represented by all of the possibilities in the many worlds that could have happened to this point over this space. and now if we want to get in our imaginary spaceship and go out much farther, everything is happening there is just the same set of things. and what we're doing is getting an outer product of all these combinations when we go out there and wait long enough to see what was out this, if we were allowed. what's happening in another branch of the universe we function here, so now that gives us another way to wrap that infinity. and it will look like an evolving infinity to an embedded observer, but you don't have this problem of what do we mean by infinite. >> yeah. and that's rooted by the fact that we're talking about the radius of a circle.

indeed, you're right, you would not have this problem that we were tussling with earlier on. absolutely. >> [inaudible] >> it can, absolutely. questions? oh, i'm sorry, are we done? >> i was going to say, i think our time is up, but thank you so much for the wonderful, lively and very mind-expanding conversation. [applause] ..

>> and his inability to provide leadership to a nation still recovering from the civil war. she spoke at the philadelphia free library. >> thank you very much. it's wonderful to be here again. i love this venue. i hope we get lots of good questions which will save time for at the end. this is an interesting occasion for me. this is 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 when i was writing it, i dispel check to make sure i did have jefferson ended when i should've had johnson because it was, the temptation was great. if somebody had told me a number of years ago, any point in my life that i had written a book about andrew johnson, i would've told them them they were crazy. it's not that i don't think it's

an interesting person. he is an interesting person. it's not that i did know anything about him, but for most of my career as a historian i've tried to avoid a period of reconstruction. 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, then educating 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 17th and 18th centuries who have a very primitive ideas about many, many things in the world and you know there's lots of things they don't know, i cannot totally forgive them, but it's not as irritating to me, exacerbating to me as a 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 that time period, it would be more like us than someone in the 18 santa or the 17th century when i'm writing about the development of slavery in virginia are writing about jefferson's monticello even. so when i read about reconstruction, and this moment of hope, it makes me angry. i'm able to be detached further back you go, in 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 a period of time when we really could have done something to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making in 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 that i never thought i would actually study it and write very much about it. but i got a phone call one

morning from arthur schlesinger, jr., and -- telling me i was going to get a letter from him and start talking just 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 presidents series which is a very nice series, a very short concise books about american president. and they get people sort of, well, sometimes people who fit, like joyce did thomas jefferson. she is a great jefferson scholar. by carey hart databook. george governor did lincoln i think. so they're sort of a mix of historians and non-historians looking at these presidencies. telling the basic story, but also getting their 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 agree to do it because arthur asked me to do it and i great

respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson. we're both on the advisory committee for the. and also because paul call up was the editor who's also the general series editor for the series, was my editor for the book i did for vernon jordan. these are two friends, you know how it is when friends ask you to do things. who asked me to do this. and i said sure. i put aside my misgivings. i knew it was a fasting topic, so much mature, very, 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 of american history. and i agree to do. that was many, many years ago. this book is i have to confess long overdue. in between thing i would do that i wrote "the hemingses of monticello" which took a lot of time and energy, and then i came back to this and seriously, and finished it. 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 are do know is that almost every survey of rankings of american presidents, he is at the bottom. keys near the bottom. he's in the bottom five. since 1997 i have participated in these surveys, and sometimes i look at the results. sometimes i don't but he is usually in the bottom five. buchanan is usually the worst, but he's 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. [laughter] he was considered the worst president. just in time for the book. and in some surveys he's considered one of the worst, and this year the worst president. once you get down to that point is really splitting hairs to think about who -- what's the

real story with that. but that's a difficult issue because how do you sit down and write about that somebody who was judged the worst of anything? well, just because someone is the worst, or near the worst, doesn't mean that they're not important. and that's the first realization i had. this man was president and one of the most pivotal period 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. and it came to me, sort of hit me that it's very important to focus on the life of andrew johnson because i do believe that some of the decisions he made during that time period affect us even today. and the choices he made, the choices he did not make him his attitude, his leadership style, all of those things helped to make us who we are. and for those reasons you have to pay attention to it.

and i said in a book history is not just about all the people you like. you know, all the people you love and would love to have dinner with and spend time with our whatever. it's about people who did things that were important that helped 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 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 to try to tell his story in a way that would illuminate what american life is like, and what it was like during the time that andrew johnson lived. 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 him how to write. in those days reading and

writing were different. were separate, very separate things. many, many people who were taught to read so they could read the bible, but writing was not something that people thought necessarily went together. and so his parents were illiterate. neither of his parents could write, read or write. we know they couldn't write because we have marks, we have no record of the writing, and people said they were illiterate. 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 would never was very comfortable doing it, at one point later on he mentioned that he had, he sort of hurt his arm and he sort of explain that as a reason he didn't write. but most people think it's because he was very, very self-conscious about it. and his writing, most of his life you self-conscious about it. so if you look at the papers of andrew johnson, or are many, many more letters to andrew johnson than 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 just 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's still enough there to sort of craft some sense of what he's thinking, what he's feeling and who he was. johnson you are at a disadvantage because we don't really have that to the same extent. and the letters we have that show when he was a young man show lots of misspellings, lots of phonetic spellings of things, and it's difficult to wrap your mind -- i make him 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 someone like jefferson but other people who were president, it's just not there. that's a big problem. and because we don't have lots

of his letters, and there is not a huge repository of him or him explaining what he's doing, we don't have lots of stories about him. there's another biography -- the principal biographer of andrew johnson is a man named hans who unfortunately died last year that i was so hoping to be able to finish this book and to show who went out and wrote a 500 page book about johnson. and he covered lots of the territory. my job was to cover some of that same territory more concise account but also to put my view of johnson onto the picture. but what once found, people tend to repeat when they're doing sort of smaller general biographies of andrew johnson. and there's not that much more pics of had to be another approach to him, and that's one -- that's where my expertise or

my study of race relations in slavery and. i think comes in and. it's interesting to think about the beginning of america had 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 -- i start out with this material that is not as luminous as i am typically used to, but a person it is very, very interesting, considering where he came from. how does 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. so he is born in north carolina and 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 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, you know, that he was illegitimate. i've gotten some criticism for mentioning this in the book, even though hans trefousse mentions it as well. but what i try to do, instead of just mentioning it, i want to talk about the context, 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 as a maid essential 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 merit 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, not that he was just forgot 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 that is driving people and people are seen as really marginal. she married again. his mother remarried a man who was as poor as she. doesn't really improve their circumstances very much, and it gets so bad that she has to apprentice her two children. so andrew johnson was apprenticed to attend when he was 10 years old. his brother was a couple years old. he was supposed be an apprenticeship until he was 21. why it would take that long to run to become a tailor, and it didn't because as you can see come it didn't take them that so he is 10 years old. is apprenticed to a tailor, and he actually runs away. he and his brother run away, and there is an ad, the language that i reproduce in the book. basically a runaway servant had, the kind of thing you would expect to see people more for my with with runaway slaves. you know, reward and everything, capture him, bring him back and

we will pay you a reward. this is the future president of the united states. this is what happens to them. he runs away. he doesn't come back. he hikes, goes off and actually gets a job as a tailor at another person stands up and becomes very, very good at his job. and actually even as an older man, when he is a politician, he makes sense for people. as a gift. it's kind of cool. think of a president who can make suits. this gender thing is out -- a doesn't matter because he is a tailor. a tailor makes -- that can't be a master thing to do but that was his way of giving gifts to people. a very practical, very real-world experience that he had. so he starts out very, very slow. and one of the things i talk about is comparing him to lincoln, whom unfortunately, this is about this business, it's really tough.

lincoln was a tough act to follow. i mean, on those same surveys that i talk about, he's almost always mentioned as the best. so you go from number one from the best to the worst in one, you know, one terrible moment. 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 had savings, which we'll talk about, but he came after someone who was, you know, and they seem to people. and in good ways and in bad, some people hated him. a very powerful figure to andrew johnson but we have these humble origins that seemed to make him in some ways -- well, it strengthens lincoln. hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way. strengthen them in empathy, strengthened them in vision and so forth.

but i think my take on johnson is that his hard life being looked down upon people, being thought of as trash made him hard in life. someone asked me, well, 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's 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 am white. and that's better than these people over there. and so if you want to maintain that come here to make sure there's always somebody over there, are under there, so you can look down upon. i think that seems to be the tack he took in life. and to the debt to become his

own personal demons really ended up affecting the course of history of the united states of america. while he's in a tailor shop, he's a very smart kid, smart person. he listened to men who would come to the tailor shop to read to dictators. sort of think about civic engagement. you know that their people in in the shop who can't read. and a man would come in retaining agreed about 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 sued to debate with a person in the shop, they can't do the moment of taking it outside, at berkeley. they decide to invite people to watch them argue. and it becomes clear 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 is a different type of speaker. he could be very, very rough speak he was sarcastic and aggressive, and people have 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, even though he started out poorly made the right kind of investments and he bettered himself financially. and he went into politics, and he climbed the ladder from alderman, mayor, every single rung of the latter he was on its up to the president. and so, it's an interesting thing. it's interesting comment on american life that someone could start out as low as he did, and go to where he went. so even though i can be somewhat hard on them in the book, there's no question he was an extraordinary person. i think one of the pol, my

editor, said if you done all of these, all of the things that have been done so far, he said all these people are extraordinaire. to make it to the presidency. it's not like somebody is sitting around one day and says okay, i'm going to the white house. there's something there, other people see something in that person and a person see something in itself so far, only him, that says i should go for that position. i should be at the top. and he was like that himself. so the book describes this event and how he fashioned himself, tried to fashion himself after his hero, andrew jackson, becomes of age during the age of jackson, he is a unionist, he is for the common man, he campaigns for the homestead act. there's lots of things about

investing very, very progressive, very populous and away. but as you know populism has this -- it's a double edged sword. lots of times populace are in favor of measures that you 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 not privileged. the catch was the only on one of that for whites. he was for the homestead act, as i said, but when reconstruction came and it was a time to give land reform, the republicans in congress wanted land reform in the south to give former in slaves 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 landed me.

you don't work for people. you can grow your own food. you can 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, 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 is as i said is for the union. he had no trouble whatsoever with secessionist. and he sort of alienated many of them even before the roar -- war, because of his support for the homestead act, the southern grandes, planters, did not like the idea of giving poor white people land. they thought, they wouldn't use the term if they thought this is

like welfare. why are you kidding these people land below market rates? why don't they go out and work for it, or why do they deserve this? but he was all for it. so from the beginning that recalcitrant about this further in antipathy towards southern planters. so he came up making enemies all along the way. lincoln gets on the ticket because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south that there was a future government of the north and the south had a future together. and so it was a symbolic gesture of unity for him to pick a southern, from the border state, from tennessee. he moved to tennessee as a young man, to put them together and to say, look, even though the south isn't this thing in the election, but they are single, i went on at a southerner on the ticket. one of these days we could get back together again.

so he ends up on the ticket. lincoln replaces hamblen who was from maine who didn't give them any kind of political clout. so there he is as a vice president, a person as i said to start 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 the office. it's a disgrace. and read these kinds of things, and i even managed to do a little bit sorry for them as you hear people ragging on him about this. but then at the inauguration he is gone. it comes to the inauguration. it's kind of fun to write that i had a lot of fun doing this. he had been ill, and in those days i think they thought was he was the cure for everything. many people think that now. and he drank too much whiskey. and so it would've been amazing if something like that would

happen today. you can imagine on youtube, on cable tv, everything. so, all of these things, people seize sexy, we we told you. those kinds of people in those kind of this is, this is what we're going to do. lincoln nevertheless stood by him. people said you should dump him to lincoln said no, no, no. he is not a drug. he said and he is no turn. he will be fine. and, of course, lincoln was killed not long after that. anti-ascended to the presidency. and people are mortified doesn't describe. the country is, does. 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 dramatic time period. 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, people said the performance as vice president has sort of gone away. he knows what to do, ceremoniously, symbolically. he'd really rises to the occasion. and as a honeymoon for him for a time period, until they get into reconstruction. this is the part of the story when i said i tried to avoid all of this, when they begin to realize that he is not going to have any support whatsoever with the notion of black political rights, any kind of rights the freed after the civil war. he only grudgingly accepted evolution. he was a slaveholder himself. is not a large-scale slaveholder. he did have slaves he was a supporter of slavery.

he was adamant about black and regarding. he said everybody has to admit that white people are superior to blacks but he was a we need to try to raise them up. but as he raised them up we should raise ourselves even further so that the distance would always be the same. that was his plan. and he said this is a white man's government and will remain and white man's government. when somebody says that, out out and says it adamantly over and over and over again, and you have a policy from the republicans in congress and the are saying black vote, land reform, some sort of political life for black people, then you realize that is the present and congress at loggerheads. that's what it was all about. is vision of south, bring the south back into the union did not encompass anything about changing black people's status beyond taking them out of legal slavery. and that was a battle join

between him and the republicans. and that would eventually is what led to his impeachment. a person wrote a book, one person who was a biographer of johnson started the book at lamenting the fact that when people write about johnson, all they seem to care about our reconstruction and impeachment. but mainly reconstruction. then he says, but, you know, what? there's not much else. so he had this grand plan to talk of all the other aspects of andrew johnson's presidency but it's reconstruction. we buy a laughter during this time period. there's problems in mexico that we have to do. but those things are handled by secretary of state. most of his time was spent on reconstruction and trying to thwart the efforts of republican members of congress who, as i said, wanted to transform the south. he deleted that the south really have not succeeded. he is that that he was that secession was illegal, and

because it was illegal they never left. jefferson davis was not really a president. there was no confederate states of america. there was nothing. that did not exist. and because it didn't exist, once the war is over and to bring everybody back in him a sort of like wind the tape, except the slavery part, and take the slavery out of it and the south would go back to exactly what it was before fort sumter, before there's any conflict conflict at all. that's a tough decision to think of. 4 million people who have been freed at this point, so what do you do with them? and there were people who realize, 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 he lied for 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 gives black people the right to vote, he vetoes and says it's unconstitutional. that's in the constitution. this is not even like some kind of interpretation of the. so you get the sense of what constitutionalism means do. i like to come its constitutional. but no, it's not. so, he thought that he was in the right are taking the constitution. the republicans thought, wait a minute, something has to change. we have to transform the south. you can't just have people wandering around there in some status, source, i don't know what he thought what they wanted

be under the domination of whites. and he does something that really surprises people. remember, i said he hated the southern grandes plantation owners and wanted to punish them. he thought they had led the south into war. he had a strange notion that southern planters, the large-scale planters and slaves were any conspiracy against poor white people. and so he blamed them for the war. at the blacks, the enslaved people and their masters, they were trying to keep rural whites do. at first he talked about punishing these people, but then he realized migrator enemy is not those southern people, those are the planters, rich aristocrats. 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 thwart,

tried to thwart the radical republicans called, the so-called radical republicans, he put all the people who have been, and help to put back into power all of the people who had been in power before the war, the very people whom he called traitors. and said he wanted to punish them. he brought them back, he didn't require the sort of oath that people had to swear to. he dispensed with those, the oath that said they never sort of -- a loyalty oath. he dispensed with that and he put them back into power. finally, the republican get angry about this and they bring on -- they impeach him, which remains a very drastic remedy, according to most americans. we've only done this twice in our history to try to remove the president from office. he survived a conviction in the senate by one vote. people think that would talk a

little bit about this in the question and answer period. the people felt that he only had maybe a year or so more to go on his turn, and he would've been out anyway. the second thing was that the person who is taking over for him was considered to be a wild eyed radical. he believes in things like women voting, which, of course, made him lie, 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 a very long to go to go on his term, and some other things, he actually made deals with people about this. they voted -- he escaped conviction by one vote. he is nevertheless sort of a ruined president after that. he has hopes of making a comeback, but his real plan was to unite conservatives in the north and the south, create

another political party to try to bring, to take the country back. that was his sort of idea that 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 can't get -- the democrats at this time, they're not democrats as you know like no, the parties have sort of split from where they were. they didn't trust him, and the republicans surely we're not going to have him. so he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he runs for office here 'tis unsuccessful at first but he then is returned to the senate, and he sees this as a vindication that he was right all along. he goes back up to a body that hyde tried to kick them out and he's only there 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, enigmatic, and probably -- well, will be ever close to us in some really significant ways just because he didn't write. 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 sorted don't have that kind of data they, you know, statements about from him, a few anecdotes from family about 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 president who i think as i said was one of the most significant effects on american life of anybody, even

though he is judged as the worst president. thurgood marshall in one of his opinions, one of his dissents i believe was, maybe a it was in bockius thinking about, i'm not sure, 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 as a point of sort of lost opportunity. and i think that you can't -- you cannot blame one person for all the good that happened all the bad that happens. but a president, this is my approach in the book. the president is the leader of the country. people in times of crisis, people to look to the supreme court or the congress, 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 his time period wasn't enough to make -- he didn't win everything all by himself but he made at 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 is health 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 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. now people say yes, we've got some good out of. we've got the 14th minute because he is in chalcedon about all the laws, all those things. force him into passing the 14th amendment. that's a good thing, but think about, think about the loss, all

the losses if he had not opposed land reform. it did not oppose like political right. and blacks have been exercising political rights from the 1860s or had land from 1860s as opposed to what happened. he settled back, set the country back and since black people back tremendously because of his, the failure of his leadership. are i would say, he would say it's a failure, from the way he exercised his leadership. he says he wanted to preserve the country as a white man's government. he was 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 the so called dunning school, a school of historians out of colombia and other places who championed johnson as a hero, who helped stave off negro rule, worthless negro rule in the south.

essentially that historical school existed into the 20th century. w.e.b. dubois wrote a book, and he just said it was something he wanted to do, set the record straight. very, very clear he and other people -- and what he did that other people began to take a look, second look at reconstruction. the people who were congress people, they got blacks in congress, chicken and bare feet and all the figures of the most educated people. these are really, really educated man, talent people who are in these offices. and it's that whole birth of the nation, dunning school business really propped up andrew johnson because it made it look like his attitude was a correct one. after w.e.b. dubois and others, sorted by the civil rights moment people began to take a look at reconstruction and understood that he was more of a problem than any kind of solution.

so, i'm glad i had to say, even though it took me a long time to do it, and it's difficult to write about someone, you know, you hold responsible for a lot of bad things that happen and you have to try to have enough detachment to be able to present his good points as well as did his bad boys. and i hope i have managed to do that. but i do think i make very strongly the case that he is a figure that we cannot ignore, that he wishes there at to import a time period for him to be unknown to most people. because i think we can explain about a lot of we are by looking at his life and look at the kind of thing that he did during reconstruction. the trajectory of his life is a very, very american story in good ways and in bad ways. at with that i would like to take your questions. [applause]

>> thank you very much. we have fans already. fantastic. >> the do you see any parallels between the take back the country movement and andrew johnson son and the tea party of sarah palin? >> well, parallels innocent americans revere the constitution. and some people say too much. dinner, that it's almost a sacred text. and anytime we are in trouble or anytime we want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document because -- even people on the left, i mean, as much as i think they should the people on the left look to the constitution as a protector.

i think it's different because, it's different in this sense. there's just been a war. i mean, almost 500,000 people died. both region, certainly the sou south. this is really life during wartime. this is not life during wartime, that kind of wartime. that war is going on overseas but this is hyperbole i think at this point taking the country back. the country hasn't gone anywhere. you know what i mean? these people are at a real -- they took up arms against one another and fought one another. those our cities life-and-death kind of issues. i think that this is -- they're using that rhetoric but it's not to my mind serious as the time period that those people were and. it's more -- its rhetoric. its sloganeering. i'm not saying people don't have legitimate concerns and they're

not serious about it but this was -- we are talking about life-and-death. certainly in the south. a big book on reconstruction and i relied on that in pointing me to some a true about some of the things that were going on. 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. the rivers with bodies floating down a. this was after the war was over, when people turned on blacks and try to reassert their control. they were playing for keeps back and. i don't know what it is. it doesn't compare to that i don't think. even though they might think it does. >> another question right here. >> thank you for coming to the

free library in philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a bit about education? i've never quite understood why the radical republicans didn't press and push much more resources into education for the free slaves. >> they did through the freedoms of your. and they tried to do that. the freedom. no, there's poignant stories about people, little kids sitting next to grown people, everybody trying -- that's what they tried to do but those schools were attacked. nightmares, people who tried to be teachers in them, there was a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people, the folks -- they didn't want blacks in schools. they wanted them in the field. so they tried to do that. the schools, higher education, howard university 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 sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during that time period. so they tried, that there was lots of opposition and violent opposition in many places. >> when the johnson free his slaves? or dd free to? >> after the end of the war they became free then. not before them. he may have read a couple before them but not until after. >> what do you think about johnson's arguments that secession was void? >> well, you know, lincoln said that, too. that is illegal, that secession was illegal. and the reason he said it was because if secession is illegal,

then the president exercises his power him his powers to quell rebellions. if secession is legal and they left, then you could say they are like territories, and congress rules the territories. so it's a matter of the separation of powers, it was a 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 said that was an abstraction. johnson took it very, very much to our. picky was very literal minded on the. what i think is that -- well, if they thought they could leave, they left. 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 want their own separate way for a time. >> what was the base of support? after all, he was regarded as a traitor to the southern diehards, and as an unreliable president, but he wasn't a abolitionist. >> before, you know, while he is president?

what he is president he didn't have that much support. he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed. and at this point he began his -- he wants to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talk about by being lenient with the former southern planters, but he tried to butter them up by not punishing the way here ridgely said he was going to do. he wanted to build his party and he wasn't successful at doing it. obligate pinion varied about him. sometimes the northerners like him and sometimes they hated him. but once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction, the uniformly hated him. that's why he couldn't get the nomination after, certainly after the impeachment, nobody wanted to have him back. i.t. really didn't have very much support. he spent most of his presidency trying to build a that by curry 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 managed at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time. but he was not -- it's interesting because he was a good politician to a degree as 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 we ended up with not very many friends at all. >> while they are getting the mic do you think he was each tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? gosh, do i -- i think he was a tragedy. [laughter] a tragic figure? this is -- he didn't -- i can't

find anything about him that -- he didn't seem to of had a visible sense of humor in a way. there's not a lot of -- that, i think he is a tragic figure. [laughter] i'm trying to think, what i think a tragedy you think of like somebody who has a grand, you know, persona, and it sort of brought down. i feel, but i do think innocent he is tragic because he wanted desperately to rise, and he actually did rise. and it's an amazing story. you can't read until you're 19 years old, and then you are president at some point. that's the grid, the tenacity. and which served him well. that's what he was able to stay committed to the union. tremendous personal sacrifice. he was a courageous -- he could have been killed. there were 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. that's the reason i'm hesitating think about 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 -- he was certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure -- you know, to get the nomination again. i think he would've thought he was successful, because he was. he really did save his region from being transformed. this was transformed in 1965 really big so he actually could count himself as success in the way for very, very long period of time. looking at him i think if he had been a real statesman and if he had -- he didn't have to do

anything to radical the republicans wanted, but it could've been a great president. if you made the right choices, i will give you an example. this i think is very telling about him. at one point in his early career, there was a proposal to bring the real -- 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 are going so quickly that you wouldn't need games and taverns. so as not to put ends and taverns out of business. you can have a railroad. that make sense in a way, except towns spring up along the railroad routes of people -- the people had to walk places.

when he would leave tennessee he would walk. he would just walk 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 vision in a way. [laughter] and in a vision, and so, but if you don't know where you are 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, many decades. i don't think he would count himself as a tragic figure. >> he's also somebody who would walk 40 miles to go to an election. >> in the snow. >> you talked about -- >> where are you? >> right here. you talked about his, a little bit about his family when he was young. tell us more about his family

life as he became an adult. >> he had his wife, helped him, as i said, taught him to read and write. and 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 serves as the first lady most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seems consumed by work. he was out getting speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. you don't get a sense that much of his family life, other than 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 talked 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's no proof of that. the only thing is that he buys her and she's about 16 years old, and she has two children who -- she is listed as blackadder children are listed as mulatto. mixed-race kids. and people talked about that, that that was possibly too. some people have criticized me about mentioning that, although a person, someone who has written a book about andrew johnson talked about this and other articles that talk about it as well. i thought, here's a person with an enslaved person in his household, a young girl. i found it was important to mention that even as a possibility out of deference for her, out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of the slaves, girls at the time

period. because it could've been. we don't know that he was by don't think, when you're talking about a person who is a slave owner yet to talk about all the aspects of that, not just buying and selling people. so it's not -- we do get a sense of -- again, and 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, that people commented on them. one thing that people did say 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 is enslaved, one of his slaves said that he even what bounce black children on his knees. he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. he was able to be apparently childlike 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. >> you may not want to answer this, or even respond to this, but have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded in vastly rearranging the last half of the 19th century? >> sure, yeah, yeah. and i think he could have. i mean, he wouldn't have had a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything that the republicans had wanted to do. one of the things that he did to that i try to convey, i talk about in the book, is that his

recalcitrant event and comfort to southerners. and people said, people said we wouldn't have accepted anything in the immediate aftermath of the war. we would have accepted anything, any terms, but he gave us hope of a white man's government. and so, we need to hold out. and so, i think the role that he played, i think it's the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. it if he hadn't so strenuously opposed voting rights, if he had not sabotaged efforts to bring about land reform, this is not to say that the south would have rolled over, you know, but we had the enemy down, you know, got them down, that's when