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Should
Andrew Johnson have been impeached?
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Andrew Johnson
was the first American president ever to be impeached. He
escaped conviction and removal from office by a single vote.
Was Johnson's only crime,
as many white Southerners insisted, a principled defiance
of vengeful and fanatic Republican radicals? Or was he a
villain, as his critics charged, who undermined efforts
to protect the civil rights of the freedmen and who fueled
Southern resistance to Reconstruction? |
From an impoverished childhood,
Johnson succeeded against enormous odds in raising himself up
to the highest office in the land. He was truly a self-made man.
He was born in 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to illiterate
parents. At the age of three, his father, a janitor, died. At
ten, Johnson was apprenticed to a tailor, but at the age of fifteen
he ran away to poor, rocky east Tennessee. He then married and
opened a tailor shop. He never attended a single day of school.
At the age of twenty-one, he entered politics. He was elected
alderman, mayor, state senator, congressman, governor and U.S.
Senator. A Democrat, he championed the common man against planter
and banking and poor east Tennessee against the more fertile western
lowlands.
Declared Johnson:
Some day I will show the stuck-up
aristocrats who is running the country. A cheap purse-proud
set they are, not half as good as the man who earns his bread
by the sweat of the brow.
The only Southern senator to remain
loyal to the Union during the Civil War, Johnson served as military
governor of Tennessee after Union troops took over the state.
In 1863, Johnson openly called for the abolition of slavery. Because
Johnson was a staunch unionist and a Democrat, Lincoln chose him
as his running mate in 1864 in order to broaden his base of appeal.
Lincoln's assassination made Johnson president.
At first, Johnson adopted a harsh
attitude toward the South, declaring that "traitors must
be impoverished....They must not only be punished, but their social
power must be destroyed." He offered rewards for the capture
of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate officials and when he
declared an amnesty, he announced that leading Confederates would
have to appeal personally to him for a pardon. Soon, Johnson's
position softened. He pardoned 13,000 Confederate officials whom
he had earlier labeled traitors, restoring their property and
political rights. The Southern state proceeded to elect many of
these ex-Confederates to state office. Others were named to leadership
positions in state militias. Nine were elected to the U.S. Congress,
including Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate Vice President.
Encouraged by the President's
actions, Mississippi refused to ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing
slavery, South Carolina refused to repudiate its Civil War debts,
and several Southern states refused to condemn their acts of secession.
One state convention declared that its was a "Government
of White People, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive
benefit of the White Race." Soon, Johnson began directly
battling Republican members of Congress. He vetoed every civil
rights bill passed by Congress, opposed the fourteenth amendment,
and used his executive powers to obstruct Congressional Reconstruction.
The fact is that Johnson, despite
his opposition to secession was also a lifelong Southerner and
a Democrat, who was a committed supporter of slavery, white supremacy,
and of states' rights. "This is a country for white men,"
he declared in 1865, "and by God, as long as I am President,
it shall be a government for white men." A deeply bigoted
man, he was determined to stop Congressional Reconstruction in
order to prevent "the subjugation of the States to negro
[sic] domination."
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