he never lived with his father. that is the secret to the family. barack obama's mother was in seattle 15 days after obama's birth enrolling at the university of washington. this is beyond the view. barack obama, senior is in hawaii. they never lived together. no one saw them date or went to the wedding. so, barack obama, sr. had nothing to do with the formation of barry obama who had a lot to do with a mother. i know there's a lot of talk about islam and he did have a say, but his mother was a hard core secretary humanist and she just drove, drove this into his head and on one occasion was a telling occasion dreams from my father that her husband works for an american oil company and

its indonesian and says we are having a party would want to come meet your fellow americans, some of your people and she shouts back those are not my people. this is barack obama's mother. she's not a little girl from kansas. she was known as anarchist anne in seattle where she left from. so is the primary formation and that was reinforced by frank marshall davis and bill ayers as deep secretary and humanism and she does have a jesus moment is that jeremiah wright's church. ..

i was wanting your opinion of your whole experience with that. >> the whole experience? well you know they have like a radio road there and that was fine. you are doing some truly weird radio things. we did know who we were talking to from one moment to the next that they seem fine and oblige bull and appropriate. i get that feeling. they are going from zero to 60. if they don't know anything about this at all, i get e-mails from our own people and they say this sounds improbable. well yeah it sounds improbable but let's face it, if bill ayers were the neighborhood electrician and barack obama needed his house rewired he would have called bill ayers. obama needs his book rewired he

calls bill ayers. >> i'm electrical engineer and now i understand. [laughter] [applause]@ >> i thought it would bring him to you. i spent five years at purdue and i talk like an engine in person. yes, sir. >> did they say anything about -- in "dreams from my father"'s? >> i e-mailed him a couple of times without response. here's what he did though. when christopher anderson's book came out in november 2009 on 2 occasions unprompted he told people that he did write "dreams from my father," however he did it with a wink in his eye, and the mainstream media interpret that to mean that he was just teasing the right. i think he was, yes i think he was telling the truth, and subverting it by making believe he is not telling the truth. think the of ultimate message went to the white house saying be good. i have got your number.

says it has got a lot of power this point. thanks a lot. good question and thank you all for coming. appreciate it. [applause] we will be signing some more books outside. >> jack heschel is the executive editor of the business magazine ingram's. to find out more about mr. cashill visit his web site cashill.com. author poet and playwright ishmael reed is on in depth live sunday april 3 starting at noon eastern.

coming up next, pulitzer prize-winning author annette gordon-reed presents a biography of the 17 president of the united states andrew johnson. she recounts president johnson's reticence to provide civil rights to recently freed slaves and his inability to provide leadership to a nation still recovering from the civil war. she spoke at the philadelphia free library. [applause] >> thank you very much. it is wonderful to be here again. i love this then you, get lots of good questions which 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. i had to write that and when i was writing it is a spellcheck

to make sure i didn't have jefferson and there when i should've had johnson because it was the temptation that was actually quite gray. if somebody had told me a number of years ago or at any point of my life that i would have written a book about andrew johnson, i would have told them they were crazy. it is not that i don't think he is an interesting person. he really is an interesting person and not that i didn't know anything about him, but for most of my career as a historian i have tried to avoid that period of reconstruction, 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 17th century and the 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do dealing with reconstruction. there something about it that is just maddening to me and i think what it is that it was a moment of opportunity. when i think of the people in the 17th and 18th centuries who have very primitive ideas about many many things in the world and you know there are

just lots of things they don't know, i cannot totally forgive them, but it is not as irritating to me, exasperating to me as that period of time when you have photographs, things that are part of the modern era and you feel closer to those people, the people in and that time period who seem more like us than someone in 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, to mix me angry. i'm able to be detached. the further back you go at that moment it makes me really 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 it period in time when he really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of make in america really one for every

one. so johnson would not have been my topic of choice. i read about that era because i had to but it wouldn't be something -- i've never thought i would have actually studied it and actually write something about it. but i got a phonecall one morning from arthur schlesinger jr., telling me that i was going to be getting a letter from him and sort of talking in general and i did get this letter from him in which he asked me to write the biography of andrew johnson for the american president period which is a very nice series, very short concise book about american presidents. they get people -- sometimes to actually fit like george appleby and thomas jefferson but gary hart did a book, george mcgovern did lincoln i think so there were sort of the mix of historians and non-historians, looking at these presidencies, telling the basic stories but also giving your own sort of

individual spin on it. and he asked me to 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 it and i had great respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. we were both on the advisory committee for that and also because paul gollop was the editor who was also the general series editor for the series. he was my editor for the book i did with burnham jordan, burnham can read. you know how it is when friends ask you to do things. they asked me to do this and i said sure. i put aside my misgivings. i knew it was a fascinating topic. there was so much material very rich but i wondered if i would be able to sort of curve my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular period in american history and i agreed to do it. that was many many years ago. this book is i have to confess

long overdue. in between saying i would do that i wrote "the hemingses of monticello" which took a lot of time and energy and that then i came back to this seriously and finished it, and i'm 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 almost every survey of rankings of american presidents, he is at the bottom. he is near the bottom. he is in the since 1997 i have participated in the surveys and sometimes i look at the results. sometimes i don't but he is usually in the bottom five. you can and is usually the worse but he is in the bottom five. this year, this past year when i didn't participate in the survey for the first time, i typically fill them out, i didn't this time because i was too busy. he made it to the last.

she was considered the worst president, just in time for the book i could say. and in some surveys he is considered one of the worst in this and this year the worst. and you know once you get down at that point it is really splitting hairs to think about what is the real story with that but that is a difficult issue because how do you sit down and write a book about somebody who is judged the worst of anything? well, just because someone is the worst or near the worst doesn't mean that they are not important. and that is the first realization i had. this man was president at one of the most pivotal periods in american history. and 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 are going to came to me, it's sort of hit me that it is very important to focus on the life of andrew johnson because i really do believe that some of the decisions that he made during that time period affect

this even today, and the choices he made in the choices he did not make him 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. i say in the book that history is not just about all the people you like. all the people you love and you would love to have dinner with and spend time with or whatever. it is about people who did things that were important that helps put us on the path to where we are now. and he is definitely a person who had that kind of role. so once i made up 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 was sort of eliminating what american life is like and what it was like during the time that andrew johnson lived. now, johnson is different from jefferson and 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. his wife taught them out to right. in those days reading and writing were different. they were separate, very separate things. there were many people who were taught to read and they would read the bible but writing is not something people thought necessarily one together and so his parents were illiterate. neither of his parents could read or write. we know they couldn't write because we have no record of them writing and people said that they were illiterate, so he didn't become literate until he was a young man. 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 mentioned that he sort of hurt his arm and that he explained that is the reason he didn't write that most people

think it is because he was very self-conscious about it, and his 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 then andrew johnson to other people, so that poses a problem for a biographer right there. we don't have this 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 lots of people there is still enough there to sort of craft some sense of what he is thinking, what he is feeling in who he was. but johnson was at a disadvantage because we don't really have that to the same extent, and the letters we have that show when he is a young man, show lots of misspellings, lots of phonetic spellings of things and it is difficult to wrap your mind -- i mean it was,

difficult to wrap my mind around who he really was a kid as you just don't have the kind of record you would typically have. not just somebody like jefferson but other people who were president. it is just not there so that is a big problem. and because we don't have lots of his letters and there is not a huge repository of them are him explaining what he is doing, we don't have lots of stories about him. there is another biography, the principle biographer of andrew johnson is a man named honcharik food who unfortunately died last year. i was so hoping to be able to finish this book and to show it to him because he is the one who went out and wrote the 500 page books about johnson and he has 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 on to the picture. but what he had found, people tend to repeat when they are

doing sort of smaller general biographies of andrew johnson. and there is not that much more, so they had to be another approach to him and that is where my expertise and my study of race relations in slavery and that period i think comes in handy. it is interesting to think about the beginning of america and come to a point where you are focusing on a time where america falls apart and that has to be put back together again. so i am with this, so i start out with his material that is not as voluminous as i am particularly used to but a person who i said is very very interesting considering where he came from. how did somebody like this go from being a letter it, a person whose parents were very very poor, to being someone who is in the highest office of the land? so he is born in north carolina to parents who as i said were

illiterate. his father died when he was three. his mother was a seamstress and she also worked as a washerwoman and in other people's homes. this is the thing that caused a lot of talk. people suggested later on that maybe andrew johnson was not the son of his father, that he was illegitimate. and i have gotten criticism for mentioning this in the book, even though hans mentions it as well, but what i tried to do instead of just mentioning it, i wanted to talk about the context how class affected the way people viewed andrew johnson from the very very beginning. because his mother worked outside the home, 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 "respectable" respectable woman,

the if those kinds of rumors would be openly spoken about during that time period. so from the very beginning it is not that he was just poor. it was that his family was seen as really marginal and there's a difference between what people would call the deserving poor, the poor but striving people and people who are seen as really marginal. she marries again. his mother remarried a man who is as poor as she. doesn't really improve their circumstances very much, and it gets so bad that she has two apprentice her two children, though andrew johnson was an apprentice to a taylor when he was 10 years old. his brother was a couple of years older. he was supposed to be in the apprenticeship until he was 21. why he would take that long to become a taylor, and as you will see it didn't taken that take them that long to become very very good. so he is 10 years old and he is an apprentice to a taylor and he actually runs a way. he and his brother run away and there is an ad.

the language of that i reproduced in the book. basically a runaway servant ad, the kind of thing you would expect to see more familiar with breath runaway slaves. reward, everything, capture him and bring them back and we will pay you a report. this is the future president of the united states. this is what happens to him. he runs away. he doesn't come back. he goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor and and another person's tailor shop in becomes very good at his job and actually even has an older man, when he is a politician a and a prominent politician he made suits for people as a gift. it is kind of cool. you think of a president who can make suits. the gender thing doesn't matter because he is a tailor, right? a tailor can be a masculine thing to do but that was his way of giving gifts to people so it was 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 is comparing him to lincoln, who unfortunately -- this is about this business. it is really tough. lincoln was a tough act to follow. on the same surveys i talked about, he is almost always mentioned as the best so you go from number one in being the best to the worst in one terrible moment, the ford theater. that is what you have in relation to enter johnson sirleaf suffers by comparison. so that heart of it. it is not just that he had failings which we will talk about, but he came after someone who was amazing to people and in good ways and bad. some people hated him but it very towering figure to andrew johnson. so we have these humble origins

that seemed to make him in some ways -- it strengthened lincoln. hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way, strengthen them and empathy, strengthened them in vision and so forth. but i think my take on johnson is that his hard life, being looked down upon, being thought of as trash made him hard and lots of ways. someone asked me, you would think that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. sympathetic to slaves. but no. the other side is, what they can do is to make you look for somebody to look down on. there has got to be somebody below you, and i think he took comfort perhaps insane you know, like many poor southern whites, i may live in a shotgun shack. i may not have very much, but i'm white, and that is better than these people over there so

if you want to maintain that you have to make sure there is always somebody over there or under their who you can look down upon. and i think that seems to be the tack he took in life and to the detriment, his own personal demons really ended up affecting the course of history of the united united states of america. while he is in the tailor shop, he is a very smart kid, a smart person. he listens to men who would come to the tailor shop to read to the tailor's. this is where you think about civic engagement. you know there are people in the shop who can't read, and that man would come and read and he would read a book about speeches. johnson loved speeches. he kept the book. the guy gave him the book he loved it so much in over the years any time 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 the 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 them 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 speaking. he was sarcastic and aggressive and people hadn't really seen anything like it. and so his fame grew. people suggested he might stand for office, which he did. he was very ambitious, a good businessman. even though we started out poor, he made the right kinds of investments and he actually bettered himself financially and he went into politics. and he climbed a ladder from alderman, mayor, every single rung of the latter he ladder he was on a cup to the president. so it is an interesting thing, 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 is no question he was an extraordinary person. i think one of paul gollop my editor said and he had done all of these. he edited all of the ones that have been done so far and he said all these people are extraordinary to make it to the presidency. is not just like somebody sitting around one day and says okay, i'm going to the white house. there is something there. other people see something in that person in the person see something in himself. so far only him. only he uses it with all of this and he says i should go for that position. i should be at the top and he was like that himself. said the book describes his offense and how he fashioned himself, tried to fashion himself after his hero andrew

jackson. he comes of age during the age of jackson. he is a unionists. he is for the common man. he campaigns for the homestead act and there were lots of things about him that seemed very aggressive, very populist in a way but as you know populism has this sort of -- viewers at double-edged sword there. lots of times populace are in favor of measures that you would think would be progressive. he was for the homestead act, giving poor people land. he wanted public education. he was always a champion of public education thinking back on his own life and how deprived he was. he wanted a better shot for people, people who were privileged. the catch was he only wanted that for whites. he was for the homestead act. but when reconstruction came reconstruction came and there was a time to give land reform, the republicans in congress

wanted land reform in the south, to give his 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 is what land meant. if you don't work for people you can grow your own food. you can subsist on your own plot and you are not beholden to anyone. he wanted that for whites but he didn't want that for blacks so this populist part, there 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 one and thinking of himself as a champion of the common man. as they said he is for the union. he had no trust whatsoever with the session is, and he sort of alienated, even before the war he alienated people like jefferson davis because of his

support for the homestead act. the southern planters did not like the idea of giving poor white people land. they said they thought it was like they would have used the term but they said this is like welfare. wired cuke giving these people land below market rate. why don't they go out and work for it or why did they deserve this? but he was all for it and so from the beginning their work helps a trance about this antipathy towards the other planters. so he came up making enemies all along the way. lincoln, he gets on the ticket because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south that there is a future, that the north in the south had a future together, and so it was a symbolic gesture of unity for him to pick a southern from the border states. by then he is in tennessee.

he has moved to tennessee as a young man, to put them together and to say look, even though the south isn't participating in the elections but they are saying look, i am willing to have a seven or 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 is from maine who didn't give him any kind of clinical clout. so there he is as a vice president, this person as a city started out illiterate up until his early manhood is the vice president of the united states and people hated that. there were many people who said he is not the kind of man who should be in this office. this is a disgrace, and reading these kinds of things and i even managed to feel a bit sorry for him as you hear people ragging on him about this, but then at the inauguration he is drunk. he comes to the inauguration. actually was kind of fun to write. i had a lot of fun doing this. he had been ill, and in those

days i think they thought whiskey was the cure for everything. many people think that now. and he drank too much whiskey, and so there is the spectacle. it would have been amazing if something like that were to happen today. you can imagine on youtube, on cable tv everything. [laughter] so all of these things. people said see, we told you. letting those kinds of people into those kinds of positions, this is what they are going to do. lincoln nevertheless stood by him. people said you should dump him. lincoln said no, no. and he is no drunk. he will be fine. and of course, lincoln was killed not long after that. and he ascends to the presidency and people are of course -- mortified doesn't even describe it. the country is traumatized. the people in north were traumatized. the 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 any one were inclined to do it. it was a traumatic, traumatic time period and there is johnson who has to rise to vacation. during those days immediately after lincoln's death, he actually does rise to the occasion. all the things that people who said, the performance as vice president is gone the way. he knows what to do ceremonially and symbolically. he really rises to the occasion. and there is a honeymoon for him for a time period until they get into reconstruction. and this is the part of the story that sort of like i said i tried to avoid all of this. when they began to realize that he is not going to have any, any support whatsoever with a notion of lack political rights, any kind of rights for the friedman after the civil war.

he only grudgingly accepted abolition. he was a slaveholder himself. he was not a large-scale slaveholder. he didn't have a plantation that he did have slaves. he was a supporter of slavery. he was adamant about black inferiority. he said everybody has to admit that white people are superior to blacks but he would say you know we should try to raise them up. as we raise them up we should raise ourselves even further so that the distance would always be the same. in other words, that was his plan, and he said this is a white man's government and it will remain a white man's government. when somebody says that out loud and says that adamantly over and over and over again and you have a policy on the republicans in congress that are saying black vote, land reform, some sort of political life for black people than he realized that is the president and congress are at loggerheads and that is what it

was all about. his vision, the south bringing the south back into the union did not encompass anything about changing black people status beyond taking them out of legal slavery. and that was a battle joined between him and the republicans and that is what eventually led to his impeachment. at person -- one person who is it either for of johnson started the book out lamenting the fact that when people write about johnson all they seem to care about our reconstruction and impeachment, but mainly reconstruction. and then he says but do you know what? there is not much else. so he had this grand plan to talk about all the other aspects of andrew johnson's presidency but it is reconstruction. did we buy alaska during this time period? there are some problems in mexico that we had to deal with. but those things were handled by the secretary of state. boast of his time is spent on

reconstruction and trying to thwart the efforts of republican members of congress who as i said wanted to transform the south. he believed that the south really had not seceded. his view was that secession was illegal and because it was illegal they never left jefferson davis. there was no confederate state of america. that did not exist and because it'd make says, once the war is over and you bring every society that can, sort of like rewinding the tape except the slavery part take the slavery out of it but the south goes back to exactly what it was before fort sumter, before there was any conflict at all. that is a tough position to think of. 4 million people who have been freed at this point, so what do you do with them? there they were people who realized that called for something, but he said no.

the constitution does not allow what you are attempting to do. 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 call sort of a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. i mean things that the lights were constitutional. things that he didn't like were unconstitutional. 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 gets black people the right to vote, he vetoes it as 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. if i like it is constitutional and if i don't it is not. so he thought that he was in the

right, protecting the constitution. the republicans thought wait a minute. something has to change your. we have to transform the south. we can't just have people wandering around in some status. i don't know what he thought 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 grandes, the plantation owners and wanted to punish them. he thought that they had led the south into war. he had the 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. the blacks and the enslaved people and their masters. they were trying to keep poor whites down. and first to talk about punishing these people but then he realized, my greater enemy is not those other people but

southern planter aristocrats. my enemies are the people in the north, the republicans who want to change the south and what he ought to do instead of punishing them was to put them back in power. and so not only does he thwart, try to thwart the radical republicans, the so-called radical republicans, he puts all the people who had been -- he puts help but get -- back into power of the people that it been in power before the war, the very people whom he called traitors and said he wanted to punish them. he brought them back on lenient terms. the sort of oath that people had to swear to, he dispense of those. that oath is said they had never never -- he dispense with a lot of those and he put them back into power. finally the republicans get angry about this and they bring on the impeachment. which remains a very drastic

remedy according to most americans. they see it as a drastic memory -- remedy. we have only done this twice in our history. to try to remove a president from office. he survived a conviction in the senate by one vote. people think that really, we can 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 into his term and he would have been out anyway. the second thing was that the person who would have taken over for him ben wave was considered to be a wild-eyed radical. he believed in things like women voting, which of course made him like a martian. 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 -- he escaped conviction by one vote.

he is nevertheless sort of a ruined president after that. he keeps vetoing bills. he is overridden. he had hopes of making a comeback but his real plan was to unite conservatives in the north end of the south to create another political party to try to bring, to take the country back. that was sort of his idea that he had gotten away from him and he needed groups of the most conservative people wherever they lived, regardless of party to sort of and together and take back the country. it didn't work. he leaves office. he can't get -- the democrats at this time -- they are not democrats as you know like now. the parties have sort of slipped from where they were. they didn't trust him in the republican surely weren't going to have him. said he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he would run for office. he is 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 is there only for a few months and he dies in 1875 of a stroke on his trip back to tennessee. so, it is sort of an amazing story of a person who is as i said, enigmatic and probably will be forever close to us and some really really significant way just because he didn't write. we don't have his voice very much. there is some question about his formal papers, how many of those things were probably prepared by other people but we strictly don't have the kind of day to day statements from him. a few anecdotes from family about him, but andrew johnson homestead has a web site that has information about him as a

slaveholder, but not, again, not huge reams of material about this person who i think as i said was one of the most -- had one of the most significant effects on american life of anybody during american history even though he is judged is the worst president. thurgood marshall in one of his opinions, one of his dissents i believe it was and maybe it was in bocci he wrote, not sure was bocci but 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 has appointed sort of lost opportunity, and i think that you cannot blame one person for all the good that happens oral the bad that happens. the president and this is my approach in the book, the president is the leader of the country, a symbolic leader. people in times of crisis,

people don't look to the supreme court or the congress. there are 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 matt wasn't enough to make -- he didn't run everything all by himself but he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done, and that is the real tragedy i think of this presidency but again, that is why i think more people should know about andrew johnson because i really do believe that he help to make us who we are today. think about land reform. think about the difference in wealth, the production of wealth in the black community and 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. people say yes but we got something good out of it. we week of the 14th amendment

because his recalcitrance about the laws congress was passing, the civil rights bill and all those things force them into passing the 14th amendment and that is a good thing, but think about, think about the loss, all the losses. if he had not oppose land reform, if he is not opposed black political rights. blacks up and exercising political rights from the 1860s or had land from the 1860s as opposed to what happened. he set us back, set the country back and said black people back tremendously because of the failure of his leadership, or he would say -- make you wouldn't say was a failure but the way he exercises leadership. he says he wanted to reserve the country as a white man's government 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 resident. if he read the so-called dunning

school's, school of historian out of colombia and other places who championed johnson as a hero who helped stave off rules, worthless rules in the south essentially. that historical school existed into the 20th century. w. e. b. dubois wrote a book called black reconstruction and he set the record straight, very very clearly. and once he did that other people began to take a look, second look at reconstruction. the people who were congresspeople. if you see birth as a nation, they have got blacks in congress in bare feet and all of this. these are some of the most educated people. these were really really educated man, talented people who were in these offices and the whole birth of the nation school business really propped

up andrew johnson because it made it look like his attitudes were the correct ones. after dubois and other strictly 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. i am glad i have to say even though it took me a long time to do it and it is difficult to write about someone who are responsible for lots of bad things that happen you have to try to have enough detachment to be able to present his good points as well as his bad points, and i hope i've managed to do that. but i do think i make very strongly the case that he is a figure that we cannot it nor, that he was just there at too important of 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 the kinds of things that he did

during reconstruction. actually the trajectory of his life is a very american story in good ways and in bad ways. with that i would like to take your questions. [applause] >> thank you very much. we have got hands already. fantastic. writer in the fifth row. >> do you see any parallels between the take back of the country movement in johnson's time and the tea party and sarah palin? >> well, parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution and some people say too much. it is almost like a sacred text and any time we are in trouble or anytime we want to make a

point, we use the constitution and say we want to get out of that document. even people on the left. i mean, not as much as i think they should that people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. i think it is different because, it is different in the sense. there have been a war for almost 500,000 people died, certainly the south decimate it. this is really like during wartime. this is not like that kind of wartime. we have got wars going on overseas but this is hyperbole i think at this point, taking the country back. the country hasn't gone anywhere. do you know what i mean? these people, they take up arms against one another and fought one another and those were really serious life-and-death kinds of issues. i think that they are using that rhetoric, but it is not to my

mind as serious as a time period for those that those people were in. it is more -- it is rhetoric. it is sloganeering. i'm not saying people don't have legitimate concerns and they are not serious about them but when johnson -- we are talking about life and death certainly in the south. you read eric phoner who wrote the big book on reconstruction and i relied on that and pointing me to some materials about some of the things that were going on. this guy talks about going to a village in texas, a town in texas and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men, women and little children, lack. rivers with bodies floating down them. this was after the war is over when people turned on blacks and try to reassert their control.

they were playing for keeps back then. i don't know if this is. doesn't compare to bad i don't think even though they might think it does. >> another question right here in the fourth row. >> thank you for coming to the free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a little bit about education? i have never quite understood the row why the radical republicans pushed much resources and providing education for the free slaves? >> what they did to the friedman's bureau. they tried to do that. the friedman's bureau, there were poignant stories about people, but he -- little kid sitting next to grown people. that is what they tried to do but those schools were attacked. knight riders, people who try to be teachers. there was a a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people people -- they didn't want blacks in schools. they wanted them in the field so they definitely try to do that.

higher education, howard university started by general howard. 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 education becomes really really sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during that time period so they tried but there was lots of opposition and violent opposition and many many places. >> linda johnson free his slaves or did he free them? >> after the end of the war they become free. not before then. he may have freed a couple before them but not until after then. >> right here. >> what do you think about johnson's argument of secession was buoyed ab initio?

>> well, lincoln said that too, that it is illegal, that secession was illegal and the reason he said it was because it secession is illegal, then the president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellion and so forth. secession is illegal and they left, then you could say they are like territories and congress rules the territories so as a matter of faith political -- of the separation of powers that was it clinical, political argument, but again lincoln died so we don't know what he would have done or what he really thought that for him, he said that was an abstraction, a pernicious abstraction. johnson took it very very much to heart. he was very literal minded on that. what i think is that well, if

they thought they could leave, they left. jefferson davis did set up a government. it is hard for me to pretend that they were not real and 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 themselves. so i understand the legal argument about it, but we are practically, realistically, they setup their own government and they stop versus paving and they went their own separate way for a time period. >> right here in the third row. >> what was basically the base of support? after all he was the cause of the -- southern diehards and was

an unreliable president. >> before -- you meanwhile he is president? while he is president, he didn't have that much support. he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed and at this point he begins to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about by being lenient with the former southern planters. but he try 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 it. public opinion buried about him. sometimes the northerners liked him and sometimes they hated him but once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction they really hated him and that is why he couldn't get a nomination certainly after

the impeachment, nobody wanted to have him back. but he really didn't have very much support. he spent us of his presidency trying to build that by currying favor with the southerners and then sometimes appearing lenient to northerners but it didn't work. he please nobody. he tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until he manages at the end to get back to the senate for brief period of time. but it is interesting because he must have been -- he was a good politician to a degree because he could have come from nowhere to where he went want to 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 in the middle. why we are getting the mic do

you think he was a tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? gosh. i think he was a tragedy for the country but a tragic figure? [laughter] i can't find anything about him him -- he doesn't seem to have had a visible sense of humor. there is not a lot of -- yeah i would think he is a tragic figure. [laughter] when you think of tragic you think of like a hero, somebody who has a grand persona and his sort of brought down. but i do think in a sense he is tragic, because he wanted desperately to rise and in the actually did rise and it is an amazing story. he can't read until 19 years old and then you he were president at some point. the grid, the tenacity which

served him well. that is why he was able to stay committed to the union. i mean a tremendous personal sacrifice. he could have been killed. there are many many people who wanted to kill him, and he stood fast against all of that, but i think -- i don't know how much self-awareness he had. you see that is the reason i'm hesitating about this. if you think of a tragic figure, tragic figures, i think you 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. so he wouldn't have seen it. he was certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to make it -- to get the nomination again but i think he would have thought he was successful, because he was. he really did save his region from being transformed.

it wasn't transformed until 1965 really so he actually could count himself a success anyway for a very very long period at time. looking at him, if he had been a real statesman and if he had -- he didn't have to do anything the radical republicans wanted but he could have been a great president. you know if he had made the right choices. again, as an example, i think it is very telling about him. at one point, in his early career there was a proposal to bring their grove road 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 are going so quickly that you wouldn't need inns and taverns. so as not to put inns and taverns out of business, you can

have the railroad's. well, that makes sense in a way. except, except towns spring up along the railroad routes. the people had to walk places. when he left tennessee he walks. he just walks 70 miles to places and stuff like that. they are talking about dodging mountain lions and so forth so you have some sense of this lack of a vision in a way. [laughter] but if you don't know where you are deficient it is 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 many decades. so i don't think you would count himself as a tragic figure. speedy is also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a lecture. [laughter]

>> in the snow. >> yes. the lady in the middle. >> you talked about his -- right here. >> where are you? >> you talked about, and 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 them to read and write. 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 lady most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seem consumed by work. he was out giving speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. but you don't get a sense that much 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 a knock on a lake, and that was a great tragedy in his life. i talk a little bit about it in the book, a reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned. there was talk that he had children with her. there is no proof of that. the only thing is that he buys her and she's about 16 years old, and she has two children. she is listed as black and her children are listed as milano meaning mixed-race kids and people talked about that, that was possibly true. some people have criticized me about mentioning that, although someone who has written a book about johnson's racial views have talked about this and other articles that talk about it