and they look ahead at the 2018 midterm elections. later, german chancellor angela merkel takes questions from reporters about trade with the u.s. and president trump's recent meetings with russian president vladimir putin. ♪ >> this week on q&a, author and constitutional lawyer david stewart. he discusses his book "impeached: the trial of president andrew johnson and the fight for lincoln's legacy." brian: david stewart, what was andrew johnson, our 17th president like? david: he was a hard man. he was intelligent. he pulled himself up from nothing. he never attended school even for a day.

totally self-made man. he had the great line, that is good to know otherwise the almighty would have a lot to answer for. he had a rather bad disposition. he was an angry man and he was rigid. those were qualities that served him terribly as president. he was smart, although self educated, he knew the constitution. he understood laws. he had a lot of political experience. he had held most positions you could hold in this country and been elected to most of them. there is a good deal to admire in him. unfortunately, as president, his qualities probably would have been unfortunate anytime, but at that moment in history, they were a terrible mismatch. brian: where did it start politically for him? david: in tennessee.

in greenville, eastern tennessee. he had opened a tailor shop and made a success of it. ran for local office. alderman, mayor, state senator, moved up the ladder and became a congressman and a senator. his moment of public attention was at the beginning of the civil war when almost all of the congressman and senators left from the south. they all went back to their home states. tennessee did secede, although by a fairly close vote. they had a referendum and it was reasonably close. johnson refused to leave the senate. that did get attention. here was a southerner who was remaining loyal to the union. brian: what was his family like? david: as a boy? he grew up -- his father died

when he was very young. he was only three or four. he didn't really grow up in the family much. he was apprenticed out at a very early age, nine or 10. he ran away from his master. he didn't like being an apprentice. he ultimately had to come to terms with the master. he had a strong independent streak there. his own family that he made with his wife was a little bit sad. his wife in the white house never left her room. she came downstairs once for a grandchild's birthday party, i think it was. he would see her every day. he would visit her a couple of times a day. he had a couple of sons who ended up badly and became alcoholics.

his daughters were quite admirable, had families of their own. one served as his hostess in the white house, and were admired even by people who didn't like johnson. brian: how did he become president? david: he had been military governor of tennessee, appointed by president lincoln. he was admired for having stood by the union. in the 1864 election, lincoln feared that he would lose. the war had dragged on a long time, he was being opposed by a war hero, general mcclellan. he did what we would call today a move to the middle. he figured all the good abolitionists and republicans had to vote for him, they certainly couldn't vote for the democrats. he wanted somebody to appeal to the democrats. at the time, republicans or the liberal figures and democrats or the conservative ones.

you have to wrap your mind around that. brian: he reached out to johnson whom he didn't know particularly well, as a southern democrat who was prounion and would broaden his appeal. it worked, or else lincoln would have won anyway. he did win. it wasn't a smashing win. he got 55% of the vote, and that is only in the loyal states. the southern states of course were not voting for him, and he wouldn't have gotten any votes there. he had been right as a politician to be concerned. then, of course, lincoln was assassinated six weeks into his second term as president. johnson, who was not prepared for the job, was president. brian: you say he had all of those jobs from alderman, to governor, senator, but wasn't prepared?

david: it's an interesting problem. we tend to want presidents who have experience in government. andrew johnson is the example of experience isn't everything, because by disposition he was ill-suited. he wasn't used to taking a national perspective. he was basically a tennessee guy. when he became president of all the people, that was unnatural to him. he had a lot of trouble with that. brian: where was he when the assassination occurred april of 1865? david: he was in his hotel room. the assassination was a larger plot than just killing lincoln. they sent someone to kill the

secretary of state seward, and send someone to kill johnson. johnson was fortunate that the man who went to kill him lost his nerve, and didn't even knock on the door. he had a couple of brings in the hotel. he just slept through it until he was awakened in the middle of the night with the terrible news. he was sworn in as president of the next morning when official word came that the president was dead. brian: what happened then in the early part? david: he initially struggled to find his feet. seward was terribly wounded and was not available to him. he started out being very vengeful in his public statements. made it clear he wanted to hang a lot of confederate leaders. when the seward recovered and came back, it appears he

basically persuaded johnson that that was not the right public stance to take. at that point, johnson did a 180 and came around to the view that we should be very charitable towards the south. that was what lincoln said. it translated into actions that surprised and upset many northerners, and i think lincoln would have found very odious. brian: from what you know of him, what attitude towards a slavery did he bring to the presidency? david: he had no problem with slavery. he owned slaves. one of the things he tended to say when southerners came to see him, former confederates would come to him for pardons. it's something he spent several months doing, meetings with rich

southerners who could pay for their pardons, and he would say if you had only listened to me and state in the union, we could still have slaves. he thought that would be great. he had no problem with it. underlying it, he had really virulent racist attitudes, which came out several times in public statements, but also in his policies. he really did think that freed slaves were a lesser form of human. it shaped everything, and it was tragic. brian: you point out that at the beginning of lincoln's second term, and he lasted only second weeks, that in the senate there were something like 42 or 43 republicans and 11 democrats. in the house, 143 republicans and 49 democrats. in your first chapter, bad beginnings, prior to the

assassination, what happened when andrew johnson was sworn in as vice president? david: he did start out on the wrong foot. he wasn't feeling well in the morning of the inauguration. he got to the capital. he had an attack of nerves, which was odd. he had been in the senate as a senator for years. he had done an immense amount of public speaking. he asked for some whiskey. the account we have is that he downed three tumblers full of whiskey, which even for a heavy drinker would have an impact in a short period of time. he went out to take his oath of office and everyone in the chamber could tell that he was drunk. he spoke erratically, he said things that didn't make a lot of sense. it was a humiliating experience. so humiliating that he left town for at least a week thereafter and stayed in silver spring, maryland.

when he came back into town, he was very invisible until the time of the assassination, because it have been such a mortifying experience. brian: you have some quotes in here that i want to read back. hamlin was a vice president in the first term, and he met him before he went out on the floor. he said, mr. hamlin, i am not well, have you any whiskey? mr. hamlin had banned the cell of liquor. he sent out of the building for a bottle. where did you get this? david: there were accounts by hamlin's son, but firsthand accounts of this exchange. brian: when the whiskey arrived, johnson down a tumbler straight. feeling reinforced, he announced his speech at noon would be the effort of his life.

later you write, johnson's face glowed a luminous red. his sentences were incomplete and not connected to each other at the biggest moment of his life, on the most important states he had ever occupied, the man was drunk. your president is a plebian, johnson announced. i am a plebian. tennessee has never gone out of the union. i'm going to talk to .5 minutes on that point and i want you to hear, tennessee has always been loyal. were they loyal during the civil war? david: any tennesseans were. many tennesseans were on both sides of the war. the government officially seceded. brian: there is something over history that rings on this next thing. sitting closest to the desk, the cabinet secretaries began to mutter amongst themselves, all of this is an wretched bad taste. the man is certainly deranged. there is something wrong. he spoke for 15 minutes.

anyway, was there a lot of publicity on his drunkenness? david: yes. brian: what impact did that have? is there any evidence? david: in the next almost four years when he would give an erratic speech, which he did on occasion, particularly when he would get out of the white house and travel around the country. there is a famous period in 1866 when he did a lot of public speaking, a lot of people reacted that he was drunk again. it was based on the experience from the inauguration. brian: was he an alcoholic? david: i think not. was he a heavy drinker? yes. you can school yourself to be a heavy drinker.

he got out of control on that occasion. we don't have other instances where people thought he was essentially drunk on duty. he was a proper man. one of the things i had to get used to about him was he was a tailor. as a result, he had a great sense of clothes. he always looked great. his clothes were perfect. a great contrast with lincoln who was famously shambly. and his clothes never fit quite right. he was an unusual size. i think people would have noticed if he had been inebriated on other public occasions. brian: he becomes president. what is the united states of america like at that point and what problems does he face? david: we are still winding up the war.

there is still a significant confederate army in the field. lee has surrendered just days before. he has to make some peace. there is another group in texas that takes a little longer to surrender and give up their arms. he has a lot of struggles with ulysses grant over the treatment of confederates, because grant gave his word that the soldiers would not be punished for their role in the war if they surrendered. as i said, johnson did not want to do that. he did want to hang some of them. grant succeeded with that. the first order of business was what to do with the states. we had no state governments down there. the south was occupied. it was an occupied hostile territory. congress was not in session. this was an era that congress only sat four or five months a year. johnson went ahead and began

reconstituting state governments basically on his own. lincoln had done that with one or two. i guess louisiana during the war, but he had war powers. it wasn't clear at all that johnson had the power to do that. it was very controversial because what happened was the former confederates were elected and took control of a new government. they were the natural leadership of the area. you had lots of former generals and former confederate congressman and cabinet members who were now leading their state and managed to get elected. brian: what was the plan about reconstruction and what was reconstruction? david: reconstruction, in concept, was rebuilding the

union. everybody realized that after killing each other for so many years, well over 500,000 people were killed. comparable numbers today would be 30 million. it was an immense period of bloodletting. the result was a tremendous amount of hate between people. something had to be done to fix that. also, to create a government structure that didn't allow for slavery. the 13th amendment had been adopted and slavery had been abolished. that is basically all johnson wanted to do. he wanted to have state governments established. they could not have slavery because the 13th amendment made the unconstitutional. beyond that, his view was that

they were on their own. that is what the constitution intended from 1787. that is what was right. if they wished to discriminate against black people, if they wished to disadvantage the freed men in any way they chose, that was their decision. brian: why was he against the freedman's bureau? what was it? david: the freedman's bureau was meant to assist both freemen in the south. that is where the devastation was. people have been driven from their homes. certainly, ex slaves who were now free. they were supposedly on their own, and they have usually no more than the close on their backs, no education, no tools, no weapons.

they had to find their way. the freedman's bureau was meant to help them. in a few areas, they confiscated the estates and chop them up into land parcels. this is where the phrase 48 acres and a mule came from. they also tried to set up schools. brian: you have a great cast of characters in your book. "impeached." who were his friends, who were his enemies? david: his friends were democrats and southerners. seward had been a prominent

republican leader, but threw in with him early. it is a complicated story about secretary of state seward. he had been seen as a great abolitionist leader. he turned to be the helpmate of this president. his adversaries, the most compelling i found was a congressman. fascinating guy. he had been born with a club foot, and had had to overcome that at a time when being disabled was a real mark. you were thought to have the mark of the devil on you. he was incredibly smart, tough, and totally devoted to the causes of underdogs. we tend to think of people devoted to underdogs as

namby pamby, softhearted people. people were afraid of stevens because he was so quick and would leave them gasping on the floor. he was a powerful guy in congress he was devoted to the he was devoted to the abolitionist cause hearing he believed in inequality in all things. he, in many ways was the heart and soul of the reconstruction effort that built in congress, and ultimately the impeachment effort. brian: what do you think president johnson at that time saw in thaddeus stevens, and how big a story was it that he lived with a woman who was an african-american, who was supposedly his housekeeper, but through the years, people suggested that they had some kind of relationship that nobody

has ever proved, and he wasn't married? david: mrs. smith. the mrs. smith story has never been confirmed that it was a personal relationship. i always thought one biography pointed out the best evidence we have that it was. stevens had a portrait painted of her. if she was only the mistress of his house as a servant, you don't get portraits painted of people like that. you get portraits painted of people you care about. i am inclined to credit it, although i agree the evidence is slim. that would have appalled johnson. he is a southerner. he knew that there was crossing of racial lines in personal relationships.

there was a vice president from tennessee that took up with a black woman and lived with her openly. i think that was richard johnson. it would have annoyed him, it would have alienated him. but it was much more that they simply were political opposites. he recognized both that stevens was going to be against him on everything, and frankly that stevens was a formidable opponent. he could muster his troops in a way that others couldn't. brian: why did president johnson keep edwin stanton as secretary of war? david: that is a great question. it's one you agonize over. stanton was another tough guy. very talented, smart lawyer. lincoln had called him his mars, for the god of war as secretary of war.

he was incredibly productive and efficient and effective as a senior military bureaucrat, a civilian bureaucrat in the military world. i think that was part of it. stanton was just good at his job. i also think that stanton was probably just flat-out rude most of the time. he was a difficult man. he didn't put up with fools at all. i think he probably managed to intimidate johnson. politically, i think in the initial months, getting rid of stanton was not a great idea because he needed to figure out how to run the government. by the time he wanted to get rid of him, he was at war with congress. it became the political

flashpoint that led ultimately, to the impeachment effort. brian: i want to get these dates right. the 13th amendment was adopted in 1865. did he support the 13th? david: he didn't oppose it. brian: the 14th amendment was adopted july of 1868, in his last year. did he support that? david: no, he opposed that. brian: why? david: he thought it was dangerous. we know equal protection and due process of law, but there were a couple of provisions that dealt with how are we going to deal with the former confederates and structure our politics now that we are reunited? he disliked those provisions. he thought they were too restrictive and not good for the south. that was the principal reason. much of the opposition of the,

14th amendment back then was over those provisions not over equal protection of the law. brian: the 14th amendment did not pass until 1870. he was gone by then. before you wrote this book, you had been deeply involved in impeachment. to start with, you clerked for three different judges. who were the and what years where they? david: a while ago. i clerked for two appellate judges. two of them were here in washington. i was lucky to clerk at the supreme court for lewis powell. brian: what did you take away from lewis powell? david: remarkable admiration. he was an impressive person. very fine judge.

now, as i approach the age, i think with some resonance of what he said to me once which was, you have no idea how hard it is to keep an open mind when you are 71. he tried to. he recognized that he didn't always, but he did try to. he tried to see both legal implications of the case, but also the human implications of the case. i think a great judge needs to look at both. brian: when did you first see the impeaching of a public official up close? david: i served as defense counsel for a district judge in south mississippi, walter nixon junior, in the late 1980's. he had been convicted of perjury before a grand jury, a lengthy and somewhat ill-conceived

investigation. he was actually in prison at the time of the impeachment effort. that was a real barrier for us to work with. he felt it was a wrong conviction, a bad case, and i concurred. we resisted the impeachment both in the house of representatives and the senate. it went to trial on the senate side. brian: what happened in a house and why did it have to start in the house, the impeachment of walter nixon? no relationship to the president. david: correct. the house brings the charges and half to basically agree on

-- and have to basically agree on reasons why a president should be removed from office, or a judge. once the house does that work, the senate then tries the case. in our case, we had hearings before a house subcommittee. to be honest, the subcommittee chair was very troubled by the case. didn't care for it. he kept us there for almost a year just reconvening hearings and wanting to hear more evidence. ultimately, he went along with it, with the impeachment case. it was approved by the house and sent over to the senate. brian: how many votes do you have to have in the house to impeach somebody? david: simple majority is enough. one vote is plenty. brian: once you are impeached, what happens next? david: the senate gets the case. the house appointed managers who serve as prosecutors on the senate side in whatever proceeding they have. these days, since the last 30 or 40 years now, the senate does not convene judicial trials

before the full senate, but appoints a committee to hear the evidence, a procedure i found, and then, both the senate does hear closing arguments and votes. >> let's jump way ahead. andrew johnson in the house of representatives. what happened on the vote to impeach? >> a partyline vote. republicans voted to impeach. the democrats did not. >> i had it written down something like 42-11. that is the senate. it was 143-49. >> partyline vote. >> what happened in the senate? >> in the senate, they had a long trial. four weeks. he was ultimately acquitted, acquitted is the right term, by

a single vote. and they needed a two thirds majority to remove, convict him and remove him from office. or twothirds present, thirds of the total number of senators? >> two thirds present. >> and what date would that have been, that he was finally convicted, excuse me, acquitted. >> the precise date escapes me. i believe it was june of 1868. >> close to the end of his term. >> close to election time. >> also out of context, but for you to explain might be interesting. each of them according to the myth ended his life a broken man , crushed by vindictive radical republicans. "not a single one of them escaped the terrible torture" wrote john f. kennedy in "profiles in courage." " a vicious criticism engendered by their vote to acquit." you say it is a myth.

one of the most popular history books in our lifetime did what? what is the myth? >> it is a scandal. , i willter on johnson not speak beyond that. the chapter on johnson said -- should be expunged from every library in the country, focusing on a fellow named edmund ross, credited with the single vote that saves johnson. vote -- itoss's calls ross's boat the most heroic in -- vote the most wrote in american history. i actually think his vote was purchased. saving johnson was not a heroic moment. "profiles in courage" was a campaign document, prepared to support kennedy running for president. it is not a work of history. it is not a responsible work of history. it gets a lot of things wrong,

i wish people would stop reading at. brian: did he write it? david: no. it was written by theodore sorensen. i think he had help from other people who fed him history materials, but at the very end of his life, sorenson admitted he had written it. and he insisted kennedy had gone over the entire book, and made some corrections and changes. brian: the seven radical republicans that voted to acquit. you say that's a myth, that they were broken and destroyed. david: correct. endedent back to kansas, up territorial governor of new mexico for the democrats, which was where he probably belonged. a number of the other senators ended up resigning, because they decided not to pursue their

careers. men were not broken in anyway. justmelodramatic story was good theater, but not accurate. brian: andrew johnson, a democrat, and these were republicans voting to acquit him. he needed 19 votes. one of them, interestingly enough, who voted to acquit was a man named thomas hendricks, who was cleveland's vice president. he voted to acquit, a democrat. the other thing, henry wilson, grant's vice president, voted to convict. david: yes. brian: there's a lot of great names. -- johnmoral, william the brother of tecumseh sherman. what role did he play in this,

general sherman? david: general sherman was a witness to some of the allegations about johnson's meddling with the military. and was a witness in the preceding in -- proceeding in the senate. he was expected to be very good at defending the president, and he didn't defend the president the way the president's lawyers have helped. in fact, his testimony was so unhelpful, harmful to the impeachers, they didn't even cross-examine him. he was in a terrible position. he sympathized with the president, but also had a terrifically close relationship with grant, and grant and johnson were really at loggerheads. positionhnson, grant's in the johnson's administration? david: he was general in chief of the army. so the real crisis developed because the army was in the

south, trying to enforce all these laws that congress adopted over johnson's vetoes to protect the freedmen, the e x-slaves, to make sure they were not shot down in the street, to give them a vote, a voice in the government. the generals in charge would often intervene to enforce the law, and as soon as they did, johnson would toss them out. he ended up removing four of the five who were initially appointed. this upset grant tremendously, both because he thought they were good officers doing what they should do, but also he had become a believer in ending slavery. he was not much of an abolitionist before the war, but he came around. stanton was infuriated by it. both stanton and grant basically developed a program of resisting johnson from within. they were at some level

profoundly disloyal to their president. brian: as you know, you wrote the book, it is very complicated. there's a lot to it. why did you want to write a book on impeachment? david: i want to write a book about this case, because when i i read all my case, the prior trials, and this case made no sense. [laughter] i couldn't figure out who was arguing about what. you read the legal arguments, they are clear on their own, but they don't tend to fit the facts, what's going on. i finally concluded it was sufficiently confusing that it wasn't going to help either side in my case, so i moved on to things that matter to me, but it always bothered me. it was this huge moment in our history, this presidential impeachment. i figured if i didn't understand it, most people didn't understand it very well, so i thought it was something i could dive into. also, i had done a book on the

writing of the constitution. this was a moment where the constitution mattered a lot, really made all the difference. so i wanted to see what that felt like. brian: our first visit was when you did a book called "summer of 1787, the constitutional convention in philadelphia." other books you have written include, besides your novels, "american emperor," about ehrenberg's treat - -- aaron burr's treason trial, and "medicine -- madison's gift." are you working on another one now? david: i am. i'm working on george washington. brian: small task. [laughter] david: intimidating. brian: andrew johnson is president, and something called in tenure of office act's his way for some reason. explain that. david: it was enacted to be in his way, the brainchild of

thaddeus stevens. they knew in congress that republicans who work opposing johnson -- were opposing johnson, they knew he was scheming against stanton, firing lots of patronage employees. this was an era of tremendous patronage. republicans won the 1864 elections, so all of their officeholders were there, and he was replacing them with democrats, driving them nuts. the whole point of winning was to get the jobs. they adopted the tenure of office act to make it hard for him to do that, and it focused s in thellipsi constitution. the constitution is clear how you appoint senior cabinet officials, the president appoints, the senate confirms. it doesn't say anything about how you get rid of them. when the first congress was setting up the government, they got wrapped around the axle on this.

they had a lot of trouble figuring out, how should we do this? there was an argument it should be the mirror image of the appointment process, you remove by having the president say i want to get rid of john smith, and the senate would have to confirm that. other people said that is too clumsy, the president needs to control the people who work for him, and he needs to be able to fire them, and that's what was done. but stevens was smart enough to know there was a respectable argument that it was constitutional to have senate approval required for removing a senior officer, and that was what the tenure of office act required. it also created a criminal penalty for violations of it, and added, just because stevens aas a good lawyer, that it was high crime and misdemeanor, which is the language of the impeachment clause of the constitution of course, to violate the statute.

so it was a trap set for johnson, and johnson was too smart not to know that. he knew if he fired stanton, which he ultimately did, he first tried to just remove him under the procedures of the act, and he suspended stanton, sent notice to the senate, asking them to confirm his removal. the senate did not, and johnson stewed about that for a time, then just removed him. brian: when did president andrew johnson know they were out to impeach him? david: there have been efforts to impeach him before. up in the senate trial. at least two. notwas weird, and we need talk about it much. it was run by a crackpot. the second one was more serious, in the fall of 1867. and it was led by republicans,

of course, who really thought his policies and his performance in office was a disaster. and so, they basically wrote that up as impeachment articles. it was reported by the committee, it haereard it, the judiciary committee, and on the floor the minority member of the committee made a very powerful argument that if we just remove him because we disagree with him, we are never going to stop having to argue about whether we should remove the president. there has to be some substance, something specific. there has to be a crime. to be honest, the framers, i don't think really thought that when they wrote the clause, but that's what this fellow made, and it was a persuasive argument for the congressmen, so that effort failed by a pretty wide margin. i think a majority of republicans opposed it. thehe had, they'd been to

well twice, but then when he fired stanton, stevens and others think, we had him now, he violated the statute, we have a crime, it says it is a high crime and misdemeanor, now we can move against him. brian: how long was the tenure of office act a law? david: in different guises, it was a law for about 45 years. it was amended significantly when grant becomes president. he says, you have got to change this law, i need to be able to fire people, my senior people, and they did. but they left some provisions of it in effect, and those remained until the 1920's when they came before the supreme court under a challenge and the supreme court said it was unconstitutional. andrewapril 15, 1865,

johnson becomes president. when is the first, you have the articles of impeachment in your book, 11 of them. when were those introduced, and by whom in the house of representatives? david: it is slightly out of sequence, the way it happens in history. they vote to impeach him, remove him from office, without having specific articles in front of them. everybody knows they are going to charge, but they haven't put them up yet. they moved so fast, they were so angry. a couple days later, stevens resents the articles of impeachment. they are amended. he answered another one at the end, but -- adds another one at the end, but the has proceedings lasted no more than four days. it was very fast. brian: what year? david: 1868, february of 1868. brian: at this time, does andrew johnson think he's going to run again? david: he hopes to. he hopes to run as the democrat. he knows the republicans will not nominate him, but he thinks he's done what democratic voters wanted him to do, and if you

have the southern states back in the union, even sees got a shot. brian: who else in and around washington at that time thinks they will be president? david: the republicans wanted to have grant. he's not a wildly politically ambitious guy. he's never been in politics. he's had a humble career until the civil war started. but i think he is frankly appalled by johnson as president, and has come to terms with the fact that he's going to be a candidate for the office. brian: so once those 11 articles are introduced and the vote is taken, the articles are introduced after the vote. how long did they have hearings? did they have hearings and discuss it all? david: no hearings. brian: right to the senate? david: this is thaddeus stevens. [laughter] he did stuff. brian: right to the senate.

david: right to the senate. brian: so how did that work, when it got to the senate? david: everything slowed down, and it should have. the house was pretty fast. gave both sides, you have the house managers and johnson appoints a number of defense lawyers, starting with his attorney general henry stanbury. the senate gives them time to prepare their case. through this whole period, you have a tremendous amount of publicity, as you can only imagine, so everything about the case is already in the press. takes about six weeks before the trial begins. brian: you have got to tell the stanbury story in the supreme court. congress responded in kind when a vacancy arose on the supreme court in the spring of 1856, and johnson nominated -- 1866, and

johnson nominated henry stanberry. you envision what would happen if this happened today. david: the republicans did not want johnson to have an appointment to the supreme court, so a vacancy arose, and he said he wanted to nominate stanberry, a lawyer from cincinnati, from ohio anyway. and congress enacted legislation the vacancy and saying the supreme court was only eight justices, no longer nine. just to make sure he would never get an appointment, they then included a provision that said, if there should be another when thei misstated, next vacancy happens, the size of the court will shrink to seven, insurance that in case somebody else left the court or died in office, johnson would

not get that appointment. brian: didn't johnson veto that bill? david: he vetoed most of the bills. brian: and then what happens? david: it passes over his veto. brian: define a radical republican, by the way, because that is intertwined in this. david: it is a soft definition. i think. they were the angriest republicans, the people most unhappy with johnson, they were the most devoted to helping the freedmen who had been slaves. congress, they were obviously radical republicans, and then it's a spectrum. probably the hard-core, what you would call radicals, were never more than a third of the republicans. but they were the forceful once. they had leadership positions, like stevens, because he took it, and they were the true adversary for johnson. their challenge was always to

pray the rest of the republicans along. brian: when they finally got to the trial in the senate, and you have done that, what were the circumstances? i know one thing you write about, ben curtis, former supreme court justice, defended andrew johnson. david: that was powerful. he was a supreme court justice. he left the court, but had been a justice, and was from massachusetts. everybody knows what that means during the civil war times. abolitionist stronghold. but even more powerfully, he had been a dissenter in the dred scott case. one of the causes of the civil war was when the supreme court upheld slavery in the dred scott decision of 1857. so sickly having to stand up on behalf of johnson was a powerful statement, that johnson had adherents who were not sort of

crazy, proslavery people. he also made a very strong legal argument on the tenure of office act. he said, i don't think it's constitutional, but you don't need to decide that. all you have to decide, did he have good reason to think it was unconstitutional? even if you think it's the wrong position, is it rational, is it possible? if it's just possible, then his actions were justified. brian: how long to be trial go on? david: about four weeks. brian: who led the house numbers on the floor of the senate to carry out the trial? david: it was most unfortunate. stevens was an old fellow at the time, in his 70's, and sick. and you could, people watched him decline. the newspapers were sort of on the death watch, describing how bad he looked every day.

he really could not perform in the courtroom. he was just too weak. man who took control of the case was a first-term congressman from massachusetts named ben butler, who was a colorful character, but not a great character. [laughter] a checkered career as a political general during the war. he was known as "beast butler" for the way he treated the occupation of new orleans. he was reputed to have stolen the silver in the house he occupied there. his military achievements were modest, at best. he was a clever lawyer, but he was not a judicious lawyer, and i think he tried the case badly, speaking as a trial lawyer, and was a bad choice. pass thathow did they first conviction? david: he had 11 articles, you

describe a past the 11th first? david: they address the 11th article first, because as the case went on, one of the weird things about a senate trial, having lived through one, is lawyers are used to, you don't chat with the judge offline, you don't chat with the jurors, everything is formal, everything is in the record. in congress, it's not like that. they are friends, or at least colleagues, so they are chatting all the time. the house managers are colleagues of the senators who are the jurors, so they are talking all the time. i think the house managers decided that their best chance was on the 11th article, which was what i call a catch-all article. it included a bunch of allegations. a very tough thing to defend against, including the tenure of

office claim concerning stanton, but also the more generic accusations that johnson really was tearing up the country, disregarding congress. this congress illegitimate because the southern states were not represented. that was challenged. hadthey felt because it multiple accusations in it, they might pick up the most support with it, and they fell one vote short. brian: 35-19 was the vote. david: correct. othersdid they vote on before it was over? david: they voted on articles two and three. which had the same boat. brian: what was president johnson's reaction to this? david: he was pleased. he wasn't ecstatic. it wasn't his makeup, really.

he didn't go into public and trumpet it. his horns to pull in a bit. one of the things people at the time noted was during the three months or so of the impeachment process, and i misspoke, the final votes were in may, not in june, he was not anywhere near as aggressive or controversial as he had been. and he was reassuring people, oh, i'm not going to do terrible hadgs, and instead -- he appointed a very inappropriate guide to succeed stanton as secretary of war. he overruled himself and appointed a former union general, a union general, john scofield, who was pretty acceptable, pretty presentable. had, was calibrating his behavior in a way that made him

less threatening, less disturbing. the rest of his presidency, he became a lame duck very fast. he didn't behave great for the rest of it, but his powers were pretty limited by then. i think the impeachment proceeding clipped his wings. brian: how much did he pardon the south? david: well, his principal activity was this process i alluded to, where in his first few months as president, in fall of 1865, he set up a procedure where a wealthy person could come and get a personal pardon from him. there were other provisions. they had to take an oath of loyalty, and they had to pay. and -- brian: directly to him? david: not to him personally, but to the government. and lots did.

he spent a couple months basically doing this all day. his anteroom was described as filled with southerners there to pay court. he had been a poor boy. great classe a resentment toward the aristocracy of the south, and hearing all these people he pretty much hated all his life coming to him on their knees. the accounts are he enjoyed that tremendously. brian: why did he pardon jefferson davis? david: that's a different question. it comes later. i don't remember the timing exactly. at least two years after the war, maybe three? davis had been in prison. he's not a threat. i think the fury about the war, the resentment, is beginning to ebb a bit, and the case for

prosecuting him involves precedents i don't think we really wanted to make. because you couldn't prosecute him and not prosecute robert e. lee, or all these other people. brian: this book was first published in 2009. is it available? is it in print? david: it is in print. it is available wherever fine books are sold. and it's available in ebook and audio version as well. brian: and it is called "impeached: the trial of president andrew johnson and the fight for lincoln's legacy." our guest has been david o. stewart, also the author of "the summer of 1787." we thank you very much. david: thanks for having me. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

>> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q-an d-a.org. two and a programs are also available as c-span podcasts. >> next week on q&a, a discussion on american history historianss with richard baker, donald ritchie and ray smock, next sunday here on c-span. supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh continues to meet with senators on capitol hill. follow the confirmation process on c-span leading up to the

senate confirmation hearings and the vote. watch live on c-span, watch anytime on c-span.org, or listen with the free c-span radio app. "washington journal," live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. ericksonorning, lenee of the democratic think tank third way talks about the divide between moderates and progressives. as president trump threatens to revoke secure to for several former members of the obama administration, a national security attorney tells us how clearances work and the process to obtain them. and a senior editor of "forbes" discusses his recent article about the new tax law offering wealthy investors and corporations a chance to erase obligations if they invest in america's most impoverished

communities. join the discussion. >> the british house of commons is in recess until september. we look back at some of the major events that occurred in the british parliament and the u.k. over the last few months. topics include exit negotiations, president trump's visit to the u.k. and the wedding of prince harry and meghan markle. courtesy of bbc parliament, this is a half hour. >> hello and welcome to a hot and saltry westminster where the temperature has been rising inside the chamber and out. coming >> hello, and welcome to a hot and sultry westminster where the temperature has been rising inside the chamber and out. coming up on this program, governme a