What we haven’t talked about yet is the animus, the racial hatred that motivated Johnson,
and the comparisons to Trump.
But lay out that period and how he was trying to continue the disenfranchisement of black
people and of freed slaves, freed enslaved people.
Yes, absolutely.
You know, there is some misconception, advocated even by Mike Pence in a recent op-ed, that
Johnson was simply continuing President Lincoln’s policies towards the South.
What Johnson did was basically endanger the result of the Civil War, which was emancipation.
He allowed Southern state governments to pretty much issue Black Codes that would put black
people back to as close a state to slavery as possible.
There was racial terrorism, “outrages,” as they called it then, against a freed people
throughout the South.
People were being murdered.
In one case, Johnson personally intervened to make sure the man responsible for it would
get off scot-free.
And he kept interfering in the Reconstruction plans of Congress.
Now, under President Lincoln, the federal government had established the Freedmen’s
Bureau to oversee this transition from slavery to freedom in the South.
When that bill to extend the life of the bureau came before Johnson, he vetoed it.
There was another bill, the civil rights law, which — the first civil rights law ever
passed in United States history, to ensure the protection of the persons and property
of freed people, who were being attacked with impunity by former Confederates and Southern
elites.
Both cases, Johnson vetoed those laws.
And he was, in a way, really guided by this idea that the United States should remain
what he called a white man’s country.
And that kind of very crude racism guided Johnson.
This notion that if you would extend some of even the most basic citizenship rights
to the formerly enslaved, that you were somehow taking away rights from whites, that’s a
very pernicious logic that has motivated racists in this country since then.
And in that sense, I would say that if you look at the scene immediately after the Civil
War in the South, the Republicans in Congress had no choice but to intervene and to rein
in Johnson in his very sort of destructive way of completely undermining the results
of a very hard-fought war, which was basically emancipation and the end of slavery.
But, ultimately, he was not convicted, by just one vote, because the Senate needed a
two-thirds majority to remove him, correct?
Yes.
Johnson came very close to being convicted.
There was seven Republicans, moderates, who voted to let Johnson go scot-free, if he promised
not to interfere in Reconstruction again.
And they were given that assurance.
But one of those votes belonged to Edmund Ross, a senator from Kansas, extremely corrupt,
who had bought his way, literally, into the Senate through bribery.
And unfortunately, he was put in John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage as a courageous man
who voted his conscience.
Now, we know that book was probably ghostwritten, but it went out under JFK’s name.
And I think part of it may be to appease Dixiecrats at that time.
But it has lent a very — it has sort of propagated a false view of history, especially
the history of Reconstruction.
Unfortunately, Mike Pence, in that editorial in The Wall Street Journal that I referred
to, picks up on this theme that Edmund Ross was a profile in courage.
We know now, through the work of historians like David Stewart, who has written on the
impeachment of Johnson, that in fact Edmund Ross was bribed for his vote.
So he was not a profile in courage; he was a profile in corruption.
And for the Republican Party today to bring up both, you know, a defense of Johnson and
portray Ross as an honorable person is astounding for the party of Lincoln, for the party of
Thaddeus Stevens and the radical Republicans who led the charge for the impeachment of
Andrew Johnson.