Why do people criticize Johnsons reconstruction record when Lincoln was going...

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Jimmy K

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...to do the same thing? Why is it that Andrew Johnson gets such a bad rap when he was doing EXACTLY WHAT LINCOLN WOULD HAVE DONE and would have succeeded in had he not been shot?
You really don't want to talk about race in this unless you want Lincoln's obvious racism.

The fact remains that Johnson wanted to carry out Lincoln's plan to the letter and he was vilified and subject to a political witchhunt, the same way that yankees did to another Southern president 130 years later


So if you have a problem with what Johnson was doing then to be intellectually honest you have to admit that you would have also had a problem with what Lincoln would have done

The real villains in reconstruction were Thaddeus Stevens and his crowd
 
I don't criticize his restoration plan, I just criticize how racist Johnson was. He stated in a letter, "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men." He vetoed a civil rights bill for Freedmen and then opposed the ratification of the 14th amendment, which would have given everyone born in the US citizenship, penalized states that didn't give voting rights to Freedmen, and gave new federal civil rights that were applicable under US courts.
 
Hu!? Johnson was doing the same thing that Lincoln would have??? That's not what I've read. Johnson dropped the ball - he was as worthless as our present Li'l Bush. And it's too bad we never impeached Li'l Bush! What a ZERO!

But Johnson was a southern boy - he had no interest in doing any reconstruction work - and if he went through the motions, he made it abundantly clear that he didn't care if anything good came of it. And guess what? Nothing good came of it.

Too bad Lincoln had picked a guy like Johnson!
 
Why would anyone want to criticize the rebuilding of what was essentially half of the United States?
 
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