**
A white supremacist, without qualms! Johnson crafts a narrative in which he is, according to historian Robert S. Levine, a "Moses" for freed Blacks who just love him! Johnson called himself the "Moses" of all Blacks in America. When he spoke to Black groups of abolitionists, Johnson believed his personal narrative of "love" worked magic. Even meeting with Douglass in 1866 to push the idea of colonization for a population he cared so much for, Johnson believed he was succeeding in convincing Blacks to leave the country.
So he believed! And he was free to do so, but neither Douglass nor other Black leaders were buying anything of Johnson's snake oil. Douglass had already been astounded by Lincoln's gall to suggest colonization for Black people who toiled and died in America for hundreds of years. Colonization was out of the question in Lincoln's era and out of the question in Johnson's.
For Du Bois, this version of Johnson was clownish compared to the one who whips up the anger of the economically poor whites in order to stir racial division. In a time when there could have been a union between the economically poor whites and former enslaved Blacks, Johnson, as Du Bois writes, encourages the economically poor whites to denounce the humanity of Black people!
You are still white ! You have something in common with your brethren, the slaveholder ! The true unification of the country should be between the economically poor whites and the slaveholder, for it was necessary that the two classes keep "the white man superior," yes?
The "poor whites" expressed as "much fear and jealousy of Negroes" as they expressed "disaffection with the slave barons." Didn't the slaveholder honor you by paying you to serve as "slave catchers, slave drivers and overseers"? So the economically poor whites picked sides, even as they were being directed to express anger not at the slaveholders and the rich barons. Instead, they were directed to recognize in Black people, Du Bois writes, a "rivalry"! And the economically poor white did just that, critically point out the "injustice" in Blacks becoming "laborers and soldiers in a conquering Northern army"! What next!
The slaveholding capitalists class was pleased. What good could come from "abolition-democracy"? On April 15, 1865, after the assassination of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, rising from the economically poor white class, found himself president, six days after Robert E. Lee surrendered, writes Du Bois. Johnson appeals to the racial identity of his former class thus becoming, Du Bois continues, "the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death."
Under Johnson's reign, Du Bois explains, "race provincialism" prevailed. The world, he adds, was "delivered to plutocracy." Credit Johnson, he continues, for leading the way "with unconscious paradox and contradiction." For the new US president Johnson, drawn to the "advancement of power and prosperity and liberty of the masses at the expense of intrenched [sic] privilege," never considered Black people as part of the masses. In fact, for Johnson, writes Du Bois, he was unable to imagine the masses of Black people "in any conceivable democracy," for he "could never regard Negroes as men."
But Johnson was also drawn to the economically powerful. As Du Bois points out, the president was an admirer of the slaveholder. Just as Johnson's economically poor brethren believed, the wealthy were a smart-looking class of people. Johnson admired their "manners; he enjoyed their carriage and clothes." For Johnson, Du Bois argues, the wealthy class of capitalists were "quite naturally his ideal of what a gentleman should be." And he, Johnson, found himself "flattered" if the wealthy Southerner took note of him. After all, the Southern gentleman appeared "free, natural and expansive" compared to the Northerner's coldness and hypocrisy!
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