Johnson’s overturn killed the only US effort to compensate the formerly enslaved

Evidence

Just four days later, an assassin shot Lincoln, who died the next day. Andrew Johnson, the racist, pro-Southern vice president who took over, immediately reneged upon this promise of forty acres, overturning Sherman’s order. Many white Americans felt that Black Americans should be grateful for their freedom, that the bloody Civil War had absolved them of any debt. The government confiscated the land from the few formerly enslaved families who had started to eke out a life away from the white whip and gave it back to the traitors. And with that, the only real effort this nation ever made to compensate Black Americans for 250 years of chattel slavery ended. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1343

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s core conceptual task: ‘deviation vs. design.’ Johnson’s overturn is the pivot where wealth-building was made into a deviation from rather than a design of American development. Also pairs with the ‘On Sacrifice’ ADDENDUM theme of repudiated debts.