‘A Treacherous President Stood in the Way’
By December of 1866, the Civil War was over, but the conflict that would define the nature of the United States of America was not close to finished. Encouraged by President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat sympathetic to their aims, the former Confederate states had eagerly subjected the newly freed slaves to the Black Codes, laws confining them to inferior status and second-class citizenship, denying them votes, citizenship and even freedom of movement, while armed groups of whites attacked them with impunity. In vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Johnson insisted that the law protecting the freedmen’s rights was in fact “made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.”
In a rebuke to Johnson, his party fared poorly in the November 1866 election, and the newly strengthened Republicans vowed to protect the freedmen's rights. Before the new Congress took office, the former slave and abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass urged the Republican Party to defy the president by protecting the fundamental rights of black Americans and shielding them from the violence of the former Confederates.
“Whatever may be tolerated in monarchical and despotic governments,” Douglass wrote in his 1866 essay for The Atlantic, “no republic is safe that tolerates a privileged class, or denies to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them.”
The choice before Republicans in that era was between accepting the efforts of a rogue president to allow the subjugation of a group of Americans based on race, or to continue striving for a more perfect union by thwarting him. — Adam Serwer
Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude more intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent. There are the best of reasons for this profound
