2011. It is about an hour. Thank you very much. It is wonderful to be here again. I love this venue. I get lots of good questions, which we will save time for at the end. This is an interesting occasion for me. This is the first time i have been in front of an audience talking about Andrew Johnson. Forgive me if i say jefferson occasionally. I had to write that and do a spell check to make sure i didnt have jefferson where i should have had johnson, because the temptation was actually quite great. If someone had told me a number of years ago that i would have written a book about Andrew Johnson, i would have said you are crazy. Its not that i dont think hes interesting. He really is. Not that i didnt know anything about him. But for most of my career as a historian, i have tried to avoid the period of reconstruction. It sounds strange for someone who writes about slavery, which is a difficult topic to write about, but i find it easier to deal with the 17th century and 18th century, and attitudes about race and slavery that i do dealing with reconstruction. There is something about it that is just maddening to me. And i think what it is is that it was a moment of opportunity. I think of the people in the 17th and 18th century that had very primitive ideas about many things in the world, and you know theres lots of things that they dont know. I cannot totally forgive them, but it is not as irritating to me, exasperating to me, as the period of time where you have photographs, trains, things that are part of the modern era, and you feel closer to the people in that time period. They seem more like us than someone in the 18th or 17th century, when im writing about the development of slavery in virginia, or reading about jeffersons mom to cello, even. So when i read about reconstruction, and this moment of hope, it makes me angry. I am able to be detached the further back you go. But it makes me angry when i think about what could have happened and what did not happen and how close we were to a period of time when you really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making america really a place for everyone. So johnson would not have been my topic of choice. I read about that era because i have to, but it wouldnt be something i actually thought i would study and right about. But i got a phone call one morning from arthur lesson junior. He was telling me that i was going to be getting a letter from him. And i did get this letter from him and which he asked me to write the biography of Andrew Johnson for the american president series, which is a very nice and series of short concise books about president s. And they get people, sometimes people who actually fit, someone like joyce apple seeded jefferson. She is a great jefferson scholar. Gary hearted about. George mcgovern did lincoln. There is a mix of historians and nonhistorians looking at these presidencies, telling the basic story, but also giving your own individual spin on it. And he asked me to do this to the johnson book, and i guess he figured i would put my individual spin on it. I agreed to do it because arthur asked me to and i had Great Respect for him. I knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. And we were both on the Advisory Committee for that. And because paul gall about was the editor, who is also the general series editor for the series, was my editor for the book ended with vernon jordan. So this was two friends. You know how it is when friends ask you to do things, who asked me to do this and i said sure. I put aside by misgivings. I know its a fascinating topic. There is so much material, very rich. But i wondered if i would be able to sort of curb my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular period in American History. And i agreed to do it. That was many years ago. I have to confess this book is long overdue. In between saying i would do, what i wrote the monte cello book which took a lot of time and energy. And then i came back to this and finished it. And i am very glad that i did. So the first thing i had to do was to think about how do i approach this . Andrew johnson is not known by lots of people. Not lots is known about him. But one thing some people probably do know is that in some survey american president s, he is at the bottom. Hes near the bottom. He is in the bottom five. Since 1997, i participated in the service and sometimes i look at the results. Sometimes i dont. But hes usually in the bottom five. Hes at the bottom five. Lets here, this past year, when i did not participate in the survey for the first time. I typically fill them out. I did not this time because i was too busy. He made it to the last. He was considered the worst president. Just in time for the book, i could say. In some surveys he is considered one of the worst. This year, the worst president. Once you get down to that point, it is really splitting hairs to think about what is the real story with that. Its a difficult issue, because how do you sit down about and write a book about somebody who is judged as the worst of everything. Just because someone is the worst or near the worst, does not mean that theyre not important. That is the first realization that i had. This man was president at one of the most pivotal periods of American History. There was a moment where this country could have gone one way or the other way, and he had an essential role to play in that. It came to me. It hit me that it is very important to focus on the life of Andrew Johnson, because i really do believe that some of the decisions that he may during that time period affect us even today, and the choices he made, the choices he didnt make. His attitudes, his leadership styles. All of those things helped make us who we are, so for those reasons we have to Pay Attention to him. I say in the book that history is not just about all the people you like. All the people you love and youd love to have dinner with and spend time with, or whatever. Its about people who did things that were important that helped put us on the path to where we are now. He is definitely a person who had that kind of rule. Once i made my mind to do this i understood how to approach it, it was relatively easy to sort of sit down and get to work, and try to tell his story in a way that would sort of illuminate what American Life is like, and what it was like during the time that Andrew Johnson lived. Johnson is different from jefferson in many ways. But first thing, first problem, is that johnson did not learn to write until he was in his late teens. His wife he married early. His wife taught him how to write. In those days, reading and writing were different. They were separate things. There were many people were taught treat. They could read the bible. That writing was not something that people thought necessarily went together. And so his parents were illiterate. Neither of his parents could read or write. We know they could not right. We have no record of them writing. People said that they were illiterate. He did not become literally until he was a young man. That poses a problem, because even though he learned to write, he was never very comfortable doing it. At one point, later on, he mentioned that he had of sort have hurt his arm. He explained it as why he did not right. Most people think it is because he was very self conscious about it. His writing, for most of his life he was selfconscious about it. If you look at the papers of Andrew Johnson, there are many many more letters. To Andrew Johnson and from Andrew Johnson to other people. That poses a problem right there. We dont have his inner voice. With jefferson you have 18,000 letters he wrote over periods of his life. Other kinds of documents. Other things. Even though he remains an enigma to a lot of people, there is still enough there to sort of craft some sense of what he is thinking, what he is feeling, and who he was. Johnson, you are at a disadvantage, because we dont really have that to the same extent. The letters we have that show when he was a young man, show lots of misspellings, phonetic spellings of things. It is difficult to wrap your mind it was for me difficult to wrap my mind around who he really was, because you just dont have the kind of record you would typically have. Its just not there. Its a big problem. Because we dont have lots of his letters, and there is not a huge repository of him explaining what hes doing, we dont have a lot of stories about him. There is another biography. The principal biographer of Andrew Johnson is a man who unfortunately died last year. I was so hoping to be able to finish this book and show it to him. Hes the one who went out and wrote the 500 page book about johnson. He covered lots of the territory. My job was to cover some of the same territory tory more concisely but put my spin and my view of johnson on to the picture. People tend to repeat sort of biographies for Andrew Johnson. They had to be another approach. That is where my expertise or my study of Race Relations and slavery and that period i think comes in handy. Its interesting to think about the beginning of america and come to a point when you are focusing on a time where america falls apart and has to be put back together again. So to start out with this material that is not as voluminous as i am typically used to, but the person who i said is very interesting, considering where he came from. How does somebody like this go from being illiterate, a person whose parents were very poor, to being someone who is at the highest office in the land . He is born in North Carolina to parents who, as i said, were illiterate. His father died when he was three. His mother was a seamstress. She also worked in other people s homes. This is a thing that caused a lot of talk. People suggested later on that maybe Andrew Johnson was not the son of his father, that he was illegitimate. Ive gotten some criticism from mentioning this. Even though Hans Trefousse mentions it as well. Instead of just mentioning it, i want to talk about the context that to Say Something about how class affected the way people viewed Andrew Johnson from the very, very beginning. Because his mother worked outside the home, worked as a maid, essentially in someones home. People felt free to say things like that about the family. I really doubt that she had been if she had been a quote unquote respectable middle class women, those kinds of rumors would be openly spoken about during that time period. From the very beginning, its not that he was just for, its that his family was seen as really really marginal. There is a difference between what people would call the deserving poor. Poor but striving people, and people who were seen as marginal. She marries again. His mother remarries a man who was as poor as she. It does not improve their circumstances very much. It gets so bad that she has to apprentice her two children. Andrew johnson was apprenticed to a tailor when he was ten years old. His brother was a couple of years older. He was supposed to be an apprenticeship until he was 21. Why would take that long to learn to become a tailor, and it didnt, because as you will see, it did not take him that long to become very very good. He is ten years old. These apprentice to a tailor. He actually runs away. He and his brother runs a runaway. There was an ad that i reproduce in the book. It is basically a runaway servant ad. The kind of thing you would expect to see people more familiar with, with runaway slaves. Reward, everything. Captured him. Bring him back and we will pay you a reward. This is the future president of the United States. This is what happens to him. He runs away. He does not come back. He goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor in another persons tailor shop. He becomes very good at his job. Actually, even as an older man when hes a politician. A prominent politician. He makes suits for people. Again, its kind of cool. I think of a president who could make suits. The sort of gender thing it doesnt matter, because he is a tailor. A tailor can be a masculine thing to do. That was his way of giving gifts to people. It was a very practical, real word experience that he had. He starts out very, very low. One of the things i talk about is comparing him to lincoln, who unfortunately, the about this wars business, its really tough. Lincoln was a tough act to follow. One of those same surveys i talked about, he is always almost mentioned as the best. You go from number one, the best, to the worst in one terrible moment at fords theater. That is what you have. You go from lincoln to Andrew Johnson. He suffers by comparison. That is part of it. It is not just that he had failings, which we will talk about, but he came after someone who is amazing to people. In good ways and bath. He was a very towering figure to Andrew Johnson. We have these humble origins that seem to make him in some ways, it strengthened lincoln. Hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way. Strengthen them in empathy, envision and so forth. I think my take on johnson is that his hard life, being looked down upon people. Being considered as trash, made him hard in lots of ways. Someone asked me you would think that that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. Sympathetic to slaves. But no. The other side is, with that can do is make you look for somebody to look down on. There has got to be somebody below you, and i think he took comfort perhaps, and saying, like many poor southern whites, i may live in a shotgun shack, i may not have very much, but i am white. Its better than these people over there. So if you want to maintain that, you have to make sure that there is always somebody over there or under there who you can look down upon. That seems to be the path he took in life to the detriment of his own personal demons. It really ended up affecting the course of the history of the United States of america. While he is in the tailor shot, he is a very smart kid. Smart person. He listened to men who would come to the tailor shop to read to the tailors. You think of civic engagement. You know there are people in the shop who cannot read. A man would come and read. He would read about a book of speeches. Johnson loved speeches. He kept the book. The guy gave him the book he loved it so much. Over the years, anytime he needed inspiration he would go back and read this book of speeches. At some point, he realizes, because he gets into a debate with a person in the shop. They do the equivalent of taking it outside that verbally to invite people to watch them argue. It becomes clear that he has a talent. His talent is public speaking. That also links him to lincoln, because lincoln was also a good speaker, but he was a different type of speaker. He could be very, very rough. He was sarcastic. Aggressive. People had not really seen anything like it. So his fame grew. People suggested that he might stand for office, which he did. He was very, very ambitious. A good businessman. Even though he started out poor, he made the great kinds of investments. He actually better to himself financially. He went into politics. He climbed the ladder to mayor, every single run of the latter, he was on it up to the president. It is an interesting thing, an interesting comment on American Life, that someone could start out as low as he did, and go to where he went. And so even though i could be somewhat hard on him and the book, there was no question he was an extraordinary person. I think one of the my editor said that he has done all these. Hes edited all of the ones that have been in so far. He said all of these people are extraordinary. To make it to the presidency. Its not like somebody is just sitting around one day and says ok, im going to the white house. There is something there. Other people see something and that person. The person sees something in himself. So far, only him. Only he is involved in this. He says i should go for that position. I should be at the top. He was like that himself. The book describes his how he fashioned himself. Tried to fashion himself after his hero, andrew jackson. He comes of age during the age of jackson. He is a unionist. He is for the common man. He campaigns for the homestead act. There are lots of things about him that seem very progressive. Very populist in a way, but as you know, populism in a way has a double edged sword. Lots of times, populists are in favors of measures that you would think would be progressive. He was for the homestead act, giving poor people land. He wanted public education. He was always a champion of public education, thinking back on his own life and how deprived he was. He wanted a better shot for people. People who are not privileged. The catch was, he only wanted it for whites. He was for the homestead act, as i said, but when reconstruction came, and it was time to give land reform, the republicans and congress wanted land reform in the south to give the former enslaved people, to give them land to give them the kind of independence that johnson and others understood was needed. That is what land meant. If you do not work for people you can grow your own food. You can subsist on your own plot. You are not beholden to anyone. He wanted it for whites. Not blacks. There was the racist part of it. It inhibited his thoughts about how this might be expanded to include everybody in america. He makes his political run thinking of himself as a champion of the common man. He, as i said, as for the union. He had no with secessionists. He sort of alienated, even before the war, he alienated people i Jefferson Davis because of the support for the homestead act. The southern grand ease, planters did not like the idea of giving pour white people land. They would not have used the term, but they sought as welfare. Why are you giving these people land. The low market rate . Why dont they go out and work for it . Why do they deserve this . But he was all for it. From the beginning, there were kelsey trans about this, further, his antipathy towards southern planters. So he came up making enemies all along the way. Cohen lincoln, he gets on the ticket, because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south that there is a future. The north and south had a future together. It was a symbolic gesture of unity for him to pick a southern from the border state, by then he is from tennessee. He had moved to tennessee as a young man. To put them together and say look, i am willing to have a southerner on the ticket. One of these days we could get back together again. He ends up on the ticket. Lincoln replaces cannibal hamilton who was from maine who did not give him any kind of political cloud. There he is as Vice President. This person who had started out illiterate up until his early manhood, is the Vice President of the United States. People hated that. There were many many people who said he is not the kind of man who should be in this office. This is a disgrace. We are reading these kinds of things and i even managed to feel a little bit sorry for him as you hear people bragging on him for this. But then at the monarch ration he is drunk. He comes to the inauguration. It was kind of fun to write. I had fun doing this. He had been ill. In those days, i think they thought whiskey was a cure for anything. Many people think that now. He drink too much whiskey. There is a spectacle. It would have been amazing of Something Like that wouldve happened. Imagine on youtube. Cable tv, everything. All of these things, people said c, we told you. You let those kinds of people into those kinds of position and this is what they will do. Lincoln nevertheless did by him. Lincoln said i wont dump him. He is not a trump no drunk. He will be fine. Lincoln was killed not long after that. He ascended to the presidency. The country was traumatized. People from the north were traumatized. People from the south may have been happy about it, but they were not really celebrating about it because they had just been defeated in a more. They were no in no position to really gloat about Something Like that, even if anyone were inclined to do it. It was a traumatic time period. There is johnson who has to rise to the occasion. During those days, immediately after lincolns death, he actually does rise to the occasion. All the things, the people who said the performance and Vice President has sort of gone away. He knows what to do ceremonially. Symbolically. He really rises to the occasion. There is a honeymoon for him for a time period, until they get into reconstruction. This is the part of the story when i said i try to avoid all of this, when they began to realize that he is not going to have any support whatsoever with the notion of black Political Rights. Any kind of rights for the free man after the civil war. He only grudgingly accepted abolition. He was a slave holder himself. He was not a largescale slave holder. He did have a plantation, but he did have slaves. He was a supporter of slavery. He was adamant about black inferiority. He said everybody has to admit that white people are superior to blacks. He would say we should try to raise them up, but as we raise them up we should raise ourselves even further so that the distance would always be the same. In other words, that was his plan. He said this is a white mans government. It will remain a white mans government. When somebody says that out loud and says it adamantly over and over again, and you have a policy from republicans and congress and they are saying black votes, some sort of political life for black people. And you realize that that is the president and congress arent loggerheads the vision of the south, bringing the south back in to the union. Did not encompass anything about changing black peoples status beyond taking them out of legal slavery. That is where the battle was joined between him and the republicans. That is what eventually led to his impeachment. A person wrote a book. A biographer of johnson started out lamenting that when people write about johnson, all they seem to care about is reconstruction and impeachment. Mainly reconstruction. And he says but you know what . There is not much else. So he had this grand plan to talk about all the other aspects of Andrew Johnsons presidency. But its reconstruction. There are some problems in mexico that we have to deal with. Those things were handled by his secretary of state. Most of his time was spent on reconstruction, and trying to thwart the efforts ever republican members of congress who want to to transform the south. You believed that the south really had not succeeded. His view was that secession was illegal, and because it was illegal, they had never left. Jefferson davis was not really a president. There was no Confederate States of america. There was nothing. That did not exist, and because it did not exist, once the war was over, he would bring everybody back in. Its sort of like reminding the tape, except the slavery part. Take the slavery out of it. Let the south come back to exactly what it was before there was any conflict at all. That is a tough position. 4 Million People have been freed at this point. What do you do with them . There were people who realized that that called for something, but he said no. The constitution does not allow what you are attempting to do. He was very much a proponent of the constitution. He saw himself as the guardian of the constitution, but he had what i called sort of a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. Things that he liked that were constitutional. Things he did not like were caught unconstitutional. The constitution clearly says that congress has the right to set rules for the governance and everything having to do with the district of columbia. So when Congress Gives black people the right to vote, he vetoes it and says it is not constitutional. That is in the constitution. Its not even some kind of interpretation of it. So you get a sense of what constitutional means to him. If i like it, its constitutional, if i dont, its not. He thought that he was in the right, protecting the constitution. The republicans thought wed a minute. Something has to change here. We have to transform the south. We cant just have people wandering around there. I dont know what he thought what they wanted other that they were supposed to be under the domination of the plates. He does something that really surprises people. Remember, i said he hated the southern grand hes, the plantation owners. He wanted to punish them. He thought that they had led the south into war. He had a strange notion that southern planters, the largescale planters and slaves were any conspiracy against poor white people. So he blamed them for the war. The blacks and the enslaved people and their masters. At first he talked about punishing these people, but then he realized my greater enemies or not the southern people, but the southern planters aristocrats. My enemies are the people of the north, republicans who want to change the south. What he opted to do instead of punishing them, was to put them back in power. Not only does he thwart, try to thwart the radical republicans, the socalled radical republicans, he puts all the people who had been he helps to put back into power all the people who had been in power before the war. The very people whom he called traitors, and said he wanted to punish them. You brought them back on linear terms. He did not require the sort of oaths that people had to swear to. He did not dispense with those. The oaths that said they had never sort of loyalty oaths. He put them back into power. Finally, the republicans get angry about this. They bring on the impeach him. It remains a very drastic remedy in most americans. It is a drastic remedy. Weve only done this twice in our history to try to remove a president from office. He survives a conviction in the senate by one vote. People think because we can talk a little bit about this in the question and answer period. The people felt that he only had maybe a year or so more to go on his term, and he would have been out anyway. The second thing was that the person who would have taken over from him then wait was considered to be a wide we believed in women voting, which of course made him a martian. He was from mars. What came after, the fact that he did not have long to go on his term you actually made deals with people about this. They voted he escaped conviction by one vote. He is nevertheless sort of a ruined president after that. He keeps vetoing bills. He has hopes of making a comeback. His real plan was to unite conservatives in the north and the south to create another Political Party to try to take the country back. That was his sort of idea. It had gotten away from him and he needed groups of the most conservative people, wherever they lived, regardless of party, to sort of band together and take back the country. It did not work. He leaves office. He cannot get the democrats dont really they are not democrats at this time like they are now. The parties are flip from where they were. They did not trust him. The republicans surely were not going to have him. So he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. He runs for office. He was unsuccessful at first, but he then he returns to the senate. He sees this as the vindication that he was right all along. He goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out. He is their only for a few months. He dies in 1875 of a stroke on a trip back to tennessee. It is an amazing story of a person who is, as i said, enigmatic and probably will be forever close to us and some really, really significant way. Just because he did not we dont have his voice very much. How many of those papers were prepared by other people . But we certainly dont have the kind of day today statements from him. Few anecdotes from family about him. The Andrew Johnson homestead has a website. It has information about him as a slave holder. But not, again, not huge rooms and materials about this person who, i think, as i said has had the most significant effects on American Life of anybody during American History. Even though he is judged as a worst president. Thurgood marshall and one of his dissents, i believe it was he wrote, he said that if america had done what it was supposed to have done during this time period, it is not cite Andrew Johnson but he talks about reconstruction as a point of lost opportunity. I think that you cannot blame one person for all the good that happens are all the bad that happens. The president , and this is my approach in the book, he is a symbolic League Leader of the country. People, and times of crisis, people do not look to the Supreme Court or the congress. Theres too many of them. The president is the energy of the government. The president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership. The kind of leadership that he exhibited during his time period was not enough to make he did not ruin everything all by himself. He made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done, and that is the real tragedy of his presidency, but again, that is why i think more people should know about Andrew Johnson, because i really do believe that he has helped to make us who we are today. Think about land reform. Think about the difference in wealth. The production of wealth in the black community. If former slaves have have land most of them, instead of being sharecroppers, the difference between owning your own property and renting it from someone else. People say yes, but weve got something good out of it. We got the 14th amendment, because he was recalcitrant about all of the laws that congress was passing. Civil rights bills, all those things. It forced them into passing the 14th amendment. That is a good thing, but think about the last. All the losses. If he had not opposed land reform. If you had not opposed black Political Rights. Blacks had been exercising Political Rights from 1860, or had land from 18 sixties as opposed to what happened, he set us back. He set the country back, and set black people back tremendously, because of the failure of his leadership, or i should say, he would say, from the way he exercised his leadership. He said that he wanted to preserve the country as a white mans government. He was actually able to do that for the longest period of time. In historical circles, up until the civil rights movement, he was seen by many as a good president. If you read the socalled school of historians of columbia, places who championed johnson as a hero, who helped saved off negro rule in the south. Essentially, that Historical School existed into the 20th century. The book black reconstruction it set the record straight. Very very clearly. There were other people, and once he did, that other people began to take a second look at reconstruction. The people who were congresspeople. If you see birth of the nation, theyve got blacks and congress. They are sitting there eating chicken. Barefeet. These are some of the most educated people. These were really, really educated man. Talented people who were in these offices, and it is that whole birth of a nation, Dunning School business. Propped up johnson because it made it look like his attitudes were the correct one. After the voice and others, people began to take a different look at reconstruction and understood that he was more of a problem then any kind of solution. So i am glad even though it took me a long time to do it its. Difficult to talk about someone who you can hold them responsible for a lot about things that happen. You have to try to have enough detachment to be able to present his good points as well as his that points. I hope i have managed to do that. I do think that he is a figure that we cannot ignore. That he was just there at too important a time period to be unknown by people. By looking at his life and the kinds of things that he did during reconstruction. Actually, the trajectory of his life is a very american story and good ways and bad ways. With that, i would like to take your questions. applause thank you very much. Weve got hands already. Fantastic. What are the parallels between taking back the Country Movement and the johnsons time and the tea party . Well, the parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution. Some people say too much. That its almost like a sacred text. Anytime we are in trouble, or anytime we want to make a point, we use the constitution. Lets say we want to get back to that document. Even people on the left, not as much as they think they should, but people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. I think it is different, because it is different in this sense. Almost 500,000 people died during the more. This was really life during wartime. This is not life during wartime. That kind of wartime. That wars going on overseas, but this is hyperbole, i think, at this point, taking the country back. The country has not gone anywhere. You know what i mean . These people edge they took up arms against one another. Those were really serious life and death kinds of issues. I think that they are using that rhetoric, but it is not to my mind, a serious as serious as the time period they were in. It is more it is slogan era. Im not saying people do not have a legitimate concern and they are not serious about it, this was johnson, we are talking about life and death. Certainly in the south. If you read eric werner, who wrote the big book on reconstruction, and i relied on that and pointing me to some materials about some of the things that were going on, i mean, this guy talked about going to a village in texas. A town in texas, and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees. Men, women, little children. Blacks. Rivers. Bodies floating down. This was after the war was over. People turned on blacks to try to reassert their control. They were planned for keeps back then. I dont know what this is. It is not compared to that, i dont think. Even though they might think it does. Another question . Right here. Thank you for coming. Could you talk a bit about education . Ive never quite understood why the radical republicans did not press and push much more resources into providing more education for the free slaves. They did to the friedmans bureau. They tried to do that. The friedman bureau. Really poignant stories about people. Little kids next to growing people. Everybody trying to read. That is what they were trying to do, but the schools were attacked. Night writers, people who tried to be teachers. There was a lot of a backlash. They did not want blacks in schools. They wanted them in the fields. They definitely try to do that. The friedman, the schools, higher education, Howard University started by general howard they tried to do that, but unless these little places they were not in control of all of this, and certainly, once the military believes, education becomes really sketching. Even more sketchy for blacks during that time period. A tried, but there was lots of opposition and violent opposition in many places. The levy on our left. When did johnson free his slaves . Or did he freedom . After the end of the war. He became free. Not before then. You may have freed a couple before, but not all of them until after. Right here. What do you think about johnsons argument of secession . Lincoln said that to, that its illegal. That secession was illegal. The reason he said it was that because if secession is illegal, then the president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellions and so forth. If secession is illegal and they left, then you could say and congress rules the territories. It is a matter of political separation of powers. It was a political argument, but again, lincoln died, so we do not know what he would have done, or what he really thought. But for him, he said that was an obstruction. A pernicious abstraction. Johnson took it very much to heart. He was very literal minded on that. I think is that, well, if they thought they could leave, they left. Jefferson davis did set up a government its hard for me to pretend that they were not real. That what they had was not a real thing. I think congress they should have been governed as territories. I think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct. I understand the legal argument about it, but real practically, realistically, they set up their own government and they stopped participating. They went their own separate ways for a time period. Yes. Right here. What was the base of support for johnson . After all he was considered a trader from the southern die hards. He was not only northern evolutionists. You mean while he was president . While he is president he did not have that much support. He gets to be president because lincoln gets killed. At this point, he wants to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about, by being lenient with the former southern planters. They are still planters, but he tried to butter them up by not punishing them the way he originally said he was going to do. You wanted to build the party. He was not successful at doing it. Public opinion varied about him. Sometimes the northerners liked him and sometimes they hated him, but once it became clear that he was not going to go along with reconstruction, they uniformly hated him. That is why he could not get the nomination after certainly after the impeachment nobody wanted to have him back. But he did not have very much support. He spent most of his presidency trying to build that by currying favor with the southerners. Sometimes appearing lenient to northerners, but it did not work. He pleased nobody. He tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until he manages at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time. It is interesting, because he must have been he was a good politician to a degree, because he could not have come from nowhere to where he went, but once he got into office, it was like he was out of his lead. He was out have his depth. He ended up with not many friends at all. Back in the middle. We are getting the microphone. Do you think he was a tragic figure . Do i think he was a tragic figure . Gosh. Do i think i think he was a tragedy for the country. Was he a tragic figure . This is he did not i cannot find anything about him he did not seem to have had a visible sense of humor in a way. There is not a lot of yes, i think he is a tragic figure. laughter when you think of tragedy, you think of a hero with a grand persona and sort of robbed down. What i do think in a sense is he is tragic. He wanted desperately to rise. He actually did rice. It is an amazing story. You cannot read until you are 19 years old, and then your president at some point. That is the grit, the tenacity which served him well. That is why he was able to stay committed to the union. A tremendous personal sacrifice. He could have been killed. Many many people wanted to kill him. He stood fast against all of that. But i think i dont know how much self awareness he had. That is the reason i am hesitating about this. You think of a tragic figure. Tragic figures you have evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. I think he died thinking he was vindicated and that he had done the right thing. So he would not have seen he was certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to to get the nomination again. I think he wouldve thought he was successful, because he was. He really did save his region from being transformed. It wasnt transformed until 1965. He actually could count himself as success in a way for a very very long period of time. Looking at him, i think, if he had been a real statesman he did not have to do everything the radical republicans wanted, but he could have been a great president. If he had made the right choices. Let me give you an example. I think this is very telling about him. At one point in his early career, there was a proposal to bring the railroad to eastern tennessee. Even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad, because if you brought the railroad, people would get to where they were going so quickly, that you would not need inns and taverns. So it is not to put in this and taverns out of business. You cant have the railroad. It makes sense in a way, except towns spring up along real roads. The people had to walk places. When he leaves tennessee he walks. They are talking about dodging mountain lions and so forth. So you have some sense of this lack of vision in a way. laughter and so if you dont know where you are deficient, it is hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure. As i said, he was successful. He actually did stave off the transformation of the south for many many decades. I dont think he would count himself as a tragic figure. Hes also somebody that would want the 14th miles to go to a lecture. In the snow. You talked about a little bit as family when he was young. Tell us more about his family life as he became an adult. He had his wife. She helped him and taught him to read and write. We dont really know that much about her. She was an invalid for many years. She did not accompany him to the white house. She did not stay with him and the white house most of the time. His daughter served as the first lady, most of the time, because she was ill. He was someone who seemed consumed by work. He was out giving speeches all the time. He was running for office. He was plotting and planning. You dont get a sense that much of his family life other and that he was married. He had three sons and a daughter. One of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. He was an alcoholic. That was a great tragedy in his life. I talk a little bit about that in the book. A reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned. There was talk that he had had children with her. There is no proof of that. The only thing is that she he buys her and she is about 16 years old. And she has two children. She is listed as black. Their children are listed as milano. They are mixed race kids. People talked about that. That that was possibly true. People criticize me about mentioning that, although a person someone has written a book about johnson other articles have talked about it as well. I thought, here is a person who is he has an enslaved person in his household as a younger. At that it was important to mention that even as a possibility. Out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of enslaved girls of the time period, because he could have been. We dont know that he was. I dont think we are talking about a person as a slave owner, you have to talk about all of the aspects of. That not just buying and selling people. We dont get a sense of, again, this is in comparison to jefferson where you have lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters. Grand children, all those kinds of things. People commented on him. One thing that people did say that he like children quite a bit. He was good with children. They liked him. One of the people who was the son of a person one of his slaves said that he even would balance children on his knee. He liked children. It is it is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. He was able to be apparently childlike with children, but you dont get a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. We have time for one more question. We may not want to answer this. Have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded, and vastly rearranging the last half of the 19th century . Sure. Yes. I think he could have. He would not have had a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything the republicans wanted to do. One of the things that he did do, that i try to convey or talk about in the book is that his recalcitrance gave aid and comfort to southerners. People said in letters or comments, people said we would have accepted anything, in the immediate aftermath of the war, we would have accepted anything, any terms, but he gave us hope of a white mans government. So we knew to hold out. I think the role that he played, i think it is the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. If he had not so strenuously opposed voting rights, if he had not sabotaged efforts to bring about land reform, this is not to say that the selfwouldve rolled over, but when you have the enemy down, prostrate, youve got them down, that is when you impose terms and move forward. Numerous people said his actions emboldened them. To be recalcitrant. To pass the black coats. To sort of tempt down the any move for transformation. It would have not been the land of milk and my honey. The south will not have accepted blacks as equal citizens, but it would not have been as bad as it was. That lessening of the problem, any lessening of the oppression i think, we have made a big difference. Yeah. I have thought about it. I do think his particular brand of particular leadership was toxic. It is important for us now to think about where we are, to go back. That is the importance of history. We rewind and go back and see how this got started and where we began to go wrong, and what kinds of remedies that we need to take. I think it couldve been different. History is all about contingencies, and we ended up with the person who was Strong Enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union, but because of his own personal character, the character issue, he was unable to see through the transformation of the south, because to him, it was against everything that he believed. Please join me in thanking annette gordonreed. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 1 pm eastern, we will mark the 57th anniversary of the march on washington with the nbc news broadcast, the American Revolution of 63, which aired less than one week after the august 28th 1963 march and dr. Martin luther king jr. s i have a dream speech. On sunday at 2 30 pm, filmmaker john discusses his book screening reality. A documentary filmmakers and how reimagined america. It explores the history of nonfiction film and television from the late 19th century Thomas Edison films to 24 century reality tv. At 4 pm on real america, we will feature to programs from cspan archives on civil rights leaders starting with writer James Baldwin at the National Press club in 1986 on racism in america. Followed by a 1992s eastern american profile interview with former congresswoman surely chisholm. Also, at 6 pm on american artifacts, look at women in congress with house of president , matthew and curator fairer elliott using artifacts and photographs from jeannette in 1917, stories about market watch American History tv this weekend on cspan three. Up next on American History tv, robert mary, former
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