President Johnson believed that black emancipation was the means of overthrowing the planter aristocracy, not of empowering blacks. He saw no reason to punish the South since the loss of slaves and labor was punishment enough. As our textbook notes, “Johnson's views, combined with a lack of common sense and statesmanship, left him unable to work constructively with congressional Republicans, even with the moderates who constituted the majority.” economic problems grew stronger as Northern whites became more incensed with the fights to protect the rights of freed people, as Northerners felt they had done enough for Southern blacks. As Hewitt and Lawson suggest, “More and more Northern whites came to believe that any debt owed to blacks for Northern complicity in the sin of slavery had been erased by the blood shed in the Civil War.” This led the nation to shift from focusing on social issues to economic issues. A third reason Radical Reconstruction failed was because a focus on social issues opened the door to legislation that limited the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The case United States v. Cruikshank (1876), for example, established that the Fourteenth Amendment protected blacks from abuse by the government, but not by private groups. After that case, more and more laws were passed, putting an end to Radical Reconstruction