Manhood—Private and Public

Members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress drew upon common cultural definitions of American manhood to determine who should possess the rights of men. Although Americans had long associated independence, economic and political autonomy, and virtue with men’s gender identity, by the mid-nineteenth century the rights of men were codified by the emerging market economy and its subsequent development of the “separate spheres,” which identified the private world of the home with women and the public worlds of politics and the market with men.⁹ The definition of manhood promoted by this ideology was racially determined, class-based, and regionally focused, but some common elements held true across race, class, and regional lines. All free men, many nineteenth-century Americans believed, possessed the right to head a household, to exchange their labor for remuneration, and to make contracts. Free white men, in addition, had the right (and duty) to protect and defend the country and to benefit from and participate in government. At the opposite end of the spectrum were enslaved African American men, who could not access any of these rights and thus inhabited a unique gender position as male dependents. Regardless of the degree to which individuals or groups could access the full spectrum of the rights of men, male gender identity in the nineteenth century was commonly defined in relation to three related and interconnected social institutions: family, property, and the state.¹⁰

Although separate-spheres ideology dictated that nineteenth-century adult manhood was displayed in the public worlds of the market and politics, the domestic sphere was also a critical source of power and authority for men. Early in the century the removal of middle-class men’s primary remunerative work from the home farm to the public market dictated that most fathers were less intimately engaged with day-to-day family activities. However, this cultural change did not necessarily mean that men had less power within their families. While fathers shifted their responsibility for children’s moral education and routine punishment to mothers, they were still the ultimate authority within the household and meted out discipline when at home.¹¹ Further, as heads of their households, nineteenth-century men were legally and socially entitled to control family members, to benefit from their labor, and to possess their earnings.¹² The eighteenth-century ideal of coverture, the subsuming of a married woman’s legal identity into her husband’s, was somewhat mitigated by the mid-1800s, but it still persisted as the foundation of marriage law.¹³ In most antebellum states until the 1850s, a married woman had neither an official identity that the government recognized nor the right to possess property in her own name. Although within individual relationships men and women negotiated differing degrees of power and autonomy, as one nineteenth-century analyst of the family wrote, “In the domestic constitution the superiority vests in the husband; he is the head, the lawgiver, the ruler.”¹⁴

As the lawgivers and rulers of families, married white men were also deemed the best lawgivers and rulers of the state. Eighteenth-century American political culture had equated marriage and fatherhood with a man’s political fitness and worth and viewed with suspicion any man who was not head of a family.¹⁵ Nineteenth-century Americans also recognized the public power that married men gained from private life and legitimized their head-of-household status by granting them the right to represent politically that household’s interests.¹⁶ In 1854, the Southern Quarterly journal reported that “the husband acquires from the union increased capacity and power. He represents the wife in the political and civil order.”¹⁷ The acquisition of political power from a wife and family definitively determined one’s status as a man and admitted one into an imagined fraternity of white men who ruled both the home and the state.¹⁸ As a correspondent for the Charleston Mercury put it in 1830, “We are equally interested [in politics] as citizens—as owners of the soil—as the fathers of families.”¹⁹ Although this editorialist’s primary focus was in the protection of slavery, the clear connection he drew between citizenship, property possession, and head-of-household status indicated how intertwined those ideas were for antebellum men.

While head-of-household status conveyed a degree of power to American men, both within the home and in public politics, it also carried a heavy burden to protect and support the subordinate and dependent members of their households. Nineteenth-century men met this responsibility by acquiring and successfully managing property, which, in the antebellum period, increasingly relied on the acquisition of cash income from outside the home as subsistence farming gave way to market exchanges.²⁰ As men navigated this new public world as wage earners, providers, property owners, and economic agents, those most successful—the most manly—were understood to be independent and self-made men.²¹ This cultural ideal’s prominence can be readily seen in antebellum political campaigns capitalizing on a candidate’s mythic rise from “log cabin” origins to political prominence. These campaigns deemed that the most admirable (and presumably the most electable) men were those who had managed to sell their labor power the most profitably, permitting social advancement, economic success, and, consequently, political power. Although many presidential candidates throughout the ante-bellum period successfully wielded this cultural myth, it was best manipulated by Abraham Lincoln, who capitalized on his rise from humble origins to capture the nation’s highest office.²² The process of becoming successfully self-made, even for those less ambitious than Lincoln, was a source of great anxiety for nineteenth-century men. They were aware not only that their livelihood, economic prosperity, and family’s class status depended on their abilities to achieve and provide but that their very identity as men was at stake.²³

If in nineteenth-century America financial success in the market and personal dominion within a family defined a free white man’s economic and personal identities, participatory citizenship formed the foundation of his public, civic identity. Along with possessing a family and developing profitable skills in the workplace, voting on election day marked white men as adults, as citizens, and as full members of the political community. The primary act of participatory citizenship allowed antebellum white men both to enact and to publicly display their manhood.²⁴

Those who most benefited from the gendered ritual of voting, office-holders, also engaged in public displays of political manhood. As the members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress used male family metaphors for the state and defined themselves as worthy sons of the nation’s founding fathers, they assessed their own and their colleagues’ political actions in gendered terms. Just as Democrats had decried the manhood of their political opponents and lauded that of their allies in equality-related debates, Republicans likewise used masculinity to define collegial relationships.²⁵ The Illinois Republican Jehu Baker, arguing on January 27, 1866, that a constitutional amendment was necessary for the nation’s safety, claimed that if congressmen “would assert [their] manhood,” they would pass such a measure.²⁶ The Wisconsin Republican Ithamar Sloan used manhood to argue for amending the Constitution’s representation provision: “Let us adopt [the resolution] like men.”²⁷ Congressmen such as Baker and Sloan who used manhood to prod fellow members into supporting their policy goals wielded gender as a coded language for political cowardice and legislative courage. This language indicated to the members of Congress that not only was martial bravery required of men within the reforming national community, but political bravery was needed as well. The Republican senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas made this connection best when he declared that “when the soldier was mustered out Congress was mustered in.”²⁸ By defining political action and manhood as synonymous for themselves, antebellum white men such as the members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress created, maintained, and exercised their political and social power—power they were not likely to surrender lightly. But sharing political power with men outside the imagined fraternity of white men was exactly what many Republicans in the Thirty-Ninth Congress contemplated.

The Inevitable Negro

To congressmen faced with reconstructing the political community, precisely how much power—and which rights of manhood—should be shared with the emancipated was both extremely controversial and patently unclear. As Maine senator Lot Morrill declared three days into Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act (Senate Bill 61), “If there is anything [about] which the American statesman is perplexed and vexed, it is what to do with the negro, how to define him, what he is in American law, and to what rights he is entitled. What shall we do with the everlasting, inevitable negro? is the question which puzzles all brains and vexes all statesmanship.”²⁹ In slavery, the legal and political status of enslaved men was clear. They were dependent on those who owned them, members of white men’s households akin to women and children and ostensibly both represented and protected by that owner, the head of the plantation household and the sole possessor of the rights of men. Citing the British legal authority Blackstone’s Commentaries, Charles Sumner acknowledged the male slave’s dependent and feminized status. “The slave,” he said, “was always regarded legally and politically, as a part of the family of his master.… Master and servant were grouped with husband and wife, parent and child, and as in the case of wife and child, the slave was represented by the head of the family, who also paid the taxes on his account.”³⁰ By tying productive labor, duty to the state, and head-of-household status to white men exclusively, the New York representative Roscoe Conkling argued, slavery had created an anomaly whereby enslaved African American men, whose labor produced the goods that were “the proper subject of taxation,” lacked both the political right of participation that was associated with taxation in American political life and the manhood rights that productive labor created. Slavery had created men who were “natural persons,” “producers,” but who, like women and children, were not political persons.³¹ Emancipation disrupted this arrangement. Conkling declared that emancipation created “a new anomaly,” whereby “four million people are suddenly among us not bound to any one, and yet not clothed with any political rights. They are not slaves; but they are not, in a political sense, ‘persons.’”³²

Republicans like Conkling wondered what would happen to the power of representation once granted to slave owners on behalf of their human productive property. “Does this fraction of power still survive?” Conkling asked his colleagues, “If it does, what shall become of it? Where is it to go?”³³ He articulated emerging Republican Party policy when he claimed that “there is no place logically for this power to go save to the blacks.”³⁴ If African Americans were to have this power of representation, other Republicans argued, then they must be members of the political community. These congressmen contended that emancipation alone had transformed enslaved people into American citizens, despite the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. For example, John Bingham of Ohio declared that “every slave the moment he is emancipated becomes a ‘free citizen’… a ‘free person,’ [who]… becomes equal before the law with every other citizen of the United States.”³⁵ Union Republican Richard Yates asserted that this citizenship meant that “every man made free by the [Thirteenth Amendment] is… one of the citizens of the United States, and entitled to the same rights and privileges as… myself or any other one of the people of the United States, by force of the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery and emancipating that people, as I contend, into the sovereignty, into the body-politic of the United States.”³⁶

However, all the people in the United States who possessed sovereignty, who were full members of the body politic with the right of participatory citizenship, and who held the status of political persons were white men. Race, as a marker for dependence and property status in the South and political disability in the North, had been used in the antebellum period to eliminate or prevent the full participation of African Americans in the democratic political process in both regions. Despite the Thirteenth Amendment, the racial prejudice that persisted in both the North and the South remained a powerful barrier to congressional efforts to grant free southern African Americans full participatory citizenship. In the face of this prejudice, gender offered a powerful, alternative way of defining black men as worthy of accessing the state.

As Republicans sought to incorporate the emancipated into the political community and protect their rights to that membership, they turned to gender as a means of overcoming the perceived political disability of race.³⁷ While enslaved, Conkling acknowledged, a black man was “a man and not a man… a native, an inhabitant, a producer, but without recognized political attribute or prerogative… he was nowhere.”³⁸ But with emancipation, many Republicans contended, southern African American men were liberated from dependence—they were no longer members of other men’s households—and so were now independent men. Every former slave, Henry Lane of Indiana argued, had “become a freeman and is counted for the purposes of taxation as a man—a free man.”³⁹ Lot Morrill, answering his own haunting question about the “inevitable negro,” also turned to manhood, arguing that the Civil Rights Act “defines [the freedman] to be a man and only a man in American politics and American laws; it puts him on the plane of manhood.”⁴⁰ It was as a “citizen and as a man,” Lane asserted, that “his rights shall be protected.” Lane’s fellow Kansan Samuel Pomeroy concurred, arguing that “without his rights of manhood he had better remained a slave.… It is adding insult to the long injury of centuries to give them the shadow of liberty without the substance, to invite them to freedom and not give the guarantees.”⁴¹ Although there was apparent agreement among most Republicans that emancipation had profoundly altered emancipated African American men’s legal status and transformed them into men, congressmen disagreed about exactly which rights these freed men were entitled to possess. Did they, with freedom and manhood, acquire all the rights afforded white men? And if not, which ones did (and should) they have?

One way that congressmen dealt with this question was to distinguish between the different kinds of rights they believed men possessed. Particularly in the early days of congressional debate, congressmen sought to maintain the long-held distinction between “civil” and “political” rights and so drafted different legislative proposals to define and protect the different kinds of rights separately. For example, the Civil Rights Act explicitly addressed the basic rights of people within a political community: the rights to the secure possession of freedom, safety, and property. Most nineteenth-century Americans, drawing on American and English legal tradition, understood these civil rights to be the inherent and fundamental possessions of all free individuals. Antebellum Americans had defined political rights, on the other hand, quite differently. These rights, they maintained, were granted to specific individuals within the political community because those individuals were deemed worthy of possessing them; the evolution of their state constitutions reflected this belief.⁴² In Congress, legislation dealing with representation (House Resolution 51 and section 2 of House Resolution 127) and with suffrage rights explicitly, as in the District of Columbia (House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 1), sought to define political rights more broadly; the bills’ supporters argued that political rights were not earned privileges but were as fundamental as civil rights. Regardless of how this distinction was made, in all rights-related debates throughout the Thirty-Ninth Congress, congressmen used gender to claim or reject black men’s possession of both civil and political rights, focusing on their social roles as fathers, household heads, workers, earners, and voters. In so doing, congressmen sought to redefine African American men’s relationship to the gendered social institutions of the family, property, and, most particularly, the state.

Family: That Citadel of His Love

Throughout the antebellum period, enslaved people were deprived of familial security as enslavers denied, ignored, or actively thwarted family connections, and southern law failed to recognize familial ties between bondsmen.⁴³ The slave system’s disruption of family life and gender roles was central to abolition arguments in the antebellum years, guaranteeing that protecting African American family life would be a cornerstone of the postwar Republican policy agenda.⁴⁴ Throughout debates on the Civil Rights Act, both moderate and radical Republicans pointed to the disruption of the traditional patriarchal family as one of slavery’s crimes, arguing that henceforth the secure possession of a family was a fundamental civil right belonging to all people in the United States. Republicans’ language when making this argument indicates that they envisioned the possessor of that right as a male head of household. For example, the Michigan Republican Jacob Howard argued that the slave “had no rights nor nothing which he could call his own. He had not the right to become a husband or father in the eyes of the law, he had no child, he was not at liberty to indulge the natural affections of the human heart for children, for wife, or even for friend.”⁴⁵ The system of slavery not only served to separate African American family members from each other, but worse, Howard argued, it denied African American men the right to benefit from patriarchal family structure.

With emancipation, however, many Republicans contended that black men’s status was transformed from “slave” to “freeman,” a term used since the earliest days of the nation to define a man eligible for rights within the community. This transformation, they argued, determined that black men were from this point forward entitled to head a household and to securely possess a family. Howard asked, “Is a freeman to be deprived of the right of… having a family, a wife, children, a home? What definition will you attach to the word ‘freeman’ that does not include these ideas?”⁴⁶ Howard’s rhetorical question implied that the right to possess a family was so closely associated with free manhood that it was unthinkable to separate the two. Implicitly, then, black men’s acquisition of freeman status had also meant they acquired legal head-of-household status. Recognizing black men as the heads of their families, Republicans argued, had a further public benefit of helping to stabilize gender relationships in the South among freedmen, relationships that under slavery had not necessarily conformed to nineteenth-century white social norms. Public and legal support for a black man’s right to head a household would restore gendered order in the South as it helped to define freedmen’s status.

Along with a man’s right to head a household, however, came his responsibility and duty to protect that household. For example, the moderate Republican and New York Times editor Henry Raymond argued that the Civil Rights Act gave the black man a “defined status; he has a country and a home, a right to defend himself and his wife and children.”⁴⁷ This right reinforced the gendered power of men. All heads of household, Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas contended, had the right to protect their family:

Pomeroy was particularly concerned about a man’s ability to protect his family from sexual predation, and he associated that right with manhood. Unlike many Democrats, Pomeroy situated that manhood (via the musket) in the hands of African American men in the South, reinforcing both the rights of men as the exclusive heads of families and the rights of African American men to claim manhood status.

Although the right to safely possess a family was not truly a radical demand, white conservatives believed that granting African American men the power accorded to heads of households was the greatest threat to southern gender relationships. The image of a musket in a black man’s hands being used to protect his family may have reassured some Republicans, but it was a profoundly threatening image to Democrats and conservatives. In particular, they were concerned that granting black men the power to head households and wield violence meant granting them power over women. Conservative congressmen recognized that independent men with families possessed the legal right to control the labor power of the women and children of their household. But they asserted that granting freedmen this same power would not necessarily be contained by racial boundaries; if black men were given patriarchal familial power over black women, there was nothing to prevent them from claiming this same power over white women. Conservatives were clearly concerned that the patriarchal arrangements of family and marriage that had long benefited white men in the United States, relationships between men and women characterized by one senator as “quasi-servitude,” would be shared by black men.⁴⁹ This power would be expressed in two ways: as interracial marriage and as rape.

Claiming that patriarchal power over a household would translate into sexual power over white women was evidence of conservative paranoia. Beyond simple racism, however, there was a kind of logic to the Democrats’ assertions. Essentially, these conservatives were acknowledging that at the heart of patriarchy lay sexual power, and thus granting black men the right to head a household was the equivalent of granting them the power to control women’s sexuality within that household. In many ways, these politicians were recognizing what Republicans had been insisting upon in these debates—that ideas about gender had the potential to obstruct embedded assumptions about race and to override prewar racial boundaries. Just as Republicans claimed that recognizing African American men’s manhood rights overrode racial distinctions among men as workers, owners, and citizens, these Democrats and conservatives argued that legally recognizing and protecting those rights would override racial distinctions among men as the possessors of sexual power over women. This would, they claimed, thereby permit black men to access white women sexually with or without those women’s consent. Legally protecting black men’s manhood rights, Democrats were essentially arguing, would make gender more powerful than race.

More moderate congressmen were concerned that granting black men head-of-household status would translate into legal protection for interracial marriage, which, they implied, would endanger white women. In particular they worried that the rights of states to make race-based laws regulating marriage would conflict with a federally enforced Civil Rights Act. Reverdy Johnson, the moderate Senate Democrat and member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, pointed to this potential conflict between state and federal law should the act pass, saying that “there is not a State in which these negroes are to be… which does not make it criminal for a black man to marry a white woman, or for a white man to marry a black woman; and they do it not for the purpose of denying any right to the black man or the white man, but for the purpose of preserving harmony and peace of society. Do you not repeal all that legislation by this bill?”⁵⁰ Although his central concern seemed to be with federalism, Johnson was also worried that if states recognized the civil rights of men, then legal segregation would not be able to constrain their family rights.

Johnson was unusual among conservatives in acknowledging that the legal restrictions against interracial marriage also applied to white men; most Democrats seemed more afraid that black men would interpret the right to head a household as a chance to take white wives.⁵¹ The way the conservative Republican senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania articulated the legal problem was more typical: “A black man in Maryland, after the passage of this act, marries a white woman, and he is arraigned under the law of Maryland forbidding it.… What would the Maryland judge do?… Here is an act of Congress which declares that, as to all civil rights and immunities, the negro is to be put upon precisely the same footing as the white man.… What is the remedy of this bill?” The states, Cowan argued, should be “competent” enough to define the boundaries of racial interactions and to determine for themselves whether or not black men were entitled to access white women, a problem that Cowan classed as similar to polygamy and incest.⁵² Most Republicans denied that civil rights legislation would result in interracial marriage. Instead, they argued that cultural restrictions and social choices would serve to replace legal authority in enforcing racial boundaries. But President Andrew Johnson, in his message to Congress, cited the possibility of interracial marriage as one cause of his veto of the Civil Rights Act. The Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, among other Republicans, argued that Johnson’s tactics were designed merely to excite racial fears and prejudice.⁵³

Whereas moderate conservatives mostly confined themselves to articulating fears about interracial marriage, more extreme Democrats contended that empowering black men with the rights of manhood would result in the rape of white women. In the immediate postwar period the fear of black men’s sexual relationships with white women took on an urgency that had not existed in the antebellum years. With the institutions of slavery to uphold southern white men’s power to control sexual access to both white and black women, the need for southern whites to carefully regulate black men’s sexual relationships was minimized. It was the possibility of sharing that power with black men that pushed conservatives and southerners to use social and sexual interactions between black men and white women as a political weapon.⁵⁴ In the Thirty-Ninth Congress the most vehement wielder of that weapon was Garrett Davis of Kentucky, one of the most outspoken opponents of black men’s equality. Davis’s primary claim was that granting African American men equal civil rights would enable them to commit violent sexual predation because legal equality would prohibit states from making race-based variations in rapists’ punishments. “By the law of my State,” Davis reported, “a negro who commits a rape upon a white woman is subject to death, as he ought to be; and he ought to die, and I hope he always will die for any such offense.”⁵⁵ On the other hand, white rapists in Kentucky, Davis told his colleagues, were merely sentenced to a few years in prison. The Civil Rights Act would make this distinction illegal, which Davis argued was “preposterous… absurd and unsound to the last degree.”⁵⁶ Davis seemed to believe that a black rapist was guilty of two crimes: the violation of a white woman and the violation of white privilege. It was, perhaps, the latter with which he was most concerned.

By favoring the death penalty for black rapists of white women, Davis demonstrated his belief that the exertion of sexual power by a black man over a white woman was akin to murder and treason. Moreover, he implied that there was a vital need for the distinction in punishments between the two crimes—that without harsher punishment for black rapists of white women, there would be little states could do to deter the crime. Whereas Davis was slightly oblique on this point, the Wisconsin Democrat Charles Eldridge explicitly declared that states needed harsher punishments for black rapists. He argued that “it may be said that there is no reason for this distinction; but I claim that there is. And there is no man that can look upon the crime, horrid as it is, diabolical as it is when committed by the white man, and not say that such a crime committed by a negro upon a white woman deserves, in the sense and judgment of the American people, a different punishment from that inflicted upon the white man.”⁵⁷ Eldridge did not actually explain to his colleagues why this different punishment was required, perhaps presuming that they understood his implication that the real crime was racial transgression.⁵⁸ Neither Eldridge nor Davis seemingly felt the need to consider the punishment for white rapists of black women or for black men who raped black women. Black women as victims in need of protection did not enter their public rhetoric and perhaps not even their consciousness. They ignored the far more prevalent and socially sanctioned sexual exploitation of black women that had been the foundation of southern slavery in favor of obsessing over a fictional black male rapist threat.⁵⁹

Reading these conservatives’ statements, one can speculate about what they were actually attempting to protect—the ostensible sanctity of white womanhood, the purity of the white race, or the right of white men to control all women’s sexuality. If black men were granted the right to control a household and therefore to have power over and access to women’s sexuality, then southern white men’s exclusive monopoly on this right of manhood would be disrupted. Although conservative congressmen may have feared for white women’s safety and viewed interracial sexual interactions as distasteful and dangerous, it seems likely that they were also concerned that white men would lose power (both sexual and political) if African American men were granted the gender-based right to possess and protect a family.

Property and Contract: The Fruits of His Own Labor

Because conservatives such as Davis and Eldridge centered white male power in the control over the family and emphasized head-of-household status as the core of gender identity, they focused much of their energy on rejecting black men’s right to possess this measure of manhood. Republicans, on the other hand, seemed less concerned with this particular issue, not because they favored interracial sexual interactions but because they focused their main arguments on the other two components of manhood: property/contract and connection to the state. The right to contract one’s labor power, along with the right to securely possess property resulting from that labor, formed the core of their arguments about civil rights owed to the emancipated, and they conceptualized this connection between citizenship and property rights as a right of manhood.⁶⁰

Although the right to possess property and contract one’s labor was a theme Republicans used in many debates, it was particularly central to their arguments for the Civil Rights Act. In the earliest debates on the act, Lyman Trumbull, Chair of the Judiciary Committee, argued that the bill’s purpose was to ensure that the emancipated were “entitled to the rights of citizens,” which he identified as “the right to acquire property, the right to go and come at pleasure, the right to enforce rights in the courts, to make contracts, and to inherit and dispose of property.”⁶¹ When pressed by California Democrat James McDougall for further clarification as to “how he interpret[ed] the term ‘civil rights,’” Trumbull pointed to the bill’s text: “The first section of the bill defines what I understand to be civil rights: the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue and be sued, and to give evidence, to inherit, purchase, sell, lease, hold and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit to all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property. These I understand to be civil rights, fundamental rights belonging to every man as a free man, and which under the Constitution as it now exists we have a right to protect every man in.”⁶² Only the enslaved, married women, children, and the institutionalized could be denied these rights in nineteenth-century America. Black men, by virtue of emancipation, were no longer dependents but free adult men; therefore, it was the duty and mission of the United States government, Trumbull argued, to protect African American men’s right to manhood and its accompanying benefits.

Trumbull was not alone among Republicans in arguing for government protection of a man’s right to property and contract. Other Republicans also identified contract and property as central to the definition of civil rights. This seemed to Pennsylvania Republican Russell M. Thayer so obvious that he could not believe any man in Congress would oppose the act: “I… challenge any man in this House to give me, if he can, a sensible reason… which he can reconcile with his own sense of justice… why the rights which are enumerated in the first section of this bill should not be extended to the freedmen of the South? The sole purpose of the bill is to secure to that class of persons the fundamental rights of citizenship;… those rights which secure life, liberty, and property, and which make all men equal before the law.”⁶³ If the right of property made all men equal before the law, conversely, all equal men must therefore have the right of property.

Even some moderate Republicans who were reluctant to extend manhood rights beyond property and family were fairly vehement that the right to possess property safely and legally was a right that African American men had acquired in the transition from slavery to freedom. The Maryland Republican John L. Thomas declared that even though he could not support social or political equality, his position on the right of property was clear:

Like Thayer and Thomas, Iowa representative James Wilson also viewed property as a fundamental right of men within organized communities. Referencing Blackstone’s Commentaries, Wilson declared that all “constituent member[s] of the great national family” had the right to personal security, to liberty, and to “personal property; which [Blackstone] defines to be, ‘the free use enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution save only by the law of the land.’”⁶⁵ Like the right of contract, ownership of property indicated one’s status as a man, and so without these rights, Republicans argued, black men would not be secure in their status or safe in their identities as citizens or men.

The language that these congressmen used indicates that they understood property rights to be restricted to men. Thomas’s use of the word “freeman” is notable, as is Wilson’s point that independence was a critical component of controlling property. Most important, however, is the fact that these arguments did not apply to women. Not all married women had the free use and enjoyment of their property in 1866: in many states they and their property were still subject to their husband’s control.⁶⁶ This point was not lost on the members of Congress. At least one conservative, Edgar Cowan, used married women to oppose the Civil Rights Act: “The bill has been taken to mean to confer those rights as they are conferred upon white citizens in the several States. That is not so. These rights are not conferred absolutely.… Now, a married woman in no state that I know of has a right to make contracts generally.… Is it intended… that this bill confers upon married women the unlimited right to contract?”⁶⁷ Cowan worried that the act would put federal and state law in conflict, but more seriously, it “confers upon married women, upon minors, upon idiots, upon lunatics, and upon everybody native born in all the States, the right to make and enforce contracts, because there is no qualification in the bill.… The power given to these people by this bill is unlimited as to persons… and to contracts.”⁶⁸

Although they feared that the Civil Rights Act would grant contract rights to the unworthy, dependent, and unmanly, Democrats and conservatives like Cowan were more concerned about the impact African American men’s civil rights would have on racial hierarchies. Reverdy Johnson, again demonstrating the Democrats’ interest in the connection between family, sexual power, and manhood, tied the right of contract to marriage. He argued that the Civil Rights Act, by protecting the right to contract, definitively protected the right of black men to marry white women because marriage was a contractual relationship. When “white and black are considered together, put in a mass,” Johnson contended, “the one is entitled to enter into every contract that the other is entitled to enter into. Of course, therefore, the black man is entitled to enter into the contract of marriage with a white woman.”⁶⁹ Though he was most likely taken less seriously by his colleagues than the respected lawyer Johnson, Garrett Davis was also concerned with the impact on whites if black men were granted the right to contract. In particular, he expressed concern for the labor market. In debate to override President Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act, Garrett Davis declared that if passed, the act would “introduce… competition between the white and black laborers for employment, for wages; and this competition on the part of the white men will be limited to the poorer classes who do not wish to employ labor themselves.… The passage of such a bill as this is calculated to produce interference between, and disturbance of, the relations of the black laborer and his white employer, to get up feuds and quarrels and contentions between them by interested and sinister persons, to alienate the white employer from the black laborer.”⁷⁰ This alienation, he claimed, would “induce the employer to resort to the white instead of the black laborer to cultivate his fields and perform his other work.”⁷¹ How Davis envisioned a labor system without either slavery or contract rights was unclear, but it was clear that he opposed granting black men any right traditionally held by white men exclusively.

Other conservative members of Congress argued that giving African American men the right to contract would result in their acquisition of other rights such as access to public education, gun ownership, and public transportation. The Indiana representative Michael Kerr argued that civil rights would enable any person to open any kind of business venture. “Under the laws of Indiana, no person except white male inhabitants can be allowed to engage in the business of retailing spirituous liquors.… Now, it cannot be said that selling liquor… is not a civil right.… It is as much a contract or civil right as would be a license to sell meat in their market houses or to run a dray in their streets or to carry on any other business.”⁷² Perhaps the danger of permitting an African American man to sell liquor was self-evident to Kerr. He seemed to feel no need to explain why this was problematic. Instead, he moved on to argue that equal school attendance would also be mandated by the Civil Rights Act, requiring a mingling of black and white children in the schoolroom—another so-called problem he did not feel warranted explanation. Kerr’s argument implies that social disruption would result from equal civil rights, violating a perceived sense of social separation between the races. More important, Kerr was noting that enabling African American men to own property and to contract would disrupt white men’s right to control black men’s labor and property, thereby reducing white men’s social and economic power.

Some Democrats argued much more explicitly that granting African American men the rights of manhood would harm whites and reduce their power. The New York Democrat John Chanler claimed that changing the southern system of labor and social organization would materially damage white workers. “The exclusion of the white laborer of the Northeast and West [from the South],” he argued, “will eventually give the finest and fairest land in the South to the black man in perpetuity to the exclusion of the white working men of this country.” This exclusion, he asserted, “is unjust to the white laborer and a mockery.”⁷³ But this was not his greatest concern. Chanler argued that with the elimination of slavery and equalization of civil rights, race would be the only category left by which power differences could be maintained. “Ingraft the black man into the term ‘people,’” he declared, “and you surrender the South to the black race, and the question comes up not between slave and free, but between white and black.”⁷⁴ Although Chanler exaggerated the potential power realignments that could result from a public recognition of black men’s right to property, he accurately perceived that with emancipation white men would lose some measure of control over both black labor power and southern property.

This seems precisely what Democratic congressmen feared. Embedded within their arguments was a fear that if the economic and social playing field were leveled, whites in general, and white men in particular, would suffer either the loss of sexual power over white women or economic power in the marketplace. Democrats like Chanler and Kerr recognized that acknowledging black men’s right to contract shifted black men’s status from dependents to sovereign men and thus threatened white men’s exclusive exercise of economic power in the South. Even more worrisome for these conservatives, it also threatened the white man’s government.

Participatory Citizenship: The Equality of His Manhood

Although Democrats were concerned that granting black men rights as heads of households and owners of property would lead to social equality, violent predations on white women, and an overthrow of white men’s monopoly on economic power, they were most worried about suffrage. Some conservatives grudgingly acknowledged the justice in granting limited manhood rights to black men, and many seemed to believe that it was reasonable to permit black men secure families, property, and labor contracts. But the prospect of sharing political power elicited their most vehement objections.⁷⁵ To reassure their conservative colleagues, during debates on the Civil Rights Act both radical and moderate Republicans insisted that civil rights were distinct from participatory citizenship. Anxious not to strain their public support, more conservative Republican congressmen argued that only civil rights should be extended to black men, who would maintain their primary legal relationship with the state via the courts. Simple contract rights, these Republicans declared, did not convey either voting rights or political power.

Despite these protestations, most Democrats remained skeptical that some of the rights of manhood could be granted to African American men without granting all of those rights. They contended that the close ties between the rights of manhood made it impossible legally to separate family, property, and citizenship. For example, the Delaware senator Willard Saulsbury asked in debate in January of 1866, “What is one means and a very important means of securing the rights of person and property? It is a voice in the Government which makes the laws regulating and governing the right of property.”⁷⁶ A few days later, he continued this train of thought, challenging the Republican attempts to separate civil rights and suffrage:

Conservatives such as Saulsbury were well aware that the same Republicans who were proclaiming so earnestly that the Civil Rights Act was not an attempt to enfranchise black men were, in debates on apportioning representation and expanding the franchise in Washington, also declaring the right of suffrage a necessary right for black men.

In representation and enfranchisement debates, many Republicans who supported black male enfranchisement argued that black men needed full participatory citizenship for purely practical reasons—to defend their rights of manhood by protecting themselves, their families, and their property. Black codes passed in the South since the end of the war indicated the extent to which the rights of African Americans were endangered without the vote. Much like their Democratic critics, these Republicans contended that the rights of manhood could not be separated from each other. Further, they claimed the most effective and natural way to remove the burden of protecting freedmen’s rights from the federal government was to give African American men the power to protect themselves. As Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas articulated most simply, the black man “should have the ballot, for he has no security short of it.”⁷⁸

Having the political power to protect one’s household and property, pro-suffrage Republicans argued, was a critical right of manhood. The Illinois representative John Farnsworth asserted that “the right of self-defense is the first law of nature. The right to vote, the ballot, is the freeman’s defense; and if his right to freedom is an inalienable and natural right, then, too, is the right to protect that freedom an inalienable and natural right.”⁷⁹ Comparing the ballot in political communities to violence in a state of nature, the Kansas Republican Sidney Clarke contended that African American men “must have the means of protection, whether it be the simple force of the savage, or the complex forms of modern civilization. This means of protection belongs to all men, not as a bestowed privilege, but as a right inherent to existence as members of society.… The right of suffrage… is not to be measured by other men’s prejudices.”⁸⁰ James Wilson also asserted that race was no longer a sufficient reason to deprive a man of his right to access the political community. He asked, “Why should the color of a man’s skin deprive him of the political right of defense?”⁸¹ It was up to Congress, Wilson argued, to remedy the injustices of the past “by placing in each man’s hands the power to defend his own freedom and rights.”⁸² The Indiana Republican George Julian also denied the legitimacy of race to divide men from their rights. “Color has nothing whatever to do with the question of suffrage,” he argued. “The negro should not be disfranchised because he is black, nor the white man allowed to vote because he is white. Both should have the ballot because they are men and citizens, and require it for their protection.”⁸³

Prosuffrage Republicans such as Julian interpreted the ballot as the best means by which black men could overcome both racial prejudice and its institutionalized legal forms. The Pennsylvania Republican Glenni Scofield argued that a hypothetical African American man in Washington, D.C., needed the ballot “because… he is hated in this city, and justice denied him by prejudiced officials.… His vote is necessary for his own protection.”⁸⁴ Ohio’s Martin Welker was also concerned with the impact of prejudice on black men’s rights in the South. He argued that black men should have the right to vote because in the South there existed “a spirit of bitterness, a determination to oppress and harass them in every way possible, [that] now pervades the legislation of most of these States. In many of them there is no protection afforded the colored men.”⁸⁵ The New Hampshire senator Daniel Clark agreed, arguing that guaranteeing civil rights was simply not enough:

If the freedmen were not given the power to protect themselves by participating in their own governance, Republicans claimed, then that power would remain in the hands of their former owners—an outcome they surely sought to avoid.

As prosuffrage congressmen styled the ballot as men’s best means of self-protection, they used distinctly martial language to describe its power and purpose. Frequently, they argued that the ballot was a weapon appropriately wielded by men in political community. Daniel Clark claimed that by granting a black man some of the rights of manhood but denying him the ballot, “you will have fitted him to use his weapon, but not have supplied him with the weapon.” But when black men had the ballot, he declared, they would gain “a feeling of independence and self-respect. There is nothing like the ballot for this. Take it from your northern men and they would feel powerless and degraded.… Arm three or four millions of people with this weapon and they will protect themselves and teach their oppressors caution and respect.”⁸⁷ The Ohio representative and future president James Garfield also depicted the ballot as a weapon of manhood, “the shield, the sword, the spear, and all panoply that best befits a man for his own defense in the great social organism to which he belongs.”⁸⁸ Given the growing racist violence in the South, that men would need weapons for their own protection in such an environment seemed almost self-evident to Republicans.

Representing the ballot as a political weapon of manhood pointed Republicans to a more literal way in which African American men had recently wielded weapons. Throughout debates on representation and suffrage, pro-suffrage Republicans echoed African American activists’ claims that black men’s service in the Union Army during the Civil War entitled them to the ballot.⁸⁹ Because the United States government had called black men to military duty, the argument went, it had acknowledged and accepted their service. This official approval offered a precedent for a similar official acknowledgement of black men’s political rights. “Tell me, then,” the New Hampshire senator Daniel Clark asked, “why two hundred thousand black men… who rushed in to save the burning house of your Government, should not be permitted to participate in that Government which they helped to preserve?”⁹⁰ If service to the state was one means by which a man proved his manhood, had not these men done their duty? Charles Sumner stated this point most succinctly: “If he was willing to die for the Republic he is surely good enough to vote.”⁹¹ In fact, advocates of enfranchisement claimed that southern black men would be a safer repository of the ballot than former confederates. Clark asked his colleagues which group they would prefer to empower: “Tell me, sir, if called upon to put arms into the hands of men in the disloyal States, into whose hands would you put them? Would you do as they have done, or attempted to do in Mississippi—arm the rebel militia and disarm the loyal black soldier?… Surely not, sir. You would retain the arms in the hands of the black men. Let, then, your ballots go where you would intrust your bayonets.”⁹²

More than offering mere service to the state through their participation in the late war, some Republicans argued, black men had overcome barriers that white soldiers did not face, making their sacrifices the epitome of manly duty. Echoing African American activists, William Windom of Minnesota argued that when black men enlisted, they knew that they faced greater risks than white soldiers, with less chance of reward: “When it was decided to accept the proffered services of the blacks, and to permit them to aid in fighting our battles, we were still unwilling to do them full justice; and they entered the Army with less pay than white soldiers, and without any of that protection which the laws of war accord to belligerents. The black soldier knew full well when he was enrolled in the Army it was with a halter about his neck, and that if taken prisoner no quarter would be shown him.”⁹³ Nevertheless, Windom noted, “two hundred thousand strong arms seized the musket, and two hundred thousand dusky heroes grappled with the foe. Nobly have they performed their part, and largely have they contributed to our victory.”⁹⁴

Using the words “strong,” “heroes,” and “nobly,” Windom depicted black men as worthy men who had fulfilled the primary duties of participatory citizenship. Other congressmen followed suit. Like Windom, James Wilson painted a heroic picture of the black male soldier:

Prosuffrage Republicans like Wilson who argued that black soldiers were brave, self-sacrificing, and virtuous mobilized gender-specific definitions of participatory citizenship to justify their enfranchisement.⁹⁶ Some congressmen were quite specific in linking military service, manhood, and the ballot. Burt Van Horn of New York lauded black men who “rose up as one man to the rescue, first of the Government, which had always denied them their liberty, and second, to assert, in the fiery shock of battle, their manhood and their claims to freedom and its immunities.”⁹⁷ As William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania declared, “The colored man… attest[ed] his manhood upon the field of battle.”⁹⁸

Whereas military service allowed black men to demonstrate their manhood, some prosuffrage Republicans contended that they were entitled to the ballot by the fact of their gender identity alone. The New Hampshire senator Clark declared, “Not chiefly… do I advocate this right of the black man to vote because he fought the battles of the Republic and helped to preserve the union, but because he is a citizen and a man, one of the people, one of the governed, upon whose consent… the just powers of the Government rest.”⁹⁹ Now emancipated, black men were independent and so had no need to earn manhood status—the mere fact of emancipation permitted them to join the male political community. The Radical Massachusetts representative George Boutwell agreed, stating, “I am for dealing justly with [black soldiers] because they have performed service. But I am more anxious to deal justly by them because they are men.”¹⁰⁰ Voting rights, Clark argued, were determined by manhood alone: “Man derives the right [of suffrage] from his manhood and the equality of his manhood with his fellow men.”¹⁰¹

Just as manhood was required for political rights, political rights reinforced manhood. Participatory citizenship, as the ultimate marker of manhood, would cement the transformation of black men from dependents to independent free men. Daniel Clark declared that “when you have given him equal rights, equal privileges, and equal security with other citizens… you have opened the way for him to be a man.”¹⁰² Charles Sumner proclaimed that “the freedman is no longer a dependent. The ballot comes to him… filling him with the strength and glory of manhood.”¹⁰³ If the ballot were denied to black men, prosuffrage Republicans warned, not only would the state be harmed by its failure to mete out just rewards to men who offered it service, but black men’s nascent public manhood would be imperiled. Sumner warned, “The elective franchise [is] essential to the security of the freedman, without which he will be the prey of slavery in some new form, and without which he cannot rise to the stature of manhood.…. Suffice it to say… that Emancipation will fail in its beneficence if you do not assure to the former slave all the rights of the citizen. Until you do this your work will be only half done, and the freedman will be only half a man.”¹⁰⁴

In order to overcome race-based objections to black men’s enfranchisement, prosuffrage Republicans sought to emphasize the common bonds of manhood among men regardless of race. Many of them argued this connection between men explicitly, in the process articulating an expanding and changing definition of manhood that was not dependent on whiteness. For example, Daniel Clark declared that “the black man has just as much right to his vote as the white man has to his; and it is no more a gift or a boon in the one case than in the other; and the white man has no more authority to confer or withhold it than the black man.”¹⁰⁵ Among men, Clark asserted, there were no distinctions of power that meant that one man could dictate the rights of another. Like Clark, John Farnsworth drew the bonds of manhood explicitly between white men and black men:

Taking this argument a step further, George Julian asserted that there was a common collegiality between white men and black men based on gender, and he challenged his opponents to apply the standards they sought to impose on African American men to themselves: “Are you willing to rest your right to the ballot on the purely contingent fact of your color? Your manhood tells you instantly that that is not the foundation. You are a man, endowed with all the rights of a man, and therefore you demand a voice in the Government; but when you say this you assert the equal rights of the negro.”¹⁰⁷ Republicans with similar beliefs contended that the commonalities between men were more important in determining the boundaries of the political community than the contingencies that divided them. It was clear to them that race was not a persuasive test of political fitness or participatory citizenship. It was equally clear, however, that gender was.

When a furious Lovell Rousseau cornered Josiah Grinnell outside the Capitol on June 14, 1866, he probably was not thinking about black men and their right to the franchise. Nor is it likely that, as he brought his cane down onto Grinnell’s head, he was actively considering the ways that Republicans and Democrats used gender to defend or refute black men’s political rights. However, Rousseau’s dispute with Grinnell, as much as it depended on ideas about personal honor, was prodded toward its violent, if abortive, conclusion by the way that each man’s party engaged in the congressional debates about gender, race, and rights. Like other Republicans who asserted that the rights of manhood must apply to African American men because of their service to the state, their newly acquired right to contract their labor, and their inherent manhood, Josiah Grinnell had faith in a vision of a race-blind postwar voting polity of male equals. Like the conservatives and Democrats, on the other hand, Rousseau believed that the rights of manhood belonged exclusively to white men because those rights were derived from sexual access to white women. He defended a vision of a reconstructed South that preserved white men’s exclusive possession of political power. This defense was so vital to Rousseau that he conflated the personal with the political and wound up in a violent altercation with a political opponent.

The way that members of Congress intertwined the rights of manhood with the rights of political participation in the early days of Reconstruction had a far greater impact than merely prodding two relatively insignificant junior congressmen to personal enmity and violence. The Thirty-Ninth Congress’s use of the rights of manhood as a model for postwar political relationships put gender at the heart of the national conversation about suffrage and rights. Although they profoundly disagreed about the meanings, qualities, and locales of the rights of men, by using these rights as a template for reconstructing the political community Republicans and Democrats alike defined political rights as dependent upon one’s gender. Thus, in their partisan debates, these powerful men explicitly and deliberately linked manhood to suffrage both to defend and to reject its expansion.

By situating gender at the heart of discussion about political rights, members of both parties defined gender identity as the linchpin linking individuals and the polity. This meant that even the most radical congressmen were not necessarily reconsidering the foundations of political citizenship. Rather, insisting on the manhood of black men enabled Republicans to alter the composition of the body politic but not necessarily redefine all of the rules governing its membership. Conflating the rights of manhood with the rights of citizens, these congressmen created a race-neutral male polity and left no room for women.