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18  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
THOMAS, J., concurring 

“apart, for  the use of loyal refugees and freedmen,” aban-
doned,  confiscated,  or  purchased  lands,  and  assigning  “to 
every  male  citizen,  whether  refugee  or  freedman,  . . .  not 
more than forty acres of such land.”  Ch. 90, §§2, 4, 13 Stat.
507.  The 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act then expanded upon 
the prior year’s law, authorizing the Bureau to care for all 
loyal  refugees  and  freedmen.  Ch.  200,  14  Stat.  173–174. 
Importantly,  however,  the  Acts  applied  to  freedmen  (and
refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ
large.  And,  because  “not  all  blacks  in  the  United  States 
were former slaves,” “ ‘freedman’ ” was a decidedly under-
inclusive  proxy  for  race.  M.  Rappaport,  Originalism  and 
the Colorblind Constitution, 89 Notre Dame L. Rev. 71, 98 
(2013)  (Rappaport).  Moreover,  the  Freedmen’s  Bureau 
served  newly  freed  slaves  alongside  white  refugees.    P. 
Moreno, Racial Classifications and Reconstruction Legisla-
tion, 61 J. So. Hist. 271, 276–277 (1995); R. Barnett & E.
Bernick, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment 119 (2021).  And, advocates of the law explicitly dis-
claimed any view rooted in modern conceptions of antisub-
ordination.  To  the  contrary,  they  explicitly  clarified  that 
the equality sought by the law was not one in which all men
shall be “six feet high”; rather, it strove to ensure that freed-
men enjoy “equal rights before the law” such that “each man
shall have the right to pursue in his own way life, liberty,
and happiness.” Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., at 322,
342. 

Several additional federal laws cited by respondents ap-
pear to classify based on race, rather than previous condi-
tion of servitude.  For example, an 1866 law adopted special
rules and procedures for the payment of “colored” service-
men in the Union Army to agents who helped them secure
bounties, pensions, and other payments that they were due. 
14 Stat. 367–368.  At the time, however, Congress believed 
that many “black servicemen were significantly overpaying 
for these agents’ services in part because [the servicemen]