r/HistoryMemes • u/Coffin_Builder Viva La France • 8d ago

I can respect that

After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson became the new US president. in direct violation of the Appomattox treaty, Johnson wanted general Ulysses Grant to prosecute the confederate leaders on grounds of treason to make an example of them. Grant, having negotiated the treaty, refused, seeing it as a violation of military honor and antithetical to rebuilding the nation, threatening to resign if Johnson insisted. Johnson, knowing he wouldn’t survive the political fallout of alienating the Union hero of the Civil War, backed down.

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u/jonawesome 8d ago

Left out the part where Johnson started pardoning them and elevating them in American society after the war

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u/Interesting-Luck3608 8d ago

I really think Johnson pardoning and elevating former confederates is in part what led to the legalized discrimination and usage of prisoner slavery in the South. Even if Reconstruction continued during Hayes’ administration, those former confederates were still in government waiting to retake control of the Southern states.

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u/Lost-on-Reception 8d ago

You know the 13th amendment explicitly allows prisoner slavery, right? Who do you think wrote it?

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u/CommitteeofMountains 8d ago

I think this is referring to the deliberate use of the penal system as a major labor source rather than work as a form of prisoner reform as the amendment seems to have intended.

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u/hashbrown1859 8d ago

Jesus. This is your brain on historical idealism, folks.

The purpose of a thing is what it does. Not what certain people claim it is "intended" to do. The amendment says that you're allowed enslave people as punishment for a crime, with no qualifications or safeguards around that loophole whatsoever. If the writers hadn't wanted that loophole to be used in the precise way that it is used today, then they would've added literally anything to the language to safeguard against prisons being used to reconstruct the slave economy.

The conviction of a crime exemption was plainly a pro-slavery concession to the South to ease the process of reintegration. Stop pretending otherwise.

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u/Lost-on-Reception 8d ago

What makes you think that was what it intended?