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Annette Gordon-Reed

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Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series: The 17th President, 1865-1869 Hardcover – Illustrated, January 18, 2011

by Annette Gordon-Reed (Author), Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Editor), Sean Wilentz (Editor)

3.8 390 ratings

Part of: The American Presidents (42 books)

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A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office

Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office.

Johnson faced a nearly impossible task―to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task. His vision of reconciliation abandoned the millions of former slaves (for whom he felt undisguised contempt) and antagonized congressional leaders, who tried to limit his powers and eventually impeached him.

The climax of Johnson's presidency was his trial in the Senate and his acquittal by a single vote, which Gordon-Reed recounts with drama and palpable tension. Despite his victory, Johnson's term in office was a crucial missed opportunity; he failed the country at a pivotal moment, leaving America with problems that we are still trying to solve.

Part of series

The American Presidents
Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Times Books
Publication date

January 18, 2011
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.56 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0805069488
ISBN-13

978-0805069488
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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth man to ascend to the highest office in the land, is generally regarded by historians as among the weakest presidents. Gordon-Reed has no intention of moving Johnson up in rank (“America went from the best to the worst in one presidential term,” she corroborates). So this is no reputation rescue. Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, takes as her task explaining why we should look anew at such a disastrous chief executive. She reasons he is worth looking at, though her reasoning yields a far from sympathetic look. In a short biography, all bases can be covered, but the author is still left to exercise the tone of a personal essay, which this author accomplishes brilliantly. Her personal take on Johnson is that his inability to remake the country after it was torn apart rested on his deplorable view of black Americans. In practical terms, his failure derived from his stubborn refusal to compromise with Congress in the abiding post-Lincoln controversy over who was to supervise the Reconstruction, the executive or the legislative branch. A failure, yes, but more than that, a failure at an extremely critical time in American history. --Brad Hooper

Review

“In this short and brilliantly written book, award-winning author Gordon-Reed … argues that the nation went from the best President to the worst during this most crucial period of its history.” ―Library Journal

“In a short biography, all bases can be covered, but the author is still left to exercise the tone of a personal essay, which this author accomplishes brilliantly.” ―Booklist (starred review)

“A fair-minded, toned-down portrait of a deeply problematic president who could not rise to the country's challenge after the Civil War.” ―Kirkus Reviews

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Times Books; First Edition (January 18, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805069488
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805069488
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.56 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #126,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #147 in American Civil War Biographies (Books)
- #255 in U.S. Civil War History
- #354 in US Presidents

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3.8 390 ratings

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Annette Gordon-Reed

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Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" and "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." She lives in New York City.

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Glenn R. Springstead

a critical, informative, and concise history of the first President Johnson

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2011

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I enjoyed reading this biography, which is another entry in the presidential biography series started by Arthur Schlesinger and now edited by Sean Wilentz. Gordon-Reed weaves a highly readable narrative from Johnson's improbable rise in local Tennessee politics to his emergence on the national stage as a vocal and courageous opponent of secession, Tennessee war governor, Lincoln's Vice President running mate in 1864, and president in his own right after Lincoln's assassination. Johnson was the first U.S. president to be impeached, and Gordon-Reed spends a good amount of time on the subject.

The book does start abruptly and subjectively, with Gordon-Reed casting Johnson in a negative light. Despite his opposition to secession and initially harsh criticism of Southern planters and rebels in his first days as President, Johnson soon quarreled with "radical Republicans" over Reconstruction in the South and began first to welcome southerners of all persuasions, including those formerly active in the Confederate forces and government, back into the good races of Congress and State offices, and then to oppose attempts by Congress to expand democratic rights to the new freedmen. While Johnson stated most of his objections to Congressional Reconstruction on state's rights, Gordon-Reed points out he also vetoed congressional legislation to award voting rights to African Americans in the District of Columbia, which Congress had Constitutional authority over.

But through much of the book Gordon-Reed handles her subject with more even-handedness. One of the regrettable aspects of Johnson's life is he apparently did not write much and appeared to have few confidants. His wife was often ill or simply very private, and as a result was not able to provide much of a public role during Johnson's time in Washington. Johnson also came into controversy after his impeachment for his role during the trial and executions of Lincoln's assassins as critics maintained he failed to give attention to pleas that the only female conspirator tried for Lincoln's death (Mary Surratt) be spared. After his years in the White House, Johnson was selected by Tennessee to fill a seat in the U.S. Senate, but Johnson died before being able to take up his new duties.

For Gordon-Reed, Johnson's short but memorable tenure is most notable for the missed opportunity it represented in establishing the rights of African Americans and re-establishing, in Lincoln's words, a new era of freedom. Instead, African-Americans, particularly in the South were largely excluded from public and political life and continued to suffer violence through 100 years of Jim Crow policies. Still, not even eight years of U.S. Grant as President, who was much more favorably inclined to African Americans than Johnson, was enough to rally the nation to Lincoln's call at Gettysburg.

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Sagar Jethani

Set the cause of racial equality back by 100 years

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2013

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Ishmael Reed recently recommended I look to Andrew Johnson if I wanted to learn the true origins of the Republican party's Southern strategy. At the time, I had little idea what he meant-- wasn't the GOP's courting of Southern racists a recent phenomenon dating back to the 1960s? After reading Gordon-Reed's superb account of the disastrous presidency of Andrew Johnson, I understand what he meant.

When Lincoln contemplated a second term, he realized that the focus would no longer be on winning the war, but on welcoming the South back into the Union. To that end, he chose a vice-president with unquestionable Southern credentials. Andrew Johnson had risen through the ranks of Tennessean politics and had become a Union favorite with his harsh denunciations of Southern separatists. When the South later seceded, Johnson fled to the North, where he became the only Senator from a Confederate state to continue serving in Congress.

One can understand Lincoln's political motive in tapping Johnson for the vice-presidency. But it must have given Lincoln a moment of pause when Johnson arrived drunk at his own Inauguration. A few weeks after this spectacle, Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, and the laughing-stock of Washington was sworn-in as president.

Johnson wasted no time in making his agenda known: now that the war was over, things would return to normal. Rather than subject the conquered Southern states to the gamut of Reconstruction, Johnson insisted that they return to how things used to be, save that they could no longer practice slavery. The South, whose crushing defeat had made it willing to accept any conditions imposed upon it by the North, was incredulous. Far from having to ensure equal treatment of blacks, it could maintain its apartheid system just like before the war.

Within months, the odious "black codes" were enacted throughout the South. These laws required that blacks produce proof of gainful employment on demand to any white who asked to see them. If the black person could not produce them, he would be jailed. Blacks were not allowed to hunt or fish, which meant they could not support themselves independently. The point of the black codes was, in the words of one observer, "getting things back as near to slavery as possible."

Violence against freed blacks in the South reached "staggering proportions." Blacks who tried to leave the plantations of their former slave masters were murdered. They were whipped, maimed, or killed if they refused to "obey the order of their former masters, just as if slavery existed."

Records tell of a black man killed for not removing his hat. Another, because the white murderer simply "wanted to thin out the n---gers a little." Blacks were hunted and shot down like wild animals for no reason other than to reinforce the message that nothing would change in the way they would be treated after the war. Lynchings spread all over the South.

Far from simply countenancing this slow-motion genocide of freed blacks, Andrew Johnson encouraged it. He encouraged southerners to act as they did and refused to use federal power to protect the rights of newly-freed blacks. "This is a country for white men," he declared. "And by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men."

Johnson disingenuously masked his approval at the slaughter of blacks behind the excuse that the use of federal power to protect them would be an unwarranted intrusion upon the rights of Southern states. The states should decide who to accord rights to within their own borders. If the southern states did not want to grant political rights to blacks, it was not the place of the federal government to make them do so. Yet his vaunted reverence of the Constitution did not prevent Johnson from trampling it underfoot when necessary to pursue other political goals, such as overruling Congress' granting of the vote to blacks residing in the District of Columbia. Under Article I, Section 8, Congress alone has legislative power over the District. Johnson, like so many conservatives after him, hid behind the argument of "state's rights" in refusing to use federal power to protect the rights of blacks.

Gordon-Reed describes the failed attempt by Republicans in Congress to impeach Johnson, and how his bid for a second term was defeated by Ulysses S. Grant.

Andrew Johnson did everything he could to make sure blacks would never become equal citizens in the United States. Rather than carry forward Lincoln's vision for Reconstruction, he simply aimed for Restoration: allow the states which had formed the Confederacy to resume life as usual with only one, technical exception: they could no longer practice legal slavery. But this leniency, coupled with Johnson's open and virulent racism encouraged the South to pass black codes and conduct widespread terrorism to bring newly-freed blacks to heel. The age of night riders and the Klan was at hand, all thanks to the man Abraham Lincoln had chosen as his second-in-command.

Had Lincoln retained Hannibal Hamlin, his first vice-president, into a second term, the entire history of racism in the United States would have taken a dramatically different turn. Hamlin was a strong opponent of slavery who urged Lincoln to deliver the Emancipation Proclamation and arm blacks to fight in the Union army. By dropping him from the ticket for his second term and picking a deep Southerner like Johnson, Abraham Lincoln unwittingly set back the cause of racial equality in the United States by 100 years.

7 people found this helpful

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Daniel Putman

A strong and justified criticism of Johnson but not a good overall biography

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2018

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The American Presidents Series has abbreviated lives of the presidents with the best books in the series being concise yet detailed enough to give the reader a well-rounded sense of the person’s years in office. Gordon-Reed’s biography of Andrew Johnson does a nice job of doing that up to the point where he actually becomes president. The author interweaves the details of Johnson’s life with important aspects of his personality in a way that gives a solid well-balanced background on the man. The problem I found with the book after Johnson becomes president is not Gordon-Reed’s emphasis on Johnson’s racism which is unquestionably right but how limited the book is otherwise with regard to what Johnson and his administration did in his almost four years in office. Granted, by far the major event was how Johnson dealt with Reconstruction and its result for the freedmen but the last half of the book is so permeated by the single issue of Johnson’s attempt to resurrect the old South based on his racial views that other events are barely mentioned. A couple lines are given to the Alaska purchase but virtually nothing else at all on foreign policy is in the book. Except for Johnson’s feud with Stanton, again very little is here about his complex relationship with his cabinet over the course of his years in office. Gordon-Reed’s almost sole emphasis on the racist motivation of Johnson on Reconstruction is accurate but, as a biography, this book would be a poor starting point for a new reader interested in the presidency since this single issue excludes almost everything else in the last half of the book. Gordon-Reed’s case against Johnson would have been stronger if her point was enmeshed in the kind of biographical writing so well done in the first half of the book.

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