Question

How did Lincoln’s assassination alter Reconstruction plans for the South? Please helppp

Answer 1

Answer:

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Lincoln was attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth – a 26-year old actor, Confederate sympathizer, and white supremacist – slipped into the Presidential Box and shot Lincoln in the head.. Booth may have decided to act on his hatred after Lincoln endorsed giving the right to vote to African-American men who had served in the Union Army.  The assassination of President Lincoln was just one part of a larger plot to decapitate the federal government of the U.S. after the Civil War.  Lincoln never lived to enact this policy. He died the following morning on April 15, 1865. His successor Andrew Johnson assumed office and presided over Reconstruction.  Johnson, a Congressman and former slaveholder from Tennessee – and the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union during the Civil War – favored lenient measures in readmitting Southern states to the Union during the Reconstruction era.  A proponent of states’ rights, Johnson granted amnesty to most former Confederates and allowed Southern states to elect new governments. As a result, new state governments formed across the South and enacted “black codes.”  These restrictive measures were designed to repress the recently freed slave population. Soon, many African Americans had little choice but to continue working on Southern plantations.