The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial IssueVarious
History
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue
Various
African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964; Civil rights movements; Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; United States -- History
Evidently, Congress must soon legislate again on the hastily organized
Bureau, which had so quickly grown into wide significance and vast
possibilities. An institution such as that was well-nigh as difficult to
end as to begin. Early in 1866 Congress took up the matter, when Senator
Trumbull, of Illinois, introduced a bill to extend the Bureau and
enlarge its powers. This measure received, at the hands of Congress,
far more thorough discussion and attention than its predecessor. The war
cloud had thinned enough to allow a clearer conception of the work of
emancipation. The champions of the bill argued that the strengthening of
the Freedmen's Bureau was still a military necessity; that it was needed
for the proper carrying out of the Thirteenth Amendment, and was a work
of sheer justice to the ex-slave, at a trifling cost to the government.
The opponents of the measure declared that the war was over, and the
necessity for war measures past; that the Bureau, by reason of its
extraordinary powers, was clearly unconstitutional in time of peace,
and was destined to irritate the South and pauperize the freedmen, at a
final cost of possibly hundreds of millions. Two of these arguments
were unanswered, and indeed unanswerable: the one that the extraordinary
powers of the Bureau threatened the civil rights of all citizens; and
the other that the government must have power to do what manifestly
must be done, and that present abandonment of the freedmen meant their
practical enslavement. The bill which finally passed enlarged and made
permanent the Freedmen's Bureau. It was promptly vetoed by President
Johnson, as "unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial," and
failed of passage over the veto. Meantime, however, the breach between
Congress and the President began to broaden, and a modified form of the
lost bill was finally passed over the President's second veto, July 16.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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