I haven't read this book but offer a suggestion on the topic as an alternative. The Oxford History of the United States volume "The Republic for Which It Stands" by Richard White gives a fairly in depth review of the problem with Johnson. It involves both, as the review states, his personality-both grandiose and aggrieved- sort of like trump and his "sympathies" after the war- which were totally directed toward the southern whites who constituted the "less privileged " class prior to the war. This was of course the origin of the bulk of the soldiers who fought for the south and where strong grievances and a history of violence lay so his stance encouraged racial aggression against black Americans throughout the south.
All of this is made clear in the Oxford history and in some fairly dense detail but it occupies only a small part of the entire book and is presented against the larger history of the time so it serves a double duty on this subject. And it is a fascinating time given the many parallels with today and also a reminder that the conflicts in this country have both a remarkable continuity and an evolutionary element as mores and attitudes change.
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It's widely recorded that Andrew Johnson was so inebriated on the day of his inauguration as Vice President, that he was unable to perform his duty of swearing in the Senators, and had to be relieved of the chore - which was a warning sign of what an abysmal Chief Executive he might become.
It is a pity that following this incident, our Constitution wasn't amended so that if any other President-elect or Vice President-elect demonstrated delusions of grandeur, inebriation, hallucination, or other unfitness on Inauguration Day, that the inauguration would be halted, and a back-up procedure would be implemented.
A real pity.
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Donald Trump is the 21st century reincarnation of Andrew Johnson - incompetent, impulsive, prone to fits of rage, and utterly unconstrained by legal and ethical norms.
The difference is that Johnson stumbled into the Oval Office by accident, following the Civil War and during an inevitably divisive and chaotic period of realignment of the nation's policies toward African Americans and civil rights. Trump, on the other hand, took the Oval Office after an unquestionably tainted election, elected by a minority of the voters; and now presides over a period of chaos and division he has intentionally cultivated as a means to his political ends.
Johnson was a disaster for this country. When we needed sound leadership the most, he was full of bluster but ultimately an ineffectual weakling. In part because of his failed presidency, we've still not worked the racial strife that followed the Civil War out of our system; and we're still saddled with the "heritage" of the Confederacy memorialized in those stupid statutes that we cannot seem to take down without starting a white supremacist riot.
I do not need to belabor the parallels with the Donald Trump presidency, do I?
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Looking forward to reading Ms. Wineapple’s book. The thirty years after the Civil War in the South is a relative mystery to me. We tend to focus on our wars (unfortunately) and history goes dark until 1898. How did a conquered nation gain back what they had lost on the battlefield? How did the South merely pivot from slave servitude to share-cropper servitude? Would something like Marshall Plan have
turned the South around?
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Your review treats the Tenure of Office act, on which the impeachment was based, as a normal law which Johnson refused to follow. In fact, the law was amended for the next president, Grant, and then later removed. Even though the law had been revoked in 1887, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1926, made a point in a ruling on a different law of stating that the Tenure act was probably invalid. Your reviewer places the blame on Johnson for not following the law. Johnson said he was setting up a case for the Supreme Court. Surely Ms. Wineapple's book got it correctly?
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@Paulette Fox Surely you're calling to light a distinction without a difference for some useful reason?
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“Most men prefer to be deceived, cheated, anything rather than to be bored.”
So THAT'S where our President got his overriding philosophy.
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If he was that miserable a human being, how did he get picked as Lincoln's running mate? Some explanation would have been helpful.
@Gary Marton Lincoln thought well into October 1864 that he would lose reelection (to George McClellan, of all people), and he'd pulled out all the stops by choosing Johnson, a southern Unionist.
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