. Before the war, the "patterollers" formed a network of surveillance and repression over the slave community to prevent blacks from fleeing slavery or violating any other rules and laws.
Violence against blacks became even more severe following the assassination of Lincoln. On April 15, 1865, Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the seventeenth president. Johnson was a Southerner who felt no sympathy for the cause of racial integration. He dismantled a great deal of the Republic Reconstruction programs in the South, including the Freedmen's Bureau, issued whole-scale pardons for Confederate officials and soldiers, and allowed the old southern aristocracy to reassume governance of the South (Tourgee 32-33).
The traditional slave codes of the old South that had been outlawed during Reconstruction were now replaced with "black codes" - denying blacks the rights of white people and returning them to a state of virtual bondage. Mississippi's black code denied blacks the right to rent land outside the city or conduct any kind of independent business. In South Carolina, blacks were
legally barred from pursuing any occupation other than farmer or house servants Under Alabama's black code, disobedient servants could be fined $50, or in lieu of the fine, hired out at public auction for a period of six months (Wade 22).
The Republican Congress reacted angrily to the dismantling of Reconstruction by the Johnson Administration. Andrew Johnson was impeached and the southern governments were annulled. The ten southern states were divided into five military districts in which new governments were to be elected by the entire male population, blacks and whites. In what later became known as the Radical Reconstruction, southern states could be readmitted to the union only after they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing
...