Andrew Johnson:
A Biography
By Hans L. Trefousse (1989)
1. President Abraham Lincoln's choice of Andrew Johnson as his 1864 running mate may rank as the most ill-fated attempt at ticket-balancing in U.S. history. Lincoln's April 1865 assassination left the new vice president to “bind up the nation's wounds,” a task for which this thin-skinned Jacksonian Democrat was temperamentally and ideologically unsuited. Hans L. Trefousse illuminates Johnson's rise from Appalachian poverty, which left him resentful both of Southern slave owners and of African-Americans who supposedly posed a threat, from below, to the white yeoman's precarious status. When black Union troops retook his old Tennessee home from occupying Confederates, Johnson fumed: “It was bad enough to be taken by traitors and converted into a rebel hospital but a negro whore house is infinitely worse.” His racism trumping his class envy, Johnson took plantation land from freedmen and restored it to ex-rebels while letting Southern states institute “black codes” that subjected emancipated slaves to discriminatory new forced-labor requirements. The inevitable clash with a Republican Congress led to Johnson's impeachment and warped national policy and politics. “His boost to Southern conservatives by undermining Reconstruction was his legacy to the nation,” Trefousse concluded, “one that would trouble the country for generations to come.”
Race and Reunion
By David W. Blight (2001)
2. On May 1, 1865, thousands of black South Carolinians, some sympathetic whites and Union soldiers of both races, held a flower-laying ceremony at a gravesite for the Union dead in Charleston. Three weeks after Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender, this first “Decoration Day,” led by African-Americans singing “John Brown's Body,” infused the Civil War with liberationist meaning. Yet that interpretation was not destined to take hold in national memory, as David W. Blight's study shows. Politically and economically, Reconstruction was mostly over after a decade. But as a cultural and ideological process—“one long referendum on the meaning and memory of the verdict at Appomattox”—it persisted. Southern whites, nostalgic for the “lost cause,” and Northern whites, eager to move on, deracialized history, glorifying both sides' military valor but playing down slavery and ignoring, or distorting, black Americans' actions. In 1913, a half century after the battle, white veterans from both armies joined hands at Gettysburg and heard Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president since Johnson, declare the war a “quarrel forgotten.”
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