Impeachment is a doleful affair. The nation has impeached a president only twice, and in each case the Senate failed to remove him from office, leaving a split decision with no clear winner and no clear justice.
The first presidential impeachment, of Andrew Johnson in 1868, has been by and large written into history as a Big Mistake. That's largely due to the efforts of historians of the Dunning School, who spent decades creating a narrative of Reconstruction as a tyrannical, corrupt and failed social experiment. The restoration of white supremacy in the South was seen as a right and proper undertaking to reconcile a torn nation. According to the Dunning School, the Radical Republicanswho impeached Johnson are the villains of the piece, and the story of Johnson's impeachment is a cautionary tale about the overreach of ideologues. Given that context, not to mention the headlines of today, it's hard to think of a better time for a reassessment of Johnson's impeachment.
Brenda Wineapple's ambitious and assured volume “The Impeachers” rightfully recenters the story along the main axis of moral struggle in American history: whether the nation is indeed a democracy for all its citizens or not. “To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing,” she writes, “is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson's impeachment.”
Johnson was, to put it mildly, an odd duck: “the queerest man who ever occupied the White House,” according to a contemporary. He was a bullheaded but canny narcissist, given to drunken harangues and racist demagogy. His aides tried in vain to keep him from making impromptu speeches to rowdy crowds lest he do something like call for the hanging of a member of Congress.
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