Andrew Johnson, who became president upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, thought these survivors should help themselves. “Slaves were assisted to freedom,” said Johnson, with the expectation that “on becoming free they would be a self-sustaining population.” Johnson here was explaining why he had vetoed a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau. He did so, he said, because any legislative action based on the idea that freedmen and freedwomen wouldn’t quickly “attain a self-sustaining condition” would be “injurious” to “their character and their prospects.”10 Congress overrode
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