However, the matter was not pressed, and his message to Congress in December, 1864, was silent on the subject. There was no present occasion to bring forward the matter, but the President still adhered to his original plan as far as Louisiana and Arkansas were concerned, and so expressed himself in his last speech before his death. So the matter of Reconstruction stood when Andrew Johnson became President. There was not much question about the general course he would pursue, because, as War Governor of Tennessee, he had, early in 1865, practically reconstructed that State under Mr. Lincoln's "ten percent" plan. As Congress was not in session, and would not convene until December, the President had the alternative of either calling an extra session of Congress or proceeding in the matter of Reconstruction according to his own ideas and the suggestions of his Cabinet, he having retained the Cabinet left by Mr. Lincoln. The latter course was pursued, and after some delay President Johnson began to act. An Executive Order swept away all laws and decrees of the Confederacy, raised the blockade and opened the southern ports to trade. On May 29, 1865, the President issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to all who had participated in the Rebellion upon their taking a registered oath to support the Constitution and the Union, but the Proclamation excepted a large number of persons of specified classes, whose treason was deemed to be too great to allow them to again participate in the Government. By the middle of July, Provisional Governors had been appointed by the President in North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida; the authority of the United States had already been established in Virginia early in May, and Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee had been reconstructed under Mr. Lincoln's plan. The President's policy was that as soon as these Governors took charge, any white person, except the classes specified, could regain his citizenship by an oath to support the Constitution and the Union. The taking of this oath by a sufficient number was followed by Reconstruction Conventions, which were held in the Southern States, and Legislators and Representatives to Congress were chosen. The work of these Reconstruction Conventions and Legislatures, although they repudiated the debts of the Confederacy and recognized the Thirteenth Amendment, was highly displeasing to the Republicans in the North, who were greatly interested in the fate of the negroes, and who now saw them, by various laws passed by the Southern Legislatures, deprived of all civil rights and reduced to a new form of servitude.