NF NY Times Reviews "The Impeachers" on the Andrew Johnson Impeachment

Non-Fiction
According to the review by Chris Hayes:

The first presidential impeachment, of Andrew Johnson in 1868, has been by and large written into history as a Big Mistake. That’s largely due to the efforts of historians of the Dunning School, who spent decades creating a narrative of Reconstruction as a tyrannical, corrupt and failed social experiment. The restoration of **** in the South was seen as a right and proper undertaking to reconcile a torn nation. According to the Dunning School, the Radical Republicanswho impeached Johnson are the villains of the piece, and the story of Johnson’s impeachment is a cautionary tale about the overreach of ideologues. Given that context, not to mention the headlines of today, it’s hard to think of a better time for a reassessment of Johnson’s impeachment.

Brenda Wineapple’s ambitious and assured volume “The Impeachers” rightfully recenters the story along the main axis of moral struggle in American history: whether the nation is indeed a democracy for all its citizens or not. “To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing,” she writes, “is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.”
 
From the conclusion of the review:

Ultimately, as Wineapple explains, there was a miserable mismatch between the cramped proceduralism embedded in Congress’s articles of impeachment and the depth of Johnson’s actual transgressions. The man had betrayed the cause of the war. He had desecrated the memories of the dead Union soldiers, black and white. He was, every day that he stayed in office, endangering the lives of freedmen and white unionists throughout the South. But he wasn’t impeached for any of that. He was impeached largely over the fact that he fired a secretary of defense who openly hated him.

The true “high crime” that Johnson committed was using the power of his office to promote and pursue a White Man’s Republic. That was a usurpation greater than any violation of a specific statute. And for that, Andrew Johnson deserved impeachment and removal.
 
This book is strangely topical. Does a president deserve impeachment/removal simply for being a terrible president, or must he have committed a serous crime that is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt?
 
This book is strangely topical. Does a president deserve impeachment/removal simply for being a terrible president, or must he have committed a serous crime that is proved beyond a shadow of a doubt?
A good question. Since only Congress seems to have the power to impeach and convict, Congress makes the rules.
 
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