THE RHETORIC AND CORRUPTION OF ANDREW JOHNSON'S RECONSTRUCTION

• Published in: Reviews in American History Vol. 38; no. 2; pp. 271 - 276
• Main Author: Williams, R. Owen
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01-06-2010
• Subjects: American Civil War; Convictions; Military history; Political appointments; Trials
• ISSN: 0048-7511; 1080-6628; 1080-6628
• DOI: 10.1353/rah.0.0206

Johnson maintained an unwavering commitment to states' rights; "more whites than blacks took advantage of postwar food handouts" (p. 30); Charles Sumner had "little interest in individuals" due to his preoccupation with "great public questions" (p. 37); when Johnson nominated Ohio's Henry Stanberry to the Supreme Court, Congress fought back by eliminating the vacant seat; the "president's opponents feared that he aimed at a military putsch" (p. 69), especially after he tried to replace the unsympathetic head of the army and "find Grant an assignment overseas" (p. 71); and the irascible, intellectually gifted, radical Republican war secretary of "breathtakingly bad manners" (p. 66), Ohio's Edward Stanton, who recommended Johnson's veto of the Tenure of Office Act, a bill specifically (and ironically) designed to keep Stanton in office (but that, in Stanton's view, unconstitutionally limited the president's powers). Stewart is always crisply informative, whether examining the status of secessionist states, the contentious relations between states and the increasingly powerful federal government, the postwar electoral effect of the Constitution's "three-fifths" clause (that shifted antebellum congressional power toward the South and threatened to do so even more after the elimination of slavery), the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, the Tenure of Office Act that served as "the centerpiece of the impeachment charges" (p. 75), or the constitutional authority behind impeachments.