but apart from that, i don't know, in other words, those are things that are controllable. you don't live the life of its vegetable when you're not one. to live in active and engaged life and make the best of your situation. yes, you new york is in assisted living community. i don't understand why more places like lansing, michigan, where my mother lives, don't the liver food at home for people, and they don't. there are cities that have a culture of delivering and people who don't. for old people on the days when whatever you've got is acting up, you know, being about to get your drugs delivered, in new york is part of the cost of doing business. they don't charge extra for it. being able, if you don't like the food that you have in your refrigerator or that or assisted living community is serving, being able to order in some chinese, this is a great thing. new york is an assisted living community in ways that a lot of cities aren't. .. -- there are

practical reforms where long-term care they should. one of the worst years of my grandmother's life she was one of the very few people in her life who didn't have demen that shah. she couldn't sit down with dinner with someone and have a normal conversation with them. that's a terrible thing.

the last time i saw her she said to me -- i took her out to a riverbank nearby and she was so happy. she said it's good to be among the living. but the last thing she said and the last time i saw her she looked out in the water and she said, it's good to know that the beauty of the world will go on without me. >> that's a lovely thought on which we will end. thank you very much, susan jacoby. the book is "never say die." >> that was "after words" booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 pm on saturday, 12:00 and 9:00 pm on sunday and 12:00 am on monday. you can watch "after words" online, go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on

the upper right side of the page. >> on the go, "after words" is available via podcast and xlm. go to booktv tv. select which podcast you would like download and listen to "after words" while you travel. >> coming up next pulitzer winner athe next book is andrew johnson. she recounts president johnson's reticence to allow civil rights to freed slaves and a nation still recovering from a civil war. she spoke at the philadelphia free library. [applause] >> thank you very much. it's wonderful to be here again. i love this venue. i get lots of good questions which we will save time for at the end. this is an interesting occasion for me.

this is actually the first time i've been up in front of an audience talking about andrew johnson and forgive me if i say jefferson occasionally. [laughter] >> i had to write that -- when i was writing i did a spell check to make sure i didn't have jefferson in there when i had johnson because it was the temptation was actually quite great. if somebody had told me a number of years ago -- or any point in my life that i would have written a book about andrew johnson, i would have told them he's crazy. it's not that he's an interesting person. he is an interesting person or i didn't know about him. assist as a historian i tried to avoid the period of recluck and it sounds strange for someone who writes about slavery which is a difficult topic to write about but i find it easier to deal with the 17th century and the 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do about dealing with reconstruction. there's something about it that is just maddening to me and i

think what it is, is that it was a moment of opportunity. when i think of the people in the 17th and 18th century who have very primitive ideas about many, many things in the world and you know there's lots of things they don't know, i can not totally forgive them but it's not as irritating to me, difficult for me. when you have photographs and trains that are part of the modern era and you feel closer to those people. the people in that time period they seem more like us than someone in the 18th century or the 17th century when i'm writing about the development of slavery in virginia or writing about jefferson's monticello even. so when i read about reconstruction, in this moment of hope, it makes me angry. i'm able to be detached the further back you go but that moment really makes me angry when i think about what could have happened and what did not

happen and how close we were -- how close the country was to a period of time when you really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making america really one for everyone. so johnson would not have been my topic of choice. i read about that era because i have to, but it wouldn't be something -- i would never thought i would actually study it and actually write very much about it. but i got a phone call one morning from arthur schlesinger, jr., telling me that i was going to be getting a letter from him and sort of talking just in general. and i did get this letter from him in which he asked me to write the biography of andrew johnson from the american president's series which is a very nice series, a very short, concise books about american presidents and they get people sort of -- well, sometimes people who actually fit someone like joyce appleby did thomas jefferson, of course, she is a

great jefferson scholar but gary hart did a book, george mcgovern did lincoln, i think. there's sort of a mix of historians and nonhistorians looking at these presidencies, telling the basic story but also giving your own sort of individual spin on it. and he asked me to do this -- do the johnson book and i guess he figured i would put my individual spin on it. i agreed to do it because arthur asked me to do and i had great respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. we were both on the advisory committee on that. and also because paul who's the editor and who's the general series editor for the series was my editor for the book i did with vernon jordan. vernon can read. and this is two friends and you know how when friends ask you to do things who asked me to do this. i said sure and i put aside my misgivings. i knew it's a fascinating topic. there's so much material, very, very rich but i wondered if i would be able to sort of curb my

natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular period of american history and i agreed to do it. this is many, many years ago this book i must confess long overdue in between saying i would do that i wrote the hemings of monticello and it took a lot of energy and i came back to this seriously and finished it. and i'm very, very glad that i did. >> so the first thing i had to do was to think about how do i approach this? now, andrew johnson is not known by lots of people. not lots is known about him but one thing people probably do know is that in almost every survey of rankings of american presidents, he is at the bottom. he's near the bottom. he's in the bottom five. [laughter] >> since 1997, i participated in these surveys and sometimes i look at the results. sometimes i don't. but he's usually in the bottom 5. buchanan is usually the worst.

but he's in the bottom 5. this year, this past year when i didn't participate in the survey for the first time -- i typically fill them out and i didn't this time because i was too busy, he made it to the last. [laughter] >> he is considered the worst president. i said just in time for the book. [laughter] >> and in some surveys he's considered one of the worst and this year the worst president. and, you know, once you get down at that point, it's really splitting hairs to think -- what the real sorry was with that. that's a difficult issue because how do you sit down and write a book about anybody who's judged as the worst. just because they're the worst or near worst doesn't mean they're important and that's the first realization hit and killed this man was president at one of the most pivotal periods in american history and had -- there was a moment when the country could have gone one way or the other way, and he had a

central role to play in that. and i do believe some of the decisions made during that time period affect us even today. and the choices he made, the choices he did not make, his attitude, his leadership style -- all of those things helped to make us who we are and so for those reasons you have to pay attention to him. and i say in the book history is not just about all the people you like. you know, all the people you love and that you would love to have dinner with and spend time with, it's about people who did things that were important that helped put us on the path where we are now. and he is definitely a person who had that kind of -- that role. so once i made my mind to do this and understood how to approach it, it was relatively easy to sort of sit down and get to work. and try to tell his story in a

way that would sort of illuminate what american life was like and what it was like during the time andrew johnson lived. johnson is different from zbloifrgs many, many ways but the first thing -- the first problem is that johnson didn't learn to write until he was in his late teens. his wife -- he married early and his wife taught him how to write. in those days reading and writing were separate, very separate things. there were many, many people who were taught to read so they could read the bible but it was writing people thought necessarily went together and so his parents were illiterate, neither of his parents could read or write. we know they couldn't read because we have no ready roof them writing and people said that they were illiterate and so he didn't become literate until he was a young man and that poses a problem because even

though he learned to write, he was never very comfortable doing it. and at one point later on he mentions that he had -- he sort of hurt his arm and he sort of explained that as the reason he didn't write but most people think because he was very, very self-conscious about it. writing -- most of his life he was self-conscious about it. so if you look at the papers of andrew johnson, there are many, many more letters to andrew johnson that andrew johnson to other people. so that poses a problem for a biographer right there. we don't have his inner voice. and with jefferson you have 18,000 letters that he wrote over the period of his life and, you know, other kinds of documents and other things and even though he remains an enigma to other people there's enough there to craft some sense of what he's thinking, what he's feeling and who he was. johnson, you're at a disadvantage because we don't really of that to the same

extent. and the letters we have that show when he's a young man show lots of misspellings, lot of phonetic spellings of things and it's difficult to wrap your mind -- i mean, it was for me. difficult to wrap my mind around who he really was because we just don't have the kind of record that you would typically have. not leaving aside somebody like jefferson but other people who are president is just not there. so that's a big problem. and because we don't have lots of his letters and there's not, you know, a huge repository of them of him explaining what he's doing we don't have lots of stories about him. the principal biographer of andrew johnson is a man named haans who unfortunately died last year. i was so hoping to be able to finish this book and to show it to him because he's the one who went out and wrote the 500-page book about johnson, and he's covered lots of the territory. my job was to cover some of that

same territory more concisely but also to put my spin, my view of johnson onto the picture. but what hans found, people tend to repeat when they're doing sort of smaller, general biphotographies -- biographies to andrew johnson and there had to be another approach and that's where my expertise or my study of race relations and slavery and that period, i think, comes in handy. it's interesting to think about the beginning of america and come to a point where you're focusing on a time when america falls apart and then has to be put back together again. so i'm with this -- start out with this material that is not as volumus that i'm typically used to but a person as i said that is very, very interesting considering where he came from, how did somebody like this go from being illiterate, a person

whose parents were very, very poor to being someone who is at the highest office in the land? he's born in north carolina to parents who as i said were illiterate. his father died when he was 3. his mother was a seamstress and worked as a washer woman in other people's homes. and this is the kind of thing that caused a lot of talk and people suggested later on that maybe andrew johnson was not the son of his father, you know, that he was illegitimate. and i've gotten some criticism for mentioning this in the book even though hans mentions as well. but what i tried to do instead of just mentioning it, i wanted to talk about the context that to say something about how class affected the way people viewed andrew johnson from the very, very beginning. because his mother worked outside the home, worked in --

worked as a maid essentially in someone's home, people felt free to say things like that about the family. i really doubt if she had been a married woman, sort of married, quote-unquote, respectable middle class woman -- if those kinds of rumors would be openly spoken about during that time period. so from the very beginning -- it's not that he was just poor. it's that his family was seen as really, really marginal. and there's a difference between what people would call a deserving poor, you know, the poor but struggling people and people who are seen as really marginal. she married again. his mother rematters a man who is as poor as she. she doesn't improve their circumstances very much. and it gets so bad that she has to apprentice her two children. so andrew johnson was apprentice to a tailor 10 years old. why his brother was supposed to

be in a apprentice to become a tailor that long. as you can see it didn't take him very long to become very, very good. he's 10 years old. he's apprentice to a tailor and he actually runs away. he and his brother run away and there's an ad -- the language of it i reproduce in the book. it's basically a run away servant ad the thing you would expect to see more familiar with run away slaves. this is the future of the president of the united states. this is what happens to him. he runs away. he doesn't come back. he hikes -- you know, goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor in another person's tailor shop and becomes very, very good at his job and actually is an older man when he's a politician, a prominent politician, he makes suits for people as a gift. [laughter] >> it's kind of cool you think of a president who can make

suits. [laughter] >> and the gender thing doesn't matter 'cause he's a tailor, right? a tailor makes suits. that can be a masculine thing to do but that was his way of giving gifts to people so, you know, as a very practical, very real world experience that he had. so he starts out very, very low and one of the things i talk about comparing him to lincoln whom, you know, unfortunately, about the worst business. it's really tough. lincoln was a tough act to follow. [laughter] >> i mean, on the same surveys that i talked about, he's almost always mentioned as the best. [laughter] >> so you go from number one to the best to the worst. [laughter] >> in one -- you know, one, you know, terrible moment at ford's theatre. that's what you have. you go from lincoln to andrew johnson. so he suffers by comparison. so that's part of it. it's not just that he -- he had failings which we will talk

about. he came after someone who was, you know, amazing to people. and in good ways and bad so the people hated him but a very towering figure to andrew johnson. so we have these humble origins that seem to make him in some ways -- well, it strengthened lincoln. i mean, hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way, strengthen them in empathy. strengthen them in vision and so forth. i think my take on johnson is that his hard life being looked down by people, being thought of as trash made him hard in lots of ways. and someone asked me, well, you would think that that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. sympathetic to slaves. but, no. the other side is, what that can do is to make you look for somebody to look down on. there's got to be somebody below you. and i think he took comfort

perhaps in saying, you know, like many poor southern whites, you know, i may live in a shotgun shack. i may not have very much but i'm white. and that's better than these people over there. and so if you want to maintain that, you have to make sure there's always somebody over there or under there who you can look down upon. and i think that seems to be the tack he took in life. and to the detriment, you know, his own personal deemons really ended up affecting the course of history of the united states of america. while he's in the tailor shop -- he's a very smart kid, smart person. he listened to men who would come to the tailor shop to read to the tailors. and think about civic engagement. you know there are people in the shop who can't read and a man would come and read and he would read a book of speeches and johnson loved speeches. he kept the book.

the guy gave him the book he loved it so much. and over the years anytime he needed inspiration he would go back and read this book of speeches. so at some point he realizes, because he gets into a debate with a person in the shop, they kind of do the equivalent of taking it outside but verbally. they decide to invite people to watch them argue and it becomes clear that he has a talent. and his talent is public speaking. and that also links him to lincoln because lincoln was also a good speaker as well but he was a different type of speaker. he could be very, very rough speak. he was sarcastic and aggressive and people hadn't really seen anything like it. and so his fame grew. people suggested that he might stand for office, which he did. he was very, very ambitious. good businessman, you know, even though he started out poor, he made the right kinds of investments and, you know, he actually bettered himself financially. and he went into politics.

and he climbed the ladder from alderman, mayor, every single rung of the ladder he was on it up to the president. and so it's an interesting thing -- it's an interesting comment on american life that someone could start out as low as he did and go to where he went. and so even though i can be somewhat hard on him in the book, there's no question that he was an extraordinary person. i think one of the -- paul gollib my editor said. he's edited all the ones that have been done all these men is extraordinary to make it to the presidency. it's not like somebody sitting around one day and say, okay, i'm going to the white house. there's something there. other people see something in that person. and the person sees something in himself so far only him. only he's involved in this that says, i should go for that

position. i should be at the top. and he was like that himself. so the book describes his assent and how he fashioned himself -- tried to fashion himself after his hero, andrew jackson. he comes of age during the age of jackson. a unionist. he is for the common man. he complains for the homestead act. there's lots of things about him that seems very, very progressive and popular. but as you know, populism has this sort of -- there's a double-edge sword there. lots of time populists are in favor of measures that you would think would be progressive. he was for, you know, the homestead act, giving poor people land. he wanted public education. he was always a champion of public education thinking about back on his own life and how deprived he was. he wanted a better shot for people. people who didn't -- who weren't

privileged. the catch was he only wanted that for whites. he was for the homestead act as i said but when reconstruction came and there was a time to give land reform, the republicans in congress wanted land reform in the south. to give the former enslaved people to give them land, to buy them -- to give them the kind of independence that johnson and others understood was needed. that's what land meant. if you don't work for people, you can grow your own food. you can, you know, subsist on your own plot and you're not beholden to anyone. he wanted that for whites but he didn't want that for blacks. so this populist part was -- the racist part of it inhibited his thoughts about how this might be expanded to include everybody in america. so he makes his political run at thinking of himself as a champion of the common man. he as i said is for the union.

he had no trouble with secessionists and he sort of alienated many of -- even before the war, he alienated people like jefferson davis because of his support for the homestead act. the southern grandees, planters did not like the idea of giving poor white people land. they said -- they thought -- they wouldn't have used the term, this is like welfare. i mean, why are you giving these people, you know, land below market rate? why don't they go out and work for it or, you know, why do they deserve this? but he was all for it. and so from the beginning, there were recalcitrants about this especially among the southern planters so he came up making enemies all along the way. lincoln -- he gets on the ticket but lincoln decides that he

wants to signal to the south that there's a future. that the north and the south add future together. and so it was a symbolic gesture of unity for him to pick to -- from a border state, by then he's from tennessee. he had moved to tennessee as a young man, to put them together and to say, look, even though the south isn't participating in the election but they're saying, look, i am willing to have a southerner on the ticket. one of these days we can get back together again. so he ends up on the ticket. lincoln replaces hannibal hamlin who was from maine who didn't give him any kind of political clout so there he is as a vice president, this person, as i said, who started out illiterate, up until his early manhood is the vice president of the united states. and people hated that. there were many, many people who said, this is -- he is not the kind of man who should be in this office. this is a disgrace. and when you're reading these kinds of things -- and i even managed to feel a bit sorry for

him as you hear people ragging about him and at the inauguration he's drunk. it was kind of fun doing this. he had been ill, and in those days i think they i thought whisky was a cure for everything. maybe people think that now. [laughter] >> and he draining too much whisky and so there's than spectacle and it would have been amazing if something like that happened like that today. you could imagine on youtube, on cable tv, everything. so all of these things -- people said see, we told you. you let those kind of people responsibilities kinds of positions this is what they're going to do. people said you should dump him. andy's no drunk. he'll be fine. of course, lincoln was killed not long after that. and he ascends to the presidency

and people are, of course -- i mean, well, mortified doesn't describe it. the country was traumatized. people in the north were traumatized. people in the south may have been happy about it but they were not really celebrating about it because they had just been defeated in war and they were in no position to really gloat about something like that even if anyone were inclined to do it. it was a traumatic, traumatic time period and there's johnson who has to rise to the occasion. and during those days immediately after lincoln's death he actually does rise to the occasion. all the things, you know, people who said the performance as vice president is sort of gone away. he east coast what to do. ceremonially, symbolic and he really rises to the occasion. and this is the part of the story where i tried to avoid all of this.

when they begin to realize that he is not going to have any support, whatsoever, for the motion of black political rights, any kind of rights for the freedmen after the civil war. he only grudgingly accepted abolition. he was the slave holder himself. he was not a large scale slave holder. he didn't have a plantation but he did have slaves. he was a supporter of slavery. he was adamant about black inferiority. he said, you know, everybody has to admit that white people are superior to plaques but he'd say, you know, we should try to raise them up but as we raise them up, we should raise ourselves even further so that the distance would always be the sam same. he said this is a white man's government and it will remains a white man's government and you

have a policy from the republicans in congress and they're saying black votes, land reform, some kind of political life for black people and you realize that's the president and congress are at loggerheads. the south bringing itself back into union does not encompass black people's status beyond taking them out of legal slavery and that was the battle was joined and him and the republicans and that eventually led to his impeachment. one person who is a biographer of johnson started -- started the book out lamenting the fact that when people write about johnson all they seem to care about are reconstruction and impeachment. but mainly reconstruction and he said you know what? there's not much else? he had this grand plan to talk about all the other aspects of andrew johnson's presidency but

it's reconstruction. we buy alaska. those things will be handled by his secretary of state. most of his time was spent on reconstruction. and trying to thwart the efforts of republican members of congress who wanted to transform the south. he believed the south had really not seceded. his view was secession was illegal and because it was illegal they never left. jefferson davis is not really a president. there was no confederate, you know, states of america. there was nothing. that did not exist and because it didn't exist, once the war is over and you bring everybody back in -- it's sort of like rewinding the tape except the slavery part and take the slavery out of it and the south goes back to exactly what it was before fort sumter, before there

was any conflict at all. that's a tough position to think of. 4 million people who had been freed at this point so what do you do with them? and there were people who realized that called for something but he said, no. the constitution does not allow what you're trying -- what you're attempting to do. anything -- he was very much, he said, a proponent of the constitution. he saw himself as the guardian of the constitution. but he had what i called sort of a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. i mean, things that he liked were constitutional. things that he didn't like were unconstitutional. [laughter] >> the constitution clearly says that congress has the right to set rules for the governance and everything having to do with the district of columbia. so when congress gives black people the right to vote, he vetos it and says it's unconstitutional. well, that is in the constitution. this is not even like some kind

of interpretation of it. so you get a sense of what constitutionalism means to him. i like it, it's constitutional. if i don't, it's not. so he thought he was in the right protecting the constitution. the republicans thought, wait a minute, something has to change here. we have to transform this out. you can't just have people wandering around there in some status. i don't know what he thought, what they wanted other than that they were supposed to be under the domination of whites. and he does something that really surprises people. you remember i said he hated the southern grandees, the plantation owners. and wanted to publish them. he thought they had led the south into war. he had this strange notion that southern planters, the large scale planters and slaves were in a conspiracy against poor white people. and so he blamed them for the war. that the blacks -- the epslaved

people and their masters, they were in league trying to keep poor whites down. and at first he talked about keeping them down. my greater hem is not those rich people. my enemies are the people in the north the republicans who want to change the south. and what he opted to do instead of punishing them was to put them back in power. and so not only does he try to thwart the so-called radical republicans, he puts all the people -- he helps to put back into power all the people who who had been in power before the war, the very people whom he called trade ers. the oaths people had to swear to. the oaths who said the loyalty

oaths and he put them back into power. we've only does this twice to remove a president. he survives a conviction in the senate by 1 vote. people think that really we could talk a little bit about this. in the question and answer period. but people felt that he only had maybe a year or so more to go on his term he would have been out anyway. the second thing was the person who would have taken over from him ben wade was considered a wild eyed radical. he believed in things like women voting which, of course, made him like, you know, a martian. like he was from mars. and so what came after -- what would have come after him and the fact that he didn't have

very long to go on his term and some other things. he actually made some deals with people about this. they voted only -- he escaped conviction by 1 vote. he is nevertheless sort of a ruined president after that. he keeps vetoing bills. he's overridden. he has hopes of making a comeback but his real plan was to unite conservatives in the north and the south to create another political party to try to bring -- to take the country back. that was his sort of idea. that it had gotten away from him and he needed groups of the most conservative people, wherever they lived, regardless of party, to sort of band together and take back the country. it didn't work. he leaves office. he doesn't -- he can't get -- the democrats don't really -- the democrats at this time they're not democrats as you know like now. the parties have sort of flipped from where they were. they didn't trust him.

and the republicans surely weren't going to have him. so he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he runs for office. he's unsuccessful at first but he then is returned to the senate. and he sees this as the vindication that he was right all along. he goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out and he's there only for a few months and he dies in 1875 of a stroke on a trip back to tennessee. so it's an amazing story of a person who is, as i said, ineggmatic and probably will be closed to us in some really, really significant ways just because he didn't write. he didn't -- we don't have his voice very much. there's some question about his formal papers, how many of those things were probably prepared by other people. but we certainly don't have the

kind of day-to-day, you know, statements -- statements from him. a few anecdotes about family from him. the andrew johnson homestead has a website that has information about him as a slave holder. but not -- again, not huge reams of material about this person whom i think as i said was one of the most significant effects on american life of anybody during an american history even though he's judged as the worst president. thurgood marshall in one of his opinions, one of his dissents, i believe, it was -- maybe it was in baki he wrote -- i'm not sure it was baki buff he said if america had done what it was supposed to have done during this time period, he doesn't cite andrew johnson but he talks about this reconstruction period is a sort of lost opportunity and i think that you can't blame -- you cannot blame one

person for all the good that happens or all the bad that happens but a president -- and this is my approach in the book. a president is the leader of the country. he's a symbolic leader. people in times of crisis -- people don't look to the supreme court or the congress. there's too many of them. the president is the energy of the government. and the president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership. and the kind of leadership that he exhibited during this time period wasn't enough -- he didn't ruin everything all by himself. but he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done and that's the real tragedy, i think, of his presidency but again, that's why i think more people should know about andrew johnson because i really do believe that he's helped to make us who we are today. i mean, think about land reform. think about the difference in wealth, the production of wealth in the black community is in

former slaves that had land. most of them instead of being sharecroppers. the difference between owning your own property and renting it from someone else. now, people say, yes, but we got something good out of it. we got the 14th amendment because his recalcitrantance about all the laws he was passing the civil rights bills and all those things forced them into passing the 14th amendment and that's a good thing. but think about -- think about the lost -- all the losses if he had not opposed land reform and black rights. if they had land in the 1860s as opposed to what happened, he set us back. he set the country back and sent back people back tremendously because of his -- the failure of his leadership. he wouldn't see it from a failure but from the way he exercised his leadership. he said that he wanted to preserve the country as a

whiteman's government. and he was actually able to do that for the longest period of time. and in historical circles up until the civil rights movement, he was seen by many as a good president. if you read stories -- so-called dunning schools, a school of historians out of columbia and other places who championed johnson as a hero who helped stave off negro rule, you know, worthless negro rule in the south -- i mean, essentially, that historical school existed into the 20th century, w.e.b. dubois wrote a book called "black reconstruction" and he said, as he was want to do, set the record straight. very, very clearly and there are other people -- and once he did that, other people began to take a look -- a second look at reconstruction, the people who were congress people -- you know, if you see "birth of a nation", you know, they got blacks in congress saying are you chicken and bare feet --

these are some of the most educated people. these were really, really educated men, talented people who were in these offices and that whole "birth of a nation" dunning school business really propped up andrew johnson because it made look like -- his attitudes were the correct ones. after dubois and others, certainly by the civil rights movement people began to take a different look at reconstruction and understood that he was more of a problem than any kind of solution. so i'm glad, i have to say, even though it took me a long time to do it and it's difficult to write about someone who, you know, you can have hold responsible for lots of bad things that happen and you have to try to have enough detachment to present his good points as well as his bad points and i hope i've managed to do that. and -- but i do think i make very strongly the case that he

is a figure that we cannot ignore. that he was just there at too important a time period for him to be unknown to most people because i think we can explain a lot about who we are by looking at his life and looking at, you know, the kinds of things that he did during reconstruction. actually, the trajectory of his life is a very, very american story and in good ways and in bad ways. but with that i would like to take your questions. [applause] >> thank you very much. we've get hands already, fantastic. right there in the fifth row. >> do you see any parallels in the take back the country movement in andrew johnson time and the tea party and sarah palin? >> parallels in the sense that

americans revere the constitution and people say too much. you know, that it's almost like a sacred text and anytime we are in trouble or any time we want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document -- even people on the left. i mean, not as much as i think they should but people to the left look to the constitution as a protector. i think it's different because -- it's different in this sense. there's been a war -- you know, almost 500,000 people died both regions, certainly the south decimated. this is really life during wartime. this is not life during a wartime. that kind of wartime. we've got wars going on overseas, but this is hyperbole, i think, at this point taking our country back. the country hasn't gone

anywhere. you know i mean, it's like these people are in a real -- they took up arms against one another and fought one another. and those were really serious life and death kinds of issues. i think that this is -- they're using that rhetoric but it's not to my mind as serious as the time period that those people were in. it's more -- it's rhetoric. it's sloganeering. it's not people have legitimate concerns and aren't serious about it. johnson, we're talking about life and death. certainly in the south. if you read eric foner who wrote the big book on reconstruction and i relied on that in pointing me to some material about some of the things that were going on. i mean, you know, this guy talked about going to a village in texas, a town in texas, and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men, women and little

children, blacks just -- the rivers with bodies floating down it. i mean, this was after war is over and people turned on blacks and try to reassert their control. they were planned for keeps back then. i don't know what this is. it doesn't compare to that i don't think even though they might think it does. >> another question right here in the fourth row. >> thank you for coming to this free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a bit about education. i never quite understood why the radical republicans didn't press and push much more resources into providing education for the free slaves. >> oh, they did from the free colliemans bureau. they tried to do that and there's poignant stories about people, little kids sitting next to grown people, you know, everybody trying to -- that's what they tried to do. but those schools were attacked, night riders, people who tried

to be teachers in them. there was a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people -- they didn't want blacks in the schools. they wanted them in the fields. they definitely tried to do that. the freeman's, higher education, howard university started by general howard, and they tried to do that but in lots of these little places, they were not in control of all of this. and certainly once the military leaves, you know education becomes really, really -- really sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during that time period so they tried but lots of opposition and violent opposition in many, many places. >> the lady on our left on the third row. >> when did johnson free his slaves or did he free them? >> after the end of the war, they became freed men. not before then.

he may have freed a couple before then but not until after this. >> right here. >> what do you think about johnson's arguments that secession was void ab initio? >> you know, lincoln said that, too. that it's illegal. that secession was illegal and the reason he said it was because if secession is illegal, then the president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellions and so forth. if secession is illegal and -- legal and they left, then you could say they're like territories and congress moves the territories. so it's -- as a matter of a political of the separation of powers, it was a political -- political argument, but again, lincoln died so we don't know what he would have done or what he really thought but for him he

thought that was an abstraction, it was a pernicious abstraction. >> jackson took it very, very much to heart. he was very literal-minded on that. if they thought they could leave, they lot. i mean, jefferson davis did set up a government. it's hard for me to pretend that they were not real. that what they had wasn't a real thing and i think congress -- they should have been governed as territories and i think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct them. so i understand the legal argument about it. but practically, realistically, they set up their own government. and they stopped participating, and they went their own separate way for a time period. >> yeah, right here in the third row. >> what was the base of support

was for johnson? after all, he was the guard by the southern diehards and an unreliable president by the northern abolitionists? >> well, before -- you know, you mean while he's president? while he's president he didn't have that much support. i mean, he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed. and at this point, he begins to say let's try to make a base of these conservatives i talked about by being lenient with the former southern planters, some of them are still planters but he tried to butter them up by not punishing them the way he originally said he was going to do. he wanted to build this party. and he wasn't really successful at doing. public opinion varied about him. sometimes the northerners liked

him and sometimes they hated him but once it became clear that he was not going to go along with reconstruction, they uniformly hated him so he didn't really -- that's why he couldn't get a nomination after -- you know, after -- well, certainly after the impeachment, nobody wanted to have him back but he really didn't have very much support. he spent most of his presidency trying to build that by, you know, currying favor with the southerners and, you know, sometimes appearing lenient to northerners but it didn't work. he pleased nobody. he tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until, you know, he manages at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time, but he was not -- it's interesting because he must have -- he was a good politician to a degree 'cause he couldn't have come from nowhere to where he went. but once he got into office, it was like he was out of -- i think, out of his league.

he was out of his depth. so he ended up with not very many friends at all. >> about four rows back there, do you think he was a tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? i think he was a tragedy for this country. a tragic figure? [laughter] >> i can't find anything about him that -- he doesn't -- he didn't seem to have a visible sense of humor in a way. there's not a lot of -- yeah, i would think he's a tragic figure. [laughter] >> i'm trying -- when i think of tragedy you think of like a hero, you think of somebody, you know, who has a grand, you know, persona and is sort of brought down. i feel -- but i do think in a sense he's tragic because he

wanted desperately to rise. and he actually did rise. and it's an amazing story. i mean, you can't read until you're 19 years old and then you're president at some point. that's the grit, the tenacity it. and which served him well and that's why he was able to stay committed to the union. i mean, at tremendous personal sacrifice. he could have been killed. there are people, many, many people who wanted to kill him that. and he stood fast against all of that. but i don't know -- i don't know how much self-awareness he had. see, that's the reason i'm hesitating about this. if you think of a tragic figure, tragic figures, you have some -- i think you have some evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. i think he died thinking he was vindicated and he had done the right thing and so he wouldn't have seen -- i mean, he was certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to -- i mean, you know, to make

it and get the nomination again but i think he would have thought he was successful because he was. i mean, he really did save his region from being transformed. it wasn't transformed until 1965 really? so he could count himself a success for a very, very long period of time. looking at him, you know, if he had -- if he had been a real statesman and if he had -- he didn't have to do everything the radical republicans wanted. but he could have been a great president. you know, if he had made the right choices. i'll give you an example. this is -- this, i think, is very telling about him. at one point in his early career, there was a proposal to bring the railroad to eastern tennessee. and even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad because if you brought the railroad, people would get

to where they're going so quickly that you wouldn't need inns and taverns. so as not to put inns and tav n taverns out of the business, you can't have the railroads. that makes sense except towns spring up along railroad routes and people -- i mean, the people had to walk maces. he had no horse. when he leaves tennessee, he walks. he has to walk 70 miles to places and stuff like that. they're talking about, you know, dodging mountain lyons and so forth. so you have this sense of this lack of vision in a way. [laughter] >> and so -- but if you don't know where you're deficient, it's hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure and as i said because he was successful. he actually did stave off the

transformation of the south for many decades. so i don't think he would count himself as a tragic figure. >> he's also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a lecture. [laughter] >> in the snow. [laughter] >> the lady in the middle. >> right here. >> where are you? >> you talked a little bit about his family when he was young. tell us more about his family life as he became an adult? >> his wife helped him, as i said, taught him to read and write. he had -- we don't really know that much about her. she was an invalid for many years and did not accompany him to the white house. did not stay with him in the white house most of the time. his daughter served as the first most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seemed

consumed by work. he was out giving speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. i don't get a sense much of his -- of his family life other than that he was married. he had three sons and a daughter. one of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. he was an alcoholic and that was a great tragedy in his life. i talk a little bit in the book a reference to one of the enslaved women -- one of the women he owned, there was talk that he had children we are. there's no proof of that. the only thing that he buys her and she's about 16 years old, and she has two children, you know, who she's listed in the census as black and her children are listed as mulano, meaning they were mixed race kids and people talked about that.

that that was possibly true. some people criticize me about mentioning that although a person -- i mean, someone has written a book about andrew johnson, his racial views talks about this and other articles have talked about it as well. and i thought, you know, here's a person who was an enslaved person in his household, a young girl, i thought it was important to mention that out of deference for her, out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of enslaved girls at that time period because he could have been. we don't know that he was. but i don't think, you know, when you're talking about a person who's a slave owner you have to talk about all the aspects of that, not just buying and selling people. so it's not -- we don't get a sense of -- again, this is -- in the comparison to jefferson where you have lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters and grandchildren and all those kinds of things, and people commented on him. one thing people did say that he liked children quite a bit. he was good with children and

they liked him. one of the people who was the son of a person who was enslaved -- one of his slaves says he even would bounce black children on his knee. i mean, he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. i mean, he was able to be apparently child-like with children but you don't get a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. >> we have time for one more question. we'll go to this gentleman right here. >> no jefferson, i'm sorry. >> you may not want to answer this or even respond to this. but have you ever speck -- speculated as to whether a

different kind of johnson could have succeed ed in vastly rearranging the fence of the last half of the 19th century? >> oh, sure, yeah. and i think he could have. i mean, he wouldn't