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164 Chapter 4 Rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction: Potential, Change, and Opposition The fluidity of the Civil War and its aftermath marked a moment of potential. Exslaves suddenly transformed from chattel property to persons and, in light of African American military service, could never go back to bondage again. In an opinion on citizenship, Attorney General Edward Bates helped set the groundwork for future civil rights legislation by explicitly rejecting the Dred Scott ruling and articulating that blacks could beAmericancitizens. Northernand Southernblacks validated their manhood by joining the armed forces and bolstered their declarations of equality by successfully protesting unequal pay. Military service also reinvigorated the antebellum African American convention movement, where blacks articulated their vision as to the contours of their new citizenship status with more coherence and potency than before the war, and forced whites to confront their expectations. The shared experiences of military service— including victory regarding the pay issue, increased political and national awareness, greater organization and unity, and growing appreciation for education and the value of African American labor—strengthened unity within the black community at the same time it afforded a powerful argument in support of expectations that those who defended the Union deserved full and equal membership in its society. Beginning with the National Convention in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864, blacks began to meet once again in national and statewide conventions, including in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and even South Carolina almost immediately upon the close of the war. Speeches by whites also indicate the moment of potential during the 1860s. An oration by Massachusetts Republican George S. Boutwell defined Union victory as a triumph against treason and a restoration of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Runkle, a Union officer and superintendent of Freedmen’s Affairs in Kentucky, urged blacks to embrace the Republican free labor ethos and pursue self-reliance, self-improvement, education, and property; to cultivate moral character; and to avoid alcohol. In this context, Congress passed, and courts enforced, a series of legislative measures that began to define and modernize the rights and practices associated Rights during the Civil War and Reconstruction 165 with national citizenship and enforce civil rights for blacks for the first time. The most obvious and profound manifestation of legal change during the Civil War came in the form of Civil War Amendments that emancipated the slaves (the Thirteenth), defined American citizens in nationalistic terms as those persons born or naturalized in the United States and thus entitled to “equal protection of the laws” and not to be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (the Fourteenth), and granted black men the right to vote (the Fifteenth). These amendments and accompanying legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, represented a major revision of American constitutionalism and federalism: they not only engraved the Union’s battlefield victory onto the law but also strengthened the American nation-state by establishing the primacy of national citizenship over that of the states, defining the body of national citizens, and marking out some of the rights associated with that status. Moreover, the amendments and legislation recognized millions of freedpeople as national citizens, and freedmen as voters, within years of the exclusionary Dred Scott case. In so doing, these amendments and other legislation helped restore to practice the egalitarian ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 defined for the first time some of the rights attendant to national citizenship, mandating in harmony with the Republican Party’s free labor ideology that “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are . . . citizens of the United States” and that “citizens, of every race and color . . . shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.” The admittedly short-lived Civil Rights Act of 1875 went even further, desegregating public accommodations and removing racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, and theaters before its nullification by the...

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