Andrew Johnson’s Civil War and Reconstruction by Paul H. Bergeron, and: Andrew Johnson by Annette Gordon-Reed (review)

It is appropriate, considering the subject, that so much of the scholarship on Andrew Johnson is partisan. The seventeenth president was renowned for his political partisanship, and contemporaries generally either loved or hated him. In this tradition, two of the newest Johnson biographers write very different kinds of books and interpret him in opposite ways.

Paul Bergeron is one of the most knowledgeable historians on Andrew Johnson and nineteenth-century Tennessee, having published extensively on the history of the Volunteer State and spending fourteen years as director of the Andrew Johnson Papers. As most of his biographers have commented, Johnson is a difficult figure to understand, and Bergeron had a rare opportunity and background to place Johnson in his time and place. Thus, how Bergeron decided to structure his book is disappointing. First, it examines only one decade of Johnson’s life, the 1860s. Second, Bergeron states, “I focus on Johnson as a public figure.” Third, he explains that in his biography of Johnson, he “seek[s] to present information and analysis primarily, but not exclusively, from his vantage point.” The limitations inherent in a book about one decade of Johnson’s public life primarily from his perspective make it difficult to place Johnson in a historical or geographical context and thus impossible to explicate the man or his actions. Writing primarily from the view of his subject also leads to the danger of Bergeron becoming an advocate for Johnson.

Bergeron clearly takes up Johnson’s battle for vindication. The purpose of the biography is to reform Johnson’s image, which he thinks historians fixated on race have unfairly tarnished since the 1960s. Sadly, Bergeron adopts the argumentative style of Johnson on the stump when discussing his fellow historians. He states up front, “One of my motivations for undertaking a reexamination of Johnson is my conviction that he has been vilified enough—first by radical Republican leaders in the 1860s and a century later by their intellectual and ideological descendants, namely certain scholars and biographers” (6). Bergeron sees a connection between Radical Republicans and modern historians, arguing that “influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, these scholars evaluated the president and his administration in terms of race and racial issues. In the process they took on the mantle of the radical Republicans of the 1860s, becoming in effect, the neo-radicals” (4). Historians ranging from Eric McKitrick to Kenneth Stampp to Eric Foner are labeled “neo-radicals,” which Bergeron clearly considers a pejorative, is an erroneous oversimplification of their views and approaches to history. He explicitly accuses other scholars, including Hans Trefousse, of having “a bias against Johnson,” which affects their interpretation (4–5, 277, 281). Beside the irony of an author who starts the acknowledgments with “I have lived with Andrew Johnson since 1987” accusing others of bias on the subject, such charges merit evidence that is never shown.

Bergeron badly misrepresents the literature on Johnson. For instance, he insists that the neo-radical historians “denounced Johnson as a racist and ascribed all of his policies and actions to his racist views,” which is simply false (4). All of the historians Bergeron labels “neo-radicals” explicitly acknowledged that issues ranging from constitutional interpretation to party realignment—in addition to race—influenced Johnson as president. Similarly, he implies that neo-radical historians find nothing good about Johnson and asserts that the president “actually did have some positive attributes and accomplishments during the 1860s, as heretical as that claim may sound to some readers” (7). Every work on Johnson this reviewer has read, however, praises Johnson for his hard work, rising out of poverty and courage as a southern unionist during secession, and many scholars have lauded his work as military governor of Tennessee...