The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation by Brenda Wineapple (review)

The Reconstruction era, it seems, is in vogue for many Americans curious about the long and vexing history of racism and power in the United States. The Henry Louis Gates Jr.–hosted PBS miniseries Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (2019) and accompanying book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019), showcase how Reconstruction is being tied to modern-day events such as the Charleston church massacre of 2015. Another Gates project (cowritten with Tonya Bolden) titled Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow (2019) is an attempt to make the Reconstruction era, and the subsequent rise of Jim Crow segregation across the South, clearer for younger readers to understand. Eric Foner has written another book on Reconstruction, this time with a laser focus on the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, titled The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019). Into this growing cacophony of works on Reconstruction comes Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.

Wineapple continues a tradition of emphasizing the centrality of race to the Reconstruction period that goes back to works such as W. E. B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Where Gates and Foner offer broader overviews of the Reconstruction period, Wineapple’s narrative centers around the presidency of Andrew Johnson, his hostility to both Republicans and the freedmen and freedwomen of the American South, and the road to his impeachment trial in the winter of 1868. The impeachment of Johnson, writes Wineapple, was such a contentious moment in American history because “it was unmistakably about race. It was about racial prejudice, which is not trivial but shameful” (xxv). The impeachment crisis of the winter of 1868 was, in short, about the future of the United States.

The Impeachers joins a growing list of books that seek to place the Reconstruction era within a longer framework of questions about American freedom and race. The book is similar in both style and substance to Philip Dray’s Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (2008), which is a sweeping biographical narrative of the African American men who were elected to Congress during Reconstruction. In both Wineapple’s and Dray’s accounts, Washington, D.C., during the Reconstruction era suddenly comes alive—and, in the process, the politics of the era relate to ours in a number of instructive ways. The issues of federal power versus states’ rights, race, and the continuing debate over who is an American citizen govern the accounts of both books. The new Eric Foner work mentioned earlier, The Second Founding, slows down the timeline on the Reconstruction amendments to make clear that while such amendments are often quickly covered in a survey course, they were in fact part of a larger debate about freedom, citizenship, and race that has not yet ended.

Wineapple does not seek to enter historiographical debates so much as craft an accessible narrative for lay readers. The writing style and meticulous research behind the book, however, show The Impeachers to be intended for multiple audiences. Wineapple’s narrative is one meant to be accessible and useful to virtually everyone: from scholars seeking more concrete information about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson that is often swallowed up by the larger (and even more complicated) history of Reconstruction, to nonhistorians seeking to simply learn more about a president and an era increasingly comparable with our own. The immediate post–Civil War years—years that Wineapple writes were ones of “bloody streets, iron men, oaths of allegiance” (xxviii)—may interest so many people precisely because of how their complicated questions about racism, government power, and national unity continue to plague Americans today. In the process, however, Wineapple also...