Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy

In 1868 Congress impeached President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the person who had succeeded the murdered Lincoln, bringing the nation to the brink of a second civil struggle. Enraged to see the freed slaves deserted to brutal violence by the hands of their former homeowners, distraught that former rebels threatened to regain management of Southern state governments, and disgusted by Johnson’s brawling political model, congressional Republicans seized on a authorized technicality as the idea for impeachment — whether or not Johnson had the authorized proper to fireplace his personal secretary of struggle, Edwin Stanton.

The fiery however mortally unwell Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania led the impeachment drive, abetted behind the scenes by the army hero and president-in-waiting, Basic Ulysses S. Grant.

The Senate trial featured essentially the most sensible legal professionals of the day, together with among the least scrupulous, whereas main political fixers maneuvered in darkish corners to save lots of Johnson’s presidency with political offers, guarantees of patronage jobs, and even money bribes. Johnson escaped conviction by a single vote.

David Stewart, the writer of the extremely acclaimed
The Summer season of 1787, the bestselling account of the writing of the Structure, challenges the standard model of this pivotal second in American historical past. Quite than seeing Johnson as Abraham Lincoln’s political inheritor, Stewart explains how the Tennessean squandered Lincoln’s political legacy of equality and equity and helped power the freed slaves right into a brutal type of agricultural peonage throughout the South.

When the conflict between Congress and president threatened to tear the nation aside, the impeachment course of substituted authorized fight for violent confrontation. Each side struggled to inject which means into the baffling requirement {that a} president be eliminated just for “excessive crimes and misdemeanors,” whereas using devious courtroom gambits, backstairs spies, and hovering rhetoric. When the mud lastly settled, the impeachment course of had allowed passions to chill sufficiently for the nation to outlive the bitter disaster.