Lincoln Assassinated; Johnson Undermines Reconstruction

John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next morning. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat and white supremacist who opposed Black suffrage, assumed the presidency. Johnson granted blanket pardons to former Confederates, returned confiscated land to planters, opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and vetoed Reconstruction legislation at every turn. Frederick Douglass, who had met Lincoln three times, wrote that Black people had lost their "best fri