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Is Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction: Is It Possible To Regulate African Americans?

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The new Reconstruction has given freedom to more than four million slaves. This is great achievement for equality in the United States of America. African-Americans are now able to work as free men. Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction Program led mad southern states loyal to the Union and slave free. However, southern states enacted bills to regulate African-American activity which led to the Civil Rights Act. At the end of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln feared that an emancipation would drive the border slave states loyal to the Union into the Confederacy. Also, he feared that this would anger conservative northerners. However, slaves convinced Lincoln that emancipation became a military and political necessity. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves. Lincoln also pushed that free and enlisted blacks deserved the right to vote; however, he was murdered days later so Reconstruction plans fell into his successor. In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson presented his Reconstruction plans. Johnson though that the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements as other issues at the state level. Also, he stated that the southern states never lost the right to govern themselves. Under Johnson’s …show more content…

These laws restricted blacks’ activity to secure their availability as a labor force. These acts made Congress furious and in early 1866 Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for approval. These bills extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and stated that all persons born in the United States as citizens shared equality under the law. Johnson decided to veto the bills which led to a permanent rupture to his relationship with Congress which would conclude in Johnson’s impeachment in 1868. The Civil Rights Act later became the first major bill to successfully become a law after presidential

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