Jon Meacham Quote
White men alone must manage the South, Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands, Johnson wrote in his annual message. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. It was, the historian Eric Foner observed, probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American president.
Jon Meacham
White men alone must manage the South, Johnson remarked in 1865. Two years later, in 1867, the president asserted that blacks were incapable of self-government. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands, Johnson wrote in his annual message. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. It was, the historian Eric Foner observed, probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American president.
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