After the Civil War, white southerners felt threatened by the political power wielded by newly freed Blacks. Radical Reconstruction only built upon this fear, and according to many historians the fear soon led to the emergence of a new form of absolute racism under the guise of the Reconstruction era Democratic Party. Although not all ex-slaveholding Confederates were Democrats, a vast majority pledged their allegiance to the conservative values of the political party which brought about the end of Reconstruction. Not all Reconstruction era southern Democrats were racist, but the stated Democratic Party platform in just about every southern state included the goal of establishing Black Codes to limit Black suffrage. The Black Codes were undeniably racist. They restricted the civil rights of ex-slaves and in many areas leaving them completely helpless. As Conservatives (Democrats) gained control of the majority of the chairs in the legislatures in the South, there was little that supporters of Black equality could do to prevent the end of Reconstruction.
Southerner ex-slaveholders became obsessed with absolute racism, building upon the racist values with which they had been indoctrinated by the previous generation. An editor of an Alabama newspaper maintained, "We must render this either a white man's government, or convert the land into a Negro man's cemetery." The way in which conservative southerners sought to achieve this racist goal was through joining the Democratic Party, which was directly responsible for the end of Reconstruction.
Andrew Johnson, the leader of the post-Civil War Democratic Party, was himself a "confirmed racist." Johnson was a working-class southerner who measured up almost exactly to the revisionists' descriptions of the poor white Democrats who used racism to end Reconstruction. Born in North Carolina, Johnson eventually moved to Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor.