of thescussion was part annual lincoln forum in gettysburg, pennsylvania. it is my pleasure to introduce our second speaker for the morning, annette gordon-reed . professor gordon-reed is the charles wharton professor of american legal history at harvard law school. she is also a professor of .istory in the college of arts her first foray into riding produced lost at sea which was written when she was seven. she is an overachiever. since then she has authored or co-authored six historical settings including the hemming'' of monticello which was a winner of the pulitzer prize. acclaimed book also won 15 additional awards including the writer douglas prize. andrew johnsonof johnson, the subject of her talk ass morning, was praised it isantly written and not available today. you will have to order it, but i do have her most recent book and that is co-authored. it is titled the most blessed of patriarchs, thomas jefferson and the empire of the imagination. she will be available for a few minutes after her presentation to sign autographs, sign books for you. one of myp me welcome favorite authors, annette gordon-reed. [applause] prof. reed: thank you. it's great to be here. last night was fabulous, talk about stanton and the energy of the place. i'm usually in a room full of people who are enthusiastic about or interested in, or obsessed about thomas jefferson. and it is strange to be in a room with people who are interested, obsessed with somebody else. are other people, other subjects, other things, and it was great. i made a facebook post about it and said now i know what we must look like to other people. [laughter] prof. reed: it's great. i'm sorry i'm not going to get a chance to be with you, couldn't be here for the whole thing. i have to leave here after this afternoon and i really wish i could be here tonight to hear the talk about grant, the worthy successor to ebrahim lincoln. -- abraham lincoln. and i'm going to talk about andrew johnson, a different category. he is a fascinating topic. i came to write about him because i was asked to write about him for the american president series by the general editor of this series and he asked me -- we were both on the papers of thomas jefferson and he got a letter one morning asking me if i could do this. paul whoa man named did the editing for this series. he and i worked together previously on a book burning can read on for an and jordan's rnan jordan's memoirs. i knew about andrew johnson, understood hubley was and his history, but i never spent much time studying him and i had studied the civil war and reconstruction era, which he really more or less belongs to from a distance. in some ways i find it -- the more heartbreaking part of american history. studying slavery is a serious thing. it can be very difficult, challenging to think about that time going through the farm book, going through letters about sales of people and so forth, but it seems distant, far away. you can become detached from it. at least i can. there are moments where you feel very deep emotion or anger and all kinds of things, or admiration for the people managed to make it through that. the reconstruction era seems even more heartbreaking to me, because it was a time of promise. when you have a higher expectations you think about people performing in free men who came out of slavery and thought now we have a chance to make a new world for ourselves. we will have allegiance to the union, after all, african-american soldiers fought to preserve the union and end slavery. it was a new beginning. you hear about people crowding into the freemen bureau schools to get married, learn to read and write, have their families recognized by law. a time of hope and later on those hopes were dashed. talk abouti want to today is the person who began dashing them in ways. andrew johnson was the successor to abraham lincoln under tragic circumstances. twoit's hard to imagine more different people. before i wrote this book, often ask to participate in presidential surveys, the best resident, the worst president and johnson is usually in the bottom i've. the year my book was published he actually made it to being the worst. i went on the tour and said i have written about the worst president in history buying buchanan and other people. aside from the fact that he was impeached and not convicted, but to me the most infamous part about him was the role he played in the recalcitrance. the notion of trying to bring african-americans into full citizenship, into society after slavery. the title of my talk is presidency of lost opportunities. you some things about the time period, but you think about what would have happened if he had been a different kind of person, if he had -- people would say what would happen if lincoln had lived, would things have been different, how would the country have been in a different position without this man. and i had an opportunity when i was writing about this book that that was going to be my take on it. i had an opportunity to investigate that question for telling his story and asking questions about what do you think this person is doing here. how would things have been different if he had not taken this stance. i begin the book with a quote from frederick douglas, which i think is important. he is talking about the first time he met andrew johnson. he was there and this is what he sees. this inauguration day, i made a discovery about andrew johnson, there are moments in the lives of most men when the doors of their soul are open and unconsciously to themselves, their two characters may be read by the observant eye. it was in such an instance i caught a glimpse of the real nature of this man which all subsequent developments proved true. i was standing aside mr. thomas when i was pointed out to him. the first expression which came to his face, the truth in his heart, was one of bitter content and aversion. saying that i observed him, he tried to assume it a more wasndly appearance, but it too late. it was useless to close the door when all had been seen. second was the bland smile of the demagogue. i turned to miss dorsey and said, what ever andrew johnson may be, he certainly no friend of our race. this turned out to be true to the end degree -- to the nth degree. he was probably understating the claim. johnson was a person who actually despised african american people. when you think about -- it's whento say, the tragedy the fate of the african-american people were being decided, he was at the helm of the government. the person whon did not care for slavery, but he did not like slavery, because he thought that it was bad for the .oor white class andrew johnson, it's interesting you have to find something good to say about people when you write a whole book about them, right? you don't want to just be condemning people. want to be as fair as possible. to his credit, he came from nowhere and he made something of himself. he started out in a poor family, i'm sure many of you may know he didn't really learn how to read until he was a late teenager. his wife taught him how to write after they got married. a had been apprentice to tailor when he and his brother were small boys and he actually ran away from the tailor shop and their ad, you think about the president of the united states, there was a runaway add for them in the newspaper, not the runaway ads for enslaved peoples. you wonder what must've been like to be just above the bottom of the run and to have people , and people that you did not want to see rays, because then you might think you would be at the bottom, too. so, this age old problem in the have of poor whites who more in common economically and ,ocially with african-americans siding with the upper classes starts with him. he bade a bunch of noise once he became a politician against the planter class. many people were frightened of him. many white southerners were frightened of him because a was a staunch union person and he was saying these are traitors, treason must be punished. people thought he was going to be an avenger once he ascended to the presidency, but it turns out that once he saw the program that the men who were called the radical republicans, always in the minority, but they had enough support from moderate republicans to try to put forth some programs, once he saw that they were going to end slavery, which he conceded would be a good thing, because as i said, he thought that this would --ually help poor whites once he saw they were going to do more than that to try to transform the south and make it -- not justlace for a place for the elites, but make blacks voting members of society and acting land reform, because that landood ownership was incredibly important, but he thought it was important mainly or whites. land brought independence. land meant if you could have your own -- you could have your own farm and work, you were not going to be dependent upon other people. that's what he wanted for poor whites. -- put him int in opposition to jefferson davis. why are you giving this land to people. why are they working for it like on alldy else? he was, measures, an understanding person about the nature of poverty and the nature of class. he just could not get past the racial question. he believed in the inferiority of blacks. he believed because of that they should either -- he basically said i don't care where they go. but can be emancipated, they're not going to have rights, the same kind of rights that white men would have. he said openly that the united states should be a white man's government. this was not an unusual thing. began a jacksonian and his crib -- began his career as a great worshiper of jackson. it shouldn't be a surprise that when it came to the session, he chose to stand with the union. he was a committed unionists. -- i almostinto his but it was bigger than that, with calhoun. if not a surprise that johnson would take that stance when secession came about and he would remain loyal to the union from tennessee, but that's all he wanted, the union restored, living over, and blacks may be in some condition like serfs, perhaps, who would not have any rights, that they would be -- you bring things back as near to slavery as possible. in fact when the radical republicans began to institute policy, he vetoed every kind of oppose every measure they put in place to try to aid transformman and southern society. the president is not all powerful obviously, but the president is the leader of the country, a symbol of the country. i almost said-- he is in, but whenever office -- so far -- he sends a message about the nature of the society, the society's aspirations. what did it mean at this moment to have a person who was actively opposed to transforming american society at the helm of society? the message he was sending not just to african-american people, but to other whites. people think about race affecting black people or people of color, but it affects whites as well. it sends messages to whites. and the message he sends is incorrect going to change that much. as much as he hated the planter class, he hated lock people more. once he saw that radical republicans were going to change the south, take this people out of power, the people he said he -- part of his -- he made people come to him to ask for pardons. was almost like a humiliation ritual. that part of him that felt looked down upon by the planter itself, at first, but once he began to look at the lay of the land and see where things were headed, he decided to put this evil -- put those people back in place as quickly as possible. reading these things, there are kinds of arguments about the balance of power between president and congress, that's a process. but the main theme or him was white supremacy and how he accomplished that, try to accomplish that, by being as pugnacious as his real biographer describes them, the reallyous president, was interested in the idea of keeping status quo. there are legends of southerners who say things like, we would have accepted whatever terms were offered to us at the beginning. assassination, people talk about people being happy about it, but a lot of people were upset about it. they were frightened because they thought they would enact retribution for the killing of the martyr, so this was not something that was joy without concern what was going to happen. as i said before, they were concerned about johnson because all of the really tough and hard things he was saying about the -- they were surprised when he took this more mellow approach to them. when he stood up to the people in congress who wanted to try to transform the south. . one person said, we would've taken a terms they offered, but he held out hope for a white man's government. that's the real question here. read about conflicts and the problems with congress and so far -- so forth here at it donned of them he was trying to put the people who lead them into work back into power and to accept the union, but keep things exactly the way they were, with black paper as neil -- as near to slavery. one letter said we want to get them back as near to slavery as possible. if there's any question what was going on with all of this, if you read letters, it is pretty clear, many people in the south were wedded to slavery as an institution, but more important in that, they were wedded as johnson was to the idea of white supremacy. and the laws put in place for the slave codes going to the black codes, and eventually the redemption governments come along and an act jim crow. tryingthose things were to bring southern society back to where it was without the mechanism of legalized chattel slavery. that is what andrew johnson gave them hopes they could have. office,president is in being recalcitrant, doing everything he can to thwart the effort to transform society. and then they try to push back by an acting a law that said that he could not remove people without people who had been appointed with consent of senate, could not remove them without permission -- with the approval of the senate. it's an act that was probably unwise, but at the moment, they were desperate, because everything they were doing they were passing legislation. he was vetoing it, they were overriding it. then he was doing things to four to administratively. i think there could have been another article, taking care that the laws were faithfully executed. he was not doing that. he was pushing akin asking people to drag their feet on these things. this is what they came up with. atviolates the law by firing 1 -- we got into a talk last night about the difference between those people. stanton, the champion of african-american rights, a person who wanted to see things can see how they would not get along. it's a shame we don't talk more about people like that, people that had those ideas. a notion -- when i say radical republicans, people don't know who they are, but it's amazing that there were people at the time who actually wanted a different story for america. they were ahead of their time, but were willing to be fair. we don't know about those people -- those names aren't as well known. arealk about people who negative or opposed to ours. but there's also always a possibility and that the main thing -- that's the exciting thing about it, some ways the tragic thing about it. things don't have to happen the way they happen. there could have been a different way during this time period. johnson is not the man to bring this about. he fires stanton. this is their attempt to remove him from office. they impeach him, but it fails in senate. terribly popular among people. impeachment power it is a big deal. i'm doing the will of people. he was not elected, but he was brought along with abraham lincoln. , a toughan amazing thing to do. he survives, but doesn't really survive as the president very much. non-entity after that, makes a return to government after he leaves office as senator, is there for a while and then dies. leftis legacy is one that us with something really terrible. marshall, the case about affirmative action speculates and wonders, what would've happened if things had been different. reason where in this position now is because steps were not taken in the past in order to .ring people forward one of the things we got from andrew johnson's recalcitrance was the 14th amendment. andight thank him of that that is something that everybody has benefited from. what had happened if he went along with the program of the freedmen's bureau and given the power of the presidency, the support of the presidency to move that forward? land reform, if african-american people had been able to have land, not the work of sharecroppers, but ownership. we know what that means to people and their families. and wealth building, the gap between african-americans and intes in terms of income is some ways is shrinking, but the wealth gap of ownership of is gettingd wealth wider. it takes generations for people to get on their feet, for families to get on their feet and build wealth here at if this had started in the 1860's and 1870's, who knows where we may be now. we do know the measures that actually retarded and prevented african-american growth over decades. -- this iserson who the part of his legacy. one hand we have an admirable story about a person who started from nothing and worked his way up, but on the other hand we have a story about the wrong person at the line -- at the was here at abraham lincoln the right person at the right time for the country, somebody who could lead the country .hrough the calamity of war and only had johnson who was not up to the task of leading people at a time of peace and when there could've been a different story. he is the president of lost opportunities because he had a chance, but he didn't take it because of his character, because of the way he was raised , because of his determination to live by the precepts of white supremacy. that's what makes it so tragic. i enjoyed doing the book ultimately, because it really did -- it forced me into a conclusion. forn't have to make a claim why jefferson is important, right? it is easy to you that one, but it's difficult -- sometimes it is hard to see people who do things that are every bit as important -- or have effects that are every bit as large, that you don't actually know that much about the person. ,ut i had to convince people of thing for me,y but he's certainly one of the most influential. we are certainly living under the world of johnson, attitudes of johnson and ways that we livinge -- might not be under the attitudes of other presidents. he represents the real face of the country at that particular moment, and a face we have been trying to change in the decades since his death and we have had some success, but he is certainly somebody who's life i .hink is worth studying between lincoln and grant, he is there and a reminder of what not to do, the way not to be, and sometimes though can be incredibly valuable lessons. with that, i would like to take your questions. [applause] >> thank you. by johnson ever realize that saying the blacks should go back state, he wasssed also pressing the working-class whites? prof. reed: no. that's a good question. he was clever, had arrived, but not a lot of foresight. -- he was against railroads. he started out being against railroads. -- say what would happen to if people were able to get to where they're going so quickly. you're thinking, well, there go, he more places to eventually understood the folly of that when the war came. got toy governor, you've move people different places, so he understood, but there's not a lot of foresight there and he's not alone in this. why have an other people understood that the south remained behind because all people were not educated. no. he didn't see that. good segue,s a because i think you are right about the white supremacy. what also played into johnson as a president, he was chosen partially because of his democratic antecedent and kind of connecting jefferson and jackson, he was a fiscal conservative and small government democrat a must so i don't know if you want to speak to how that hamstrung him as a president in addition to being the wrong person at the wrong time at an expansive era. prof. reed: his vision of applications for the nationalization of the country and he was not prepared for that. act,nted -- the homestead the vision of people with their farms and independent, he thought that would be enough. if you gave people that, things would go forward and you didn't have to make massive changes. the vision was limited in lots of ways and he was attractive to people because of the antecedents and because he remained loyal to the union. this was lincoln's way of saying , well, we are all really together. he didn't want to make it seem as if he was sticking with one side. this was his being expansive, but he picked a person to -- he obviously could not have known what was going to happen, but it was a mistake. >> i was thinking about frederick douglass' oration at the lincoln memorial in 1876, so we have had lincoln as president and then johnson as president, frederick douglass spends a lot did thetalking about -- frederick douglass say anything after what you have told us once johnson was president about how he felt about johnson and where he was going, the direction he was going? >> only of the critical things. it was no reassessment of him. douglas, as you know, had -- was off and on on lincoln, and he basically said at the end he was the only person her -- only person who treated me like a human being, even though he was impatient with some of his tactics, but he wasn't in office. it's people on the outside agitating for things, not the person who has to make the decisions, it sometimes tough to understand what people are doing, but people -- he did not change his assessment of andrew johnson. dr. john fill in from washington, d.c. and i say that because i'm going to ask you a washington related question. prof. reed: washington the city? >> yes. he survived i one vote by edmund in your research were you able to determine if ross really voted his conscience or he was bought off or came under the influence of his former ewing, or were you able to determine if he --lly was a i wasn't.: no, i talk about the charges that there were instances where off,e were bought influence, but no, i wasn't able to find anything definitive about that. people were afraid of ben wade. if he had not been -- if he had been moved, his successor was somebody a lot of people were scared of and that probably played into this as much as anything else. who is next. the devil you know is better than the one you don't. i guess they knew ben wade, too, who was a radical and somebody who championed lack rights. -- black rights. veteran memberar of the cleveland roundtable. we had a debate last year, lincoln's biggest mistake. it was hisargin selection of vice president in -- i live 15't miles from johnson's house. i have been there several times, and if he hadn't been president i would have never gone, but i like to jump to another subject, which frank touched upon in the beginning today, and that is the fact, we have 47 new members. i talked to a couple of them. i was trying to find out if frank was -- where they found out about us and why they joined. .wo of them had a question i'd like you to deal with it. -- so fewere so many black members here. i belong to the cleveland roundtable for 26 years, i'm a founding member of the grant association and we just don't have african-american members. how can we encourage these people -- this is a significant part of their history and yet they don't seem to want to join us, why? prof. reed: well, it's a good question. i ask the same question about the early american republic. i think it's a very painful subject for african-americans. i cannot speak for all african-americans, but i am that it is painful and i do know that most of the -- a tremendous amount of interest in the civil rights era, the second civil rights era, the point at which people began to have action and move -- although people are moving during this time as well, i just think it is a painful thing, to talk about or discuss matters that are in ofr family, the subject painful memories and so forth. i think it's necessary for people to be involved in history and in this matter as well. i think it is really tough. i don't want to say too soon. is it too soon? >> 150 years? prof. reed: from urban that what when they ask joe -- he thought of the french revolution, he said it is too soon to tell. years in terms of history is not a long time, that's a blink of an eye. -- theya lot of it worry about how it's going to be received. chat well.g from this may be a tangent. i was leaving charlottesville one day and i looked over and saw a bunch of evil in gray uniforms, and hoop skirts, and i was terrified for a second. i know that this was in the 2000's. you know, this is not the civil war. they are not real confederates, -- that whole era is >> i know, but i don't have a great uniform. you are not scary, but you don't know how you're going to be received. we are new at this. when i went to the movies when i was a little girl, we had to sit in the balcony. , thereent to the doctor was a an office for us and one for white people. we are just beginning the process of any kind of reconciliation. any kind of understanding. so i would just say be patient. >> i won't be around in 100 and 50 more years of. prof. reed: thank you. thank you for asking. >> during the. -- during the period of reconstruction you see racially -- footer intimidation, and your research did you find any evidence that president johnson or anybody in courage --tration of encouraged that intimidation or violence? i did not find any evidence he encouraged it, but he deftly did nothing about it. people told him what was going on and that didn't concern him. i think that is the principal difference. when people say lincoln had a --ciliatory policy during toward confederates as well, he's trying to bring them back into the fold so he's doing conciliatory things. i don't think -- if lincoln was lincoln, i don't believe he would have acquiesced to the torrent of violence that was visited upon african-americans after that. eric boehner, his work is written about, you're coming into texas seeing bodies floating down the river, coming into a town where there's 28 people hanging from trees, just carnage. if lincoln heard those kinds of things, i think if he was that you're people here -- that you are interested in, he would've done something, johnson didn't. but i don't know that he would've encouraged somebody to go do that. >> i don't always agree with them, but in and interview recently i heard george will say he thought lincoln was jefferson's greatest student. what do you think about that? prof. reed: he understood that you had to use america's creek to get this thing back together again and say, now we have a new birth of freedom, and so forth. in that sense i think he was, because of the way he used jefferson's words to write a new script for america, and you couldn't have a better lesson and more important lesson than that one. >> i'm the author of the lincoln passed to -- in the course of reading comments to marry lincoln, she quotes mary lincoln as warning a blink and not to trust andrew johnson, .hat he is a danger and and then lincoln issues is terms for the southerners to return gain their forgiveness, if you will, and then the booth was a highlyich organized operation into which the confederacy poured a great deal of money quarterbacked by jefferson davis via robert e lee. do you think that operation, as efficient as it was, intended to kill andrew johnson, that he would have survived? prof. reed: i talked a little bit about this in the book. i don't know. it's too far off. i don't know enough about that to make a claim about the notion that -- the suggestion was that johnson may have been in on this and he was targeted, but really not targeted. i don't know. >> johnson was being impeached or convicted i one vote. they tried to convict him, as i understand it, because they pass that law saying the senate could have a say in who his cabinet was. wasn't that considered unconstitutional? prof. reed: later it was. it took a while. >> but it didn't have to do anything with his acquittal? prof. reed: no. >> thank you. prof. reed: only in the sense that people thought it was a bad idea later on. >> i'm not sure i want to say this -- prof. reed: oh, go ahead. >> yet. i want to respond to the united states colored troops. i am a reenactor. i had relatives who fought in war, don't ask for their names, but that's part of what happened to our family. -- thing we have seen is between the colored reenactors and white reenactors, a lot of times there is a lot of animosity. and that's based on the way the leadership is a structured in those reenactors. we know for example that in the civil war, the officers were white officers and when we go to some of these reenactors, the generals, colonels, so on are all white officers. a lot of the black reenactors, they get try it -- they get tired of that. prof. reed: so they basically reenact what was going on. >> yep. that's a real issue. i think then when we talk about why african-american reenactors don't want to participate at in some of the units, i think we need to look at this from a -- prospective. and a person would've thought that white supremacy is still a subtle message within the whole reenactment organization. prof. reed: i'm glad you said that. i'm not a reenactor. it never would have occurred to me that that would be a problem, but you basically say this is 1864, so were going to act like it, and there's a lot that goes along with it that is not very not very pleasant. >> i really like your presentation. >> you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming every weekend. -- follow usitter on twitter for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. >> -- was established in 1974 with the mission to better understand drug abuse and addiction. in addition, it focuses on treatment, prevention, and educating the public about the risks and societal costs associated with drug abuse. next, drug abuse --"drug abuse: meeting the challenge," a half-hour film produced in 1987 to highlight the most recent findings.

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