Editied by Christian
G. Samito
In this volume ten expert historians and legal scholars
examine the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first federal civil rights statute in
American history. The act declared that all persons born in the United States were
citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition of slavery.
Designed to give the Thirteenth Amendment practical effect as former slave
states enacted laws limiting the rights of African Americans, this measure for
the first time defined U.S. citizenship and the rights associated with it.
Essays examine the history and legal ramifications of the act and highlight
competing impulses within it, including the often-neglected Section 9, which
allows the president to use the nation’s military in its enforcement; an
investigation of how the Thirteenth Amendment operated to overturn the Dred
Scott case; and New England’s role in the passage of the act. The act
is analyzed as it operated in several states such as Kentucky, Missouri, and
South Carolina during Reconstruction. There is also a consideration of the act
and its interpretation by the Supreme Court in its first decades. Other essays
include a discussion of the act in terms of contract rights and in the context
of the post–World War II civil rights era as well as an analysis of the act’s
backward-looking and forward-looking nature.
About the Editor
Christian G. Samito,
who earned a law degree from Harvard Law School and a doctorate in American
history, is the editor of Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War
Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
and “Fear Was Not in Him”: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C.
Barlow, U.S.A, and the author of Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans,
African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era.
ISBN 978-0809336524, Southern Illinois University Press, ©
2018, Papberback, 292 pages, End Notes at the end of each essay, Appendix &
Index. $45.00. To purchase this book click HERE.
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