April 1865

President Lincoln was shot on April 14 and died April 15, 1865. Black Americans mourned deeply. Frederick Douglass called him 'the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely.' Lincoln's death elevated Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who opposed Black political rights, fundamentally altering Reconstruction's trajectory against Black freedom.

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