Erin ’s Reviews > The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson > Status Update

The Black man is a permanent part of the American people.

It is hate the nigger and it can be brought into an election with telling effect.

He noted the unfairness of African Americans being subject to taxation without representation.

Andrew Johnson was a racist like most white Americans of the time. But he was a racist who believed strongly that he cared about Black people.

Johnson turned out to be the absolute wrong president for his times, but that wasn't immediately clear to Douglass or the Republicans who worked with him during his first few months in office.

Slavery is not abolished until the Black man has the ballot.

Up to the time he assumed the Vice Presidency, Johnson remained on good terms with Nashville's African Americans.

Frederick Douglass rejected emigration and colonization alike, arguing that African Americans deserved to be citizens of the nation they had helped build.

Johnson was a politician and before he adopted anti slavery views during the early 1860s he defended slavery in Congress.

Johnson scoffed at the idea that Congress could abolish slavery in Washington D.C., he reviled abolitionist for preparing "to turn over 2 million negroes loose upon the country to become a terror and burden to society."