====== Civil Rights Act of 1866 ======

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (14 Stat. 27) was a federal statute enacted by the United States Congress on April 9, 1866, becoming the first federal law to define citizenship and assert that all citizens are equally protected by the law. The Act declared that all persons born in the United States, excluding untaxed Native Americans, were citizens regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and were entitled to the same legal rights and remedies as white citizens. Its constitutional foundation - whether it rested on the Thirteenth Amendment, or required the Fourteenth Amendment for validity - has been a matter of sustained legal and historical debate.

===== Background =====

The Act emerged from the first session of the 39th Congress during the early Reconstruction period, in response to the Black Codes enacted by Southern states following the Civil War. Those statutes had imposed legal disabilities on freedmen - restricting movement, labor contracts, and access to courts - that Congress regarded as incompatible with emancipation. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, arguing that Congress lacked authority to legislate on citizenship and that the measure discriminated against white citizens. Congress overrode the veto on April 9, 1866, the first override of a major piece of legislation in American history.

For a full account of the legislative history, see [[civil-rights-act-1866-history]].

===== Current State of Knowledge =====

The Act's operative provisions granted citizenship, enumerated specific civil rights (to make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence, and inherit and hold property), and provided federal enforcement mechanisms. Scholarly attention has centered on several unresolved interpretive questions: whether the Thirteenth Amendment alone authorized the statute; how the Act shaped the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment in the months immediately following; and what substantive content the Act's equality guarantee was understood to carry at the time of enactment. Original-meaning and living-constitutionalism frameworks produce different answers to each of these questions, and those differences have practical consequences in contemporary civil rights litigation.

The Act was reenacted in 1870 following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in part to resolve doubts about its original constitutional basis. Section 1981 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code descends from its contract-rights provision and remains an active vehicle for employment discrimination claims.

===== Viewpoints =====

**The Act rested validly on the Thirteenth Amendment.** Some constitutional historians and legal scholars argue that the Thirteenth Amendment's grant of power to enforce abolition was broad enough to support the Act's citizenship and civil rights provisions, making the subsequent Fourteenth Amendment reenactment precautionary rather than constitutionally necessary. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-thirteenth-amendment-sufficient-viewpoint]].

**The Act required the Fourteenth Amendment for constitutional grounding.** Others, including some originalists, hold that the Thirteenth Amendment's enforcement clause reached only the direct incidents of slavery, not the full range of civil rights the Act enumerated, and that the 1870 reenactment implicitly acknowledged the original statute's doubtful validity. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-fourteenth-amendment-required-viewpoint]].

**The Act defined a narrow, formal equality.** One body of scholarship reads the Act's equality guarantee as protecting only identical legal treatment in enumerated categories - contract, property, access to courts - without reaching broader social or economic conditions. On this reading, the Act was procedural rather than substantive in its ambitions. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-narrow-equality-viewpoint]].

**The Act embodied a more expansive equality principle.** A competing line of scholarship, drawing on congressional debates and the broader Reconstruction-era legal context, argues that the framers of the Act understood equality to reach substantive conditions of civic belonging, not merely formal legal parity. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-substantive-equality-viewpoint]].

**Johnson's veto raised legitimate federalism concerns.** A minority position holds that Johnson's objections - particularly regarding the traditional allocation of citizenship and domestic relations law to the states - identified genuine constitutional questions that were not fully resolved by the override, and deserve serious treatment independent of his broader resistance to Reconstruction. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-johnson-veto-federalism-viewpoint]].

===== Controversies =====

**Thirteenth Amendment enforcement scope.** Whether the Thirteenth Amendment authorized the Act has been litigated and debated continuously since 1866, with direct implications for the reach of modern civil rights statutes enacted under that amendment. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-thirteenth-amendment-enforcement-controversy]].

**Relationship to the Fourteenth Amendment's drafting.** Historians dispute the degree to which the Act's text directly shaped Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether the Amendment was intended to constitutionalize the Act's provisions or to expand beyond them. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-fourteenth-amendment-drafting-controversy]].

**Application to private conduct.** Courts and scholars have disagreed over whether the Act, particularly as codified in 42 U.S.C. § 1981, reaches private discrimination or is limited to state action, a question the Supreme Court addressed in //Runyon v. McCrary// (1976) and revisited in subsequent decisions. See [[civil-rights-act-1866-private-conduct-controversy]].

===== Related Pages =====

  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-history]] - Legislative and Reconstruction-era history
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-thirteenth-amendment-enforcement-controversy]] - Controversy over the Act's constitutional basis
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-fourteenth-amendment-drafting-controversy]] - Controversy over the Act's influence on the Fourteenth Amendment
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-private-conduct-controversy]] - Controversy over application to private actors
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-thirteenth-amendment-sufficient-viewpoint]] - Viewpoint: Thirteenth Amendment alone was sufficient
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-fourteenth-amendment-required-viewpoint]] - Viewpoint: Fourteenth Amendment was constitutionally necessary
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-narrow-equality-viewpoint]] - Viewpoint: Act established formal, procedural equality only
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-substantive-equality-viewpoint]] - Viewpoint: Act embodied a substantive equality principle
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-johnson-veto-federalism-viewpoint]] - Viewpoint: Johnson's veto raised legitimate federalism objections
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-thirteenth-amendment-sufficient-vs-required-viewpoint-debate]] - Viewpoint Debate: Thirteenth Amendment sufficient vs. Fourteenth Amendment required
  * [[civil-rights-act-1866-narrow-vs-substantive-equality-viewpoint-debate]] - Viewpoint Debate: Narrow vs. substantive equality
  * [[reconstruction-amendments]] - Related Main Topic
  * [[fourteenth-amendment]] - Related Main Topic
  * [[black-codes]] - Related Main Topic

===== Footnotes =====

1. Civil Rights Act of 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27 (1866).
2. Eric Foner, //Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877// (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 239-243.
3. Robert J. Kaczorowski, "To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress, Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War," //American Historical Review// 92, no. 1 (1987): 45-68.
4. George Rutherglen, //Civil Rights in the Shadow of Slavery: The Constitution, Common Law, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866// (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-30.
5. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 1679 (1866) (veto message of President Andrew Johnson).
6. Michael Kent Curtis, //No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights// (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 57-91.
7. Akhil Reed Amar, //America's Constitution: A Biography// (New York: Random House, 2005), 381-387.
8. //Runyon v. McCrary//, 427 U.S. 160 (1976).
9. Civil Rights Act of 1870, ch. 114, § 16, 16 Stat. 140, 144 (codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. § 1981).
10. Jacobus tenBroek, //Equal under Law// (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 201-224.