1867 Andrew Johnson - Fear of Negro Supremacy

In 1867, Radical Republicans had a firm grasp of congress and passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This act temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments were to be based upon universal suffrage of all males. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th amendment which granted equal protection and voting rights to freed slaves before they could rejoin the Union. Andrew Johnson seemed to believe that this would bring about Negro Supremacy in the south, claiming that ratifying the 14th amendment would subjugate the South to Negro domination, and this "would be worse than the military despotism under which they are now suffering". There is no way around it, he proved himself to be a disillusioned or some might call a delusional racist who wanted to preserve white supremacy.  I don't mean this as an insult, but rather I use the word "racist" as a technical term meaning 'one who believes in racial superiority'.   Here are just a few more of his own words from his 1867 annual address to congress:

"But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism" 

"[I am willing] to join in any plan within the scope of our constitutional authority which promises to better the condition of the Negroes in the South, by encouraging them in industry, enlightening their minds, improving their morals, and giving protection to all their just rights as freedmen. But the transfer of our political inheritance to them would, in my opinion, be an abandonment of a duty which we owe alike to the memory of our fathers and the rights of our children." 

"Already the Negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder. They are taught to regard as an enemy every white man who has any respect for the rights of his own race. If this continues it must become worse and worse, until all order will be subverted, all industry cease, and the fertile fields of the South grow up into a wilderness" 

"The great interests of the country require immediate relief from these enactments. Business in the South is paralyzed by a sense of general insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of Negro supremacy." 

" It can not have escaped your attention that from the day on which Congress fairly and formally presented the proposition to govern the Southern States by military force, with a view to the ultimate establishment of Negro supremacy, every expression of the general sentiment has been more or less adverse to it."

None of these words were taken out of context. Andrew Johnson went on and on, vehemently expressing what he considered the dangers of allowing blacks to vote.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29508
http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction
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