This is the second review by a major newspaper this week of Robert S. Levine’s The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. I earlier posted the review from the New York Times. Here is what the Washington Post had to say:
The crowd erupted in cheers for freedom.
Johnson then evoked the Book of Exodus, promising that soon Black people would find a Moses to lead them into a promised land. The crowd began shouting, “You are our Moses!” Johnson responded by explaining that they should seek a Black Moses, saying, “Your Moses will be revealed to you.” Levine writes that the crowd shouted again, “We want no Moses but you!” Johnson folded: “Well, then . . . humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage, to a fairer future of liberty and peace.”
They could not have known the hypocrisy that would later come as Johnson betrayed them and their descendants, setting the country on a trajectory of racism and racial terror still felt today.
From the conclusion of the review:
Levine’s prose is often beautiful, but even more beautiful is his reliance on the truth of history. “Republicans had hoped for a fundamental transformation of southern society that would bring equal rights to the freedpeople,” the author writes. “But that was not part of Johnson’s vision. He wanted the former Confederate states to be quickly readmitted to the Union after setting up new state governments, and he had no problem with former Confederate leaders being part of those governments. All he asked was that the states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, offer some sort of statement about their regret for seceding (even though he believed no state truly had seceded), and repudiate their war debts.”
Levine argues that racism clearly was behind the president’s deceit: “Johnson may have conceived of himself as a leader for African Americans, but that did not mean he regarded Blacks as equal to whites in the way of people like [Charles] Sumner and [Thaddeus] Stevens.”
Johnson’s betrayal cost thousands upon thousands of Black people their lives in the era of racial terror that was to come. “Mississippi became the first of several ex-Confederate states to adopt Black Codes,” Levine writes, “laws that disempowered African Americans by sharply restricting their mobility and legal rights.” In Mississippi, Black people were barred from owning or renting land, bearing arms, or even meeting at night. Black people were arrested as vagrants and forced to work on chain gangs, in an approximation of plantation slavery.
Sumner was horrified by Johnson, observing, “What could you expect from an old slave-master & an old democrat?” He implored the president to change his policies toward states that had seceded, arguing that the new system “abandons the freedmen to the control of the ancient Masters.” Stevens, who believed that Southerners were “a conquered people” and the South “a conquered territory,” joined in writing urgent letters to Johnson, contending that the “restoration” of rebel states would “greatly injure the country.”
Levine explains that Johnson was a con man who had orchestrated a con job on the country. On Feb. 19, 1866, Johnson vetoed an extension of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, whose agents were posted throughout the South to distribute food, clothing and medical assistance to the more than 4 million newly freed Black people. “The bureau also offered some police protection for the freedpeople,” Levine writes. “It was, in many respects, a radical agency that challenged the racial hierarchies and exclusions that had been central to slave culture.” Levine argues that Johnson “either didn’t care about or was willfully blind to the harm done by the southern Black Codes and various forms of anti-Black violence.”
After his impeachment in 1868, Johnson was portrayed in Black and Radical Republican newspapers as the “demented Moses of Tennessee.” Levine explains that he was “the white president who promised to be the leader of Black people and turned out to be their oppressor.” Johnson, the author writes, was a “president for whom Black lives did not matter.”
