The New Yorker recently published an interview with the author of a new book on the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Brenda Wineapple in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation offers an interpretation of the first presidential impeachment as an important Radical effort to protect the civil rights of African Americans.
From the New Yorker interview:
You write, “To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.” That is not the version of Johnson’s impeachment that is usually taught. Are you trying to offer a corrective?
I certainly hope it offers a corrective, and more than that I hope it’s convincing. I don’t know how you were taught, but I certainly wasn’t taught much about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. I was taught that it was preposterous. It was engineered by fanatics. Even recently, when I gave a talk, a very literate, intelligent man asked me if the Tenure of Office Act hadn’t been cooked up in order to ensnare Johnson, which I think was a kind of standard view.
But, when I read through the Congressional record, when I went back to newspapers, when I went into old files and letters and archives, it became clear, to my mind, that the cause of it, that what was being debated, was the way in which the country would go forward and not just get rid of slavery, which the Thirteenth Amendment did, but get rid of the lingering effects of the slavery, which were huge.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute here: if he had been removed from office for violating a law that was then found to be unconstitutional, or that people thought was an undue check on the President’s prerogatives, do you think that that could have had negative consequences?
I understand your question. But there were eleven articles of impeachment, and not all of them dealt with the Tenure of Office Act. The eleventh article, for example, the one that was mostly promoted by Thaddeus Stevens, who really wanted Johnson impeached for much broader issues, was called the Omnibus Article. And, in that sense, what they were trying to do was say, “Look, this is really why he’s impeached.”
If he had been removed from office, then Benjamin Wade [a Radical Republican and the president pro tempore of the Senate] would have come into the Presidency, and then the writing of history, or the writing of Johnson in history, might have been different, because Wade might have dealt with the Presidency and race and the effects of slavery in a whole different way.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
