Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean occupying the White House, had acted quickly. While Congress was in recess, he singlehandedly re-established Southern state governments by executive proclamation. He subsequently issued pardons to former Confederates on easy terms and at an astonishing rate. He later nudged out of the Freedmen’s Bureau those who disagreed with his position and tried to shut down that Bureau by vetoing legislation that would keep it running. He vetoed civil rights legislation as unfair to whites and attempted to block passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which
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