Most histories of the Civil War end at Appomattox. Some may include a few words about Gen. Johnston’s surrender to Gen. Sherman, but most end either at Appomattox or with the assassination of President Lincoln. Shelby Foote’s massive Civil War trilogy pays a little attention to the aftermath of the war in perhaps a dozen pages out of some 3,000. Foote’s interpretation of the radical Republicans follows the standard wisdom that they were vengeful and vindictive, bloodthirsty politicians who wanted only to see the South prostrate at their feet.
The Lost Cause, which portrayed the South as noble and heroic, was what I was taught ages ago in grade school. President Andrew Johnson was a hero trying to follow the policies of Abraham Lincoln, which earned him the enmity of the Republicans in Congress and led to his impeachment. He was saved by a single vote, which I learned was cast by a brave senator who did not wish to be responsible for the first conviction of an American president.
Or at least, that is what I was taught by an education system in the middle of the Cold War. Everything in our history was presented in the best possible light, even if it meant that the very states that started the bloodiest war in our history in order to preserve their imagined right to own other people should be viewed with respect and admiration. Within 100 years of the war’s start, it had been completely whitewashed.
But what if what we were taught was only a fantasy? What is it was only a story told by men like D.W. Griffith, who produced The Birth of a Nation based on a book named The Clansmen by Thomas Dixon, Jr. which portrayed the marauding bands of murders known as the Ku Klux Klan as noble heroes?
What if Andrew Johnson was more like Donald Trump than Abraham Lincoln? A remarkable book by Brenda Wineapple presents a well-researched and very strong argument that he was.
If you only read one book before Donald Trump’s impeachment trial begins, this should be that book. A comprehensively researched work of history, The Impeachers has much to tell us about what we face today.
Brenda Wineapple has brought to life the dusty men of our history using letters, speeches, and a broad array of histories, magazines, and memoirs.
Andrew Johnson was far from the hero presented in our history. On the contrary, he was a forceful proponent of white supremacy.
Again he proclaimed, this time to the governor of Missouri, that “this is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.”
Meanwhile, those that we were taught to view as radical, vindictive Republicans were actually those men who realized that without the franchise, the newly freed black men would soon be returned to their status as slaves of the white southerners.
After Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Johnson refused to call Congress back into session, ruling by fiat for the eight months that preceded the regularly scheduled December session. (In a small parallel to the nepotism of the current occupant of the Oval Office, he appointed his son as his personal secretary.) This unelected president apparently believed that his personal prejudices were all that were needed to govern.
Johnson decided that the Confederate States never left the Union, since the Constitution did not allow for secession, and that all they needed was to hold free elections—for white men. He pardoned political leaders of the Confederacy as well as army officers at the rate of 100 a day, giving them the franchise which they then used to control the state governments and militias.
Disturbed by the actions that Johnson was taking, the Republicans, once Congress was in session, passed bills ensuring civil rights for the freedmen and the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist them. Johnson vetoed both bills. About the civil rights bill that was eventually passed over his veto:
“Fraught with evil,” he labeled it. The bill placed too much power in the hands of the federal government. It deprived individual states of the ability to make or enforce their own laws—such as black codes, presumably. It operated “in favor of the colored and against the white race.” Johnson said immigrants had more of a right to citizenship than black people did. And most repugnant of all, the bill had been passed by what Johnson called a “rump” Congress—that is, a Congress that had not yet seated representatives from the eleven former Confederate states.
…
Astonished and offended, [Illinois Republican Senator] Lyman Trumbull frostily reminded the President why those eleven Southern states had not been seated: recall, they had rebelled against the federal government, and their representatives were “fresh from the rebel congress or rebel armies, men who could not take the requisite oath to entitle them to admission to seats” since they couldn’t swear they’d never borne arms against the United States.
…
And since the President had weirdly alluded to marriages between blacks and whites in his veto message, Trumbull inquired why he had mentioned marriage at all—except, he specifically added, as “an argument to excite prejudice—the argument of a demagogue and a politician.”
And that was just the beginning. In March 1866, a riot in Memphis left 42 dead. Four months later, a riot in New Orleans resulted in more than 100 deaths. Wineapple’s description of the slaughter is heart-rending. On Gen. Sheridan’s return to New Orleans, “he discovered that in his absence nothing short of a sadistic massacre had occurred. ‘No milder word is fitting,’ he said.”
The 13th Amendment banning slavery (but not black codes) was adopted on Dec. 18, 1865. With its adoption, those who had originally counted as three-fifths of a person were now considered whole persons as far as representation in Congress was concerned. This resulted in granting the South 20 more congressional seats and electoral votes, even if black people were not entitled to a vote. The fear of the Republicans was that the additional representation without the electoral participation of black southerners would result in the rise of newly energized rebel states of white supremacists.
Based on his actions, it is easy to assume that Andrew Johnson would have no problem with this state of affairs. He believed firmly in white male governance. He was against the proposed 14th Amendment, which would reduce the number of representatives of each state in the same proportion of men not allowed to vote within that state.
In order to restrain Johnson, the Congress passed the Tenure of Office Law that restricted his ability to fire his Cabinet members and eventually gave them cause to impeach when he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
The most interesting aspect of Wineapple’s book is her examinations of the men involved. She relates their individual histories and attitudes so thoroughly that one expects to see them walking down the street or sitting in Congress—today.
The parallels between Johnson and Trump are numerous and pointed, even though Wineapple began writing her book during the Obama administration.
Johnson was blamed by some for the deadly riot in Memphis, as his leniency toward the former rebels “reassured them that white supremacy was true and right and to be defended to the hilt, if not with legislation then with torches, bricks, and guns.” Reading that line, I was reminded of the images of the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, and Trump’s pathetic response.
Similar not just in their racism, Johnson, too, was thin-skinned and quick to react to criticism, causing federal government clerks to fear for their jobs if they didn’t support the president. That’s not terribly different from the position that a certain ambassador found herself in a few months ago.
During a campaign trip in 1866, Johnson suggested to one crowd that radical Republican Congressmen Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips should be hanged. Sound familiar? At one stop of what he called his Swing Around the Circle, he claimed that he had been martyred for doing his job:
“I have been traduced and abused,” he shot back, his voice tremulous with self-pity. “I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been called Judas Iscariot,”
The speech then dissolved into incoherent ramblings and eventually a plea to favor “the emancipation of the white man as well as the colored man” after suggesting once again that Reps. Stevens and Phillips be hung. Have you listened to a Trump speech lately?
The parallels are honestly uncanny. Both men represent barely literate, thin-skinned autocrats with little to no real governing ability. Both men excel at exacerbating existing divisions within the nation, not caring for the long-term consequences to others as long as their interests are protected.
The real heroes of Wineapple's book are the impeachers. They’re the representatives and senators who tried unsuccessfully to impeach and convict this accidental destructive president. Oh, and that senator who bravely voted to acquit because he didn’t want to see the first American president convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors? There is evidence to suggest that his vote was purchased by Johnson supporters.
Impeachment is hard. It is messy. Even in 1868, the trial could be bogged down in process questions, and it was. The Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate could and did drag out the process, hoping it would go away. We should be prepared for the same.
I could not put this book down. It is so well-written that even though I knew the eventual outcome, I could not resist sitting up late at night, devouring chapter after chapter, learning more than I ever imagined about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson and the men who fought so hard for “the dream of a just nation.”
I often turn to American history, looking for any clues as to whether we will fall to an incompetent autocracy or manage to struggle our way through to a decent future. At first glance, The Impeachers would seem to be the assurance I normally look for: A president exceeds his authority, ignores the Congress, and is impeached. Although he is not convicted, he is pretty much politically castrated by the entire experience. And our nation moves on.
But did we, really?
Andrew Johnson’s actions during the eight months between Lincoln’s assassination and the opening of the Congress were those of a wartime president—or an autocrat. He spent those eight months trying to undo the results of a war that cost 750,000 lives.
Did he succeed? How many Confederate flags are flown in this nation today? How many statues of traitors adorn our public spaces? The damage he did during his brief tenure has echoed down the generations.
How long will it take us to recover after Trump? Will we ever return to a government of three separate and equal branches capable of providing balance? Can we ever again be the “nation of laws, not of men” that John Adams envisioned?
Or will we remain chained to the doctrine of white supremacy which has guided us for 250 years? Can we ever reach a point where we actually believe that all people are created equal and then treat them that way?
Perhaps not, but that should not stop us from trying, from pressing forward with an impeachment, and from making sure that all Americans are informed of the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Trump. If nothing else, The Impeachers can prepare us for what lies ahead.