Abraham Lincoln before the war's end. Before it sputtered out after 1876, however, Reconstruction had not only introduced terms like "carpetbagger" and "scalawag;" it also saw the beginning of the Ku Klux Klan and the only impeachment and trial of a President in American history, that of Andrew Johnson in 1867.3 For a century after Reconstruction, its memory was a central feature of the politics of the South, and for that same century black Americans were relegated to the second class citizenship, nearly outside the protection of the laws, which Reconstruction itself had been intended to prevent. Why did it fail, and why was that failure so colossal? Those are the central questions addressed by this report, with an emphasis on the political aspects and especially the presidency and impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Andrew Johnson was a Southern Democrat who remained loyal to the Union cause when the Civil War broke out. Abraham Lincoln chose him as his Vice President in 1864 as a "fusionist" gesture intended to begin the process of binding and healing the wounds of the war. Like the second President Johnson a century later, he was elevated to the Presidency by an assassin's bullet, not by the ballot box. Thus, from the beginning, he faced the political problem of having no mandate from the people. On the other hand, he could count on the support Americans have generally given to Vice Presidents in his situation, especially in the emotional aftermath of the Civil War's end. His political success or
3Over a century later, in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned after a House Committee voted to recommend articles of impeachment, but before the whole House actually voted on them. failure would be shaped in part by his own qualities and abilities as a politician and statesman, and in part by the political situation which he inherited. It is to the latter that we will turn first.
Lincoln, a flexible, pragmatic, and shr...