Confederate amnesty allowed treasonous leaders to reinstate quasi-slavery through Black Codes.

Evidence

Shortly after the war, President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to many in the Confederate leadership. Free from the threat of the gallows for committing treason, these white men—such as General Benjamin Humphreys, who had fought against the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg and then became governor of Mississippi—assumed positions in the newly formed state governments and passed legislation known as the Black Codes. These laws were designed to reinstall something close to slavery. They required African Americans to sign a yearly labor contract to work for a white employer, blocked their ability to testify in court against a white person, and banned freedpeople’s access to and ownership of guns under the threat of a public whipping of thirty-nine lashes. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 802

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing-vs-empirical-claims reading goal: the gun ban and Black Codes are specific contested factual claims worth verifying against e.g. Foner’s Reconstruction work.
• QUESTION: The specific claim that Black Codes ‘banned freedpeople’s access to and ownership of guns under threat of thirty-nine lashes’ is a concrete empirical assertion worth checking against the primary sources historians cite.