# Civil Rights Act of 1866 The **Civil Rights Act of 1866** was the first federal civil rights statute in American history. Its opening section declared **all persons born in the United States — excluding "Indians not taxed" — to be citizens of the United States**, "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude," and guaranteed to those citizens the same rights "to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence," and to hold property, "as is enjoyed by white citizens." Enacted over President [[Andrew Johnson]]'s veto in April 1866, it was a direct response to the [[Black Codes]] the former Confederate states had passed to re-subordinate freedpeople, and it became the statutory blueprint for the citizenship language later written into the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]. The Act matters for the KB as **the birth of federal citizenship as a legal category independent of the states** — and as the site of one of the most explicitly racist presidential veto messages in American history. The through-line runs directly from this statute to the constitutional guarantee at issue in [[United States v. Wong Kim Ark]] (1898) and, ultimately, in [[Trump v. Barbara]] (2026). ## What the Act did - **Defined national citizenship by birth.** For the first time, federal law declared that citizenship attached to birth on U.S. soil regardless of race — overturning the citizenship holding of *[[Dred Scott v. Sandford]]* (1857) by statute. - **Guaranteed core civil rights.** It secured, for all citizens, equal rights to contract, sue, testify, and hold property, and "full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property" enjoyed by white citizens. - **Created federal enforcement.** It authorized federal officers and courts — not the state courts that were enforcing the [[Black Codes]] — to prosecute violations, a structural federalization of civil rights that Johnson's veto message denounced as an assault on state sovereignty. Portions of the Act survive in modern law: its contract-rights guarantee is codified as [[Section 1981]] (42 U.S.C. § 1981), and its property-rights guarantee as § 1982. ## The Johnson veto President [[Andrew Johnson]] vetoed the bill on **March 27, 1866**, in a message that objected to federal citizenship for the native-born on frankly white-supremacist grounds. Johnson complained that the bill would make citizens of "the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks" — treating a multiracial citizenry as a self-evident objection — and argued that conferring citizenship on freedpeople was both unnecessary and unwise: > [!quote] This provision comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, Negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood. Every individual of these races born in the United States is by the bill made a citizen of the United States… If, as is claimed by many, all persons who are native born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill can not be necessary to make them such. > — Andrew Johnson, veto message, March 27, 1866 (The veto message reads "gypsies"; the passage is sometimes quoted with the period spelling "Gipsies.") The logic of the veto is telling. Johnson's "cannot be necessary to make them such" argument tried to have it both ways — suggesting that if the native-born were *already* citizens the statute was superfluous, while elsewhere questioning whether "four millions" of freedpeople possessed "the requisite qualifications" for citizenship at all. He also warned that federal civil-rights enforcement was "a stride toward centralization" that would "sap and destroy our federative system." The message is a foundational document of the states'-rights case against Reconstruction. ## The override — a constitutional first Congress overrode the veto: the **Senate on April 6, 1866** (33–15) and the **House on April 9, 1866** (122–41). It was **the first time Congress ever overrode a presidential veto of a major piece of legislation** — the opening rupture between Johnson and the Republican Congress that would culminate in his impeachment two years later. ## Lineage to the Fourteenth Amendment The override did not settle the matter. Republicans feared that a future Congress could simply repeal the statute, or that the courts might hold it beyond Congress's power — so they moved to **constitutionalize its citizenship guarantee**. The [[Fourteenth Amendment]]'s Citizenship Clause ("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens…"), proposed in June 1866 and ratified in 1868 as part of the [[Reconstruction Amendments]], lifted the 1866 Act's opening principle into the Constitution itself, partly in direct response to Johnson's veto and the vulnerability it exposed. The statute declared birthright citizenship; the amendment made it permanent. That constitutional guarantee is the one interpreted in [[United States v. Wong Kim Ark]] (1898) and reaffirmed in [[Trump v. Barbara]] (2026). The birthright-citizenship principle the modern right seeks to narrow was first enacted here, in April 1866, over a president's explicitly racist objection. ## See also - [[Fourteenth Amendment]] — constitutionalized the Act's citizenship principle in 1868 - [[Reconstruction Amendments]] — the 13th–14th–15th package this statute helped inaugurate - [[Andrew Johnson]] — the president whose veto the Act overrode - [[Section 1981]] — the surviving codification of the Act's contract-rights guarantee - [[Black Codes]] — the state laws the Act was written to counteract - [[United States v. Wong Kim Ark]] — the 1898 case interpreting the constitutionalized guarantee - [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] — the twentieth-century successor statute