Sam Bridgers

HIS 202 B02

James Haynsworth

November 14, 2020

Andrew Johnson’s Retrospective on Reconstruction

Over a century and a half ago, the American Civil War had been won in favor of

preserving the union. Those treacherous scoundrels who led the South against the North had

finally conceded that their efforts for independence were stupidly short-sighted. Sadly, one

patrician that dominated the theatre saw to it that our beloved President Lincoln would not live to

oversee reunification, and though Booth was punished and executed, a deadly wound had been

dealt to this country. As next in the chain of command, I was naturally sworn in as Lincoln’s

successor. Though the traitors were able to reintegrate into the United States, the process of

Reconstruction that I had begun, and was later usurped by the Radical Republicans, was only a

partial success, and the blame falls upon myself and so many others. I am writing these memoirs

to God as I review the decisions made over the dozen years that would set the course for the

country for decades to come.

As I mentioned prior, I was President Lincoln’s successor following his unfortunate

demise, and I had deviated from his planned course of relatively easy forgiveness. Abraham had

wanted to bring about the 10% plan: with the exception of the highest ranked Confederate

officers, every Southerner would receive a pardon erasing their treason once a tenth of the voting

population from 1860 had renewed their oaths of loyalty that they betrayed years prior, and a

government would be established that would integrate them back into the Union. Naturally, he
didn’t consult Congress regarding this, as even his most loyal advisors would consider this

incredibly naïve at best and downright moronic at worst. Then again, the irony of how the South

had made things worse for themselves by having Boothe kill Lincoln is not lost on me. The

strongest element of his original plan was the 13th Amendment, which had liberated the Negroes

from their lifetime of servitude to their treacherous masters.

Once I had taken over, as someone with much more political shrewdness, I knew that

Abe’s ten percent plan was less punishment than a slap on the wrist. Therefore, I decided to

provide less lenient terms to the Southerners. Like Lincoln, I had decree that most Southerners

would be allowed back upon a simple oath except for the Confederate officers and those with

property that exceeded twenty thousand dollars. Those I took much pleasure in forcing them to

beg me personally to receive forgiveness. Perhaps I was wrong to grant them that, as many of my

Republican colleagues noted that the pardoned planters were shifting back to the status quo, only

without slavery. I granted thirteen and half thousand special pardons to the elite, and many

Southern state constitutions fell short of the minimum requirements which repudiated slavery,

state debts, and secession. Black codes restored the social hierarchy of the antebellum South, and

we were almost back to where we started.

After the 13th Amendment was put into place, I had believed that Reconstruction was at

an end, but the Radical Republican Congress had other plans: they rejected my authority and the

Southern congressmen. As I’ve had almost a century and a half to look back on my actions, it

would appear that I was wrong to veto the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the 1866 Civil Rights

Act, as not only were they overridden in a landmark achievement by Congress, but I let my white

supremacy make matters worse for decades to come. Not like the Radical Republicans had their
hands clean either: many of them were more focused on punishing the South than promoting

social justice, which leads me to my next point.

The South was already in ruins after all of the fighting, some of it can be blamed on

overzealous Union troops, but Columbia being burned to a crisp was actually due to some drunk

rednecks that effectively rage quit harder than the Game of Thrones fans that I’ve interacted with

in heaven after the eighth season. While Lincoln’s ideas were too naïve for a President, his

forgiving demeanor was understandable. Both before and after the Civil War, history has

demonstrated what happens when postwar reparations are too extreme: old wounds continue to

bleed. Just like how an already economically ravaged Germany was punished further by the

Treaty of Versailles, the Radical Republicans bled the South dry as further punishment, both

through official laws and indirectly through carpetbaggers, a multitude of Northerners that came

to live in the South after the war.

Had you been around back then, I would have urged you to hold the entirety of the

carpetbaggers in contempt, but even as my wisdom earned from my many years in heaven have

enlightened me that several of them were genuinely trying to good in the South, it’s an

undeniable fact that the greedy scumbags that took advantage of the situation didn’t do anyone

else any favors. The economic investments they put in the South only served to benefit

themselves through bankruptcy announcements upon the construction of new railroads. Millions

of Southerners, white and black alike, were just trying to survive in the period of Reconstruction,

though I will concede that the latter had a much harder time, not helped by black codes,

sharecropping, or the new Ku Klux Klan, a collection of neo-Confederates that sought to strike

back against carpetbaggers or scalawags, but later devolved into an anti-black group. It got so

bad the original founder, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, urged implored his
followers to disband, and even later advocated for black law colleges. Not that it did much good

then.

Almost a decade after I had been impeached by Congress, the Reconstruction period had

come to an end, and the Union troops left the South after nearly a dozen years, but the South got

as close to the antebellum period as possible through loopholes within the 13th, 14th, and 15th

Amendments so large, you could drive a locomotive through them. Through the mistakes of

myself and my colleagues, the sacrifices of those who died in the war were for virtually nothing:

the South had lost its slavery and chances for secession, but the North didn’t get the social

equalities they were hoping for. Real change for the Negroes wouldn’t come until almost a

century later in the 1960s. There were so many bad decisions made in this period that I’m still

surprised the country is still united, even after the division that remains with us to this very day.