Over the President's Veto: The Civil Rights Act of 1866

A Bill, a Veto and an Override

1The Constitution sets out how a bill becomes a law. A member of the House or Senate introduces a bill, and a committee studies it and may change it. The full chamber debates and votes, and the other chamber must pass the same version. The President then has ten days, not counting Sundays, to sign it or to veto it and send it back with his objections. A vetoed bill still becomes law if two-thirds of the members voting in each house vote to override the veto.

2When the Civil War ended in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. But late that year, Mississippi, South Carolina and other Southern states passed Black Codes, laws that limited where freedpeople could live and work and allowed many who had no labor contract to be arrested and fined. Black citizens answered by meeting in conventions, writing petitions to Congress and to state lawmakers, and sending delegations to Washington. In 1866 most states, North and South, did not let Black men vote. On February 7, 1866, Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders met President Andrew Johnson at the White House and urged him to support voting rights. Johnson did not agree.

3In January 1866, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who led the Senate's Judiciary Committee, introduced a civil rights bill. It declared that people born in the United States were citizens, except for “Indians not taxed,” meaning most Native Americans living in their own nations. (Congress did not make all Native Americans citizens until 1924.) The bill said that citizens of every race had the same right to make contracts, to sue and give evidence in court, and to buy, own and sell property.

4Both houses passed the bill. On March 27, 1866, Johnson vetoed it. In his veto message he argued that Congress should not pass such laws while eleven Southern states had no members in Congress, and that the bill took over powers that belonged to the states. Supporters set out to gather the two-thirds they needed. In April both houses voted to override, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law. It is often called the first major law in American history passed over a President's veto.

5Supporters worried that a later Congress could repeal the act or that courts could strike it down, so Congress wrote its promises of citizenship and equal protection into the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868. Under laws Congress passed in 1867, Black men across much of the South voted for the first time, and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 barred states from denying the vote because of race. In 1880, in Strauder v. West Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down a state law that let only white men serve on juries. Even so, in many places Black citizens were kept from voting and from juries for decades by violence, unfair tests and local officials.