Brenda Wineapple on What We Can Learn from the First Impeachment

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Brenda Wineapple joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her latest book The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a New Nation.

From the episode:

Brenda Wineapple: Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, when you’re talking about a country that was broken in half and putting it together in the terms of what you do with that, it was enormously fundamental to the nation. This goes back to your question: why was this pushed under the rug? I didn’t know the answer, and that’s what was interesting, was to find that answer. I had no idea. The more I read the trial transcripts, I thought that it was so clear now: the issue was slavery still. The issue was the eradication of slavery. The issue was that the country was at a crossroads. Which way are we going to go? Are we going to go to a more equal, free, and just country, or are we going to allow the same point of view and prejudices to determine the rest of the history of our nation to allow slavery to continue as long as it did?

People like Charles Sumner stood up and basically said that this impeachment was one of the last battles with slavery. It seemed to me that one of the reasons that we didn’t know about it is because we weren’t for many years—until the 1950s and 60s with the Civl Rights Movement—we didn’t understand the way that race played such a central role, not just in the Civil War but in the period after that war. That was really the issue that caused Johnson to be impeached, which is astonishing.

Roxanne Coady: Do you think that the process of impeaching Andrew Johnson paved for the way for Grant to take on reconstruction with the enthusiasm that he did.

Wineapple: Definitely. Grant loathed Johnson.

Coady: Didn’t Johnson not even attend Grant’s inauguration?

Wineapple: By the time Grant won the Presidency—and, by the way, Johnson was not nominated by either party—Grant wanted nothing to do with [Johnson]. Initially, Grant didn’t even invite him in his carriage, but changed his mind at the last minute. There was no love lost between these guys. One of the things that Grant did best was destroy the Ku Klux Klan, which Johnson and his Administration helped to foster. Johnson had said that there was no such thing as the Klan, it’s just propaganda.

Coady: They were just lying in wait, unfortunately.

Wineapple: There were already acting out, with state militias forming. There is a school of thought that there were many reluctant impeachers because they were afraid that impeaching Johnson may hurt Grant’s chances of getting into the White House, so there were a lot of factors involved in the acquittal of Johnson. What happened with Johnson, and Johnson’s terrible point of view and racial politics formed, shaped, and even radicalized Grant so that he would be able to take on that mantle for awhile.

Coady: The seeds of what happened under Johnson as we know resurrected themselves at the end of Grant’s administration and after that. How does this process that happened in the 1860s inform our current political environment.

Wineapple: Enormously. First, it’s educational. … We need to know more about the process. We hear a lot about “Let’s impeach, let’s impeach.” We need to know and figure out whether we’re going to do it on narrow grounds, that smoking gun.

Coady: A law that broke.

Wineapple: Right. Or larger, abusive power unfit for office. Corrupt use of pardoning power.

Coady: That’s a very difficult path.

Wineapple: And that’s implicit in what is being debated now. Moreover, we hear about the judiciary committee and what their role is in investigating and bringing forward certain indiscretions. We’re not talking sexual, but political and abusive kind of things. All of that is very important. It’s important to see that impeachment is a serious process, and that there is a real procedure that is in place. The Constitution has allowed for it to happen, and while there are negative potentials associated with it, it also implies a way to rectify something, a way to get it right and makes things better.

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Brenda Wineapple is the author of the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School and lives in New York City. The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a New Nation is her latest novel.

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Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.