Smithsonian has an interesting article by National Book Award winner Annette Gordon-Reed on the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. You can read the article here.
From the article:
Obviously, this was about much more than an entertaining trial. The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day. Johnson’s real crime in the eyes of opponents was that he had used the power of the presidency to prevent Congress from giving aid to the four million African-Americans freed after the Civil War. Johnson’s deep antipathy toward black people, not his view of the Constitution, guided his actions.
What did it mean for the country’s future that the man at the head of the government—at a moment when black people’s fortunes were being decided—hated blacks? Johnson had opposed slavery because he thought it hurt the class of poor whites from which he had come. Blacks were to be freed but left to the mercy of white Southerners. His plan of action—to put whites back in charge in the South—set him on a collision course with the Radical Republicans, who believed that the South must be transformed to incorporate blacks into American society as equals.
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