To the right is an image of a former slave having to

To the right is an image of a former slave having to sell himself in order
to pay his debt as a sharecropper. What does this mean in terms of
whether slavery was really over or had been replaced by another kind?
Southern whites mostly returned prominent Confederates and old
elites to power and violence against freedpeople and northerners in
the South generated opposition to Johnson’s policies. White
southerners also enacted BLACK CODES, which were state laws that
regulated the lives of former slaves.
What did the BLACK CODES do?
• While these laws gave blacks the right to legally marry, own property,
and access the courts in some ways, they denied them rights to testify
against whites, serve on juries or state militias, or VOTE
• They also allowed authorities to arrest and hire out to white
landowners any blacks who refused to sign annual labor contracts , a
measure to force the former slaves to return to the plantations.
• Some states prohibited blacks from buying land and allowed judges to
assign black children to work for their former owners without
parental consent.
• These codes, an effort to reinstitute conditions of slavery, caused
many in the North to believe that Johnson’s policy was encouraging
white southerners to restore their prewar way of life.

The role of the federal
government?
To the right is a Democratic Party broadside from the
election of 1866 uses racist imagery to argue that
government assistance aids lazy former slaves at the
expense of hardworking whites.
Congress isn’t happy:
Johnson didn’t do much about the Black Codes and in
December 1865, he declared that the establishment of
loyal governments in all southern states had reunited the
nation. But Radical Republicans in Congress, who
coalesced around opposition to Johnson’s policies, called
for new state governments that would exclude “rebels”
from power and guarantee the vote to blacks. The
Radicals believed that the Union victory presented an
opportunity to guarantee equal rights for all, despite
race. They welcomed the expanded powers of the
federal government and thought federalism and states’
rights could not prevent national efforts to secure equal
rights.
Consider this argument with what you learned in
previous chapters about big versus small government.

Congress takes action and passes the 14
th
Amendment
Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th Edition
Copyright © 2017 W. W. Norton & Company
Frustrated with President Johnson poor reconstruction plan, by 1866 Republicans in Congress created their own Reconstruction
plan. It soon passed and sent for ratification the Fourteenth Amendment, which placed in the Constitution the principle of
citizenship for all persons born in the United States and empowered the federal government to protect the rights of all
Americans.