magistrates to set unemployed blacks at work under arrangements that
amounted almost to peonage. It is now evident that the South was
actuated by what it considered the necessities of its situation and
not merely by a spirit of defiance. Yet the fear on the part of the
North that slavery was being restored under a disguise was not
unnatural. Radical northern newspapers and leading extremists in Congress
exaggerated the importance of the codes until they seemed like a
systematic attempt to evade the results of the war. As Republican
leaders in Congress saw the satisfaction created in the South by the
President's policy, and discovered that northern Democrats were rallying
to his support, the jealousies of partisanship caused them still further
to increase their grip on the processes of reconstruction. A disquieting
by-product of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, also began
to appear. Hitherto only three-fifths of the negroes had been counted in
apportioning representation in the House of Representatives. As soon as
the slaves became free, however, they were counted as if they were
whites, and thereby the strength of the South in Congress would be
increased. It was hardly to be expected that the North would view such a
development with satisfaction.

The first action of the leaders in Congress was the introduction of a
bill to continue and extend the powers of the Freedmen's Bureau, a
federal organization which supervised charitable relief given the
negroes, protected them in making contracts for labor and assumed a sort
of guardianship over the race in making its transition out of slavery.
The new measure was intended to continue this federal tutelage of the
blacks. The President's veto of the bill, February 19, 1866, served to
widen the breach between him and Congress and thereby postponed still
further the admission of the representatives of the southern state
governments. Three days later Johnson addressed a crowd which collected