One of the chief presidential enablers seemed to have reached the off ramp. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the House of Representatives has voted to impeach the president. The Senate process will now begin at our first regular meeting following receipt of the article from the House.”
And so it begins (again). This is the second impeachment for the president and this time it is for incitement of insurrection. The charge is that the president of the United States did the unimaginable. Rather than faithfully executing his duties to uphold the Constitution, he fired up an angry crowd to storm the Capitol; as his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani put it, it was time for “trial by combat.”
In moments of national crisis, such as we are witnessing now, we turn to history for lessons and comfort. Comparisons between Trump and 19th century President Andrew Johnson have been made. Both were impeached, both are seen as failed and divisive presidents at critical moments of crisis in the country (Trump during the worst health crisis in our nation’s history and Johnson at the end of the Civil War). The comparisons are understandable, but deeper and more significant than typically understood.
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Yes, Trump and Johnson were both impeached, but whatever the first-level issues were at play in both cases, underlying both were strong racial currents. We ignore this hard truth at our own peril. The racial resentments of some white people, on full display in the storming of the Capitol, seem sadly ingrained in American life. We have gotten to this fractured racial moment of crisis before, but repeatedly turned away heeding calls of unity, as we are hearing from some members of Congress now.
This is as if unity and confronting what Gunnar Myrdal called the “American Dilemma” of race were mutually opposing forces. Our failure to confront and have an honest and open dialogue on the realities of race in this country in the past is history’s sad legacy in this moment.
In 1865, with the end of the Civil War, there was both hope for the newly freed slaves and a deeply divided nation on the path of Reconstruction. Andrew Johnson, of course, was Lincoln’s vice president. He was an odd choice.
Johnson, a Democratic senator from Tennessee, was the only Southern member of Congress who did not side with the Confederacy when his state left the union. As Lincoln readied for the election of 1864, during the war, he chose Johnson as his running mate as a show of national unity, demonstrating the view that the nation had never dissolved but was witnessing an unlawful insurrection. When Johnson became president following Lincoln’s assassination, it was at a delicate stage of this reckoning.
Johnson tried to exert control over Reconstruction, obstructing policies and laws passed by Congress in his effort to bring the Confederacy back into the American fold. Those in Congress who dared to push for a more humane and equal treatment for the recently freed men and women opposed this rush to reunite and were called “radicals,” a negative political slur that holds to this day to anyone seeking social justice for the marginalized.
These “Radical Republicans” wanted political participation for newly freed Black men (not women). Johnson saw that as a nightmare he could not imagine and therefore would oppose. He undid many of the Reconstruction efforts. He reversed Lincoln’s amnesty program, allowing almost all former Confederates to regain the vote. He gutted the Freedman’s Bureau, killing any dream of Southern land reform.
He appointed provisional governors that instituted new “Black codes,” removing all legal protections for Blacks. Lynching and racialized violence became a new form of social control. Johnson’s efforts redirected white supremacy, playing to the Democratic Party’s Northern white working-class voters and Southern whites. Legalized Black Codes and extralegal, organized white militias thwarted Reconstruction until he left office in 1869, all supported by the president.
We know how this ends: with impeachment. On its face, the case was about the limits of presidential authority, as Johnson fired a Cabinet Secretary Congress attempted to impose upon him. But underlying that dispute were issues of race. It is interesting that one can see the impeachment of Donald Trump, maybe the first of two, as purely political and with echoes to Johnson.
As historian Annette Gordon-Reed says in her biography of Johnson: “What about a president in a death battle with Congress? The body passes laws that the president vetoes. Congress promptly and resoundingly overrides those vetoes. The president, having lost the political battle, then decides to use his powers to thwart the execution of the laws. He either appoints administrators he knows will not abide by these laws or signals directly or indirectly to these administrators that they should not follow the law or should be as obstructionist as possible. In other words, the chief executive uses the concept of presidential discretion to avoid ‘faithfully’ executing laws passed by the United States Congress.”
But what motivated much of this tension and political fire were contradictory notions of racial justice and a vision of expansive democracy. The lens through which to look at Johnson is through issues of race. Then as now, race is the hidden political force.
As the leading authority on Reconstruction Eric Foner has stated about Johnson: “He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to work with Congress.” (Hear an echo?) The political battles between the GOP and Johnson centered around race and civil rights. Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866; Congress overrode his veto.
This is one of the most significant laws in American history because it states that citizenship is a birthright to those born in the United States. It granted American-born slaves citizenship and therefore rights. To Johnson this was unimaginable, and today we would frame his opposition in the language of reverse racism, as he said in his veto message: “The distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”
Foner continues, “In 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, again over Johnson’s veto. These set in motion the establishment of new governments in the South, empowered Southern Black men to vote and temporarily barred several thousand leading Confederates from the ballot. Soon after, the 15th Amendment extended Black male suffrage to the entire nation. The Reconstruction Acts inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, when a politically mobilized Black community, with its white allies, brought the Republican Party to power throughout the South. For the first time, African-Americans voted in large numbers and held public office at every level of government. It was a remarkable, unprecedented effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery.” It was short lived, however.
The tensions around race and Reconstruction did not end when Johnson left office. They stayed and festered, so strong that eventually the nation turned away, giving up on the ideal of interracial democracy. The 1876 presidential election was one of the most fractious in our history, and as such was frequently compared to the election of 2020. But 1876’s election was more than votes and politics.
Seeing it only through this narrow political lens misses the centrality of race to this contest between GOP Rutherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden. In one of the closest elections in our history, it all came down to the three not yet “redeemed” Southern states of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. A redeemed state was one under local white control rather than Union/GOP (through a coalition of freed Black men and white male allies) control. If the GOP could hold these states, they would win the electoral college by one point, but would still lose the popular vote.
Both parties sent representatives to these states to watch the vote counting as the nation held its breath. Under the Reconstruction laws, votes obtained in districts where violence and intimidation (what we would call voter suppression) occurred could be thrown out. The GOP did so, but the Democratic Party watchers kept them. In the end, both parties sent their results to Congress, but the Constitution was unclear of how to resolve this crises. Tensions were extremely high, and some were concerned about the resumption of armed conflict. In the end, a deal was reached. The GOP was given the White House, as Hayes was declared the winner, and the South and Democrats saw the end of Reconstruction and the complete “redemption” of the South.
This political bargain was seen as a moment of national unity, but this unity was achieved on the backs of Southern Blacks who were cast into new Jim Crow realities without protections. The North might have won the war but, as has often been said, the South won the peace. Heeding to calls for national unity, both parties stepped away from political combat, but as historian Manisha Sinha states this stance had consequences: “you have the unleashing of massive white-supremacist violence in the South against African Americans and a systematic campaign to disenfranchise, a systematic campaign of racial terror in the South….”
Unresolved issues of Reconstruction have plagued our nation ever since. The civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s was in many ways a Second (yet incomplete) Reconstruction. The current BLM movement is yet a continuation of a long quest for equality. At its core the impeachment of President Trump—and the insurrectionist riots, and more broadly the president’s incendiary final days—show how race remains our American Dilemma. We cannot heal our fractured society until we recognize this simple reality. Our failure, our cowardice, will bring a repeat of this history for future generations.
