American History Hit - President Andrew Johnson: Reconstruction & The First Impeachment

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Three quarters of a million people dead in the Civil War. A country separated in to two. How do you join it back together? Do you punish the secessionists? How do you grapple with the question of enslavement? And who do you choose to be at the controls?When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, his Vice President, Andrew Johnson, became President. Johnson was a Southerner who had sided with the Union during the war. To hear how his standpoint impacted on his policy in the aftermath of the war, Don speaks to Erik B Alexander.Erik is an Associate Professor of American History at Souther Illinois University.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The Constitution of the United States, Article 2, Section 4, states, the President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States

shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. It's 1868, and the United States Congress conducts its first ever impeachment trial of a U.S. President, Andrew Johnson. Eleven articles of impeachment are approved by the House. The charges are as follows. 1. Violation of the tenure of office act by dismissing Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, without Senate approval. 2 and 3. Further violations of this act in hiring Stanton's replacement.

4 through 7. The High Crime in Office of Conspiracy to Deprive Stanton of his office. 8. Unlawfully seizing the property of the Department of War in appointing his replacement. 9. Diverting orders passed the Secretary of War. war to the general of the army. Ten. Hmm. Making speeches, quote, with a loud voice, certain intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, and did therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces against Congress, amid the cries, jeers, and laughter of the multitudes then assembled and within hearing,

unquote. 11. Failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The first presidential trial would be something to see. A thousand tickets were printed for each day of the Senate trial. And I don't know about you, but I'd have paid good money just to hear how they plan to argue, Article 10. Hey, I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for listening today as we forge inexorably onward with our special series covering the presidencies of the United States. Today is our 17th president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, lands between Abraham Lincoln and succeeded by Ulysses Grant.

Johnson was sworn in as Abraham Lincoln's vice president on March 4, 1865. Six weeks and one southern surrender later, Mr. Booth shot Mr. Lincoln at Mr. Ford's theater, and Andrew Johnson's presidency was underway. What would be a full four-year term, almost, from 1865 to 1869, just short a month or so? After Northern armies had finally vanquished a Confederate rebellion to disunite the United States, the man who had fought the fight now lay dead, and a new president, was in charge. Arguably, the wrong guy for this most pivotal moment. Andrew Johnson was an obstructionist, at least towards the kind of reconstruction that radical Republicans yearned to achieve.

Reconstruction would happen, of course, in the most basic sense. The United States was reunited. But the obstacles Johnson placed in the path of progress would prove problematic down the line. If you're looking for the poisoned spring of so much discord that flows through American culture in the past and up to the present, it's fair to start with Andrew Johnson's role in reconstruct. So let's start with Dr. Eric B. Alexander of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he specializes in 19th century U.S. history, especially the antebellum era, through to Reconstruction. Greetings professor, Eric, thanks for the guidance. You're about to provide. Much appreciated. Thank you, Don. Really happy to be here.

The reconstruction period in general lasts 1865 to 77, but it breaks down into kind of two major categories. You've got presidential reconstruction and, I guess, congressional reconstruction. Is that the second part? Yeah, I think that's as a general overview. Absolutely correct. 1865 to 1877 are the very traditional dates that historians have used, that history textbook used, that we use in the classroom. We can talk more about this as we go, but I think one thing that historians have started to emphasize is, is 1877 really the end? It kind of carries on until the end of the 19th century, depending upon how you define reconstruction. But certainly in a microview, yes, you have sort of the presidential period, which we will talk about today, and then the congressional

period. Eric, when we're discussing Andrew Johnson, we're really on two paths. We're talking about both his presidential and his whole biography, for that matter, but also the reconstruction period, which just, it goes hand in hand when you're discussing the rise and downfall of Andrew Johnson within his one period. But I think many people might be confused that Andrew Johnson was not Lincoln's first vice president. By the time Johnson comes along, we're done with the first term of Abraham Lincoln. He had a vice president named Hannibal Hamlin. That man does not. go forward, it becomes Andrew Johnson. This is my question. Why Andrew Johnson, a southerner from Tennessee, suddenly steps into the vice presidential seat? That's a great question, Don, and a complicated one.

So you are right. His first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, a man who, as far as I can tell, is famous only for being Lincoln's first vice president. He was a staunch Republican. Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party, of course. Hamlin was from Maine. He was a Republican. Very sort of traditional choice, you might say, for the vice presidency. What's interesting is that during the war, Lincoln and other Republicans increasingly tried to rebrand the Republican Party. A problem that Lincoln understood is that his party, when he was elected in 1860, he received no votes in the South. His party was a strictly sectional northern party. And Lincoln understood that the war was going to end eventually. And thinking long term that the Republican Party would have difficult

I think surviving if it remained only a northern party. So Lincoln and many other Republicans increasingly thought about how can we expand the base of our party? How can we bring in more support, particularly in the border south? And for that reason, then, Lincoln and other Republicans, first they renamed the Republican Party. So one thing that's interesting is when Lincoln runs for re-election in 1864, it is not the Republican Party. It is the Union Party. And that was not just a superficial or cynical name change. It was a real effort to create a new, different organization than the one that had elected Lincoln in 1860. They wanted to bring in loyal unionists in the border south, who had remained loyal to the union. They wanted to bring in

so-called war Democrats, members of the Democratic Party in the North, who had supported the union war effort and had increasingly come to support Lincoln's administration. So that context, I think, can help us understand why Lincoln and others would support Andrew Johnson for vice president, because Johnson, of course, is from Tennessee, was a longtime member of the Democratic Party, but was a very loyal unionist. He was the only senator who had remained in the Senate after secession from the South. He had already served. Lincoln had appointed him as the war governor of Tennessee during the war. And so I think that context helps us understand that Johnson kind of served many purposes, but one was part of this effort to broaden the base of the Republican Party,

appeal to border South Unionists, and he checked all those boxes. I have to backtrack to that fact. This was new to me when I read this, that in the face of secession, and we're talking about 1860, 61, the creation of the Confederate States of America, the only senator from the South that remains in Congress is Andrew Johnson. Had to have made him a traitor to the South, but a hero to the North, right? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think as we preview just a little bit when we get into his presidency, in many ways, that's one of the complicated things about Johnson. He's a southerner, so once he's president during Reconstruction, many Northerners don't fully trust him. But at the same time, Southerners, as you said, Don, don't really trust him either. They saw him as a traitor to the

South. So he kind of ends up on the bad side of both North and South. Had to have gotten him a lot of media attention, right? I mean, he must have been a quite famous man in those years. Oh, certainly. And by the time he's vice president, I mean, he had served decades in public office, 36 years in total at virtually all levels of public office, from the local level in Tennessee all the way up to Congress and then at the state level in Tennessee, federal, state, local, he had done everything and was certainly very well known. We're going to get into his past and even his origins in a moment, but I just want to put, you know, set the table for that conversation we're going to have in a bit about reconstruction. It's a mistake to think that this is a period that begins with the end of Lincoln. He's already

thinking about reconstructing the United States as early as 1863, as I understand. What's called the 10% plan is his first attempt to kind of frame out how these southern states will reenter the union, 10% referring to that sector of the southern population in any state that would agree to an oath of loyalty to the United States. Once there was 10% of those people, which is not a very big percentage, by the way, of that white male population, then they could reenter the United States. Is that about right. Am I getting it? No, you did very well, Don. That's, um, I get an A. Thank you. You're welcome. And as I tell my students when I teach my courses on the Civil War, this reconstruction is, I think, the most complicated period in American history and frequently the most

misunderstood. And I mentioned to you earlier, I think I often have, I myself having to look things up, and I've been doing this for a long time. So I think for reconstruction, first thing to understand is that, yes, you were right. It is not something that begins with Lincoln's death. In fact, Lincoln from the moment the Civil War began was already thinking about what will happen when the Civil War ends. And so for that reason, I think Reconstruction is a process that begins, you could argue, as soon as the Civil War begins. Lincoln always believes the war will end, that the South will have to rejoin the Union, and that will always be a political problem that the federal government will have to solve. So, yes, Lincoln's first plan, known popularly as the 10% plan, as you said, Don,

effectively required two things. The first was when 10% of Southern voters, basically on the census of 1860, when 10% of southern voters took an oath of loyalty, of loyalty to the United States, they could begin forming state constitutions that they would then submit to the federal government to Congress for approval. And as long as those state constitutions agreed to accept the end of slavery, as they abolished slavery, the 13th Amendment has not yet been passed, they could rejoin the union. That I think, and it still strikes me, that is extraordinarily lenient, it seems to me. Yes. But I think it reflects Lincoln's belief. that somewhat naive belief probably that the vast majority of white southerners actually loved the

union, wanted to stay in the union, that the war had been caused by a real minority of extreme elite slaveholders. And so Lincoln always believed, as he came from Kentucky, this border state, and he felt that most white southerners felt as he did. They loved the union. They wanted to stay in the union. So that was Lincoln's plan put forward in 1863, and it only saw the admission of Tennessee as a state successfully under that plan. But then there's the way Davis thing, I do not want to get into the weeds of all this, but I'm just trying to make the point that there's all this stuff happening, this whole these discussions of Wade Davis being the much more extreme version, a congressional version of how to readmit a state. So all that's in the air,

you know, that people are thinking about how they're going to put this all back together. So put a pin in that for a moment as we back up and get to the biography of Andrew Johnson. As you say, a very, very skilled and very experienced politician in the Nashville area. But prior to that, remarkably common man didn't even learn to read until he was 17. Yeah, that's right. He's born into extreme poverty in North Carolina, and his father died before he knew who his father was. He's eventually apprenticed at a very young age by his mother to a tailor and becomes a tailor. That's sort of his trade as a young man. As you said, he learns to read, not until he's 17.

And there's an older sort of school of thought among historians that, as we get into reconstruction in a little bit, part of what is driving Johnson is that early experience, that he absolutely hated slaveholders because of the sort of economic tension, the class tension, where he's growing up in the antebellum South is an area of incredible wealth, but it is incredible wealth for a very small minority of people. Per capita of the South, their wealth per capita is on par with the North, but it is held by less than, you know, we talk today about the 1%. That's really what's happening in the Antimelam South, and Johnson is not part of that 1%. And that some historians have speculated that that sort of drove his ambition, but also drove his attitude towards slaveholders once he becomes president. An odd little moment here in his life. He's an indentured servant learning the trade of being a tailor. That's the business that he's taken in. Who's the boss of this? A guy named Selby, right? A local guy named Selby is the tailor. And he's actually very good at being a tailor, isn't it?

Yeah, he's quite good at it. And it becomes kind of this badge of honor as once he becomes and starts moving up the ladder of politics and becomes well known, it endears him to people. Very much like Andrew Jackson, this political figure who came from nothing, as you said, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, very classic kind of 19th century Horatio Alger story. And could darn his own socks. That's important. That's very admirable quality. These Jacksonian Democrats, I mean, all of what goes on in his career, basically we're talking about a period from 1843. to 57. The backdrop of these political careers is astonishing when you consider what was going on, you know, in their time in Congress or anywhere, really. But you've got westward expansion, indigenous Americans removal, the Wild West happening, the debates, legislation, Supreme Court decisions of enslavement, the Mexican-American War, the creation of, you know, manifest destiny, the American continent. All of this is what's going on as these men move through their offices. It is extraordinary.

It is. And Johnson's, again, as I said earlier, had spent 36 years in public office. He had started as an alderman in Tennessee, sort of a local, what we might today say, city council. He serves in the Tennessee state legislature. He then moves on and becomes a representative in the United States Congress. He's governor of Tennessee. He then goes into the Senate before the Civil War military governor of Tennessee.

So he had done and seen it all. And again, very skilled politician. Right. He is, importantly, an enslaver himself, 1843, purchased, the rights of ownership over a girl named Dolly, 14 years old. She goes on to have three children. Then Dolly's half-brother Sam, who has nine children with his wife, Margaret, Sidebar, Sam, an amazing story. This formerly enslaved becomes the commissioner of the Friedman's Bureau. I mean, it's amazing. Anyway, there's another person. Ultimately, Andrew Johnson enslaves about 14 people in his

lifetime. And then he frees him in 1863. This is the weird thing that's going on here. That's what I'm trying to bring up is this fact that there's two lives colliding here. in the White House between Lincoln and Johnson. By the time he frees his slaves in 1863, I think he, like many Americans, had come to see that slavery was the cause of the war, that slavery is the reason the union had broken apart. And if you loved the union, as 19th century Americans did, and Lincoln, in some ways is similar in this regard, that Lincoln himself, I think, had took him a while to come to this conclusion that if we are going to save the union, we must destroy slavery.

Those two things are incompatible. And I don't want to compare Lincoln to Johnson because obviously Johnson is not nearly as successful or skilled or as beloved as Lincoln. And as we'll get to all the problems Johnson has as president. But I do think by the time Johnson becomes president, he is also concluded slavery must be done away with. This is the thing that caused the war. This is a thing that destroyed the union. And if we're going to preserve the union, preserve American democracy, then we must get rid of slavery. Did he ever explain his position in public?

Not really. I mean, in the 19th century, yeah, it was seen as inappropriate for candidates to be seen as seeking office. There was this kind of tradition of you've been called to public service. So, for example, when Stephen Douglas runs for president in 1860, he goes on a very famous speaking campaign that was really the first of its kind. Up until that point, candidates mostly stayed home. They might go out on their porch, on the stump, and they might speak to crowds who came to see them. But the campaigning was really managed by their campaign team who issued biography. who printed editorials, who sort of oversaw the coordination of campaigns from state to state. So when Johnson is running as vice president, my knowledge, no, he's not doing any serious campaigning like we might consider today. He certainly does, though, explain a lot of his ideas when we get into reconstruction. But no, I think to the point by the time he's elected as vice president, there's not a sort of a popular vision of what Johnson believes, I guess. Could Abraham Lincoln have won the 1864 election without Andrew Johnson, you think? Oh, certainly. I think so. Most accounts of the election of 1864 emphasized that it really hinged on battlefield results.

I mean, interestingly enough, Lincoln is fighting against his own Republican Party for his nomination. There are factions within the Republican Party who are debating whether or not they should remove Lincoln. Some Republicans believe that Lincoln just had not done enough on slavery. and these radical Republicans who want a more progressive candidate, as we might say today. Others, like Lincoln, however, they're worried that he's not electable. He has too much baggage from the war. And ultimately, though, because Lincoln was such a skilled politician, he managed the convention beautifully and does receive the nomination unanimously. But even as late as August, at the end of the summer, there's still a movement to replace Lincoln on the ticket.

And Lincoln himself doesn't know that he's going to win. There's a very famous moment, the blind memorandum where Lincoln walks into his cabinet and has them sign a document without knowing what it is. And the document turns out to be a promise, a pledge to help the next administration if Lincoln was not to be reelected. But famously, though, it's Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September of 1864 that really turns the tide. Persuades Northerners that not only is the end of the war in sight, but that perhaps Lincoln's execution of the war effort has been good. And so that ultimately is what propels Lincoln to office. So I think I wouldn't say that the vice presidential candidate is really the deciding factor, whether it's Johnson or if it had been Hannibal Hamelin again or anybody else.

March 4th, 1865, they are inaugurated together, President Lincoln and his vice president Johnson. Six weeks later, of course, everything changes. We have in a previous episode covered the assassination and even John Wilkes Booth's escape or attempt to escape. So I'm going to skip over the details of that. just underscore the fact that Andrew Johnson was part of this assassination plot. There was a famous episode where George Azzarot, one of the conspirators, actually stayed in the hotel where, I guess, the Kirkwood House, where Andrew Johnson was staying and then chickened out, basically, got drunk and walked away from the killing he was supposed to do. So upon the assumption of the presidency, which happens immediately afterwards, we have now a southern racist in charge of reconstructing his own realm, enacting a northern vision of full civil rights and suffrage to blow.

Oh, never mind, that's not going to happen. Not under Andrew Johnson. And this, so we begin, the first reconstruction era, which is called the presidential reconstruction. To be utterly clear about this, the reason this happens is upon that assassination and his assumption of the office, Congress is not in session. So suddenly we have this president stepping into the office and he's totally in charge. He has to do what he needs to do. anybody would, but he takes the opportunity to start this process of bringing the South in more

according to his terms than certainly Congresses. That's great. I'm so happy that you picked up on that, Don, because it's something, it's a nuance, it's subtlety that's very hard to understand the schedule of congressional sessions, which was actually pretty common in the 19th century. You might go six or even nine months without Congress in session. So Congress had adjourned in the spring of 65 and then wouldn't meet again until December. So, yes, it's this really sort of kind of accidental twist of fate that Lincoln is assassinated and now we have a president. And there's a lot of work that's got to be done and Congress isn't around to do it. So there's so much counterfactual. You wonder if Lincoln would have called Congress back into

session, you know, like done the right thing here or not. You know, maybe he had the same impulse. Certainly a president, Johnson could have done that. And, you know, one thing I'd like to emphasize here is that, of course, we know that at the end of this story. We know that Johnson becomes reviled and really is, It's hard to emphasize the racism of Johnson and how extreme it was. I think most white Americans in the 19th century were racist by our standards. Johnson, even by those generous standards, is still extraordinarily racist. And so it's important to note that, you know, we know where he ends up. We know the things he does in office, the disaster his presidency becomes.

But what's interesting is that as he takes office in 1865, one, he's beloved. If you read, for example, state platforms of parties, there's, constant praise for Johnson. There's really high hopes he's going to be great. And what's also interesting is that Republicans in Congress are actually concerned that Johnson's going to go too far. He's going to be too harsh, that Lincoln had been too lenient and they were worried they might have to rein in Johnson, that he might go too far in punishing Southerners that his reconstruction policies might be, again, too harsh. And so that's interesting because, of course, exactly the opposite happens. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

One important factor here, Erica, that people to understand is that the Congress is extremely important in this equation here. There's three factions of Congress, basically the radical Republicans, as you've mentioned already, who are obviously, you know, looking for suffrage for black citizens, you know, citizenship for black people, by the way, and a number of other elements. But certainly they are that left wing of this Congress. There's a moderate and a right wing. And so all of this is what Johnson is not wanting to deal with. And he has his opportunity. So let's take us through the first couple of months, maybe even six months of Johnson's term. How does he deal with the idea of reconstruction? He's very favorable in many ways, but not in others. What you said is absolutely right. There are these different factions of the Republican Party, which is still at this point the Union Party. Johnson is, again, a longtime Democrat. So it's not clear where Johnson fits in. And part of this, too, speaks to how political parties functioned in the 19th century. We are so, Americans today are so accustomed to these two massive parties that were stuck with. But parties in the 19th century were very fluid, and they were constantly changing shape. And so it wasn't clear where Johnson fit in on the political spectrum.

And there was a lot of sort of angst among both Republicans and Democrats. Some Democrats, well, maybe this guy was a long time Jacksonian. Maybe we really actually have a Democrat in the White House. Other Republicans weren't sure, can we trust it? But so what Johnson does, he takes office in April. By May, he issues two proclamations, presidential proclamations that outline his reconstruction policies. And again, these are actually on paper much harsher than what Lincoln had done with Lincoln's 10% plan in 1863. Johnson's proclamation, his first one, offers amnesty and pardon to all Confederates who would take a loyalty oath, and also, as long as they recognized emancipation, the end of slavery. And if they took that oath, it would restore

all property rights. So they would get everything back, their citizenship, their rights, everything accepts slavery. Basically, as long as they said, I'm sorry, I won't do this again. However, in that proclamation, Johnson also laid out 14 different classes of white Southerners who were not eligible for that amnesty. That included pretty much any prominent Confederate military or government official, but also anyone who owned more than $20,000 of taxable property. And the message here was very clear that he was exempting saying they were ineligible. This was all the wealthy landowners, the plantation elite of the antebellum south. So the idea here was that Johnson's proclamation would reward the sort of everyday white

southerners, the unionists, people like his background, while preventing the political elite, the military elite, and the social and economic elite from rejoining from gaining their rights back from becoming U.S. citizens again. That is, of course, much harsher than the military elite and the social and economic elite from rejoining, from gaining their rights back from becoming U. what Lincoln had done, as we discussed earlier. And this was why many Republicans thought, wow, this is, maybe we might need to rein this in a bit. The irony, though, is that the proclamation also said that the Southerners who were not eligible for the amnesty pardon could apply to the president directly. They could apply to the president directly and receive a presidential

pardon. And that's exactly what happens. Over the course of 65, Johnson's basically pardons anyone who comes to him. And, you know, we don't have exact numbers, but it's more than 20,000, more than 20,000 white southerners who, and it's really interesting because there are these plantation elite who have political connections in Washington from before the war. They're writing these senators, mostly Democrats from the north, saying, hey, can you get me a, you know, can you get me a face-to-face with Johnson, please, so I can plead my case. And there's an older school of thought, an older theory, and I don't know if I buy this, but I think it's interesting nonetheless that if we want to psychologize Andrew Johnson,

there are some historians who argued that because of Johnson's background, because he grew up so poor, and he had hated these plantation elite, that he just absolutely relished this moment, that he now is at the peak of power, and he gets to watch these former slaveholders, these wealthy southerners, grovel before his feet, and he gets to offer them amnesty. And so on the one hand, Johnson on paper, his policies look really harsh, that it's going to really punish the Southerners who were responsible for the war and responsible for secession. On the other hand, in practice, Johnson is actually far more lenient and is pardoning basically anybody who asks for one. As a result, these southern states can enact

their own laws, which they call black coats. When do the black codes come into play? It's basically slavery under a new name, isn't it? That's absolutely right. And it's by the fall of 65. So also at this moment, you know, the other thing to understand is the 13th Amendment is still not official. One of the things about emancipation we have to understand is that emancipation was a process. I think one of the things, the popular misconceptions is Lincoln issues his emancipation proclamation in 1863. Next day, everybody's free. Certainly not how it worked at all. It's a process. It's very complex. And the reality was that by the end of the Civil War, fully 75%, 3 million enslaved men and women in the South are not yet free. The process of emancipation did not yet reach them. And because the emancipation proclamation was a

military proclamation. It's a military document. It's using wartime powers. There's a lot of uncertainty. Is this going to be remain in effect now that the war is over? So having a 13th amendment that will actually formalize and codify emancipation in the Constitution is really important. And we certainly know that Lincoln, by the end of his life, is working very hard to make sure that amendment is passed. It was passed in March just before Congress adjourned, but it is now before the state's ratification. So we have this moment when Johnson takes office, he issues his policies, and it's really not clear what the legal status of freed people in the South is going to be. The 13th Amendment is finally ratified in December, but throughout this

year of 65, a lot is up in the air. There's a lot of questions. So the black codes then are this effort, as you said, Don, very correctly, of southern states to basically recreate slavery without calling it slavery. Effectively, they were state laws, local laws that identified misdemeanors. So here we have a population of people, a group of men and women who have emerged from slavery with nothing. They're illiterate mostly. They own no property. They own no land, of course. And we have laws then that say, for example, vagrancy laws.

It is illegal to be a vagrant or laws that say it is illegal to be unemployed. You would have other laws illegal to be drunk and lots of very vague things that you could arrest anyone for. And so when people were arrested for violating these laws and of course they were arresting black Americans for violating these laws, laws. They were thrown in jail. They were given fines. And, oh, you can't pay your fine. I'm sorry to hear that. Well, Mr. Jones down the road, he can certainly pay your fine. And then you can go work off that fine as effectively an indentured servant on his plantation. Recreating slavery. Pionage, all that exists as a result of this. And the important thing, just to keep us on track here, this is all happening because Johnson is in office at this point. He's the one that's giving this,

you know, this whole idea air. And this will be what the Civil Rights Act of 1866 is in reaction to. It'll be the 14th Amendment also in reaction to. You know, all this stuff is happening in this really six, eight months before Congress comes back into power, you know, in December of 1865. It's amazing. I mean, northerners are furious. They are absolutely outraged that southern states are doing this. I mean, there's this sense of what in the world did we just fight this war for? Why did 750,000 Americans die? Why isn't the president doing anything? So when Congress comes back into session, I've never thought about this. And forgive me, I haven't done my reading, but is it a particular moment for them? Like, where's the election, the next election

that they have to worry about? Like, this is a very short window that they have to dismantle what is going on here, or at least pass new laws. Well, so the Congress that convenes in December of 65 is the Congress that had been elected in November of 64. That's again, how long that break had been. And the next election coming up would be November of 1866. Though really in the 19th century, the elections were not standardized. There was virtually a state or local election, year round in almost every state, virtually every Friday you could find an election somewhere. But the big elections are going to be fall of 1866. So Congress, when they come back in December, they're still not totally, Republicans in Congress

are not fully out on Johnson yet. They wonder, well, you know, we don't agree with everything he's done, but we'll just, we'll tweak his policies. And there was full a belief among congressional Republicans that Johnson's going to go along with this. So among other things, there is this institution, the Friedman's Bureau, which was a federal institution created that would assist former slaves with the transition to freedom. It could provide them, for example, a legal counsel. Or men and women who could not read. It would provide legal

counsel for contracts for that ends up becoming sharecropping, provided education. And so one of the things Congress does is it renews the Freedmen's Bureau. Then they also start working, as you mentioned, on the Civil Rights Act, which will begin to outline some of the issues surrounding citizenship and the questions surrounding citizenship that become part of the 14th Amendment. And Congress, fully expects Johnson's going to go along with these things. They think they're very reasonable. And what does Johnson do? He immediately starts effectively vetoing everything that Congress does. On what grounds? Was it because he thought of presidential power as more absolute? Or what was his feeling about this? As a Jacksonian, what becomes clear is that Johnson firmly believes in

states' rights, that he doesn't think that these are issues that the federal government should be taking over. And what's interesting is that Johnson himself. So, for example, In the fall of 65, Johnson had been sending instructions to some of the provisional governors of southern states. Again, now, southern states have still not rejoined the union. You have these provisional governors in place. So, for example, in August of 1865, Johnson had sent instructions to the provisional governor of Mississippi and instructed him to extend, quote, extend the elective franchise

to literate and property-owning African-Americans. So there's this real contradiction here that Johnson, at moments, clearly hated slavery, by this point, and also has done some things as president, but he believes again that this needs to be handled at the state level. So I think philosophically, I mean, putting aside a lot of his too is just motivated by his racism. But philosophically, he also believes in the, these are issues that need to be reserved for state governments. Wow. You know, most people will not know what this means. I certainly didn't. Tenure of Office Act, it proves very important in this story. And I want to understand what it means exactly. Sure. So one of the things Republicans understand is that if you leave the South to

figure things out, the people in charge are Southern Democrats. And they also understand that Johnson is in charge of a lot. I mean, the president of the 19th century had a lot of power over appointments, not just his cabinet, which are, of course, the most visible and important appointments, but military positions, generals, judges, ambassadors, tax collectors. And so the president as able through the power of patronage to affect things at the local level. And so if Congress doesn't want the states to, and what doesn't want these former Confederates, these white Southern Democrats to be in charge of things, they realize that they're going to have to put a leash on Andrew Johnson because Johnson can put various people in power who will do the things that

he wants and not the things that congressional Republicans want. And so that law, that tenure of office act is really an effort to, yeah, rein in Johnson, make sure that he's not mucking up congressional Republicans' plans in the South. Yeah, well, a conspiratorial, you would think it almost seems like a trap, you know, because we live in a time when every president has all the power. He wants them over this kind of thing. And that's all been undone. But at the time that they were really setting and playing a chess game with them at that point,

1867, Congress creates a military reconstruction program to enforce political and social rights for Southern Black. People explain what that means. So this is where we now enter the second phase, congressional reconstruction. At the end of 1866, you had the midterm elections. And so basically, by this point, Congress had passed the 14th Amendment. And so they go to the voters in the fall of 66. And it's basically, do you support Andrew Johnson and what he's done?

Or do you support what Republicans are doing? And Republicans win sweeping victories in those midterm elections. They get a super majority in Congress. It is clear that northern voters have rejected Johnson's programs. They've rejected. And some of this is motivated by a desire for helping former. slaves in the transition to freedom, a lot of it for northern voters is motivated. They're just furious with the South. They're angry about the war. They want to punish the South. So,

Republicans come out of those elections with a band-a-bendate. They've got a supermajority in Congress, and so they create, as you said, Don, military reconstruction acts. It's actually a series of multiple laws over a couple of years, and it gets very complicated, so I won't get into the weeds. But at the basic level, what it does is it divides the South, the former Confederacy, into five different military districts. And it creates some very strict requirements before southern states can rejoin the union. It effectively puts the military in charge

so civilian governments are suspended. The army is in charge. And it's an attempt basically to force southerners to accept the results of the war. Not only slavery, but it also requires citizenship for former slaves. And before we get to the 15th Amendment, which is what gives black men the right to vote,

the military reconstruction acts were already required. that these former states allow black men to vote. And from the get-go, Southerners do everything they can to get around these. And there's always loophole. So every time there's a loophole, Congress passes another military reconstruction act, fix the loophole, and it's this sort of power struggle. And Johnson comes into this. Of course, he's vetoed every one of these. I think one of the interesting things about reconstruction, you mentioned earlier, Don,

the different factions of the Republican Party, the conservatives, moderates, radicals. They didn't agree on a lot. many moderates and even in most conservative Republicans didn't believe in voting rights for African Americans, for example. But because Johnson is so stubborn and because he's vetoing everything that congressional Republicans try to do, they come together. They unify because they are in opposition Johnson. They have a common enemy. And so there's an irony here that Johnson unintentionally, effectively creates reconstruction, makes it more radical by opposing Republicans and pulling them together. But he goes out on the road. He makes a campaign for this whole thing. In 1866, he hits the road and

makes all kinds of speeches about how he's being wronged. And he ends up losing the election that he's fighting for, you know, for the Congress. And this is actually proves to be a very pivotal moment, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. That's his very famous swing around the circle. And they are remarkable speeches where he is blaming, for example, he blames the abolitionists. He says somebody, you know, there's a story where he's giving one of his speeches and someone in the crowd says, we should hang, Jeff Davis, referring, of course, to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, and Johnson replies and says, well, what about hanging Wendell Phillips, I think, who is an abolitionist politician? So it's clear Johnson has just sort of gone down a path that is really dark path, and he's not

coming back. And so, well, rumor has that he's drinking a lot, too, right? Yeah, that's a tricky one, too. There are definite moments where they're very documented that he was drunk. Whether he was an alcoholic, I think, has something that has been exaggerated, but certainly he has moments where he's self-medicating, as we would say today. He finally challenges this tenure of office act and fires the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had been Lincoln's man who carried us through that war.

Under what pretense? He didn't like the guy, right? And again, here we have the problem of Congress not in session. And Johnson knows very well. And later, I think it becomes clear that what Johnson is doing here is where he says what he's doing is actually he believes this law, this tenure of office act is unconstitutional, and he's intentionally creating a test for it. And because we have these military reconstruction laws and because the army is now in charge, well, the president, of course, is commander in chief.

The president is in charge of the army and can put the secretary of war in place, various members of the war department, what today is actually the Department of Defense. So the president can oversee. So if Congress has created these laws to control southern governments, but the army's in charge and the president's in charge of the army, here's another loophole where Johnson can then through appointments, put people in charge. who will do what he wants as opposed to what congressional Republicans want. So Johnson waits to all Congress is not in session.

He fires the Secretary of War. And again, all this is in effect, an effort to dictate what's happening in southern states. And then when Congress comes back, they're obviously not going to be very happy about this. Eric, this is weird to me. This just occurred to me. So 1866 is the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson tries to undo. Congress has to override his veto, correct? Correct.

A hundred years later, the second civil rights bill in 1965 is signed into action by who? President Johnson, Lyndon v. Johnson. Is there any relationship there at all? I mean, is it just a weirdness of history? Just one of those weird coincidences of history. Oh, my God. I never even thought of that. A century later.

Sure. But historians, you know, often referred to the civil rights movement of the 1960s as the second reconstruction. Sure. And we think about the constitutional amendments that come out of reconstruction, the 13th Amendment, which abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment, which has been, of course, in the news quite a bit recently, grant citizenship to everybody, regardless of race or religion. And then the 15th Amendment, which gives all men the right to vote, you can effectively imagine these

amendments as promises. They are promises for equality, promises for freedom. For many, many reasons, those promises go unfulfilled by the end of the 19th century. And it's a modern second reconstruction of the 20th century, the 1960s, that then eventually fulfills those, or begins to fulfill those promises. the only person here who didn't realize that. Anyway, Congress in February 1868 votes to impeach Andrew Johnson over the firing of Edwin Stanton, citing this tenure of office act. House impeaches him. He barely avoids conviction in the Senate by one vote. We are so familiar with this whole process now. And he serves out his term until 1869. He indeed tries to run for reelection, because obviously he has

strong southern support. But the Democrats, his own Democrats, don't nominate him. Yes, it's, you know, it's, of course, the first impeachment, presidential impeachment in American history. And what's interesting about the fact that he wasn't convicted, the impeachment itself is a strict party-line vote. And then the trial in the Senate is you get a few moderate Republicans who break rank and vote to acquit Johnson, which is a really interesting, given how polarized and partisan Congress had become during Reconstruction, the fact that you have a handful of Republicans who decide not to convict him, not to remove him from office. And the reason for that is interesting, because this is happening in the spring of 1868.

Both parties are gearing up for the presidential election in the fall. Johnson is by this point a lame duck. He does, as you mentioned, want to run again, but the Democrats certainly are not going to nominate him. Republicans are absolutely not going to nominate him. However, the question becomes, if they remove Johnson, who then becomes president? And the president would be because Johnson himself had been a vice president.

We did not yet have the 25th Amendment, which sort of passed in the, 20th century, which allows for all the different scenarios and allows for a vice president who becomes president to then name a new vice president to be approved by Congress. So Johnson has no vice president. He's serving without a vice president. So who gets to be president then? Well, it is president of the Senate, a man named Benjamin Wade from Ohio, who is extraordinarily radical. Sure. Wade Davis, the Wade Davis bill. Yes. And so some Republicans in Congress have this moment where they realize, wait, if we get rid of Johnson, Wade becomes president, he's too radical,

he's not electable. Do we then have to nominate him for our presidential election in the fall? Rather, they'd rather nominate someone else. And the Republican nominating convention is just about to happen just after Johnson's impeachment trial. So there are some real kind of political, strategic reasons that congressional Republicans decide it's actually not in our benefit politically to remove Johnson. We don't want this guy, Benjamin Wade, to become president. We don't want to have to nominate him and run him in the fall. So they ultimately decide to acquit Johnson. He's not removed from office.

I remember when Nixon was, you know, Watergate and all that, how horrifying it seemed that someone, that a modern president would go down the same path as Andrew Johnson. Oh, my God, 100 years ago. Now, of course, it's like impeachment every term. Every term. Johnson's legacy is really what might have been from Reconstruction era, but he made impossible. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 passed by Congress, extended suffrage to formally enslave male African Americans. Hundreds of black delegates participated as a result in state constitutional conventions. And from 1869 to 1877, 14 black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Boy, do a lot of people forget this. This is a huge headline of this post-Johnson time going into Grant. And yet it really happened, and so much including Griffiths, film, you know, birth of a nation is a reaction. Yeah, it actually references this period of time as so horrifying to those racists. There were two black men in the Senate. Andrew Johnson was vehemently opposed to all this. And it's in the era when Ku Klux Klan is born, where Tennessee and begins to rise through Johnson's presidency, you know, so many things about American society take root that are so hard to pull out of the ground later on. It's really on his watch that that really happens.

No, that's all true, and it's very well said, Don. And I think it's easy to think about the failures of reconstruction and the fact that, as I mentioned a few moments ago, this idea that these amendments represent promises that went unfulfilled. But at the same time, it's important to recognize that there was extraordinary progress. So if you imagine nobody, I think in 1860, when the Civil War is about to begin, could imagine that within 10 years you would have not only freedom for 4 million enslaved men and women, but voting rights and citizenship. The fact that, as you said, there are are African-American men serving in public office at local state and federal levels is simply remarkable. And again, demonstrates just how much progress. And for black Americans, I mean, they seize those new rights, those freedoms. They not only are voting, they are becoming and becoming politically active. They are creating their own institutions, social and economic and civil societies in the South. It is a real moment of progress, despite the sort of failures that takes until the 20th century to begin to rectify. And yet even in the 13th Amendment, there are things baked into that amendment that are very

problematic for Black Americans. It's also true. Create an entire prison class. We'll cover all that under Grant, which is yet to come. Reconstruction has only just begun. Eric, I really appreciate you taking us through this tangle of undergrowth that is Reconstruction. Very difficult to understand.

And you obviously are very talented teacher who does it well. Dr. Eric Alexander is a historian at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, whose work focuses on politics in the run-up to an aftermath of the Civil War. Published numerous articles about politics during the Civil War era and is currently at work on a book about Northern Democrats and the Politics of Reconstruction. Do we have a title for that yet, Eric? Revolution Forstalled. Look forward to it.

Thanks so much. No, no problem. I'm always happy to talk history. I hope you enjoyed this episode of American History. it, please remember to like, review, and subscribe. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next time.