For in it he again asserted that the states formerly in rebellion were part of the Union, that they had never in fact left it, and that the late war had been fought only to preserve the Constitution. What’s more, without the Southern states, Johnson exclaimed, the Union did not exist. Nothing new there. But Johnson also played with the word “slavery,” using it not to refer to the formerly enslaved black population but to white state governments that Congress presumed to hold in thrall, state governments, as Johnson prophesized, that would be subjected to a “negro domination” far worse than the
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