So long as Reconstruction seemed to be about the transfer of power from the old Southern elite to the plain people of the South, Johnson was enthusiastically for it. When Radicals, however, pressed for equal rights, citizenship, and even suffrage for the freedmen, then Johnson’s devotion to a white republic surged to the fore. He thought that in this he had the sympathy of the Northern electorate, which thought of suffrage as a privilege rather than a right. In the fall of 1865 proposals to extend the vote to black men went down to defeat in Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
