President lincolns assassination. This was recorded at the Philadelphia Free library in 2011. Its about an hour. Thank you very much. Its wonderful to be here again. I love this venue. Get lots of good questions which we will save time for at the end. This is an interesting occasion for me. This is actually the first time ive been up in front of an audience talking about Andrew Johnson. Forgive me if i say jefferson occasionally. I had to write that when i was writing, i did a spell check in there. Because it was the temptation was quite great. If somebody had told me a number of years ago or any point in my life that i would have written a book about Andrew Johnson, i would have told them they were crazy. Its not that i dont think hes an interesting person. He is an interesting person. For most of my career as a historian ive 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 the 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do dealing with reconstruction. Theres something about it that is maddening to me. And i think what it is, it was a moment of opportunity. When i think of the people in the 17th and 18th century who have very primitive ideas about many, many things in the world, and theres lots of things they dont know, i cannot totally forgive them, but its not as irritating to me, exasperating to me as a period of time when you have photographs, trains, things that are part of the modern era and you feel closer to those people. They seem more like us than someone in the 18th century or the 17th century when im writing about the development of slavery in virginia. So when i read about reconstruction and this moment of hope, it makes me angry. Im able to be detached. The further back you go, but that moment it makes me angry when i think about what could have happened and what did not happen and how close we were, how close the country was to a period of time when you really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making an american really one for everyone. So johnson would not have been my topic of choice. I read about that era because i have to, but i never thought i would actually study it and actually write very much about it. But i got a phone call one morning and telling me that i was going to be getting a letter from him and talking just in general. And i did get this letter from him in which he asked me to write the biography of Andrew Johnson for the american president series, which is a very nice series, a short, concise books about american president s. And they get people sort of sometimes people who actually fit, gary heart did a book, George Mcgovern did lincoln, i think. Theres a mix of historians and nonhistorians looking at these presidencies, telling the basic story but also giving your own sort of individual spin on it. And he asked me to do this to do the johnson book and he figured i would put my individual spin on it. I agreed to do it because author asked me to do it and i had Great Respect for him. I knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. And also because paul was the editor who is also the general series editor for the series was my editor for the book i did with vernon jordan. So this was two friends, you know how that is when friends ask you to do things, who asked me to do and i said, sure i put aside my misgivings. I knew it was a fascinating topic. Theres so much material. Very, very rich. But i wondered if i would be able to curb my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular period of American History and i agreed to do it. And that was many, many years ago. This book is long overdue. I wrote the hemmingsons of monticello and i came back and finished it and im glad that i did. 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. But one thing that people probably do know, in almost every survey of rankings of president s, hes in the bottom five. Since 1997, ive participated in these surveys. Sometimes i look at the results, sometimes i dont. But hes usually in the bottom five. Buchannan is usually the worst. This past year when i didnt participate in the survey, i didnt this time because i was too busy, he made it to the last, just in time for the book. This year hes considered the worst president. Once you get down to that point, its splitting hairs to think about whats the real story with that . How do you write a book about somebody who is judged the worst of anything . Just because someone is the worst or near the worst doesnt mean theyre not important. And thats the first realization i had. This man was president in one of the most pivotal periods of American History. There was a moment when the country could have gone one way or the other way and he had a central role to play in that. It came to me, it hit me that its very important to focus on the life of Andrew Johnson because i really do believe that some of the decisions he made affect us today, the choices he made, the choices he did not make, his attitude, leadership style, all of those things help to make us who we are. For those reasons, you have to Pay Attention to him. I say that history is just not about all the people you like. All the people you love and that you would 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. And he is a person who had that role. Once i made my mind to do this and 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 was it was like during the time that Andrew Johnson lived. Johnson is different from jefferson in many, many ways. The first problem is that johnson didnt learn to write until he was in his late teens. He married early. And his wife taught him how to write. In those days, reading and writing were separate things. There were many, many people who were taught to read, so they could read the bible. But writing was not something that people thought necessarily went together. His parents were illiterate. We know they couldnt write because theres we have marks, we have no record of them writing and people said they were illiterate. And so he didnt become literate until he was a young man. And that poses a problem because even though he learned to write, he was never very comfortable doing it. And at one point later on he mentioned that he had he hurt his arm and that he explained that as a reason he didnt write. Most people think it was because he was very, very selfconscious about it. If you look at the papers of Andrew Johnson, there are many, many more letters to Andrew Johnson, than Andrew Johnson to other people. That poses a problem for a biographer right there. We dont have his inner voice. And with jefferson, you have 18,000 letters that he wrote over the period of his life and other kinds of documents and other things. Even though he remains an enigma to lots of people, theres enough there to craft a sense of what hes thinking, feeling and who he was. Johnson, youre at a disadvantage because we dont really have that to the same extent and the letters that have when hes a young man, show lots of misspellings. And its difficult to wrap your mind it was for me, to wrap your mind around who he was because we dont have the record that you would typically have, but other people who were president s, its just not there. Thats a big problem. Because by dont have lots of his letters and theres not, you know, a huge repository of them or him explaining what hes doing, we dont have lots of stories about him. Theres another biography the principle biographer of Andrew Johnson is a man who unfortunately died last year. I was so hoping to be able to finish this book and to show it to him. Hes the one who went out and wrote the 500page book about johnson and hes covered lots of the territory. My job was to cover some of that same territory more concisely, but to put my spin, my view of johnson onto the picture. But what hes found, people tend to repeat when theyre doing sort of smaller, general biographies of Andrew Johnson. And theres not that much more. There had to be another approach to him. And thats one of the thats where i my expertise or my study of Race Relations and slavery in that period comes in handy. Its interesting to think about the beginning of america and then focusing on a time when america falls apart and has to be put back together again. Im with this start out with this material that is not as voluminous as im typically used to. How did somebody like this go from being illiterate, a person whose parents were very, very poor, to being someone who is at the highest office in the land . So hes born in north carolina. To parents who, as i said, were illiterate. His father died when he was three. His mother was a seamstress. This was a thing that caused a lot of talk. People suggested that maybe Andrew Johnson was not the son of his father. That he was illegitimate. And ive gotten some criticism for mentioning this in the book, but what i tried to do instead of mentioning it, i wanted to talk about the context, to Say Something about how class affected the way people viewed Andrew Johnson from the beginning. Because his mom worked outside the home, people felt free to say things like that about the family. I really doubt if she had been a married, respectable, middle class woman, if those kind of rumors would be openly spoken about during that time period. From the very beginning, its not that he was just poor, its that his family was seen as really, really marginal. And theres a difference between what people would call the deserving poor, the 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. Doesnt improve their circumstances a lot, and it gets so bad that she has to apprentice her two children. Andrew johnson was apprentice to a taylor. He was supposed to be in the apprenticeship until he was 21 years old. Hes 10 years old. His apprentice to a tailor and he runs away. And theres an ad, the language of it i reproduce in the book, basically a runaway servant ad, the kind of thing you would expect to see people more familiar with runaway slaves. Reward everything, capture him, bring him back and well pay you a reward. This is the future president of the United States. This is what happens to him. He runs away. He doesnt come back. He goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor and becomes very, very good at his job. Even as an older man, when hes a politician, he makes suits for people as a gift. Its kind of cool. You think of a president who can make suits. And the sort of gender thing is out the it doesnt matter. Hes a tailor, right . A tailor makes suits. But that was his way of giving gifts to people. It was a practical, very realworld experience that he had so he starts out very, very low. And one of the things i talk about is comparing him to lincoln whom, you know, he unfortunately this is about this business. Its really tough. Lincoln was a tough act to follow, right . On the same surveys that i talked about, hes almost always mentioned as the best. You go from the best to the worst in one terrible moment at fords theatre. Thats what you have. You go from lincoln to Andrew Johnson. He suffers by comparison. Thats part of it. Its not just that he had failings, which we will talk about, but he came after someone who was, you know, amazing to people and in good ways and bad. There were people who hated him. A very towering figure to Andrew Johnson. We have this humble origins that seem to make him in some ways well, it strengthened lincoln. Hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way, empathy, vision and so forth. But i think my take on johnson is that his hard life being looked down upon people, being thought of as trash made him hard in lots of ways. And someone asked me, well, you would think that that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. Sympathetic to slaves. But, no, the other side is, what that can do is to make you look for somebody to look down on. Theres got to be somebody below you. And i think he took comfort, perhaps, in saying, you know, like many poor southern whites. I may live in a shotgun shack. I may not have very much. But im white. And thats better than these people over there. If you want to maintain that, you have to make sure theres always somebody over there or under there who you can look down upon. And i think thats that seems to be the tack he took in life to the determent his own personal demons ended up affecting the course of history of the United States of america. While hes in the tailor shop, hes a very smart kid, smart person. He listened to men who would come to the tailor shop to read to the tailors. Think about sort of civic engagement. You know there are people in the shop who cant read and a man would come and read and he would read a book of speeches. And johnson loved speeches. He kept the book, the guy gave him the book he loved it so much. And any time 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 kind of do the equivalent of taking it outside, but verbally. They decide to invite people to watch them argue. And it becomes clear that he has a talent. And his talent is public speaking. And that also links him to lincoln because lincoln was also a good speaker as well, but he was a different type of speaker. He could be very, very rough speaking. He was sarcastic and aggressive and people hadnt seen anything like that it. His fame grew. People suggested that he might stand for office, which he did. And he was very, very ambitious. Good businessman. He made the right kinds of investments and he actually bettered himself financially and he went into political and he climbed the ladder from alderman, mayor, every rung he was on it up to the presidency. Its 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 can be someone hard on him in the book, theres no question that he was an extraordinary person. I think one of the my editor said that hes done all of these. Hes edited all of the ones that have been done so far. And he said all of these people are extraordinary, to make it to the presidency. Its not like somebody is sitting around one day and says, okay, you know, im going to the white house. Theres something there. Other people see something in that person and the person sees something in himself, so far only him, only he is involved in this, that says i should go for that position. I should be at the top. And he was like that himself. So the book describes his ascent and how he fashioned himself, tried to fashion himself after his hero, andrew jackson. He comes of age during the 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, very providing progressive, very populous in a way. But as you know, populism has this sort of theres a double edged sword. Lots of times, populist are in favor of measures that you would think would be popular, giving poor people land, he want Public Education. He was a champion of Public Education thinking about back on his own life, at how he prooifed he was. He wanted a better shot for people. The catch was, he only wanted that for whites. He was for the homestead act, as i said. But when reconstruction came and there was a time to give land reform, the republicans in congress wanted land reform in the south, to give the former enslaved people, to give them land to buy them to give them the kind of independence that johnson and others understood was needed, thats what land meant. If you dont work for people, you can grow your own food, you can subsist on your own plot. He wanted that for whites but he didnt want that for blacks. So this populist part, there was the racist part of it, inhibited his thoughts about how this might be expanded to include everybody in america. So he makes his political run at thinking of himself as a champion of the common man. He, as i said, is for the union. He had no truck whatsoever with secessionists. And he sort of alienated many of even before the war, he alienated people like Jefferson Davis because of his support for the homestead act. The southern grantees did not like the idea of giving poor white people land. They said they thought they wouldnt have used the term, they thought this is like welfare. Why are you giving these people, you know, land below market rate . Why dont they work for it or why do they deserve this . But he was all for it. And so from the beginning, it furthered his antipathy toward the southern planters. He came up making enemies all along the way. Lincoln, he gets on the ticket because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south that there was a future. That the north and the south had a future together. And so it was a symbolic gesture of unity for him to pick a southern from the border state. Hes from tennessee. He had moved to tennessee as a young man. To put them together and say, look, even though the south isnt participating in the election, theyre saying, look, im willing to have a southerner on the ticket. One of these days we can get back together again. He ends up on the ticket. Lincoln replaces hamlin from maine. There he is as Vice President , someone who started out as illiterate, is the Vice President of the United States and 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. And reading these kinds of things, and i managed to feel a bit sorry for him. But then at the inauguration, hes drunk. He comes to the inauguration, it was kind of fun to write. I had a lot of fun doing this. He had been ill and in those days, i think they thought whisky was a cure for everything. Maybe people think that now. And he drank too much whisky. Theres this spectacle. It would amazing if somebody like that would have happened today. You can imagine it on youtube, cable tv, everything. People said, see, we told you, this is those you let those kind of people into those kinds of positions, this is what theyre going to do. Lincoln nevertheless stood by him. People said you should dump him. Lincoln said, no, no, andy is not a drunk. Hell be fine. And of course lincoln was killed not long after that. And he ascends to the presidency. People in the north were traumatized. People in the south may have been happy about it but they were not celebrating about it because they had just been defeated in war and they were in no position to gloat about Something Like that. It was a traumatic, traumatic time period and theres johnson who has to rise to the occasion. And during those days, immediately after lincolns death, he does rise to the occasion. People who said, the performance as Vice President is gone away. He knows what to do symbolically. He rises to the occasion. And theres a honeymoon for him for a time period until they get into reconstruction. This is the part of the story that sort of when i said i try to avoid all of this, when they begin to realize that he is not going to have any support whatsoever about any kind of rights for the freed men after the civil war. He only grudgingly accepted abolition. He was not a largescale slave holder. He did have slaves. He was a supporter of slavery. He said, everybody has to admit that white people are superior to blacks. But he would say, we should try to raise them up. But as we raise them up, we should raise ourselves even further so the distance would always be the same. That was his plan. And he said, this is a white mans government and it will remain a white mans government. When somebody says that out loud over and over and over again and you have a policy from the republicans in congress and theyre saying, black votes, land reform, some sort of political life for black people, you realize they were logger heads and you realize thats what its all about. His vision about bringing the south back into the union did not encompass anything about changing black peoples status beyond taking them out of legal slavery and thats where the battle was joined between him and the republicans and that lead to his impeachment. One person who was a biographer of johnson started the book out lamenting the fact that when people write about johnson, all they seem to care about is reconstruction and impeachment. But mainly reconstruction. But then he says, you know what, theres not much else. He had this grand plan to talk about the other aspects of Andrew Johnsons presidency, but its reconstruction. We buy alaska during this time period. Theres some problems in mexico. Those this morning were handled by his secretary of state. Most of his time was spent on reconstruction and trying to thwart the efforts of the members of the republican members of congress who wanted to transform the south. He believed that the south had not there was nothing, that did not exist. And because i didnt exist, once the war is over and you bring everybody back in, sort of like rewinding the tape, except the slavery part. The south goes back to exactly what it was before fort sumpter, before there was any conflict at all. Thats a tough position. You have 4 Million People who had been freed at this point. What do you do with them . There were people that realized that called for something but he said no. The constitution does not allow what youre trying what youre attempting to do. Anything he was very much, he said, a proponent of the constitution. He saw himself as the guardin of t the constitution, but he had a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. Things that he liked were constitutional. Things that he didnt like were unconstitutional. The constitution clearly says that congress has the right to set rules for the governance and anything having to do with the district of columbia. When Congress Gives black people the right to vote, he vetoes it and says its unconstitutional. That is in the constitution. This is not some kind of interpretation of it. So you get a sense of what constitutionalism means to him, if i like it, its constitutional. If i dont, its not. So he thought that he was in the right protecting the constitution. The republicans thought, wait a minute, something has to change here. We have to transform the south. You cant have people wondering around there in some status. I dont know what he thought what they wanted other than they were supposed to be under the domination of whites. And he does something that really surprises people. You remember i said he hated the southern grantees, the plantation owners and wanted to punish them. He thought they had led the south into war. He had this strange notion that planters and slaves were in a conspiracy against poor white people. He blamed them for the war, that the blacks and the enslaved them and their masters. They were trying to keep poor whites down. And he at first he talked about punishing these people. But then he realized my greater enemy is not those southern people, my enemies are the people in the north, the republicans who want to change the south. And what he opted to do instead of punishing them, was to put them back in power. Not only does he try to thwart the radical republicans, the socalled radical republicans, he puts all of the people who had been he helps to put back into power all of the people who had been in power before the war, the very people whom he called traitors and said he wanted to punish them. He brought them back. He didnt require the oaths that people had to swear to. He dispensed with those. The oaths they said loyalty oaths. He dispensed with a lot of those and he put them back into power. Finally the republicans get angry about this and they impeach him which was and remains a very drastic remedy, according to most americans. They see it as a drastic remedy. Weve only done this twice in history, to try to remove a president from office. He survives a conviction in the senate by one vote. People think that really we could talk a little bit about this, in the questionandanswer period. But 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, the person who would have taken over from him was considered to be a wildey wildeyed radical. He believed in women voting which made him like he was from mars. What came after what would have come after him and the fact that he didnt have very long to go on his term, and some other things, he made some deals with people about this. They voted he escaped conviction by one vote. Hes nevertheless sort of a ruined president after that. He keeps vetoing bills. Hes overridden he has hopes of making a comeback. But he wanted 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 consecutive people, wherever they lived, regardless of party, to ban together and take back the country. I didnt work. He leaves office. He cant get the the democrats dont the democrats at this time, theyre not democrats as you know now. The parties have sort of flipped from where they were. They didnt trust him and the republicans surely werent going to have him. So he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. He runs for office. Hes unsuccessful at first but he then is returned to the senate and he sees this as a vindication, that he was right all along. He goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out and hes there only for a few months and he dies of 1875 of a stroke on a trip back to tennessee. Its an amazing story of a person who is as i said, and probably will be forever close to us in some really, really significant ways just because he didnt write, we dont have his voice very much. Theres some question about his formal papers, how many of these things were probably prepared by other people. But we certainly dont have the kind of daytoday statements about statements from him, few anecdotes from family about him, the Andrew Johnson homestead has a website that has information about him as a slave holder. But not again, not huge reams of material about this person who i think has had one of the most significant effects on American Life of anybody during American History, even though hes judged as the worst president. Thurgood marshall in one of his opinions, one of his dissents, i believe it was, he said that, you know, if america had done what it was supposed to have done during this time period, he didnt cite Andrew Johnson, but he talks about the reconstruction period as a point of sort of lost opportunity. And i think that you cant blame you cannot blame one person for all the good that happens or all the bad that happens. But a president and this is my approach in the book. A president is the leader of the country, hes a symbolic leader. People in times of crisis, people dont look to the Supreme Court or the congress. Theres too many of them. The president is the energy of the government and the president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership. And the kind of leadership that he exhibited during this time period wasnt enough to make he didnt ruin everything all by himself. But he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done and thats the real tragedy i think of his presidency. But, again, thats why i think more people should know about Andrew Johnson because i really do believe hes helped to make us who we are today. Think about land reform. The difference in wealth, the production of wealth in the black community if former slaves had had land, most of them, instead of being sharecroppers. The difference between owning your own property and renting it from someone else. People say, yes, we got something good, we got the 14th amendment. About all of the laws that congress was passing, civil rights bill, all those things, forced them into passing the 14th amendment and thats a good thing. But think about all it will losses, if he had not opposed black political rights. If blacks had been exercising electrical rights from the 1860s or had land from the 1860s as opposed to what happened, he set us back, set the country back and has set black people back tremendously because of his the failure of his leadership. He wouldnt say it was a failure. But from the way he exercised his leadership. He said that he wanted to preserve the country as a white mans government and he was 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 Dunning School of historians who championed johnson as a hero, who staved off negro rule in the south, that Historical School existed into the 20th century. There was a book written called black reconstruction and he set the record straight very, very clearly. Once he did that, other people began to take a second look at reconstruction. The people who were Congress People if you see birth of the nation, you know, they have blacks in congress, theyre eating chicken and bare feet. These are some of the most educated people. These were really, really educated men, talented people who were in these offices. And that whole birth of a nation Dunning School business really propped up Andrew Johnson because it made him look like his attitudes were the correct ones. After du bois and others, people began to take a take a look at reconstruction and understood he was more of a problem than any kind of solution. Im glad even though it took me a long time to do it and its difficult to write about someone who, you know you can hold responsible for lots of bad things that happen and you have to try to have enough detachment to present his good points as well as his bad points and i hope ive managed to do that. I do think i make very strongly the case that hes a figure that we cannot ignore, that he was there at too important a time period for him to be unknown to most people because i think we can explain a lot about who we are by looking at his life and looking at, you know, the kinds of things that he did during reconstruction. The trajectory of his life is an american story, in good ways and bad ways. With that, i would like to take your questions. [ applause ] thank you very much. Weve got hands already. Fantastic. Right here in the fifth row. Do you see any parallels between the take back the Country Movement at Andrew Johnsons time and the tea party and sarah palin . Well, you know, parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution. And some people say too much. Its almost like a sacred text. Any time we are in trouble or want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document. Even people on the left, not as much as i think they should, people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. I think its different because its different this in sense. Theres been a war almost 500,000 people died. Both regions, certainly the south, decimated. This is not life during wartime. In a kind of wartime. We have wars going on overseas. But this is hyperbole, i think, at this point, taking a country back. The country hasnt gone anywhere you know what i mean . These people are in they took up arms against one another and fought one another and those were really serious life and death kinds of issues. Theyre using the rhetoric, but its not to my mind as serious as the time period that those people were in. Its more its rhetoric. Its slogan. Im not saying that people dont have legitimate concerns. But when johnson were talking about life and death certainly in the south. If you read eric phoner, the big book on reconstruction and i relied on that in pointing me to materials about some of the things that were going on. This guy talked about going to a village in texas, a town in texas, and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men, women and little children, blacks, just the rivers with bodies floating down them. This was after the war is over and people turned on blacks and tried to reassert their control. They were playing for keeps back them. I dont know what this is. It doesnt compare to that, i dont think. Even though they might think it does. Another question in the fifth row, fourth row. Thank you for coming to the free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. Could you talk a bit about education. Ive never quite understand why the radical republicans didnt press and push much more resources into providing education for the free slaves. They did. They tried to do that. The Freedom Bureau there, the poignant stories about people little kids sitting next to grown people. Everybody trying to thats what they tried to do. Those schools were attacked. Night riders, people who tried to be teachers in them. There was a lot of a backlash because they didnt want people the folks who they didnt want blacks in schools. They wanted them in the fields. They definitely tried to do that. The schools, the howard higher education, Howard University started by general howard and they tried to do that. But in lots of these little places, they were no in control of all of this. And it becomes even more sketchy for blacks. They tried, but there was lots of opposition and violent opposition in many, many places. Third row. When did johnson free his slaves, or did he free them . After the end of the war, they become free. Not before them. Right here. What do you think about johnsons argument that succession was void well, you know, lincoln said that too, that its illegal, that it was illegal. The reason he said it, if it is illegal, the president exercises his power to quell rebellions. If ceaa matter of a the separation of powers, it was the political argument, but, again, lincoln died, so we dont know what he would have done, or what he really thought. For him he said that was an abstraction. Johnson took it very, very much to heart. He was literal minded on that. What i think is that well, part of me if they thought they could leave, they left. Jefferson davis did set up a government you cant its hard for me to pretend that they were not real what they had wasnt a real thing. And i think congress, they should have been governed as territories and i think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct them. So i understand the legal argument about it but real realistically, they set up their own stopped participating and they went their own separate way for a time period. Yeah, right here in the third row. Well, what was the base of support, was for johnson . After all, he was thought of as a traitor by the southern die hearts and as an run reliable president by the northern abolitionists. Before you meanwhile hes president . While hes president , he didnt have that much support. I mean, he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed. And at this point, he began to he wants to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about by being lenient with the former southern planters. They were still planters. But he tried to butter them up by not punishing them the way he originally said he was going to do. He wanted to build this party, and he wasnt really successful at doing it. Public opinion varied about him. Sometimes the northerners liked him, and sometimes they hated him. Once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction, they uniformly hated him. Thats why he couldnt get a nomination after impeachment nobody wanted to have him back. But he really didnt have very much support. He spent most of his presidency trying to build that, by, you know, currying favor with the southerners and then sometimes appearing lenient to northerners. It didnt work. He pleased nobody. He tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until, you know, he manages at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time. But he was not he was its interesting because he must have been he was a good politician to a degree because he couldnt have come from nowhere to where he went. But once he got into office, it was like he was out of his league. He was out of his depth. So, he ended up not with not very many friends at all. About four rows back in the middle. While were getting the mic there, 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. [ laughter ] tragic figure . You know, this is he didnt i cant find anything about him he didnt seem to have had a visible sense of humor in a way. Theres not a lot of yeah, i would think hes a tragic figure. I mean, im trying to think when you think of tragedy, you think of a hero. You think of somebody who has a grand persona and is sort of brought down. I feel but i do think in a sense hes tragic because he wanted desperately to rise, and he actually did rise. And its an amazing story. I mean, how did you cant read until youre 19 years old and then youre president at some point. Thats the grit, the tenacity which served him well. Thats why he was able to stay committed to union. Tremendous personal sacrifice. He was courageous. He could have been killed. There were people, many, many people who wanted to kill him. He stood fast against all of that. But i think i dont know how much selfawareness he had. Thats the reason im hesitating about this. If you think of a tragic figure, tragic figures, you have some i think you have some evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. I think he died thinking he was vindicated and he had done the right thing. So, he wouldnt have seen i mean, he was certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to i mean, you know, to make it and to get the nomination again. But i think he would have thought he was successful because he was. I mean, he really did save his region from being transformed. This was transformed in 1965, really. So, he actually could count himself a success in a way for a very, very long period of time. Looking at him, i think, you know, if he had if he had been a real statesman and if he had he didnt have to do everything the radical republicans wanted. But he could have been a great president. You know, if he had made the right choices ill give you an example. This is 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. And even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad because if you brought the railroad, people would get to where theyre going so quickly that you wouldnt need n inns and taverns. So, as not to put inns and taverns out of business, you cant have the rr. Well, that makes sense in a way, except except, you know, towns spring up along railroad routes and people wanted to get he walked the people had to walk places. He had no horse. When he leaves tennessee, he walks. He has to walk 70 miles, places and stuff like that. Theyre talking about dodging mountain lions and so forth. You have some sense of this lack of vision in a way. So, if you dont know where youre deficient, its hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure. And, as i said, because 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 tragedy ic figure. Hes also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a lecture. Snowing. In the snow. Yeah. The lady in the middle. You talked about his right here. Where are you . Oh. You talked about his a little bit about his family when he was young. Tell us more about his family life as he became an adult. His wife helped him, as i said, taught him to read and write. He had we dont really know that much about her. She was an invalid for many years and did not accompany him to the white house, did not stay with him in the white house most of the time. His daughter served as the first lady most of the time because she was ill. She 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 than that he was married. He had three sons and a daughter. One of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. He was an alcoholic. And that was a great tragedy in his life. I talk a little bit about, in the book, a reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned, there was talk that he had children with her. Theres no proof that. The only thing is that she he buys her, and shes about 16 years old. And she has two children, you know, who shes listed in the census as black, and her children are listed as milano, meaning theyre mixed race kids. And people talked about that, that that was possibly true. Some people have criticized me about mentioning that, although people have written a book about it and other articles have talked about it as well. I thought, heres a person who was an enslaved person in this house hold, a young girl. I thought it was important to mention that even as a possibility out of deference to her and out of concern for that you paint the picture of the lives of enslaved girls at that time period because he could have been. We dont know that he was. I think when youre talking about a person whos a slave owner, you have to talk about all the aspects of that, not just buying and selling people. So, its not we dont get a sense again in the comparison to jefferson where you have lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters and grandchildren and all those kinds of things and people commented on him. One thing that people did say is that he liked children quite a bit. He was good with children, and they liked him. One of the people who was the son of the person who was enslaved, one of his slaves, said that he even would bounce black children on his knee. You know, he liked children, which 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. Well go to this gentleman right here. No jefferson . You may not want to answer this or even respond to this. But have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded in vastly rearranging events of the last half of the 19th century . Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. And i think he could have. I mean, he wouldnt have had to go a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything that the republicans had wanted to do. One of the things that he did do that i didnt try to convey, that i talk about in the book, is that his rekalscalcitrants g aid and comfort to southerners. And people said, there are letters and comments, people said, you know, 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, he knew to hold out. So, i think the role that he played i think its the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. If he didnt hadnt so strenuously opposed voting rights, if he had not sabotaged efforts to bring about land reform this is not to say that the south would have rolled over and would have but when you have the enemy down, you know, got them down, thats when you impose terms and you move forward. And numerous people said, you know, his actions emboldened them to be recalcitrant, to pass the black codes, to be to sort of tamp down the tamp down any move for transformation. So, it would not have been the land of milk and honey. The south would not have rolled over and accepted blacks as equal citizens, but it wouldnt have been as bad as it was. You know, that a lessening of the problem any lessening of the oppression, i think, would have made a big difference. So, yeah, i have thought about it, and i do think he i think that his particular brand of president ial leadership was toxic. And its important, i think, for us now to think about where we are. To go back thats the importance of history, rewind, to go back and see how this got started and where we got it wrong and what kinds of remedies we need to take. I think it could have been different. History is all about contingencies. And we ended up with a person who was Strong Enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union, but because of his own personal character, a character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of the south because, to him, that was against everything that he believed. Please join me in thanking an annette gordonreed. So, basketball started in 1910. It won its First National championship in 1957 with an undefeated 320 season