Andrew wanted to bring the South back into the Union on the basis of white suffrage (Murrin 601). It was clear that Johnson wanted to exclude both blacks and upper-class whites from the reconstruction process. The Radicals later realized that Johnson was just as bad as the Confederates. He shared the white Southerners' attitude toward blacks, considering them inferior and unready for equal civil or political rights. Next the "black codes" came into play.
Southern whites turned to the traditional political leaders of their section for guidance in reorganizing their governments. Unfortunately each reconstructed Southern state government proceeded to adopt "Black code" which regulated the rights and privileges of freedmen (Encyclopedia Britannica). Blacks right to own land was restricted, they could not bear arms and they might be bound out in servitude for vagrancy and other offenses. These Black Codes aroused anger among northern Republicans, who saw them as a brazen attempt to reinstate a quasi-slavery (Murrin 602). But it seemed like once more and more blacks moved up north and began taking jobs from the northern whites, the northern Republicans didn't support blacks anymore. .
Without food, land or money, most freedmen had to continue working for their white masters doing sharecropping work. This system became favored in the South because it did not require Southern whites to pay cash wages. While all this was going on, the Republicans in Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the basic civil rights of all citizens regardless of color (Encyclopedia Britannica). The South ignored the law. Then the Congress demanded to have Johnson impeached based on the violation of the Tenure of Office Act when removing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (Murrin 609). The Ku Klux Klan surfaced and tried to scare the blacks and whoever was helping them to leave the South and run north.
