The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

America's first presidential impeachment: A prize-winning author tells the story of the efforts by heroic citizens to preserve the victories of the Civil War by removing a bigoted president who ruled as if he were king.

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Vice-President Andrew Johnson became "the Accidental President," it was a dangerous time in America. Congress was divided over how the Union should be reunited: when and how the secessionist South should regain full status, whether former Confederates should be punished, and when and whether black men should be given the vote. Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore a pre-Civil War society, just without slavery, and the pugnacious Andrew Johnson, who was no Lincoln, seemed to share their goals. With the unchecked power of executive orders, Johnson ignored Congress, pardoned rebel leaders, promoted white supremacy, opposed civil rights, and called Reconstruction unnecessary. Congress had to stop the American president who acted like a king.

With her extensive research and profound insights, Brenda Wineapple dramatically restores this pivotal period in American history, when the country, on the heels of a brutal war, was rocked by the first-ever impeachment of a sitting American president. And she brings to vivid life the extraordinary characters who brought that impeachment forward: the willful Johnson and his retinue of advocates--including complicated men like Secretary of State William Seward--as well as the equally complicated visionaries committed to justice and equality for all, like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Ulysses S. Grant. Theirs was a last-ditch, patriotic, and Constitutional effort to render the goals of the Civil War into reality and to make the Union free, fair, and whole.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Presidents, Civil War, Biography

576 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2019

About the author

Brenda Wineapple is the author of the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I know why the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was not taught in my high school. Not only is the story too complex for the rote instruction of the time, it was also a time when curriculum never included uncomfortable truths.

Author, Brenda Wineapple, shows Andrew Johnson’s determination to undo the Union victory. He quickly pardoned prominent Confederate warmongers and appointed them to positions of authority. No dog whistles for Johnson. His racist/white supremacist speeches make you cringe but they aroused his supporters leading to murders of crowds of unarmed blacks. Massacres in Memphis and New Orleans made national news but there were countless others. Johnson defunded the Freeman’s Bureau and restored confiscated lands to agitators all the while ignoring the deaths of blacks and Union veterans and sympathizers across the South. He pardoned Lincoln assassination conspirators and his parting shot was pardoning both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

Andrew Johnson, in undermining Reconstruction, did damage that we live with today.

Those who objected to Johnson’s undoing the Union victory were stigmatized as “radicals”. They were persistent. While Johnson appointed local officials for enforcing martial law (racist judges and military officials),"radicals" in Congress led successful efforts to not seat former Confederate rebels.

Johnson was obnoxious and overplayed his hand. The precipitating action (after many outrageous actions and words) was Johnson's attempt to replace Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. With the South under martial law, Johnson wanted to fill the military leadership positions (with former Confederate generals, etc.). Stanton literally locked himself in his office.

A vote for an impeachment trial easily passed in the House of Representatives. Author Brenda Wineapple shows the Senate’s resistors: fence sitters, advocates for compromise to heal the nation, racist supporters of Johnson, US Grant supporters who felt impeachment would make his presidential run risky and those who did not want to give the presidency to Benjamin Wade, the next in line.

Wineapple goes through Articles of Impeachment, the trial and the events leading up to the vote and the drama of the vote itself. She shows and how delays allowed time for maneuvers (and most likely 4 bought votes) and how Johnson squeaked though by one vote (35 to 19 with 36 votes needed to impeach).

While the book is well organized it has a slow start. You have to read through a lot of background. A long prologue defines the personalities of the participants which, you see as the story progresses, enriches the trial. The descriptions of the participants not only hold your interest, but bring the times alive. The portrait of Thaddeus Stephens stands out. William Seward is shown as a scheming opportunist. The recent and well documented biography: Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man shows him to be an important early civil rights activist and outstanding Secretary of State.

The Articles of Impeachment, The Tenure of Office Act (the basis for all but one of the impeachment articles) and annotated list of participants are in the Appendices.

You cannot help but notice of the parallels to our own time.

This book should be widely read.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now that the congress is conducting an impeachment investigation of Trump, I thought it would be a good idea to read about Johnson’s impeachment trial. Wineapple recounts the struggle over the implication of the Civil War amid the impeachment of an erratic president.

The book is well written and researched. Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) was a Southern Democrat born in North Carolina. He wanted to return the South to the way it was prior to the War. He had lenient reconstruction policies toward the South and he vetoed the Reconstruction Act. He started his political career in the Tennessee legislature. In 1843 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Tennessee. Wineapple discusses Johnson’s presidency (1865-1869). The impeachment as well as what goes into an impeachment. Congress had tried multiple times to impeach Johnson before finally succeeding to trial only to lose. Wineapple includes the history primarily in the South post the Civil War emphasizing the treatment of the freed slaves. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I learned a lot about Johnson and the difficulties of impeachment.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is fourteen hours and thirty-six minutes. Gabra Zachman did a good job narrating the book.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

With all the talk of impeachment coming out of Washington, I thought it a convenient time to read Brenda Wineapple’s comprehensive book about the trial Andrew Johnson faced in the US Senate in 1868. Full of great detail and a narrative that takes the reader through the process, Wineapple provides the reader with a great primer for what may be a prickly endeavour if used again in the near future. The American state was extremely divided in the mid-19th century, a period of civil and social unrest where the Southern states declared their desire to leave the Union. What followed is likely well-known to many with a basic understanding of the American Civil War, culminating in the South losing and Lincoln’s assassination. Thereafter, an odd collection of events befell the newly exhausted (loosely) United States, with the recently elevated Vice-President Andrew Johnson taking over as the Commander-in-Chief. Johnson, hailing from Tennessee, was thought to be a great choice by Lincoln for the 1864 election, but when he assumed the role of president, many saw him show some of his true colours. With little interest in binding the country back together, Johnson sought to push a renewed segregationist agenda while trying to stymie the attempts at Reconstruction Congress was pushing through in the form of legislation. While many disliked these antics, the push for impeachment had yet to reach the force needed to be effective. It took Johnson violating the Tenure of Office Act, a key piece of legislation, thumbing his nose at the Senate all the while. This proved to be the final straw for many in the House of Representatives. With the Articles of Impeachment secured and supported by a majority in the House, the machine of an impeachment trial began to rumble, with the pre-trial antics in the Senate. As Wineapple discusses, this was the first presidential impeachment, forcing interpretation of the US Constitution and the balance between legal and legislative roles for those involved. What follows is an intriguing trial held in the Senate chamber with a number of important actors, each playing their role. Wineapple takes the reader through each step and shows where the Managers (House of Representative members chosen to present the articles to the Senate as a whole) fell short and how general sentiment might have steered the votes away from impeaching Johnson, if only by a single vote. There are some wonderful subplots that emerge in the narrative and will likely help the reader better understand the nuances of this 19th century political stage-play. Captivating in its delivery and full of a great deal of information I had never heard previously, Brenda Wineapple takes the reader on an adventure through some of American’s most divisive legislative days. Highly recommended to those who have a passion for all things political, as well as the reader who enjoys learning a great deal about events relatable to today’s political situation.

I saw a friend read and review this book on Goodreads a while back, but held off reading it until I could make the loose parallel between Johnson and Trump. While I am not prepared to draw the political and social parallels between the two men at this point, this book that details the trial from back in 1868 with some similarities to events taking place now. Brenda Wineapple is able to convey much of the well-known lead-up to the impeachment talk, tackling these topics with ease, while providing sufficient details to ensure the reader is clear on how things progressed. As the political infighting continued, Wineapple depicted all the essential actors—from a hard-hearted member of the House whose sole goal was to see Johnson fall, through to the Chief Justice who presided over the trial and sought the White House for himself—and provide sufficient backstory to explain the intricate details of events and political moves that shaped the push for impeachment. Of particular interest, Wineapple addresses this being the first presidential impeachment, forcing those involved to guess at what the Founding Fathers might have wanted. Going through the trial, step-by-step, Wineapple provides a clear narrative of the political process and how Johnson was able to skirt sure removal from office. With chapters that focus on all aspects of this historical period, Wineapple delivers where others have only glossed over in past tomes. Of note, this was an impeachment held in a presidential election year, just so no one can toss out that it is “infeasible and unconstitutional to do this to a president with the public set to vote”. Not to be missed for lovers of American political history.

Kudos, Madam Wineapple, for this captivating piece. I cannot wait to see what else you have written, on this and other topics.

Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/

A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging account of Andrew Johnson's disastrous presidency, centering on Congress's failed efforts to impeach him. Wineapple knows this period and these personages well, having covered them in previous works like Ecstatic Nation, and does an excellent job crafting the rush of Reconstruction figures into a cohesive narrative. Johnson, taking office after Lincoln's assassination, squandered an initial outburst of goodwill as his plans for Reconstructing the South prove a betrayal of racial ideals. He pardons and coddles Southerners even as they work to rebuild the edifice of white supremacy, while dismissing blacks as inferior and unworthy of rights or protection, and attacking Republicans in Congress, the military and his own cabinet as disloyal traitors. Johnson's portrayed, harshly though convincingly, as a thin-skinned near-madman who rages against his enemies, embarrasses himself with public intoxication, racist rants and inflammatory speeches; he comes to view racial equality and the rule of law itself as a conspiracy against him. As Johnson schemes and stonewalls, the postwar South descends into race riots and terrorism against freed blacks and white Republicans; in the North, lingering wartime idealism battles with a yearning for normalcy and reconciliation. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans debate the feasibility of impeachment, couching their efforts as principled opposition to Johnson's destructive agenda - and conniving the Tenure of Office Act, designed to protect Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from dismissal to force a showdown. The tale's contemporary relevance is obvious, though Wineapple wisely leaves such comparisons between the lines. She ably sketches Johnson, Republican leaders like Stanton, Thaddeus Stevens (Congress's crabbed, sulfrous racial egalitarian), Charles Sumner (who married conviction and caution in equal measure) and Benjamin Butler (mercurial, memetically ugly but a gifted lawyer), with a smattering of celebrities, writers and activists - Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Georges Clemenceau and Walt Whitman among them - providing commentary. Most authors, even those sympathetic to Johnson's foes, couch impeachment as a legally dubious mistake; Wineapple disagrees, arguing it was a necessary if disreputable step to curb Johnson's abuses of power and obstruction of civil rights legislation. Historians will undoubtedly debate her interpretation; readers, especially those reading with an eye to modern politics, must decide for themselves. Either way, it's a well-written, sharply observed look at a perilous time in American history, where Americans faced a choice between chaotic reforms, an unequal but deceptively comforting status quo...and an unstable president acting as a law unto himself.

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Impeachers by Brenda Wineapple should have been boring. Basically, a bunch of politicians arguing about things and then having a show trial, right?

Well, Brenda Wineapple made me look stupid! This book is really good. Wineapple is first and foremost, a gifted writer. She knows how to put the words on the page without putting you to sleep. More importantly, she knows what facts to pull into her story without overwhelming the reader. Wineapple has to introduce a lot of characters and she does it almost seamlessly. She gives you a quick page or two primer on the subject and then inserts them into the story.

Wineapple does justice to the injustice that was Reconstruction. While we will never know what Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction was, I am fairly certain allowing newly freed African Americans to be murdered in the street was not his intention. Wineapple could easily have focused entirely on Johnson as a villain (and he is), but instead she lets his actions do the talking. You don’t need to do much when the sitting president does not react at all to widespread rape and murder.

I’d like to reiterate, Andrew Johnson sucked.

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Impeachment put the President on notice."

I heard the author give a talk to the U.S. Capitol Historical Society in May 2019 about this book. Her talk was fascinating and it prompted me to buy the book, however, I did not decide to read it until the current impeachment inquiry began, I wanted some historical context. Wineapple's book tells the story of the first presidential impeachment in American history of Andrew Johnson. Wineapple's writing is great and the book reads like a novel. At times I found myself reading passages that were eerily familiar to our current moment. Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act but Wineapple effectively argues that his impeachment was about more than just the violation of one law it was also about Johnson's handling of Reconstruction, his racism, his perceived abuse of power, as well as the the preservation of the Union and the institution of slavery. Surprisingly the Senate trial section of the book was the least interesting part to me. However, I think this is the perfect book to read in our current moment not just because of the similarities but because it made me think about how the current impeachment process would be viewed 151 years from now, which is the same number years since the Johnson impeachment occurred.

Read more of my reviews on Ballasts for the Mind: https://medium.com/ballasts-for-the-mind

[Donald Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fun page turner that revealed real, detailed history. She writes with an angle from current times but explains, as best the record will permit, the motivations, manipulations and goals of many players. This may become a definitive work on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. I have read several books from this era and learned a way of seeing some of the players from a deeper perspective and greater understanding. This would be a great book for freshman studying political science.

A great part of the book is buried at the end with the notes and index. It is a short biographical on most of the people mentioned in the book.

The similarity and the differences with the other impeachment, Nixon's near impeachment and current events regarding President Trump were discussed, with some analysis, and this added relevancy to this great piece of American History writing.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suspect that most people who are reading this book are doing so because this is a new book and the current political environment has elevated the concept of impeachment. If that describes you, then this is a perfectly suitable book.

The book is well written and enjoyable.

The book is on exactly what the title describes, “The Impeachers.” Wineapple tells the story by providing short bios on the major characters and largely through quotes of these participants. She does not delve too deeply to explain why the characters said or did things. She simply recounts the events--often taking the characters words as truth. Thus, while sharing a fair amount, the book lacks depth.

While she often repeated things, there were key facts that were either ignored or glossed over. For example, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was not the first attempt, but the fourth such attempt.

The Republicans passed the “Tenure of Office Act” over a presidential veto. In simplistic terms, the TOA was an effort to prevent the President from firing officials without congressional approval. Congress knew that Johnson would not accept the validity of the law and his failure to accept it would provide the pretext for an impeachment. Wineapple does not adequately address this facet.

Stanton and Johnson could not stand each other, and the battle for control of the Department of War seemed abbreviated. Stanton literally bunkered himself in the War Department Office as if the person who physically possessed the office held the title!

The ramification for the 1868 presidential election was largely overlooked. While Wineapple discusses Chief Justice’s Salmon Chase’s aspiration for the White House and Senator Wade’s being next in line of succession, the book does not fully discuss the 1868 election. U.S. Grant was in an unusual situation. Grant was largely seen as the presidential candidate and likely next president. Both the Republicans and Democrats were hoping that he would run under their banner. Republicans knew that Johnson was removed from office, and then Wade would likely become the Republican presidential candidate--forcing Grant to run as a Democrat and likely losing. But Wade apparently had a negative disposition and many Republicans did not want to see him as president and feared the prospect of his being the Republican Nominee in 1868 and winning!

Thus, there was a political reason not to convict Johnson months prior to the election.

The book alludes to the various underhanded shenanigans, but understates them. By the time the final vote occurred, there was enough political machinations on both sides to make one’s head spin. Johnson may have survived impeachment by one vote, but that's because a number of Republicans abstained. There is a common belief that had Edmund Ross not voted for acquital, then one or two of the abstaining votes would have changed their vote to acquittal.

In short, the decision not to convict was decided not so much on the merits of the case, but rather upon other considerations. Those considerations are mentioned on in passing in Wineapple's book.

Another one of my problems was her conclusion that Lincoln would have aligned himself fully with the Radical Republicans. She seems to have proof texted quotes from Lincoln to portray him as a hardline Radical. She seems to have forgotten that Lincoln repeatedly declared that the southern states could not have left the Union. That his plan for readmittance of the South was much more lenient than the one proposed by Congress. When Congress presented him with a hardline stand on Southern Reconstruction in the form the “Wade Davis” bill, Lincoln took the bill and placed it in his pocket. (Thus the origin of the phrase ‘pocket veto’). Lincoln believed that restoration of the Union was of tantamount importance and would have welcomed the South back before Congress resumed and could do anything.

In short, this was an easy book to read, but provided only a pulp history view of the subject.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 13th amendment had some unintended consequences. One was the abolition of the 3/5ths rule that counted slaves as only 3/5ths of a person for representation. That meant that when and if the southern states were readmitted to the union they instantly gained 20 more representatives and the opportunity to win back everything they had lost during the war. Already, former slave owners and whites were attacking, beating, and killing any black who might venture onto the street, especially anyone they suspected of having been in the union army. The Memphis, TN riots of 1866 were just a taste of what might be coming and Tennessean Andrew Johnson was no help at all. Conditions in the south had become intolerable as Johnson emissary, Carl Shurz, discovered to Johnson’s dismay.

The “cheerful” South of President Johnson was not the South described in German immigrant leader Carl Schurz’s report. The former Major General would report on a post-war region whose people alternated between depressed prostration at the hands of a conqueror and a desire for vengeance against blacks and Southern Unionists. Schurz wrote that even the shooting of uniformed United States soldiers was not “unfrequently” reported.

Worse was the situation of freedmen and the Northerners working with them. Officials from the Freedman’s Bureau were often mobbed and their contractors assaulted and murdered. Blacks were expected to behave as slaves by 95% of the white Southerners Schurz talked to. One former slaveholder even suggested they should submit willingly to whippings by whites. Those that did not “act like slaves” were sometimes tortured or killed. Blacks who left the plantations where they had been enslaved were “shot or otherwise severely punished”, Schurz wrote. A diligent investigator, Schurz met with former slaves and examined the “bullet and buckshot wounds in their bodies”.

Brenda Wineapple has done a masterful job of describing the background of Johnson, his trial and the personalities of the Senators involved. There's no question that Johnson had no interest in helping former slaves gain an appropriate footing after decades of subjugation. He certainly did not want them to have the vote and considered them subhuman. His only goal was getting the union back together and if that meant letting former slave owners back into positions of authority in the south, removing federal troops that were the only guarantee of protection for former slaves, and dismantling the Freedman's Bureau, well then, so be it. His argument was that the Constitution had supported slavery so what was the big deal. In fact, he supported amendments to the Constitution that would have guaranteed the perpetual right to have slaves and another that would have made those amendments unamendable. (Where he found that piece of idiocy in the Constitution I have no idea.)

Johnson famously said he believed in “government for white men”. Hundreds of African Americans died in riots in New Orleans and Memphis that showed the new freedoms would not be easily kept. Johnson’s supporters dismissed the scores of murders as “isolated incidents”. Johnson dismissed military leaders in the southern states and appointed governors who would support him.

Even though the book was written before the current impeachment crisis, similarities abound. Johnson took a train around the country holding rallies to whip up support and making remarks such as “I don’t care about my dignity.” Senator John Sherman of Illinois complained that Johnson had “sunk the presidential office to the level of a grog-house”. No one it seems liked him. Wineapple highlights “the president’s morbid sensitivity, his need for absolute loyalty, and his wariness”. Johnson revered Andrew Jackson, another populist. He hated elitists (i.e. lawyers) and plutocrats.

Clearly, Johnson was guilty of violating the Tenure of Office Act. Johnson always claimed it was unconstitutional, and it probably was. It certainly was according to the Supreme Court in 1926 that ruled a similar law unconstitutional. The original had been repealed in 1887. But the article on which Johnson was most nearly convicted was the catch-all 11th article, which accused him of offenses including violations of the separation of powers but also of autocratic actions and other behavior inconsistent with the office.

The final tally in the Senate failed to convict by one vote and it's clear according to David Stewart that Ross's vote -- contrary to the hagiography in Profiles in Courage -- was purchased.

Excellent read.

.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I grew up in the ’90s, and I vaguely remember on TV when I was a kid some kind of scandal involving this guy named Bill Clinton, whom I knew as the President of the United States. The word impeachment kept getting thrown around, but of course I didn’t really know what that meant. Fast-forward 20 years, and the word has resurfaced as a possible fate for the current President, Donald Trump—and this time, I knew what the word meant, but I didn’t really understand what impeachment entails. So Brenda Wineapple’s book on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson came into my life at an opportune time. The Impeachers explains the nature of presidential impeachment through a case study of one of the only two presidents ever to be impeached. However, it is much, much more than that. It’s really a snapshot of American history immediately following the American Civil War. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC.

Here in Canada, we learn some very bare-bones American history (which means we learn slightly more than the average American does about American history). So obviously I knew what the Civil War was, what it was about, causes, etc. I knew the names Lincoln and Grant and (vaguely) Johnson. As history classes in school often do, however, they elide the difficult reconstruction parts that follow any massive conflict. I had known the Civil War was a thing, and that it had led to Emancipation. Never did I really pause to think what that actually looked like, how the Confederate states were readmitted into the Union, the immediate effects of emancipating slaves in the South, the violence that ensued … but of course, the moment Wineapple starts describing the headaches, problems, and loss of life, it was immediately obvious. Just because the Union had “won” the war didn’t mean everyone in the South was suddenly going to magically be all right with living next to free Black people. Duh.

So Wineapple spends the first part of the book on a brief history of the United States right at the beginning of Johnson’s presidency: Lincoln assassinated, the country still fractured, legislators deeply divided on what an equitable Reconstruction looks like. Wineapple frames this as Johnson essentially being the wrong man at the wrong time, his temperament and ideology inappropriate for the task of Reconstruction. As I mentioned above, lots of this was new to me. I had no idea about Johnson’s political views on secession, suffrage, etc.

Wineapple also covers a lot of the animus and internecine racial conflict in the South. She doesn’t mince words: the Union might have won the war and abolished slavery, but that didn’t end racism any more than Obama’s election in 2008 ended it. White people were lynching Black people (and white allies) quite openly. The overall effect is to belie the comfortable idea that the violence and unrest in the present-day United States of America is somehow a new or different condition than earlier in its history. So many people seem interested in “returning” to the better days, of making America—dare I say—great again. Although Wineapple doesn’t come right out and say it, we can infer that there is a strong possibility America was never “great” in that sense. Indeed, even with the civil war “won,” the idea that the former Confederate states would simply return to the Union was not a foregone conclusion….

So, impeachment trial itself aside, The Impeachers provides such valuable insight into US history just after the Civil War. How does it fare with the impeachment though?

Honestly, there are more details here than I probably wanted. This will be an excellent reference for anyone who is a student of this era. Wineapple is careful to go into the backstories of anyone who might be anything more than a passing player in this drama; there are even photos! Believe me, I’m not criticizing the book for these attributes—but they do add up for a somewhat drier experience than I typically look for in my history books. This is just a case of mismatched book and audience, though, not a reflection on the book’s quality.

When we finally get to the impeachment trial, things feel more anticlimactic. Again, Wineapple wants to recount everything in as much detail as possible, drawing out the inevitable acquittal (uh … sorry, spoilers) that we know must be coming. Again, if detail is what you want, then you will not be disappointed. I really just wanted to know what happened and hear Wineapple’s take on the how and why.

On the other hand, all of the back and forth helps us understand what impeachment is and is not. Firstly, it’s not clearly laid out in the Constitution. This first presidential impeachment was very improvisational and ad hoc. It’s not a criminal procedure—it’s a political one, despite the Chief Justice presiding. Finally, its political origins mean it hangs more on the well-chosen words and backroom deals of political vote-grubbing than it does on any type of evidentiary support. At the end of the day, Johnson is acquitted not because he’s “innocent” of the articles of impeachment but because enough senators had doubts, or professed to have doubts because it was more politically expedient for them to do so.

I understand now better the issues at stake as people call for the impeachment of Donald Trump. It’s not just a procedural but an inherently political decision. And, without meaning to downplay the direction in which the United States is currently heading, this book reminds us that there have definitely been Constitutional lacunae previously in American history. It’s true that we don’t really know what Americans and their government will do if Trump finally crosses some kind of line he hasn’t already crossed with apparent impunity—but the United States has actually been in similar situations before. Now, I don’t say this to be reassuring in any way. Instead, I just want to observe that The Impeachers is a good lesson in why learning one’s history is so important: if we remember where we’ve been, we have a better sense of the precedents that can shape our future.

Anyway, as a non-American who doesn’t often read about American history, this was a pretty OK read. A little too technical/detailed for my history-reading tastes. A student of history might be more appreciative of that kind of thing, though. This definitely improved my understanding of an important period of American history and helped put some current events in a new perspective. If we take that to be part of history books’ purpose, then on that scale, The Impeachers succeeds.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is well written and researched. I have read about the presidency of Andrew Johnson, but this is the first that goes into detail about his impeachment. It is well a well known fact that Andrew Johnson was not one of the better Presidents that we have had lead our nation. He worked to overturn many of the intended consequences as a result of the southern states losing the Civil War and extended extreme racial bias on a wide basis for another century and more. The book goes into detail about the many people who played a role in the impeachment and trail of Johnson and does so in an informative manner.

I recomend this book for those looking for more information on the specifics of the first impeachment trail of a President in the United States.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brenda Wineapple does a very good job of "setting the stage". so to speak for what led up to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson by giving a detailed background of his actions and views that caused so many members of the Senate to despise him and wish to remove him from office. Long before we get to the impeachment process itself, the reader may find his or herself agreeing heartily that Johnson definitely needs to go and wondering how he ever got there in the first place. After all, he was and remained, a Democrat in a Republican administration, a slave owner (until the Emancipation Proclamation), and a believer in white supremacy. And yet....it turns out that other hands were not quite so clean and pure as one would have thought either. There is a lot to be learned in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Many of the Congressmen involved, even some of the abolitionists were all in favor of freedom for the former slaves but not as eager for citizenship or suffrage as history would have it. It was the Radical Republicans who, as they had before the war, led this same battle after the war. Johnson moved these moderates into the far-right camp when he kept admitting former Confederates back into the Union without any penalty, returning their property sans slaves, and their voting privilege ignoring Congress in the process. This was something no one was prepared to tolerate and this sparked the impeachment debate. That and his effort to be rid of Secretary of War Stanton.

Wineapple gives such clear and precise descriptions of all the major characters and backs them up with quotations from the newspapers and magazines of the day along with quotes and interview excerpts from the various journalists that it gives a true feeling of contemporaneity. You feel like you are in the gallery looking down on the trial or present at smoke-filled rooms debating what to do next.

Johnson was extremely disliked by almost everyone, North and South. He was considered common, boorish and an embarrassment and this worked very much against him. The Radical Republicans were, in the beginning, in power and it was presumed they would easily win the trial and get rid of Johnson but as things dragged on, the rest of the Senate (and the country) began to long for an end to all of this and want the country back as before, for this constant talk of the freedmen to stop. When the vote was finally taken, Johnson was acquitted by one vote.

[Matthew Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple is an engrossing history of one of the most important moments in American history: reconstruction after the Civil War. This was a period that was never taught too much in school at least from my experiences. It could have been that I just wasn't paying enough attention in class, but that's a story for another time. Due to my obsession with Ken Burns documentaries, I have a fairly good grip on the narrative of the Civil War. But once Lincoln was assassinated, I don't remember learning about much between that point and the 20th century. Andrew Johnson has the honor of being the first president to be impeached, and this was a piece of trivia I actually knew, especially from being raised in the era of Bill Clinton's trial in the late 1990s, but that was about it. This book spares no detail in setting the stage for how our country came to this crossroads, and all of the important people involved. I'll try my best to summarize: Abraham Lincoln, seeking reelection in 1864, in the midst of that pesky Civil War, needed to bring balance to his campaign ticket. Johnson, a staunch believer in Union preservation, but from the southern state of Tennessee was just what Lincoln needed to appease the less radical voters. Unfortunately, after his tragic assassination, nothing seemed to go according to plan. Johnson was sworn in as president, and to everyone at the time, seemed committed to the progression and activism required to put the pieces of the country back together. Rebuilding the Union after the Civil War meant progressive ideas that were frankly tough to swallow for people located below the Mason-Dixon Line. After all, there were around 4 million Americans newly freed from the shackles of slavery and looking for their deserved basic liberties and human rights. Post war, more radical members of Congress believed that after a costly conflict to decide its meaning, the Constitution was to be taken literally, for the rights of ALL who lived under it. Johnson however, seemed to have other ideas...

I hope you can forgive my ignorance, but I had no idea Andrew Johnson was such a complete sack of crap. Johnson proclaimed that, "This is a country for white men, and as long as I am president, it shall be a government for white men." Of course, Johnson's line of thinking wasn't unheard of, but it's clear through the study of this book that Johnson as president didn't have the balls to confront everything that was happening around him. Tough decisions needed to be made, not only about freedmen, but about how the former members of the Confederacy were to be confronted and dealt with. While Congress passed numerous Reconstruction Acts to guarantee liberties and keep Confederates from controlling the states, Johnson worked against them, and tried tirelessly to block their execution. As Johnson and members of Congress fought tooth and nail, one could imagine the prospects of the country once again falling apart, and something drastic needed to be done. In 1868, Andrew Johnson was formally impeached.

Ok, enough of the history lesson out of me, I want to examine and talk more about the writing style of the book. It's a quite interesting blend of informational text combined with lyrical story telling. With quotes and musings of persons of note sprinkled in with the narrative, The Impeachers reads like an entertaining documentary spread out on paper. Despite the vastly intellectual subject matter, the style lends itself to be comfortably read with ease, so long as you spare the time to read it. My only struggle was trying to figure out just the right voice actors speaking the lines in my head.

After the Bill Clinton proceedings in the 1990s, we say the word "impeachment" with a far different thinking than those from generations long before. While the interpretations of impeachment have come a long way from "high crimes and misdemeanors", the Andrew Johnson trial forever shifted its use to enforce the intended balance of power in our government. It's truly amazing to me how after over 150 years from both the Civil War and the Johnson impeachment, the vestiges of their respective results plague our thoughts and actions to this very day.

Verdict: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple is a brilliantly cultivated history of the struggle between legislative and executive that framed the era of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Enjoyable to read while still being fully engrossing, this book is well worth the investment of time that it takes for a full appreciation. It's a heavy handed thing to say in the political climate we're in, but I think it's warranted: those who do not learn history, are all but doomed to repeat it.

A special thanks to Random House Publishing Group for generously supplying an advanced review copy to TehBen.com, all views and opinions are my own.

Review to be published on tehben.com on May 1st, 2019

[Carol Storm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing that makes this book such a success is the way Brenda Wineapple lets real-life people tell the story. So many of the eyewitnesses to the Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson are fascinating and their voices really come through. Everyone from Mark Twain to Frederick Douglass to future president James Garfield and future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau has brilliant analysis to offer about why the Radical Republicans failed to drive Johnson from office, and how their failure spelled doom for Reconstruction and the hopes of the millions of former slaves freed by the Civil War.

There were some minor things I didn't like about this book. The tiresome use of modern euphemisms, for example. "Enslaved people" and not "slaves." "Enslaver" instead of "master." "Freedpeople" instead of "Freedmen." This is the kind of stuff Winston Smith used to worry about at the Ministry of Truth! But in the end he found out it didn't matter, when they placed the wire holding facility full of disgruntled omnivorous four-legged mammals over his face.

Another problem is the way she takes the same predictable cheap shots over and over. Every time someone champions votes for black freedmen BW has to remind us "nobody wanted women to vote." As if all white women ardently desired to stand in solidarity with the, uh, freedpeople. Actually, there were millions of white women in the un-Reconstructed South who didn't have the vote and didn't want it. But they sure were happy to help their menfolk keep the colored people in line. It's like that title card from D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION, that says, "50,000 Klansmen needed robes and hoods. Gallant southern women had to sew in secret. Not one ever revealed the truth." Exactly!

That brings us to the other problem with this book. Brenda Wineapple is happy to depict Andrew Johnson as a loser and a creep, and to make him the face of American racism. It's convenient to make him the fall guy because he's an uneducated poor white male from the rural south. There's nothing to be gained by pointing out that his racism was shared by millions of Southern women, of all classes. Also by millions of Irish immigrants, both male and female, including high ranking clergymen of the Catholic church. Brenda Wineapple gives lurid, blow by blow accounts of racial violence in New Orleans and Memphis, and lays all of the blame on Johnson. She doesn't mention that an even more terrible race riot happened in New York City in 1863, when the war was still on and Lincoln was still president. Clearly there's no profit in trashing Lincoln. Or the Catholic church. Or New York City. Real people live there, people like Brenda Wineapple. But nobody important lives in Tennessee.

The most interesting sentence in the book seems to have slipped through by accident. Brenda Wineapple quotes one of the Radical Republicans indulging in speculation to the effect that the rise of the Ku Klux Klan might have been financed by Tammany Hall in New York City. If true, it would suggest that Irish immigrants, seeing the uh, freedpeople as an existential threat, were willing to make an alliance with the same people who made them slaves in the first place. This wouldn't be much of a shock to a southerner like Margaret Mitchell. She made Scarlett O'Hara an Irish Catholic immigrant for a reason. To quote Bernardo in WEST SIDE STORY, "every dog knows his own."

But it's funny how "liberal" Catholics like Anna Quindlen and Mary Gordon and Joan Walsh at the NATION always play dumb about this stuff. Then again, maybe it's not so funny after all.

[Kelley Stoneking · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written and published prior to the 2 impeachments of our 45th president, this book could have been an account of that president's time in office and his impeachment (although with different issues, of course). AJ and DJT are surprisingly similar men. Following is just one quote that shows the similarity. There were many more.

"Andrew Johnson was not a statesman, He was a man with a fear of losing ground with a need to be recognized, with an obsession to be right, and when seeking revenge on enemies--or perceived enemies--he had to humiliate, harass, and hound them. Heedless of consequences, he baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people. It was a convenient illusion."

This book could be very dry. I had a hard time keeping the players straight, even with a Dramatis Personae. It took me 6 weeks to read.

It raised many questions for me. I want to know more about the political parties of the time--I'm not sure exactly what the reasons were for calling yourselves a Republican or Democrat. It seems like the parties overlapped and criss-crossed ideologies and were just a name.

I recommend this book to anyone seriously into American History.

[Leah K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book feels like it could have been written about today's events. Instead this is a history book about events 150 years ago. The fact that it feels so in line with today is scary to say the least. This was a well researched book. Interesting and educational. A solid 4 star book for me.

[Ken Oder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have trouble wading through the mountains of less interesting details most historians seem to think they should include in historical accounts simply because they discovered them. This book is an exception. Wineapple is a good story teller, and although this book is laden with detail, the story of Andrew Johnson's impeachment and her writing style make it all very interesting.
Johnson is a fascinating character of unparalleled strength and monumental weakness. The only President who never attended a day of formal schooling, he taught himself to read and write. Born into abject poverty in NC and raised in abject poverty in Tennessee, he taught himself to be a tailor, and from that humble position slowly climbed out of the squalor and launched a political career that took him to the highest levels in the state. A staunch unionist in a slave state, he resisted secession, and eventually landed on the 1864 ticket as Lincoln's VP. Then came John Wilkes Booth.
In the wake of the assassination, Johnson looked like he might bind the nation's wounds. He promised to be the Moses who would lead the slaves to the promised land. Within days, he broke that promise. He tried to welcome the slave states back into the union without preconditions, put former Confederates in charge of Reconstruction, turned a blind eye to murder and mayhem against southern unionists and former slaves, and fought vehemently against black suffrage. He would listen to no one's counsel who disagreed with him and wouldn't give an inch on any issue. His great ambition and iron will took him to the White House. His stubbornness and bigotry brought him to an impeachment trial in the Senate. He survived removal by one vote. The story of his life and the nation's first impeachment trial is a great read.

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting and timely book, and I had my nose glued to it for long segments of time. I do recommend it for a perspective on impeachment, but I have two caveats:

1. The author spent so much time focused on the personalities and politics of the impeachment trial that he all but overlooked the fact that the actual articles of impeachment were badly written and misdirected. Should Johnson have been impeached? I think so, but not on the basis of the articles submitted. Poorly defined and directed articles (and poor management) were an important part of his acquittal.

2. I was all set to write an even better review, and then I arrived at the second to last page and stopped cold. I do understand the author wanting to find something redeeming about the Johnson presidency, but they must have been scrambling pretty hard They somehow came up with the fact that the 13th amendment had been ratified and the 14th and 15th were in process as an attempt at 'it wasn't all bad'. Seriously? Does overriding a veto not mean anything? Any progress that was made was made in blatant defiance of President Johnson. Giving him any credit at all is completely at odds with reality and insults the efforts of those who did the real work.

So... Yeah. Good book, but skip the last two pages of the epilogue so they don't ruin it for you.

[Donna Pingry · Rating 3 out of 5]

If only a decent president had followed Abraham Lincoln! Andrew Johnson was a much bigger crook than Nixon yet Nixon at least had enough honor to leave. This book got long winded in many parts but that's politics for you. I didn't know anything about the Radical Republican Party before I read this book. I find myself wondering why none of this is required high school teaching. Just like today, political opinions are easily bought and paid for. Promises and honor lay in the dust. Our generation is still struggling with the evil caused by that time and we've learned absolutely nothing. So sad.

[John DiConsiglio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was once seen as Reconstruction run amok. (Even JFK applauded his “courage.”) Historians have long since adjusted their thinking. An “accidental president” who took office 6 weeks into Lincoln’s 2nd term, Johnson was an unapologetic racist. He saw himself more as a king than a chief executive. Wineapple juggles a large Civil War cast & the ill-defined impeachment process. She handles it like a courtroom drama, even if we already know the verdict. Is it fair to compare Donald Trump to Andrew Johnson? Probably not. One is a bigoted, egomaniacal despot. And the other is Andrew Johnson.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summary: A history of the accidental presidency of Andrew Johnson, his resistance to the civil rights fought for in the Civil War, and the impeachment proceedings against him.

Impeachment. Only twice in American history has Congress pursued impeachment proceedings against a President of the United States. Neither instance resulted in conviction of "high crimes and misdemeanors." This book chronicles the first instance where this remedy was pursued, during the presidency of Andrew Johnson.

Brenda Wineapple gives us a well-crafted account of the presidency of Andrew Johnson, the circumstances leading to his impeachment, the key figures from the House of Representatives that prosecuted the impeachment, as well as the presiding Chief Justice, the defense, and the final denouement.

Andrew Johnson was always a bit of a lone wolf, rising from tailor to accidental president when Lincoln was assassinated. When the Civil War began, though sympathetic with the white supremacy of the South, Johnson argued against secession as unconstitutional, and that in fact it was impossible for states to secede from the Union, a position he maintained later on as president. When Tennessee seceded, he continued to take his seat in the Senate. Later, Lincoln named him military governor of Tennessee. When it came time for Lincoln the Republican to run for his second term, he did the unusual thing of offering Johnson, a Democrat, the Vice Presidency, partly to weaken the Democrats, and perhaps with a view toward the restoration of the Union.

Wineapple describes how Johnson quickly instituted his own version of Reconstruction, allowing many of the old leaders of the south to return to office, undercutting newly won civil rights for blacks, and looking the other way when blacks were violently attacked, lynched, and slaughtered. He undercut the efforts of moderate Republican Lyman Trumbull to extend the Freedman's Bureau by vetoing the bill, even after Lyman's extensive consultations with Johnson led him to think it would be passed. It increasingly appeared that all the sacrifice of Union troops was for naught, as Blacks still were treated as slaves in all but name. The crowning insult was Johnson's campaign trip, the "swing around the circle" during the 1866 elections where he denounced Republicans Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Philips by name.

While Republicans in Congress seethed at this treatment and the reversal of gains fought for during the Civil War, all of this occurred under the cloak of legality. Wineapple then discusses the efforts to limit the military occupation, including the work of Secretary of War Stanton and General Grant. This was one of the remaining protections for Black citizens. To protect Stanton, Congress passed over Johnson's veto the Tenure in Office Act, prohibiting the firing of cabinet officials without Congressional approval. Johnson, believing the act unconstitutional, eventually sacked (or tried to) Secretary Stanton, which represented the crossing of a threshold that triggered the vote of impeachment in the House, and the impeachment trial in the Senate.

Wineapple takes us through the trial, introducing us to the managers for the House prosecution: Benjamin Butler who presented much of the evidence, and George Boutwell, and the courageous Thaddeus Stevens, enfeebled and dying. She gives us sketches of Chief Justice Chase, the defense for the president, key senators like Ben Wade, who stood to succeed to the presidency if Johnson was convicted, and correspondents including Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Georges Clemenceau. Then came the vote, 35-19, with a key Republican, Edmund Ross changing his vote to acquit at the last hour. Six other Republicans joined him and twelve Democrats in voting to acquit. Though never proven, there was evidence of payoffs.

Johnson served out his term, but was disappointed not to receive the appointment of his party. He eventually returned to the Senate, dying in office in 1875. Ulysses Grant succeeded to the presidency, reversing to some degree the effects of Johnson's "Reconstruction." But the promise briefly glimpsed by Lincoln was never to be.

Wineapple does an outstanding job of unfolding the history and the fascinating characters around the impeachment. Her account of the life and death of Thaddeus Stevens was particularly striking. Her book makes the case for the challenges of impeachment: the ambiguities of language and procedure. The truth was, Andrew Johnson was a disaster and a white supremacist and could not be removed for these reasons alone. Only the violation of a questionable law (later ruled unconstitutional) provided the pretext. Even this effort fell short. Wineapple also shows us that white supremacy is nothing new but has a long and ugly history in our country, one accustomed to the commission of sordid acts and the constraining of civil liberties with the pretext of respectable legality.

Essentially, impeachment is an unproven remedy for the removal of presidents considered to have committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Section IV of the 25th Amendment has never been attempted. This brings us back to the critical importance of the choices we make for who we elect to be president and vice-president. Whether in office by vote or accident, the only proven way presidents may be removed from office is by the Electoral College, reflecting (hopefully) on a state by state basis the results at the ballot box, an opportunity that comes only every four years. The attacks of White Supremacists on voting rights in Johnson's day also remind us of the vital task of rigorously protecting voting rights for all our citizens, recognized as critical for "liberty and justice for all" then--and now.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review e-galley of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history of the first instance of presidential impeachment in US history. I only meant to skim the book but got drawn in by the colorful characters, the superb writing and the sheer drama of the historical moment.

The U.S. Civil War had just ended, Republican president Lincoln had died, and his VP, who'd been plucked from the rival Democratic party because he was the sole southern senator who'd been anti-secession and therefore his inclusion on the ticket helped convey a pro-Union political agenda, was basically seeking to thwart all serious efforts at meaningful reconstruction from the Republican Congress. He was openly white supremacist, and regarding the readmission of the rebel states, he made every effort to resume the pre-war status quo as much as possible.

I left the book with not only a deeper understanding of the post-Civil War era but a much greater understanding of the challenges of impeachment under the U.S. Constitution.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poignant biography, a haunting, lyrical treatment of the nation's first impeachment trial. I found this book to be very, very persuasive and also immensely entertaining. The author tells the story of Andrew Johnson; president due to an assassin's bullet. Along the way we meet politicians of many stripes. Some honest crusaders, some charlatans, some who fall under both categories at once. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in presidential history, as well as Civil War buffs. An excellent book.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and engaging history of a time not covered well enough US History classes, much to the detriment of our society. Reading about Johnson's handling of the early years of Reconstruction helped me understand why we're still left fighting some of the same battles over 150 years later.

[Jim Twombly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding portrayal of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the arguments about what impeachment is or should be. It is also noteworthy how much there is in common between Johnson and Trump.

[David Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Johnson was called an accidental president, a Tennessean who was anti-secessionist and pro-Union yet held racist and white supremacist beliefs. Johnson was a U.S. senator and a “War Democrat,” a member of the faction that supported military action against the 11 Confederate states. Abraham Lincoln, fearing for his re-election chances in 1864, named Johnson as his running mate in an attempt to balance the Republican ticket and shore up support in a nation battered and exhausted by years of war. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, a little more than a month after Lincoln’s second inauguration and six days after the Civil War ended at Appomattox and Johnson became president.

Washington initially embraced Johnson, believing he would maintain Lincoln’s policies backed by Republican majorities in Congress. Johnson quickly showed his disdain for reconstruction and assimilating the four million freed slaves into a free society, opposed the 14th Amendment. vetoed civil rights legislation. Then to top it off he allowed numerous ex-Confederates to reclaim political power after the war. Every time Johnson vetoed a bill aiming to “reconstruct” the South he argued that the bill wasn’t constitutional because the ex-rebel states weren’t represented in Congress.

Johnson made no attempt to heal the wounds of the war and looked the other way ignoring the hateful and cruel conditions faced by black people. Two of the most vivid examples occurred in 1866. Both were essentially race riots started by white mobs. In Memphis, 46 black people were killed, five black women were raped, and dozens more were wounded. Two white men died, one of whom shot himself. Several months later, in New Orleans, an attempt to enact black voting rights as part of a state constitutional convention devolved into a bloodbath exacerbated by lax federal oversight and corrupt local police and government. Former Confederates accounted for two-thirds of the New Orleans police force. Instead of preserving or restoring order, in some cases they helped white mobs kill and beat hundreds of former slaves. Terrorism of black people ran rampant during this era, a time that included the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Impeachment followed a slow, deliberate, and unsteady path for more than a year before the eventual trial and acquittal of the president in 1868. Congress and the nation grappled with defining untested Constitutional concepts of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as well as the allowances and limits of executive power. When Johnson attempted to fire the popular Secretary of War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton, it was the last straw triggering the impeachment. Johnson survived conviction by a single vote, Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, whose vote, was the result of a bribe.  

Aside from the impeachment drama the book describes other historical figures and their roles, Chief Justice, Salmon P. Chase; Grant, the Union war hero and future presidential candidate; William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s close friend who loathed politics but couldn’t escape them; and literary giants Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. Two of the most powerful voices immersed in Reconstruction-era America were Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain, who served as a Washington correspondent at the time.

Quotes:

“Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” Frederick Douglas

“I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it).”  Make Twain

“Impeaching a President implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small—unable to listen to, never mind to represent, the people they serve with justice, conscience, and equanimity. Impeachment suggests dysfunction, uncertainty, and discord—not the discord of war, which can be memorialized as valorous, purposeful, and idealistic, but the far less dramatic and often squalid, sad, intemperate conflicts of peace, partisanship, race, and rancor. Impeachment implies a failure—a failure of government of the people to function, and of leaders to lead. And presidential impeachment means failure at the very top.”

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is in general, great to fantastic.

At the same time, it's got a flaw bad enough that it loses as star for it and also makes me somewhat question Wineapple as a historian.

All the good stuff first, then the flaw at the end.

First, Wineapple does a great job of setting the stage. Long before the KKK was invented and Bedford Forest was asked to lead it, white violence against blacks was real. As in the first days after the war ended.

Johnson’s failure to act immediately could be seen as political paralysis for a couple of weeks. But, not after that.

Second, Congressional Republicans weren’t really Radicals vs conservatives. They were more tripartite, Radicals, moderates and centrists.

Wineapple plays this out on a background of the GOP already splitting on hard money vs soft money factions, fearing that this might wreck the party, fearing that not deciding what to do with Johnson might wreck the party, and that not knowing in 1867 whether Grant was Republican or Democrat hung over their heads.

And, did you know there were multiple impeachment attempts in 1867? The first failed in the Judiciary Committee. The second passed it but failed on the floor of the House.

When impeachment was approved in 1868, the House then muddled on an actual bill of charges, and Thad Stevens worried that leading with the Tenure of Office Act issues was wrong.

Wineapple also does a very good job with the start of the Senate trial. First, among the brevity of items the Constitution mentions about impeachment, it does NOT say the Chief Justice has to preside.

Salmon P. Chase wormed his way in. She does a good job of noting all the demands he listed to the Senate and largely got accepted by it. And, per Stevens’ fears, this turned the trial from a matter of presidential competence to one of legal acts. (In light of Trump, Mueller’s refusal to indict, and the Justice Department’s advisory opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, I believe that note, and the related idea of how Chase framed the trial, were and are wrong.)


The problem? “Presumably” does NOT mean the same as “allegedly,” but Wineapple acts like it does in the book. She mixes them up 10 or more times.

Example (at least the fifth by this point) on 217:
“Grant presumably conceded [in a dispute over what he had or had not agreed to tell Johnson about resigning as interim Secretary of War], adding that he’d been busy with General Sherman and other matters.”
No, he ALLEGEDLY conceded.

When empirical evidence points in a direction that a person likely acted in such and such a way, but you can’t prove it, it’s “allegedly.” Or “reportedly.” But NOT “presumably.”

Ditto, when a person is presented by historical legend as having said something, but it can’t be verified.

‘I know only two tunes,” Grant presumably said. “One of them Yankee Doodle and the other one isn’t.”
Since this is an allegation (and the bon mot was told of Lincoln as well, among others), it’s “allegedly” or “reportedly” said.

This is more than a grammatical error; it’s a literary one, and it risks promoting a false narrative line, as in the first cited example, in a history book.

And it’s one that a professional historian simply should not make.

And, if she is making it, it’s one that a professional book editor shouldn’t allow her to make.

==

There’s also, for its brilliance otherwise, errors here and there. Ben Wade can’t have worked on the Erie Canal after moving to Ohio. Think about it. Yes, he did work on the Canal, but before moving to Ohio.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew John and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple published in 2019. This was another library roulette book for me; I filtered the books at my local library by availability, eBook format, and history/biography. The book itself seems very relevant, no? In fact, when telling others what book I was currently reading, I just said The Impeachers to see how they would react. No, no, this is current events, this takes place in 1868.

Like Donald Trump, Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House, but was not convicted by the Senate. He missed conviction by a single vote. While you may have remembered that Andrew Johnson was the first president to be impeached and you may even remember that he had a reputation as a really bad president, the veil of history has removed the urgency and the political infighting of the event itself. What was Andrew Johnson actually impeached for?

Andrew Johnson became the target for impeachment because in the eyes of many, he was losing any of the gains made by the Union after winning the Civil War. To name a few:

One of the open questions after the Civil War was when could the Southern states rejoin the Union as equal states. Andrew Johnson believed this should happen without delay and without any punishments or conditions because "the Southern States never left the Union because they never seceded. The Constitution forbids it." If secession was invalid according to the Constitution, how could we punish them for seceding?
Because of this crooked interpretation, President Johnson, without giving Congress its prerogative, reorganized the southern state governments by executive order appointing governors as if nothing had happened. Congress was furious and viewed it as presidential overreach.
When Congress convened, they began their own reorganization of the South by organizing military districts of multiple states. The south would still be under martial law. But the president could appoint this military governors of these districts. While Johnson went along with it, he did not acknowledge their legitimacy, as Congress has not allowed the senators from the southern states to be seated. Through the whole tussle with Congress, he would not acknowledge its legitimacy.
Andrew Johnson pardoned all Confederate soldiers if they came and asked for a petition. Many Southerners who had fought against the Union were being accepted back into the halls of power as if nothing had happened.
Johnson openly tried to hinder the goals of Congress by appointing men opposed to reconstruction and black civil rights. In this way, he undermined the southern military districts as well as the Freedman's Bureau.
Perhaps to summarize it most succinctly in his own words, Andrew Johnson believed "This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men."

How had Andrew Johnson even become president? Why was he picked as Abraham Lincoln's running mate? Well, Abraham was a politician, and he had to play political games to try to appeal to the broadest base. Andrew Johnson was a senator from Tennessee. He was the only senator from a southern state to oppose secession. He was a Democrat and a slaveholder, but he believed in the Union and would not fight against it. He was despised as a traitor, and in many ways was noble in his fight to preserve the Union. Though a Democrat, Lincoln's party figured that a pro-Union southerner would even out the ticket. It certainly caused tears in the Republican party after Lincoln was shot.

The book does a masterful job at painting the context of impeachment, the character of the man as well as the figures of the day who were involved. There are some surprise appearances of famous figures you may not realize were contemporaries. Mark Twain was a journalist at the time in D.C. where he wrote updates on the trial. Walt Whitman, the poet, was around too and had his opinions on the matter.

The book to me outlines an important question I have always asked: how did the party of Lincoln that stood for fighting against slavery become the Republican party today that, more often than not, seems at-best ambivalent to making strides in civil rights? They don't seem the same at all. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson doesn't explain it all, but it does show that the seeds were already there. You realize that the Republican party didn't uniformly stand for black civil rights. It was only the "radical" Republicans of the day that provided the moral compass of the party and who believed that black Americans were deserving of equal respect and equal rights. Many Republicans of the north were find giving civil rights to blacks in the south as a kind of punishment, but didn't want to consider extending those same rights to blacks in the north. The sentiment that held the party together post-war at least initially was that the gains of the war should not be lost, whatever that meant. Once civil rights became a political liability, they were sacrificed. I also look at how pro-business interests begin to take a hold in the Republican party in my review of The Great Dissenter at about the same time here.

The other aspect of impeachment that wasn't clear to me until reading the book was how new it was. It was scary territory, the equivalent of regicide in a democratic country. Impeaching a President implies mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small-- unable to listen to, never mind to represent, the people they serve with justice, conscience, and equanimity. Impeachment suggests dysfunction, uncertainty, and discord-- not the discord of war, which can be memorialized as valorous, purposeful, and idealistic, but the far less dramatic and often squalid, sad, intemperate conflicts of peace, partisanship, race, and rancor. Impeachment implies a failure-- a failure of government of the people to function, and of leaders to lead. And presidential impeachment means failure at the very top.

The Constitution gives very little to go off of, so these men had to interpret what the Constitution actually meant. A few questions that had to be resolved:

Is the Senate acting as jury in a trial? Or as a legislative body?
The Constitutions says that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is to lead the trial; how much decision power does he have over the proceedings? Does the Senate make decisions about admissibility of evidence, or does he?
Does the President have to actually break a law on the books to be convicted of impeachment?

That last question in particular isn't clearly resolved to this day, and it popped up again in the impeachment of Donald Trump. Many insisted he hadn't actually committed a crime, while others argued he had demonstrably violated his prerogatives as president. Because there was disagreement in Congress about this issue, Congress had to pin impeachment on a technicality, the Tenure of Office Act. President Johnson had dismissed his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, when the an act of Congress said he first had to get congressional approval. It all seemed like a joke, as the issues at stake were much larger than that: all of reconstruction was at stake.

Reconstruction lasted another eight years under the tenure of President Grant. But after federal troops were withdrawn from the south with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, black Americans would have to wait decades to gain their full civil rights. The failure of Andrew Johnson's impeachment was one of the early signs that Reconstruction was starting to fail.

[Jan Lynch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given the impeachment of Donald Trump and the divisive political atmosphere, I’ve been reading around the Civil War as an earlier era of discord against which to measure the present. Learning about history often provides solace, but my reading this time has not been comforting. The Civil War era is complicated, its heroes and villains ambiguous. A simple narrative of values that runs like this is simply wrong: Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator who freed slaves and became a martyr; Northerners were the good guys, Southerners, the bad; abolitionists fought for freedom for slaves because they believed in the equality of all humans. The reality is more nuanced; historical figures of the era were people whose values changed over time, some embracing abolition and fighting for it, then refusing to support freedman after the Civil War; others becoming progressively more concerned about the rights of freed slaves and creating a society of opportunity and justice for all. Lincoln’s thinking was in that camp, perhaps evolving even when his life was cut short.

In his book Lincoln and the Abolitionists, Fred Kaplan refers to Abraham Lincoln as an anti-slavery moralist, one who opposed slavery on moral grounds, but who accepted it as Constitutional. I’d always assumed those who opposed slavery did so on the grounds that blacks were equal and deserving of their freedom, but that is another simplification that is not true. Many anti-slavery moralists viewed slavery as an unfortunate blot and bane largely because slave labor put whites out of work as well as compromised white integrity. A common attitude was that emancipated slaves should be sent elsewhere so as not to mix among free whites. A good number of abolitionists shared these basic attitudes, and while they would foment against the institution, many abolitionists cared little about the freed slaves themselves, only that those freedmen did not end up in their backyard. How depressing, how relatable to our times.

Northern heroes of the Civil War often did not hold the values we might wish they did. General Winfield Scott, who “repulsed Pickett’s charge from behind Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg” (288), is one such example. A strong supporter of the Union, he also “was an unapologetic white supremacist committed to states’ rights” (289). Many Northerners were finished with their contributions, having won the war. But, unfortunately, the real work that needed to be done was just starting. Freedmen needed food, shelter, education, and employment. The economy of the South was in tatters, as was its culture. Needing to be rebuilt, who would finance this? How would rebellious states be reintegrated? As Congress tried to begin the process of putting a fairer more just country together through Reconstruction Acts, Johnson defied them at every step, vetoing their bills. Though Republicans had a strong enough majority to override his vetoes, Johnson argued that since Southern states were excluded, none of what the Congress did had legitimacy. Meanwhile, Southerners were proceeding to restore the old order in all but name. Blacks were slaughtered mercilessly, including women, the elderly, and children, with no consequence. Massacres at New Orleans and Memphis were tragic examples. Meanwhile, many Northerners still refused to support the idea of black suffrage. Of course there were exceptions like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips to name only several. But the blanket view that the North was good and the South was bad is obviously wrong.

How important the selection of a point at which to start and a point at which to finish. Having read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, for instance, I became fond of William Seward (Secretary of State under Lincoln), Edwin Stanton (Lincoln’s “Mars,” his Secretary of War), and Gideon Welles (Lincoln’s “Neptune,” his Secretary of the Navy). Yet their stories continued after April of 1865, and Seward almost seems traitor to Lincoln in his opportunistic relationship with Johnson. Stanton, whose goal was to implement reconstruction peacefully and in a way that offered freedmen safety and opportunity, ended up in the middle of the controversy that beget impeachment, while Welles tried to thwart Stanton every chance he had. History is endlessly fascinating and endless. I see glimpses of the same individuals from different perspectives in reading around an era. So, one work offers this side of Frederick Douglass, another, that. Same with Thaddeus Stevens and William Seward. Then, Henry Adams chimes in, or going backwards, John Quincy Adams. Like a spider’s web, one only has to pull and all moves, all is connected.

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson is intriguing. Johnson himself was hardly sympathetic. A racist and stubborn, self-righteous, unpredictable, undisciplined (except in his meticulous wardrobe), his character is repellent. Those who defended him lived with constant worry of what he might do or say. How familiar this all sounds. And yet, impeaching and removing a president would reverberate well beyond Johnson’s tenure. This too sounds familiar. Looking at the grounds for his removal, looking at the specific act that he was said to have violated, it is clear that the House may have been unwise to charge on those grounds. Morals, corruption, blatant violation of freedmen’s right to safety and security, these seem inarguable. But violating the Tenure of Office Act? Shaky, since the Act’s constitutionality was questionable.

Brenda Wineapple’s writing is superbly readable. She is a gifted storyteller who knows how to incorporate sufficient background without bogging her narrative down; she allows the suspenseful, dramatic character of the story she is telling to sell itself rather than inserting unnecessary commentary. When she does offer her insights, Wineapple is incisive and clear. Fun, too, are the glimpses of the famous--a young Mark Twain as a journalist covering impeachment, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier. All of this against the backdrop of the first presidential impeachment. Anyone who followed the impeachment of President Trump with interest would find the story Andrew Johnson’s impeachment educational. From the impeachment itself to the divisiveness of the larger culture, this story echoes our own times. Or, take the last phrase and reverse.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I found this to be a very good read- it's extremely informative, well researched, and I thought it did a good job getting into the personalities who were at the heart of the push to impeach President Johnson, as well as the history of his path to the presidency.

If I had any complaint, it would be that I thought the book jumped around a bit, which at times made it a bit harder to read. Couple that with the few really dry parts in the book (it has to happen- this is a book about politics, after all), well- some chapters were just a pain to read through. This isn't true of the whole book, however, and I'd say that anyone with at least some interest in the subject should pick this one up.