B. During the Civil War (1861 – 1865)145-149.pdf

B. During the Civil War (1861 – 1865) Bloodiest war of the USA, more victims than all the wars reunited (roughly 359,000 Union soldiers, 258,000 Confederates). Abraham Lincoln addressed the issue of slavery on two famous occasions. The first was the Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862....

B. During the Civil War (1861 – 1865) Bloodiest war of the USA, more victims than all the wars reunited (roughly 359,000 Union soldiers, 258,000 Confederates). Abraham Lincoln addressed the issue of slavery on two famous occasions. The first was the Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. The second was the Gettysburg Address delivered on the battlefield of Gettysburg on November 19, 1863 (four months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy). Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862 “That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free: and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States." Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued. 145  And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages. And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service. And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. to stop fighting and admit defeat The Civil War ended when Robert E. surrendered in 1865 and Lincoln was killed the same year by confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. C. After the Civil War (1865 – 1954) bien The period of “Reconstruction” (1865-1877) aptly describes the coming together of the American nation – the North and the South – after years of brutal conflict. Not all was said uphill : and done however. African Americans still faced an uphill struggle. The muskets and rifles barely laid down, a number of southern states enacted laws (known as “Black Codes”) aimed pénible at denying the recently freed slave population all but the most elementary civil rights and liberties. Assuredly, African Americans now had standing to sue, could marry (though not to white persons…) and had the right to hold property, but at the same time, they were denied the right to strike or to leave their employment. Wandering African Americans could be arrested and fined for vagrancy. The Louisiana Code left no doubt as to where African Americans’ obligations lay. “Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty, and leaving home without permission will be deemed disobedience; imprudence, swearing or indecent language to or in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent, or quarrelling and fighting with one another, shall be deemed disobedience. For any disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed”. disobedience : refusing to do what someone in authority tells you to do The President, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee (1808-1875), did nothing to prevent such abuse. He felt that the States, however unwise, were acting within their constitutional rights and declined to interfere. He even vetoed the follow-up Freedmen’s Bureau bill and the Civil rights bill, aimed at protecting the African American population. Congress by contrast, now controlled by radical Republicans, refused to follow suit. It out-vetoed the President (the first instance of such an occurrence) and further intervened on the constitutional plane, in effect out-vetoed: opposé à un veto 146 outlawing slavery (the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865 ). The infamous Dred Scott 392 decision was thus repealed. Furthermore, all citizens of the United were guaranteed the equal protection of the laws, again against the will of the President (the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868 ). Finally, voting rights were ensured for all (the Fifteenth Amendment, 393 passed in 1870 ). In addition to these constitutional amendments (known as the “Civil War 394 Amendments”), Congress enacted a civil rights law in 1875 aimed at giving more flesh to the Fourteenth Amendment. Any public form of discrimination against African Americans was henceforth forbidden – in theatres, restaurants, transportation and the like. Congress’s right to forbid a State to act contrary to the Constitution was unquestioned. The law, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, assumed that Congress could also prevent racial discrimination by private individuals… Meanwhile, a number of African American leaders would emerge, in state legislatures, on the bench of state supreme courts , in the House of Representatives, and 395 in the U.S. Senate. 396 Despite this progress, the South’s “resources for racial oppression were by no means exhausted”. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court “came to the rescue” of white supremacists by 397 declaring the civil rights law of 1875 unconstitutional. The majority of the Court considered that Congress’s authority to pass legislation preventing racial discrimination could only extend to States’ violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. States were left free with respect to individuals. Put differently, the decision meant that Congress could not lawfully protect African Americans from most forms of discrimination. With the Supreme Court declaring that Congress had no federal power to enact “primary and direct” legislation on individuals, it opened the lid to the passing of State laws legitimizing segregation. Many States eagerly seized this opportunity, adopting so-called “Jim Crow” laws that prohibited African Americans from using the same facilities as whites (taking their name from a blackface minstrel song). Among others, States passed laws requiring separate schools, hospitals, restaurants, railways and waiting rooms: even public restrooms and drinking fountains were divided. States also enacted laws organizing elaborate literacy tests to qualify for voting, all 398 white primary elections , and laws establishing a poll tax. All the while, loopholes exempted 399 400 many whites. failles 392 According to the Thirteenth Amendment, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. […]”. 393 According to the Fourteenth Amendment, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. […]”. 394 According to the Fifteenth Amendment, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. […]”. 395 Cf. Jonathan J. Wright, who sat on the Supreme Court of South Carolina. 396 Hiram Revels sat in the U.S. Senate for two years : 1870-1871. Blanche K. Bruce sat for a full term : 1875-1881. These two people were the only African Americans to sit in the Senate before the election of Edward Brooks of Massachusetts in 1966. 397 Cf. Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the United States, op. cit., p. 362. 398 New Orleans required separate districts for prostitutes with white prostitutes in one district, African American prostitutes in another. In Oklahoma, telephone booths were separated. Certain ordinances even prohibited people from playing checkers together. 399 Since parties intervened in the primaries, and were considered to constitute voluntary bodies, they were not covered by the Fifteenth Amendment. Thanks to the efforts of the NAACP, the white primary was defeated in the case of Nixon v. Herndon (1927). This victory was nevertheless offset by the case of Grovey v. Townshend (1935), in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously acknowledged the legality 147 The Supreme Court was given the opportunity to voice its opinion on the constitutionality of these laws in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case concerned a Louisiana law requiring railroads to provide separate cars for the two races. The Court declared that segregation had nothing to do with the superiority of the white race and that segregation was not contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities were equal. The doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson became the law of the land in those states maintaining segregation. In a word, segregation was constitutional. Only one Supreme Court Justice dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision. For Justice J.M. Harlan, “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens”. Unrepentant, the Supreme Court, in Mississippi v. Williams (1898), and in Giles v. Harris (1903) upheld voting laws that in effect disenfranchised African-Americans. Figures speak 401 for themselves when comparing the number of registered African-American voters in Louisiana in 1896 (130,334) and in 1904 (1,342). Black turnout in the Presidential election of 1904 was zero in the states of Virginia and South Carolina. The separate but equal doctrine is an oxymoron because in short, the Louisiana law does not 18 violate the 14th Amendment’s requirement that all citizens be afforded equal protection of the laws. It’s an oxymoron without a doubt. We can see different objections. There is a campaign to improve the condition of racial minorities in the USA which has a strong relationship with between cultural, economic, social political and legal change. 5 reasons explain the change: 1. Cultural change The beginning of significant protest in music and words (books), unmuted cries against racism. of a revised, but equally effective form of the white primary. The Supreme Court finally declared the white primary to be unconstitutional in any form in Smith v. Allwright (1944)(this case was also NAACP inspired). 400 The poll-tax was a payment that citizens had to make before they were allowed to vote. Naturally, this tax eliminated the brunt of African Americans, the poorest citizens, from their Fifteenth Amendment rights. Inasmuch as certain poor whites might be prevented from paying the poll tax, a so-called “grandfather clause” was inserted in a half-dozen Southern State constitutions. This enabled the poor to vote if their immediate ancestors had done so in 1867. African Americans never qualified under this clause. Thanks to the efforts of the NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the “grandfather clause” in the case of Lane v. Wilson (1939). 401 In Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), Williams, an African-American from the state of Mississippi was indicted by an all-white grand jury and convicted by an all-white petit jury for murder. Williams was sentenced to death (through hanging), prompting his appeal to the Supreme Court. He argued that Mississippi violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by excluding African-Americans from jury service. The Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that mere possibility of discrimination was not a sufficient ground to invalidate the disputed provisions in Mississippi law that effectively disenfranchised African-Americans. In Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903), the Supreme Court (in a majority opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes) upheld the lower court’s dismissal of the case. Again, Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented. 148 2. Economic change Jim Crow laws (two parallel systems) are inefficient from an economic standpoint. Justice Harlan considered already that these laws would be pernicious in the future. He warned the other justices, but they didn’t listen. 3. Social change During WWII, the USA was fighting a racist regime in Germany while they were racists too. Black people didn’t have basic rights whereas Nazi war prisoners enjoyed facilities, such as railway restaurants and dining-cars, which black American soldiers were denied access to. Furthermore, black soldiers were given poor training, poor equipment and sent to the least promising parts of the battlefield while being forced to fight for the USA. Finally, wartime service and wartime mobility widened black horizons → in Europe there were no such problems. 4. Political change At home (and abroad), the antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy was making the name of America stink in many nostrils → terrible image of the US across the world → the US lost most of its soft power in the 1950s. Racist policies were used to discredit the USA in the developing world (and the USA aspired to be the leader of the free world). 5. Legal change The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was a grassroots civil rights organization founded in 1909 (600 000 members in 1946). The head of the organization’s Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall, set a deadline in the 1950s called "free by 63" (the 100 anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) and managed with a th strong legal campaign to end segregation. The NAACP worked for change while the SCOTUS was also changing. President Eisenhower appointed Justice Earl Warren (a Republican) thinking Warren would preserve Republican values. From the moment Warren arrived at the SCOTUS as Chief Justice, he basically considered that the President couldn’t ask him anything anymore. Desegregation Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled in 1954. Serving as a lawyer in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Thurgood Marshall used a very clever technique to tip the balance in favor of this overruling: he used the so-called “Brandeis brief”. He cited the 14 Amendment th but instead of giving legal information to the SCOTUS, he gave information that had nothing to do with law (psychological, statistical, economic information). Marshall considered that SCOTUS already knew the law, so he decided to proceed differently and underline the pernicious effects of racial segregation on the American people. Marshall’s brief in this case was over 100-pages long, with just 4-5 pages of legal information. lasting only a short time or containing few words 149