalization alone was
necessary. The Dred Scott decision limited this rule by determining that
State citizens of African descent could not be citizens of the United
States.
During
the war, however, the old view was entirely overthrown in practice.
Mr. Lincoln’s attorney-general argued away all the precedents, and gave
it as his official opinion that a free Negro, born within the United
States, was ipso facto a citizen thereof. He assumed nativity as the
broad basis of citizenship . . . [and] With that assumption the status
of United States citizenship was placed entirely beyond the reach of any
State influence whatever, and a purely national conception was
attained.
To
justify this sweeping enactment, the special conception of citizenship
which the history of our institutions had developed was discarded, and
the broad principle of public law was adopted in its place. All
[Northern] authorities agreed that the status of citizen implied the
reciprocal duties of allegiance and protection. A citizen of the United
States, then, was entitled to the protection of that government to
which allegiance was owed. But this protection was to operate against
all sources of oppression, and if a State government happened to come in
this category, it too must succumb.”
(Essays
on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics, William
Archibald Dunning, The MacMillan Company, 1898, pp. 96-99)
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