Now, they faced those same demands from workers in the North, and this changed the way some of them thought about Reconstruction.

'Cause they start complaining about their labor, you know, and the growing labor movement in the North that is demanding an eight-hour day, safety conditions, abolition of child labor, and all that.

Historian Manisha Sinha, who we've heard from before, told me that this is when the tide really started to turn against Reconstruction.

A lot of things are happening in the North that make many Northerners, especially Northern elites, very sympathetic to Southern planters who are complaining about Black labor all the time.

It's one plus one is three.

Absolutely.

And especially for Johnson to talk about free people's rights is a bit rich, exactly, in your face, rich.

But he really wants to tell Northerners, hey, the South is no longer bitter, and they're not bitter against the Union or you, that they have all accepted it.

And in fact, Schertz has just witnessed the precise opposite.

It was an election year, on top of everything else, so the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy Reconstruction.

He even says the real traitors to the union were not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans and the abolitionists.

These are the real enemies to the union.

We passed by a large log house in which a colored preacher was exalting his congregation, for it was Sunday.

This is an area where the Union Army, abolitionists, freed people themselves are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery.

Freed people's idea of free labor was linked to their own traditions of economic autonomy.

They envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored, and what they would get for it.

So the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy reconstruction.

He even says the real traitors to the union were not the former Confederates, but they are the radical Republicans and the abolitionists.

These are the real enemies to the union.

Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view.

We passed by a large log house in which a colored preacher was exalting his congregation, for it was Sunday.

This is an area where the Union Army abolitionists, freed people themselves, are experimenting in systems of free labor that would replace slavery.

Freed people's idea of free labor was linked to their own traditions of economic autonomy.

They envisioned free labor as sometimes even ownership of land, but definitely control over who they labored for, how much they labored, and what they would get for it.

It was an election year on top of everything else, so the president wanted voters to give him a new Congress, one that would support his vision for a quick and tidy Reconstruction.

He even says the real traitors to the Union were not the former Confederates, but they are the Radical Republicans or the abolitionists.

These are the real enemies to the Union.

Johnson is stuck in this very rigid racist view, so he thinks the majority will support him because he can play the race card, and he does that constantly.

Just as a reminder, what is the 13th of the 13th, 14th, 15th, the key Reconstruction Amendments here?

The 13th Amendment, of course, abolished slavery in the United States.

And it was one that Lincoln, just before his death, really pushed hard for.

You could see that in the Lincoln movie.

And it did have, no one looks at the second or third clauses always of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that said Congress shall have all the power to implement them.

Now, in a federal system, this was giving Congress a lot of power, the federal government a lot of power.

This is when the southerners begin this chant against big government.

I'm mangling it, but it's ridiculous to think that their ideas about how we run our country should be the ones that dominate for all time.

I mean, what, you know, what's the situation here? What do we mean by Jim Crow? And what, what are these passages? What do these passages tell you about it?

Yeah, so these passages are from the 1890s when this sort of new regime of racist terror was put into place in the South after the overthrow of Reconstruction.

And throughout the latter half of the 19th century, we can see African-Americans, including those who were sort of leaders of the community, somebody like Benjamin Singleton, who had run away from slavery, come back during the Civil War, tried to organize the community by land.

And he saw that in the Jim Crow South, with disfranchisement, with racist violence, lynchings, massacres, and generally a very oppressive economic system that involved debt peonage, convict labor.

The things were barely a step ahead of slavery.

And he sort of gives up.

And you can see from what he's saying in his testimony how people are being bulldozed, which was the 19th century term of being violently intimidated.

Manisha, you wanted to respond? Yeah.