Capitol Men (29 page)

Sumner believed that Congress's duty lay in the enactment of legislation it deemed necessary and that outstanding issues of constitutionality should be left to the courts. Most men in Congress, however, many of whom were lawyers, considered themselves expert on the subject of the Constitution and did not agree that such responsibility should be passed along. They raised numerous objections to his proposed legislation—that enforcing equality in churches was unconstitutional, that the government could not impose rules of conduct on privately owned businesses, and that blacks and whites actually preferred a degree of separation in many of their activities.

The latter point was integral to Southern representatives' perennial argument that race relations were a matter of intimate concern primarily to Southerners, since it was in their section that most black Americans lived. Sumner's crusade for civil rights, in their view, was intrusive. "I am not here to be dictated to by the Senator from Massachusetts," James Lusk Alcorn of Mississippi declaimed on the Senate floor.

He fights the battles of the colored people from afar off, at a safe distance. I have fought their battles in a hand-to-hand conflict. I hold my place here under their authority ... I speak for both races; I speak that their friendly relations may not be thus unwisely disturbed. I, sir, whose childhood was nursed in the lap of the negro; who in his boyhood shared every playground with the negro ... I, sir, have no snobbish prejudice against the colored people.

Rhetoric similar to Alcorn's echoed across the corridor in the House chamber as well, prompting Joseph Rainey to demand,

If the Democrats are such staunch friends of the negro, why is it that when propositions are offered here and elsewhere looking to the elevation of the colored race ... the Democrats array themselves in unbroken phalanx, and vote against every such measure? You, gentlemen of that side of the House, have voted against all the recent amendments to the Constitution, and the laws enforcing the same. Why do you do it? I answer, because those measures had a tendency to give to the poor negro his just rights, and because they proposed to knock off his shackles and give him freedom of speech, freedom of action, and the opportunity of education, that he might elevate himself to the dignity of manhood. Now you come to us and say that you are our best friends. We would that we could look upon you as such.

Had Sumner faced only the predictable Southern hostility to his bill, his task might have been easier; but numerous moderate Republicans opposed him as well, most notably the Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, one of the main architects of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as Lot Morrill of Maine. Both men thought Sumner's bill overstepped congressional authority—that there was no
basis for the federal government to influence the treatment an individual received in a public accommodation; and they challenged specifically its reliance on the Declaration of Independence as a source of legislative powers. Sumner grew impatient with what he saw as Morrill's insistence on the strictest of constitutional interpretations. "He [Morrill] finds no power for anything unless it be distinctly written in positive precise words. He cannot read between the lines; he cannot apply a generous principle which will coordinate everything there in harmony with the Declaration of Independence." Trumbull believed that "in regard to the rights that belong to the individual as man and as a freeman under the Constitution ... I think we had a right to pass the Civil Rights Bill [of 1866]...but I think we went to the verge of constitutional authority." Sumner, in Senate session, accused Trumbull of standing in the way of equal rights.

"Equal rights in what and for what?" Trumbull demanded.

"Equal rights for the colored race."

"Has not a colored man the same right to go anywhere that I have?" Trumbull asked.

"He is exposed to insult wherever he goes," Sumner replied.

"And so is the white man."

Sumner frowned. "My friend ought not to say that. He knows a white man may travel from one end of the country to another, and he is exposed to no insult on account of his color."

"I do not know of any right by law that a white man has to travel that a colored man has not," Trumbull insisted. "And if [Sumner] will show me where any white man has any right to travel that a colored man has not, I will vote with him to correct it. There is perfect equality now."

"Perfect equality!" Sumner snorted. "Will the Senator listen to Mr. Frederick Douglass as he reports his experiences? I wish the Senator would listen to him reporting his experience on his recent visit to New Orleans; how he was insulted on all the railroads, shut out from equal rights." Douglass, describing his journey, had written in the
Independent
of being made to sit in "a second class car, amid filth and smoke," and of being denied refreshments at depots en route.

"I ask the Senator," Alcorn of Mississippi interjected, querying Sumner, "was Mr. Douglass insulted anywhere in the South?"

"He was."

"Whereabouts?"

"At what precise stopping-place, I know not."

"I say that colored men can travel in Mississippi and do travel in Mississippi in first-class cars," Alcorn asserted, "and that there is no insult offered them anywhere."

"Then Mississippi is in a happier condition than I had supposed," Sumner retorted.

"Then," Alcorn proposed, "let your legislation come up to the line and leave Mississippi alone."

"We must legislate generally," Sumner said, exasperated. "There must be one law for every part of the country, the law of equal rights.

Perhaps the bill's chief technical difficulty was that it sought to guarantee equal treatment in public accommodations that, unlike voting, had never been made explicit by previous legislation. And unlike a formal right, such as voting, daily interactions between the races regarding public accommodations were governed by deeply ingrained patterns of prejudice that would be hard to police and perhaps impossible to reform. "Equality," C. Vann Woodward observes, "was a far more revolutionary aim than freedom." Securing equal rights in everyday life "involved many more relationships than those between master and slave ... It involved such unpredictable and biased people as hotel clerks, railroad conductors, steamboat stewards, theater ushers, real estate agents, and policemen."

To those who questioned whether the government could proscribe private actions, Sumner replied that certain institutions, although in private hands, were nonetheless part of the public weal. Schools, supported by tax dollars and regulated by law, were certainly public, not private, entities; similarly, hotels, railroads, and theaters were licensed and subject to public regulation. "A hotel is a legal institution ... a railroad corporation is also a legal institution," he insisted. "So is a theater, and all that my bill proposes is that those who enjoy the benefits of law shall treat those who come to them with equality ... Whoever seeks the benefit of the law, as the owners and lessees of theaters do, as the common carriers do, as hotelkeepers do, must show equality."

Was Lyman Trumbull correct in suggesting that a bill requiring equal rights in the private interactions of citizens went too far? This was the core question, for even if such laws were morally right, even if Congress should be allowed to enact them, how could they be successfully enforced? The uncertainty raised some ancillary questions: Where exactly did the battle for black America's rights end? Did it
ever
end? In 1865 William Lloyd Garrison, believing that with the adoption of the Thir
teenth Amendment the longstanding goal of the American Anti-Slavery Society was attained, had tried to disband that organization. Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass resisted, however. They believed, as Lincoln had observed of his Emancipation Proclamation, "We are like whalers who have been long on chase. We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer, or, with one 'flop' of his tail, he will send us all into eternity." A significant number of abolitionists were willing to view the Thirteenth Amendment as only the first victory in what would be a long crusade to win true equality for the freedmen, and they remained committed to that struggle, even after the Constitution was amended further to provide citizenship rights and the franchise. The discrimination a black American encountered in his or her daily experience, however difficult to address, could not be swept to the margins; it must be confronted. "While a colored gentleman is ... unable to obtain admission to the public hotels; while state-rooms are refused in our steamboats, and berths refused in our sleeping-cars, on account of color," Douglass wrote, "the negro is not abolished as a degraded caste."

There was one group of American reformers, once closely tied to the abolition movement, whose active support for new legislation Charles Sumner could no longer take for granted. Many women's rights leaders had become alienated from the civil rights cause, upset that Congress would again immerse itself in the subject of rights for the freedmen, for whom so much had been done already, when their own demands had received scant attention.

Women had organized as supporters of the abolition movement as early as the 1840s, not only because it was the morally right thing to do, but because its aims mirrored their own aspirations for equal rights. They had felt slighted, however, by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments' transformation of black men (but not black and white women) into citizens and voters. As for the Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, Susan B. Anthony, president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, would offer no more than qualified praise. "I only long for the hour when you shall turn your constitutional law and logic in the direction of women citizens," she wrote to Sumner, encouraging him to speak "as grandly for Equal Rights to
all women
as you have to
all men
" for surely "the majesty of the U.S. Constitution" was meant "to protect
all
of its citizens." She warned him that because "women are absolutely
nothing in Republican minds today, as were the Negroes with Democrats twenty years ago ... I will give no aid or comfort to any pact that fails to recognize the equal rights of women citizens."

This rift between women's rights advocates and civil rights activists—"one of the saddest divorces in American history," the historian William McFeely has termed it—was painful for both sides. Women were understandably angry to be sidelined in the postwar push for freedmen's rights. But civil rights supporters, facing an uphill battle of their own, came to resent the complaints from those they once considered natural allies. It was an embarrassing quandary for which many abolitionists had no good resolution; philosophically they knew the women were right; however, they could not help but take offense when women expressed indignation that "illiterate black men" would be able to vote before educated white women. Garrison and Sumner, Douglass and Phillips, while supporting women's suffrage in principle, denied its alleged urgency. The nation, they believed, had been conditioned by the war's sacrifice to accept the empowerment of the freedmen but was not prepared to endorse women as voters; Phillips insisted that burdening the one good cause with the other would resemble putting too many bundles in a small boat, sinking all of them together.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

At the end of the Civil War, Anthony and her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton had sought actively to join the two causes. Anthony told audiences that the time was right to remake the government so that it would serve all Americans, white and black, male and female. Her argument went to the heart of the question of what Reconstruction was and should be. Was it to be solely a means of elevating the former slaves to citizenship or a grand retooling of society at large? "We have fairly boosted the Negro over our heads, and now we had better begin to remember that self-preservation is the first law of nature," declared Stanton in May 1866. "Some say, 'Be still, wait, this is the negro's hour.' But I believe this is the hour for everybody to do the best thing for reconstruction. A vote based on intelligence and education for black and white man and woman—this is what we need ... and [we will] press in through the constitutional door the moment it is open for the admission of Sambo." Douglass, flinching at her use of a racial slur, cautioned the women that while the vote was an important goal for all who did not possess it, for blacks it was absolutely essential, a matter of life and death.

Phillips, in a meeting with Anthony and the editor Theodore Tilton, suggested that the vote for women would likely have to wait another generation. When Tilton concurred with Phillips, Anthony seethed. "I would rather cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the black man and not for women!" Stanton displayed similar obstinacy at a larger gathering in New York City in May 1867, explaining that she did not look forward to having black elected officials who were themselves "degraded [and] oppressed" create the laws for her and other women; if women were not to be enfranchised, the qualification for voting should be made an educational one. Otherwise, all the newly created black voters would be men hardly qualified to have authority in public affairs, resembling instead an "incoming tide of ignorance, poverty, and vice." That same year a campaign in Kansas to amend the state constitution to allow both black and women's suffrage drew Anthony and Stanton to the state, but the crusade stalled, newspapers refused to treat it seriously, and a wealthy but wayward male sympathizer, George Francis Train, unleashed nasty words about black people, which the press, and other feminists, denounced. The result was that neither black nor women's suffrage passed the Kansas referendum, confirming fears back east that the two causes could not be combined.