" Johnson, who saw black empowerment as a nightmare, insisted, “This is … a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”54 Therefore, Louisiana’s declaration that “people of African descent cannot be considered citizens of the United States” aligned perfectly with Johnson’s. One Georgia plantation owner agreed as he asserted that white Southerners now had “the right and power to govern our population in our own way.” And, as Louisiana emphasized, that meant “getting things back as near to slavery as possible. "

― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide