The black codes were a name given to laws passed by Southern governments established under President Andrew Johnson. These laws imposed severe restrictions on freed slaves, such as disallowing them from voting, serving on juries, limiting their right to testify against white men, carrying arms in public places, and exercise certain professions. After the American Civil War, radical Republicans advocated passage of the Civil Rights Bill, legislation designed to protect freed slaves from the South's black codes (laws that imposed severe restrictions on freed slaves, such as prohibiting their right to vote, their ban on sitting on juries, limiting their right to vote). testify against white men, carrying weapons in public places and exercising certain professions). In April 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the civil rights bill. Johnson told Thomas C. Fletcher, the governor of Missouri: "This is a white man's country, and by God, as long as I am President, it will be a white man's government." His views on racial equality were made clear in a letter to Benjamin B. French, Commissioner of Public Buildings: "Everyone would and must admit that the white race was superior to the black race and that even if we should do our best to bring them to our present level, and in doing so we should at the same time raise our own intellectual status so that the relative position of the two races is the same. » Radical Republicans passed the Civil Rights Bill and also succeeded in passing the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868. Despite these laws, white control over Southern state governments was gradually restored when organizations such as the Ku Kux Klan were successful in dissuading blacks from voting in elections.(1) In his speech on July 7, 1862, Charles Sumner attacked President Lincoln's decision to allow the black codes to continue . A government organized by Congress and appointed by the president is responsible for enforcing laws and institutions, some of which are abhorrent to civilization. Take for example the North Carolina Revised Code, which I have in front of me. "Any free person who teaches or attempts to teach a slave to read or write, with the exception of the use of numbers, or who gives or sells to this slave a book or pamphlet, will be considered guilty of 'a crime, if one with...... middle of paper ......sments in various ways What the future can prove, how intelligent they can become, with what eyes they can regard. the interests of the state in which they may reside. , I cannot say more than you (5) Thaddeus Stevens wrote his own epitaph which appeared on his headstone in an African-American cemetery. in this quiet and isolated place, not from a natural preference for solitude but to find other cemeteries limited as to race, by the rules of the charter, I chose this to be able to illustrate in my death the principles which I have advocated throughout a long life, the equality of man before the Creator. (6) JL Alcorn, letter to Elihu Washburne (June 29, 1868. Is it possible that the peoples of the North have made the Negro free, but that he be made, a slave of society, to bear in such slavery the vindictive resentments which the satraps of Davis entertain today towards the peoples of the North? It is a thousand times better for the Negro that the government should return him to the care of the original owner, where he will have a master to watch over his well-being, than that his neck.