Think of the implications of those acts, Johnson added: black people permitted to “rule the white race, make and administer State laws, elect Presidents and members of Congress, and shape to a greater or lesser extent the future destiny of the whole country. Would such a trust and power be safe in such hands?” Andrew Johnson answered his own question. “Negros have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people,” he announced. If left “to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” He begged Congress to stop, stop, stop the (radical) attempt to “Africanize the half of our country.”
It was an astounding broadside. “There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency,” W.E.B. DuBois later remarked with pith, “and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”
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