Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 26: The recalcitrant Southern establishment in 1865

Abraham Lincoln's successor as President was "Union Democrat" Andrew Johnson, who had been Lincoln's running mate in 1864. Johnson became the first President to be impeached, though not convicted and removed for office in the Senate trial. He pursued a conciliatory policy toward the Southern planter class who had caused the Civil War. Johnson's weak Reconstruction policy was the real political basis for his impeachment.

Brenda Wineapple wrote about Johnson's Reconstruction policy in The First President To be Impeached American Scholar Spring 2019. She describes the situation immediately after the end of the war this way:

Visitors from the North frequently found white southerners smoldering, aggrieved, and intransigent; white southerners had tried to protect their homes, believing they had fought for the unassailable right of each state to make its own laws and preserve its own customs.

It's actually unlikely that many white Southerners immediately believed the war was mainly about some abstract commitment to "states' rights". They knew it was about what the Confederate leaders said clearly that it was about: preserving slavery.

Having lost the war, they would not surrender such rights easily. "It is our duty," said South Carolina planter Wade Hampton, "to support the President of the United States so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all our rights as a sovereign State." Union General Philip Sheridan, renowned for his unrelenting aggression during the war, alerted his superiors that planters in Texas were secretly conspiring "against [the] rights" of the freedmen. In New Orleans, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, traveling through the South, was stunned to find a picture of Lincoln hanging next to one of John Wilkes Booth, and above them both a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee. [my emphasis]

Many of the defeated Southern planters and their political supporters were not ready to play nice, in other words.

She continues:

All through the South, ex-Confederates vilified the black population, and one legislature after another passed "black codes," ordinances designed to prevent freed men and women from owning property, traveling freely, making contracts, and enjoying any form of civil rights or due process. "People had not got over regarding negroes as something other than men," wrote Reid. Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean occupying the White House, had acted quickly. While Congress was in recess, he singlehandedly reestablisl1ed southern state governments by executive proclamation. He subsequently issued pardons to former Confederates on easy terms and at an astonishing rate. Later, he nudged out of the Freedmen's Bureau those who disagreed with his position and tried to shut down the bureau by vetoing legislation that would keep it running. He vetoed civil rights legislation as unfair to whites and attempted to block passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to blacks. He turned a cold eye on the violence directed toward the freedmen, and he emphatically staked out a position he sought to maintain, saying, ''Everyone would and must admit that the white race is superior to the black." [my emphasis]