The first president who played an important role was Abraham Lincoln, he was the sixteenth president of the United States. Lincoln first drafted African Americans into the Union Army to fight in the Civil War and, once the war was over, freed the slaves with the Thirteenth Amendment and his Emancipation Proclamation. After Lincoln arrived, Andrew Johnson did not play a major role in helping African Americans for good because of the black codes he established and his negative attitude towards the Freedmen's Bureau. Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson and helped African Americans by arresting Klansmen, but he didn't last long because some people were tired of giving civil rights to African Americans, so Rutherford B. Hayes took office. Hayes imposed Jim Crow laws, which brought America no closer to equality for African Americans. These presidents had greater power during the Civil War and Reconstruction period and still did not come close to equality for Africans.