With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Johnson was saved from removal by one vote in the Senate trial, presided over by Salmon Chase. Even William Seward, Lincoln's closest ally in his cabinet, seemed to waver.
By the 1868 election, united Republicans nominated Ulysses Grant, Lincoln's winning Union general. His attempts to reconcile Southerners with the Union and to quash the rising Ku Klux Klan were undercut by postwar greed and corruption during his two terms. Reconstruction died unofficially in 1887 when Republican Rutherford Hayes joined with the Democrats in a deal that removed the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill with protections first proposed in 1872 by Charles Sumner, the Radical senator from Massachusetts.
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“Tom Perkins narrates this
comprehensive account of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (1865-1877). His
balanced journalistic tone lays equal culpability on Northern hard-liners, who
wanted the South to pay dearly for splitting from the Union, and Southern
apologists, who found ways to systematically strip freed blacks of their new
Constitutional rights. From Charles Sumner to Nathan Bedford Forrest to Ulysses
S. Grant, nobody comes out smelling like a rose, but Perkins’s voice has an
inherently American optimism. Overall, the work suggests that if the nation
made it through Reconstruction, we can make it through anything.”
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