Johnson, who was himself from Tennessee, favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. He implemented his own form of Presidential Reconstruction – a series of proclamations directing the seceded states to hold conventions and elections to re-form their civil governments. After the National Union ticket won the 1864 presidential election, Johnson was sworn in as vice president on March 4, 1865.On April 14, 1865, in the closing days of the Civil War, President Lincoln was shot  and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Johnson believed that the Southern states had never truly left the Union. With the rebellion defeated, he thought that the South should re-take their place as equal partners under the United States Constitution. Despite the pleas of African-Americans and many congressional Republicans, Johnson viewed suffrage as a state issue, and was uninterested in using federal power to impose sweeping changes on the defeated South.
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