These Truths: A History of the United States

For many years before and after the Civil War, the government had no clear definition of what a citizen was. The nation wondered about what made people citizens and under what conditions residents were not citizens. Additionally, one wondered about “the privileges and immunities of citizenship” (313). In the 19th century, political theorists and politicians began to interpret citizenship within the contexts of human rights and state authority. Other questions, however, also emerged: Were women citizens? Was suffrage a right available only to certain citizens? Were the Chinese immigrants populating the West citizens like “free white persons” or “free persons of color?” Or were they something else entirely?

After the Union defeated the Confederacy, it set about guaranteeing civil rights to newly freed Black Southerners. Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, established the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission in 1863. Later, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, best known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, provided food and clothing to refugees. The bureau also aided in their resettlement. Rumors spread that the bureau also intended to provide those formerly enslaved with 40 acres and a mule. As for the Confederacy, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens insisted that the South had to be treated as conquered territory—thus, its foundational institutions would have to be reformed.