In February 1866, alarm was spreading through the Republican North over President Andrew Johnson’s Southern course. Politics in the occupied South seemed to be careening toward something like a neo-Confederate restoration.

Johnson’s entire career had fit the archetype of a hill-country Jacksonian: the Herrenvolk democrat, the striver from humble roots, the anti-monopoly champion of the poor white man — and therefore, the bitter enemy of the West Tennessee “slaveocracy.” Yet he believed with equal vehemence that the United States was and should remain “a country for white men.” And so under his reconstruction policy, white state governments in the South had imposed a series of draconian “Black Codes” on the freed slaves, and the planter oligarchy now seemed on the brink of a revival.

That month, Frederick Douglass visited Johnson at the White House. Arriving as an official representative of the National Convention of Colored Men, his plea was for black suffrage. At a time when former rebels were threatening to retake power, the president’s Southern policy made no sense, Douglass argued. “You enfranchise your enemies and disenfranchise your friends.”