The man after Lincoln

Countless books have been written about Abraham Lincoln. Very few have been written about his successor, Andrew Johnson. Yet Johnson's presidency also had an immense impact on American history. As Howard Means says in the closing words of his 2006 book The Avenger Takes His Place, "His failures are still with us."

The title comes from a poem by Herman Melville. The couplet reads, They have killed him, the Forgiver —/The Avenger takes his place. Johnson's attitude toward Reconstruction was expected to be, and probably was, quite different from what Lincoln's might have been. Chances are, however, even Lincoln at his merciful best would have had a difficult time not making a mess out of what was left after the Civil War — an impoverished South, a vengeful North, freed slaves who had no place in a still-divided nation.

Johnson was a Southerner — from Tennessee — whom Lincoln chose as his running mate because he was anti-slavery. Yet Johnson's reasons for opposing slavery had little to do with the slaves themselves. He was resentful of those who profited from slavery, the rich planation owners and the industrialists who got rich from the cheap labor. He opposed slavery not because it was unfair to blacks but because it was unfair to whites. When slaves provided the labor, there were no jobs for lower-class whites, like himself. To him, slave owners were the evil, not slavery itself.

Johnson was not without his good points, and much of his press coverage at the time was glowing. Yet he was unwilling to compromise, and his strong biases caused him to make mistakes that Lincoln might have avoided. Even so, America was well on its way to recovery and equality of the races until the 1960s, when another Johnson — Lyndon — screwed things up again with his War on Poverty that set back the fortunes of so many descendants of slaves by making them dependent on the federal government.