 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Robert S. Levine, author of The Failed Promise. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about September programs you can view on our YouTube channel. In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks and to honor the heroic efforts of first responders and eyewitnesses, we'll present two virtual programs. On Tuesday, September 7th at 7 p.m., journalist Phil Hirschkorn will moderate a discussion related to the new book, American Phoenix Heroes of the Pentagon on 9-11. Joining Hirschkorn will be author Lincoln M. Starnes and eyewitnesses Benjamin W. Starnes, Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills, Army Sergeant First Class Christopher Braiman and Army Sergeant Major General Tony Rose, all of whom were in the Pentagon on 9-11 and performed acts of rescue. And on Friday, September 10th at 6 p.m., we'll present the discussion, A Life of Selfless Service, Sacrifice and Civic Engagement, honoring the life of Cyril Rick Rascola. Rascola perished in the attack on the World Trade Center. He is credited with saving the lives of 2,700 fellow employees of Morgan Stanley and inspiring all those around him. April 1865 brought the Confederate surrender at Appomattox and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In this period of uncertainty, Americans wondered how the new President, Andrew Johnson, would lead the divided nation. Many, especially African Americans, were hopeful that Johnson would actively promote the cause of black equality. Black leaders, however, became disillusioned with Johnson after a dramatic meeting with the President at the White House Frederick Douglass attacked Johnson's policies in a number of lectures across the country. Johnson's conflict with Congress over reconstruction eventually led to his impeachment. Within the records of the National Archives is the resolution to impeach Johnson, written on a scrap of paper and introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on February 21, 1868. Three days later, the House voted 128 to 47 to adopt the resolution. In the failed promise, Robert S. Levine portrays the conflicts that brought Frederick Douglass and the wider black community to reject Andrew Johnson and call for a guilty verdict in his impeachment trial. Robert S. Levine is distinguished professor of English and distinguished scholar-teacher at the University of Maryland at College Park. His most recent books before the failed promise are the Lives of Frederick Douglass and Race, Transnationalism and 19th Century American Literary Studies. Levine has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association awarded him the Hubble Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies. Now that's here for Robert Levine. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for that kind introduction. It's a real honor to be here. I'm going to do a slideshow and talk through what I do in the book. So I'm going to go to share a screen and let's see. Okay, so this is the cover of the book. Again, I want to thank David Berra for the kind introduction. The thing I really like about this cover is that underneath the red is a page from the Articles of Impeachment. I think that's kind of cool, plus I like the pictures and the whole color scheme. So the large aim of the book is to provide a black perspective on the early years of reconstruction, 1865 to 1868. On Andrew Johnson and on the impeachment itself, which occurred in 1868. Most of the standard studies of the impeachment focus on the white radical Republicans. I wanted to bring to life an African American perspective on reconstruction and impeachment by focusing on Frederick Douglass and other black activists. Reconstruction was about black voting rights and rights to citizenship and blacks fought for those rights. Douglass and other African American activists were concerned about anti-black racism in the North and South and had their own problems with Johnson. And let me just say that I try to tell a story about the interactions, the relationship between Douglass and Johnson that hasn't been told before. And I think it's really interesting and I try to do it in a novelistic way. So here's what I call the adversaries, very good pictures of these two men. They were forceful, formidable figures. They were great orators. They dressed well. Johnson was a former tailor. Douglass felt it was important in his photographs. And some have argued he's the most photograph man of 19th century America. Wanted to depict himself against the stereotype of the so-called black savage. So he tended to dress well and he tended to look serious in his pictures. Johnson and Douglass met only twice in person. They met at Lincoln's second inauguration, which was March 4th, 1865, when Lincoln gave his famous with malice toward non-speech and in the White House on February 7th, 1866, when Johnson was president. But they shattered each other throughout Johnson's presidency and Johnson even made Douglass a job offer in 1867. Today I will talk about some key moments in the Douglass-Johnson relationship and about the drift toward the Johnson impeachment. So let's start with the first meeting between Douglass and Johnson of March 1865 at Lincoln's second inauguration. Here's a famous picture of Lincoln. And I think if you can see my arrows, he's right around here. My historian friends say that Douglass is right around here in the second row, I'm not entirely 100% sure of that, but Douglass was at the inauguration because Abraham Lincoln, who met with Douglass twice earlier in the White House, had invited him to the inauguration. After the speech, Douglass tried to get into the reception in the White House. He was stopped by security, but eventually was vouched for and was greeted by Lincoln who asked Douglass how he liked the speech and told the assembled group that Douglass was his great friend. Douglass told me he liked the speech, then he walked away. Johnson joins Lincoln at the reception. And I'm going to let Frederick Douglass tell the story of what happened next. This is from Douglass's 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, so it's about 16 years later. I was standing in the crowd when Mr. Lincoln touched Mr. Johnson and pointed me out to him. The first expression which came to his face in which I think was the true index of his heart was one of bitter contempt and aversion. Seeing that I observed him, he tried to assume a more friendly appearance, but it was too late. It is useless to close the door when all within has been seen. His first glance was the frown of the man. The second was the bland and sickly smile of the demagogue. I turned to Mrs. Dorsey, Douglass's black friend and said, whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race. It's a great passage. Douglass is a great writer. I am an English professor and I like the metaphor of this idea of a door, sorry, let me go back, of a door opening and closing showing Johnson's true fields. The thing I want to emphasize about this passage is that it's retrospective and I don't think it's fully to be believed. In the 1881 Life and Times, Douglass celebrates Lincoln as a savior. During the Civil War, Douglass often attacked Lincoln at one point comparing him to Confederate leaders. I start with this moment and then I move back in time in order to give a more nuanced portrayal of Johnson as not necessarily pure evil. And I wanted also to point out how he ended up being Lincoln's vice president. And I also wanted to make the point that a lot of people thought, including our black abolitionists, that he would be a great vice president. There was something promising and appealing about Johnson, at least until 1865, that brought him to the attention of Lincoln and the Republican Party. So very briefly, he was a senator from Tennessee in the only, I mean, the only Southern senator who was pro-union and against secession. He put his life on the line by taking that position. Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee in 1862 and in 1863, Johnson again put his life on the line by calling for the end, the abolition of slavery. Again, this is quite unusual for a Southern leader. He was named vice president in 1864 when Republicans feared they would lose the election. And in October 1864, and for me, this is a key moment, as it is a key moment for Johnson, while still military governor, Johnson gave a famous speech called his Moses of the Colored Men's Speech, in which he declared before a large crowd of black people in Nashville that all of the enslaved people of Tennessee were free. They had not been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation because Tennessee was a border state. The speech was widely reported. It was celebrated in abolitionists and black newspapers, and it made Johnson's reputation. Johnson also became obsessed with the speech, and he referred to it again and again throughout his career whenever he wanted to make the case that he cared about black people. So you're going to hear about this speech a couple of times during this talk. Here's a few passages from a newspaper account of the speech. So this is Johnson speaking to this large crowd of African Americans in Nashville, and he says, in due time, your leader will come forth, your Moses will be revealed to you. And he says this after he declared that slavery was an end, which he was not legally authorized to do. According to the reporter on the scene, the large black crowd responds as follows, you are our Moses, and the exclamation was caught up and cheered until the Capitol rung again. We want no Moses but you again shattered the crowd. And then Johnson's response, well then, humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will indeed be your Moses and lead you through the red sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace. There's a whole lot of people who think that Johnson, it was dishonest, here and throughout his career. I think that he was kind of caught up in the energy. This is a man who wanted to be loved. This doesn't mean he wasn't a racist. It doesn't mean that he wasn't paternalistic and I'll have more to say about this throughout the talk. To return to the reception for Lincoln's second inaugural, Douglas said he saw a racist, but I'm not sure if that's what he saw in 1865 when he was in the White House or when he was writing up the account in 1881, long after Johnson's terrible presidency. The fact is that when Johnson took office on April 15, 1865 after the assassination of Lincoln, some thought that he would be more progressive than Lincoln. Okay, and now I want to offer just a few words on Douglas during the Civil War years before he saw Johnson from a distance at the second inauguration. Douglas was committed to the Civil War as a war of emancipation and he wanted more than emancipation. He wanted the full rights of citizenship for African Americans. In this slide, I referred to the Douglas argument of 1861 to 1895, that's the year that he died, basically calling for emancipation during the Civil War and then citizenship. And I note famous speeches that he gave, the mission of the war in 1863, statements at a black convention in Syracuse in 1864, and then in remarks he made virtually every day of the Johnson administration. He would again and again say something like this, slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot. So the emancipation proclamation and then the 13th amendment weren't enough. This particular quote is taken from a speech at the May 1865 American Anti-Slavery Society meeting which was led by William Lloyd Garrison who announced to the crowd that the society could disband because the 13th amendment ended slavery. Their job was over. Douglas disagreed. He said, what I just quoted here, there was a vote and they decided not to disband, but they would pursue not just the end of slavery which had happened, but the vote and in a larger sense citizenship. And this is basically what Douglas is arguing for for the rest of his life, even when it becomes legal. And he is noticing that it is still difficult for black people to vote. So Johnson became the 17th US president a little more than a month after Lincoln's second inauguration. Douglas at this point in the spring and into the summer of 1865 had nothing negative to say about Johnson despite what we read in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Initially the radical Republicans actually seemed to like Johnson. And here's an image of two of the most prominent radical Republicans, Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts and Badia Stevens, Congressmen from Pennsylvania. Lincoln's Republican Party and now Johnson's Republican Party was dominated by the radicals who wanted the ex-Confederate states to be reconstructed and put a special emphasis on that word reconstructed. In addition to the end of slavery which came in 1865 with the 13th Amendment, they wanted former leaders of the Confederacy out of power. They wanted black men to have the right to vote. The radicals initially saw Johnson as a fellow traveler, someone who shared their views. Charles Sumner for example visited Johnson, said that Johnson told him that he agreed with everything he said about black voting rights. And then he wrote a friend and concluded that I'm going to quote that quote, Johnson is the sincere friend of the Negro and ready to act for him decisively. As I elaborated the book, other radical Republicans had similar responses in April and even into May. They thought that Johnson was going to do what they wanted. But then things started to change. Had Johnson been conning these men, was he in fact like most other Southern white men or even worse. On May 29, 1865, Johnson issued an amnesty proclamation which basically allowed the ex-Confederate states to return to the Union as they had been before the Civil War except without slavery. Confederate leaders could remain in power in the government of the ex-Confederate states. The wealthy needed to petition for pardons, but that wasn't a problem. Johnson set up an office and offered pardons. Johnson's large commitment was to restoration. I want to emphasize that word, restoration, as opposed to reconstruction. With the wild idea that the states never succeeded because secession was not allowed by the Constitution. History of Brenda Wineapple says that's like saying a murderer couldn't have killed because murder is against the law. According to Johnson, restoration should be watched over and enabled and guided by the president. In short, he believed in presidential restoration he wanted nothing to do with Congress. The Republicans continued to call for congressional reconstruction. The President and Congress were in conflict over the next three years, and I'm not going to go into detail about that. Interestingly, Johnson continued to see himself as Blacks Moses. In his first year in office, he met with a number of Black groups in the White House, and he even allowed for the possibility of limited Black suffrage. He mentions this in a private letter, in an interview, and even in his first annual presentation to Congress. He suggested the Blacks who had money and had fought and the war might be given the right to vote, but nothing came of that from his end as he fought against the radical Republicans who wanted full rights of suffrage for the freed people. He became more and more reactionary in response to the radical Republicans. As I say, the radical Republicans were slow to turn on Johnson. Frederick Douglass and other African-Americans turned on him more quickly. In a lecture in Boston in the fall of 1865, Douglass compared Johnson to the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and warned, and I'm quoting now, that the gains of the Civil War were on the verge of being lost because of the imbecility or the treachery of President Johnson. Douglass and other Black activists believed that something needed to be done, and that takes us to Douglass's second meeting with Johnson on February 7th, 1866. And that was in the White House. At a Black convention in December 1865, Douglass had proposed that a Black delegation should go to Washington D.C. as a lobbying group to talk to congressmen and the president about Black rights. The convention approved the resolution and the group around 10 people, which included Douglass arrived in the district late January of 1866. These are two members of the group. George Downing was a Black activist. He also was a caterer, a Black restaurateur from Rhode Island who had moved to Washington D.C. He had become friends with Charles Sumner. He got the job of being in charge of the congressional dining room. He was the nominal leader of the group. Louis Henry Douglass, who was the first son of Frederick, and Anna had worked with his father as a journalist. He was the corresponding secretary and was involved in writing responses about the meeting. And one thing I want to emphasize here, and I emphasize this throughout the book, Douglass is not acting alone. He is often working with other Black activists, and that's part of what I really explore in the book. Johnson agreed to the meeting with this Black delegation because he thought it would go well and serve as good publicity. He had a stenographer named James Clefane, CLE, P-H-A-N-E, who is well known as a pioneer in shorthand. He could take wonderful notes. Johnson wanted him there because he thought the meeting would go really well and would show once again that he is the Moses for Black people. A transcript of the meeting appeared in a DC newspaper that night, which is an incredible tribute to the stenographer Clefane, and a corrected version appeared the next morning. And that account then appeared in newspapers around the country. I mean, I found it in newspapers in Nevada and California, for example. The meeting was basically an effort to get Johnson on board with promoting advocating Blacks right to vote. And the meeting went something like this. Downing led the group in. They greeted Johnson. Johnson greeted them. It was some small talk back and forth. And then Johnson lodged into a speech that Douglas later said took about an hour. But the transcript suggests that it wasn't that long because Johnson was interrupted by questions from the Blacks who were there. When he was interrupted, Johnson became a bit aggressive, feeling that the Blacks themselves were aggressive and he would do this throughout his career. Whatever he felt kind of defensive around Black people, he would tell them, I am your Moses. At this particular moment, he says to the delegation, and I quote, I have said, and I will repeat here, that if the colored man in the United States could find no other Moses or any Moses that would be more able and efficient than myself, I would be his Moses to lead him from bondage to freedom. And quote, there's a little more discussion. Black delegation says thank you. They say they're goodbyes and then the keeping happens. Frederick Douglas, who is a performer and I think wanted to get under Johnson's skin, was at the door. He's about to leave and he says to Johnson, quote, if the president will allow me, I would like to say one or two words in reply. You enfranchise your enemies and disenfranchise your friends. By which he meant you enfranchise the people that during the Civil War, the Confederates, he said were your enemies, and you disenfranchise the Black people, the Black men in particular, who fought for the Union during the Civil War. This absolutely infuriates Johnson and the meeting that comes back and forth between Johnson and Douglas. The transcript shows that this went on for quite a while. This is just a snippet from the exchange in which Douglas says let the Negro once understand that he has an organic right to vote and he will raise up a party in the Southern States among the poor who will rally with him. And there is this conflict that you speak of between the wealthy slave owner and the poor man and his emphasis here is this will be good for democracy. Johnson responds, you touch right upon the point there. There is this conflict and hence I suggest immigration. If the free man cannot get employment in the South, he has it in his power to go where he can get. This is pretty bold statement. He's basically saying Black people can leave the South and he may even be saying Black people can leave the United States. In effect what Douglas did in the exchange is expose Johnson for what he was, a racist who didn't care about Black people. This was important. Johnson was frustrated by the meeting. It got away from him. It got out of his control. Privately, he meets after the meeting with some aides, one of whom described the meeting in a letter to a newspaper editor who decided not to print the description because he was a Johnson supporter. But according to that letter, this is what Johnson said, quote, those damn sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap. I know that damn Douglas. He's just like Eddie. And then he uses the N word and he would soon cut a white man's throat, then not end quote. Either the year later, he would offer Douglas a job. But for now, let me just say this. The Black delegation quickly crafted a response to Johnson. Douglas and his son probably wrote that. It appeared in the next days on Washington D.C. newspaper as the frame to the transcript of the meeting. It helped to shape how you would read that transcript. Douglas and his delegation had real media savvy. Douglas, it is 1881 autobiography says the meeting was a turning point. It exposed Johnson that may have been its main purpose. Johnson's friends came to his defense. There was some back and forth in newspapers, but Black newspapers and Northern Progressive journals printed this exchange and they turned against Johnson. This is what Douglas had to say about Johnson just a few weeks after the meeting speaking at a Black suffrage organization. What shall be said of Andrew Johnson? What shall be said of him who told us that traders must take a back seat? Again, the traders being the Confederates that he spoke out against during the Civil War must take a back seat in the work of restoration if he now invests those same traders with the supreme control of the states in which they live. What shall be said of him who promised to be the Moses of the colored race if he becomes their Pharaoh instead? In Black writing, you see a lot of the Moses becomes Pharaoh. Douglas paused for a few seconds according to the account why this must be said of him, that he had better never have been born. Following the meeting with the Black delegation, Johnson becomes even more reactionary. That spring and summer saw massacres of Blacks and Memphis and New Orleans, which Douglas and others believed were encouraged by Johnson's racism and his refusal to support Black suffrage. This is a painting by Thomas Nast, who's a caricaturist. It's kind of in the tradition of Hogarth, a regular contributor to Harper's Weekly. It's a painting about the massacre riot. It's been called both things. It occurs late July in New Orleans. Johnson was not there, but according to Nast and Douglas, he was there in spirit. Here he is to the right. He was wearing a crown because critics said he thought he was like a king at the top of this little bunker here. Trison is a crime. That's what Johnson had said about the Southern Confederates. If you can read this, I am your Moses. The Moses, the king, is kind of watching on as white people are gunning down. Black people speaks to where Douglas Nast and other critics of Johnson are coming from. Douglas continued to speak out against Johnson. He developed a fabulous stump speech called Sources of Danger to the Republic, which he gave for the first time in December, 1866, and then on numerous occasions in 1867. In the book, I focus on the version he delivered on January 3, 1867 in a Black lecture series in Philadelphia organized by William Still, the African-American who played such an important part in the Underground Railroad. A transcript of this version appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper and has not been republished until now. I include it as an appendix in the book. I think it's fascinating to see Douglas talking to a predominantly Black audience. He participated in the lecture series with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a popular African-American poet, fiction writer and lecturer, and I want to say a few words about the lecture she gave also in January titled National Salvation. Again, I want to emphasize that Douglas worked in tandem with other Black leaders to oppose Johnson and make the case for reconstruction and Black rights to citizenship. This is a picture of Harper from a book that was edited by William Still, and I want to show you the conclusion of her talk, National Salvation, which is about racism in the North and South and actually begins by talking about how Black people in Philadelphia have problems using public transit. Racism does not exist only in the North, but racism in her account is embodied by Andrew Johnson. So she says near the end, we have needed Andrew Johnson in this country as a great national mustard plaster to spread himself all over this nation so that he might bring to surface the poison of slavery which still lingers in the body politic. But when you have done what the mustard plaster, what do you do? Do you hug it to your bosom and say it is such a precious thing that you cannot put it away? Rather, when you have done with it, you throw it aside. So I love that image of tossing aside Johnson. He kind of takes the racism out of the national body and maybe the nation will be better. Douglas and his sources of danger to the Republic speech, and I'll just quickly summarize but just say it's a really fascinating speech that does a lot of different things. He says near the beginning, drive no man from the ballot box because of his color and keep no woman on account of her sex. He is really concerned about black suffrage and women's suffrage. And then he goes after Johnson. But in going after Johnson, he also raises questions about the Constitution. He says that there aren't enough checks on the presidency. He says again and again, what happens when a bad man becomes president? How are we going to stop someone who is invested? He says with kingly powers, he attacks the one man veto, the one man power of the president and points to the presidential veto, the pardoning power and patronage as giving too much unchecked power to a bad man. And he's not talking just about Johnson. He's saying in the future, we could have some bad men who might want to become kings like Johnson and do things like use the pardoning power. He also in the speech sets forth a theory that people thought was kind of funny that when the people knew that Andrew Johnson, in fact, was going to support the South, that there was a kind of conspiracy to make the vice president into someone who was going to do awful things in terms of reconstruction. So he also says, get rid of the vice presidency because vice presidents are one heart beat away from the presidency and they're going to want to kill the president. He gives the speech again and again through 1867. And in a very strange twist in the Johnson Douglas story, Johnson that summer in 1867 proposes at a private cabinet meeting to appoint Douglas commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau and to fire Oliver Otis Howard. So I have a lot about this in the book. I'm going to have to go quickly right now. This is a picture of Howard. He lost an arm in the Civil War. He's a white man, but he was loved by black people. He was the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau based in Washington, D.C., which had offices throughout the South, which were supposed to help black people in terms of education, legal issues, money matters and so on. Congress has set up the Freedmen's Bureau. It was regarded as a very important institution. Douglas and other black people thought Howard was doing a great job. Some of you in the audience know that Howard University was named after Oliver Otis Howard who helped to found it. Arguably replacing Howard with Douglas made no sense for a president who didn't want a radical in the job, except that it was a way of getting Douglas under Johnson's control. Johnson never made a formal offer to Douglas. He worked through back channels because he didn't want to be exposed to going after Douglas, especially if Douglas said no. So, Douglas' third son, Charles Ramon Douglas, who worked at the Freedmen's Bureau in Washington, D.C., was charged with asking his father if he would like the job, as was William Slade, a steward at the White House. The courtship went on in letters for several weeks. Douglas made it clear he didn't want the job. Then he betrayed the privacy that Johnson wanted by letting an anti-Johnson New York newspaper know about the offer. The editor of that newspaper wrote as follows, the greatest black man in the nation did not consent to become the tool of the meanest white for this prudence and firmness Mr. Douglas is entitled to the thanks of the country. We now come to the controversy that precipitated the February 1868 impeachment. Johnson wanted to fire Edwin Stanton, who was secretary of war under Lincoln and then under Johnson. Such a firing at that time was illegal and even an impeachable offense under the tenure of Office Act passed by the Republican Congress in March 1867. These are some snippets from the tenure of Office Act, but basically I'm going to paraphrase it says that if someone is appointed by the Senate, they have to be removed by the Senate and not just by the president and that violating that would be seen as a high misdemeanor, which would be cause for impeachment. In February of 1868, Johnson decided to fire Stanton, no matter what. This is a picture of Stanton. You can see he died in 1869. He was fired and what he did after he was fired is he said I'm not fired. That's illegal. He hid out in his office until the impeachment trial was over. I think that added a lot of stress, which might explain why he died a year later. Okay, so Johnson decides to fire Stanton, even though it was a violation of the tenure of Office Act. Johnson was impeached for violating that act and not for his resistance to reconstruction. At least that's the case on paper. If you look at the 11 articles of impeachment, you will see a few mentions of reconstruction, but it's really dominated by the tenure of Office Act. For that reason, the trial itself, and you can read that online through Congressional Office, it's over 2,000 pages. It's dull. The trial was dull. It was mostly about the legalistic struggle over whether the tenure of Office Act had been violated. The question I ask of the book is, did anyone really care? Something I point out in the book is that there were no black voices at this trial. There were some moments, but not many, about Johnson as a failed reconstruction president. Virtually all newspaper reports spoke to the tedium of the debates on the firing of Stanton and on the articles of confederation. Here's an image of the Senate as a court of impeachment. I will say it was obviously great theater. The galleries were packed virtually every day. I don't have all that much remaining time, but I have a big question. Where is Douglas in Office? My quick answer is he stays on the sidelines for several reasons. The first being that he was clearly troubled by what a number of black newspapers called the legal quibbles that dominated the debate. He also didn't want to become a distraction. And also, finally, he has his son Charles Ramon there as a conduit. And this is a picture of Charles. And one of the things I do in the book is I look at a number of letters that Charles, who is based in D.C. at the Freedman's Bureau of Office, writes his father about the impeachment trial saying again and again that this name is horrible and deserves to be convicted of impeachment. And he did not ever talk about the tenure of Office Act. In April, April 16th, Charles got two tickets for the trial. He expected his father to come. Frederick Douglass booked a room. It's an interesting day in the transcript you can see from April 16th because I'm representative from Massachusetts. Benjamin Butler attacked Johnson for his racism and for causing great harm to black people. He actually said that, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court who was presiding over the trial, Sam and Chase, basically said he was out of order. That's not what this trial is about. And Charles and his father Frederick both turned against Chase. Douglass at the last minute decided not to show up again, I think because he thought all eyes would be in him and not on the trial. Charles no doubt told him about what he missed. So I'm sure some of you know what happened with the impeachment trial. There were votes on two of the 11 articles of impeachment in May, 1868. Both fell short by one vote. Douglass, his son, Francis Harper and many other blocks felt betrayed. Historians are speculating that the Republicans didn't want Benjamin Wade of Ohio, the speaker of the House, next in line for the presidency to become president in part because he was the socialist and in part because they wanted Ulysses S. Grant as the next president. Charles Roman Douglass and his father both believed that Johnson, as I say, should have been convicted and they both thought that chief justice of the Supreme Court, Sam and Chase, was at fault for keeping the proceedings overly focused on the tenure of Office Act. This is an image of Chase. Chase was a former abolitionist who was angling for the presidential nomination and knowing that Grant would be the choice of the Republicans. He was trying to make the Democrats happy. Here's what Douglass had assigned how to say about Chase. And again, I'm going to paraphrase Charles says he will not support this ban basically for the president because he helped to secure the acquittal of Beatrix Johnson. And Douglass says that Chase, moving from his abolitionist position to seemingly being an advocate for Johnson, was quote, certainly one of the saddest spectacles which can afflict the eyes of men. Chase's failed machinations, he said, led him to the gutter. And I think that for both Charles and Frederick, this was all about principles. Sam and Chase had no principles. Douglass in turning down the jog from Andrew Johnson had principles. Douglass stayed relatively quiet during the trial, but shortly after he expressed his unhappiness with what had happened in speeches and newspaper commentary. Still, he was delighted with the ratification of the 50th Amendment in 1870. But as he saw Blacks rights to vote and do other things that citizens could do, erode in the post-1870 years, and as he saw the continuation of Jim Crow practices and as he saw the Supreme Court seeming to be complicitous in all this, he regularly warned Americans that they were returning to the Andrew Johnson moments, like we're going back to the early years of reconstruction. This is Douglass on Johnson five years after Johnson's death. Andrew Johnson, the Moses of the color race, had betrayed that race into the bloodstains of the old master class. And in the interest of moving on, I'm not going to read the rest of that, but he does not like Johnson. And he picks up on that image of Johnson as a Moses. At the end of Johnson's presidency, he moved back to Tennessee and decided to learn for Congress. He regularly spoke to Black groups in 1869 and reminded them that they had once regarded him as their Moses. He even showed the newspaper clippings of his famous Moses speech. He also very perceptively told them that spinach was like a form of slavery. He wanted their love in their vote, but he also had some understanding of what Blacks were suffering in the South. For that reason, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his great 1935 book on Black Reconstruction, calls Johnson not the most evil man in American history, but, and I quote, the most pitiable figure in American history. Johnson had promised, Johnson had promised, and he let that down. It's part of what the title of the book is all about. Johnson lost the congressional election, but in 1875, he was named Senator of Tennessee. They have no direct elections for Senate then, and served several months in office before dying in Tennessee. And he dies not as the kind of hated person that he is generally now, but here's an image from Courier and Ives, death of the honorable Andrew Johnson, which widely circulated at the time. I don't see any Black people at that side crying. Meanwhile, here's Douglas, circa 1880, five years after the death. If Douglas were alive today, and I'm moving out to my conclusion, I think he had much to say about what's going on in Georgia, Texas, and elsewhere with states restricting voting rights, which he no doubt would say takes us back to the days of Jim Crow. But, and this is the important, but he'd also remind us of American ideals and possibilities. In one of Douglas's most famous late career speeches, he addressed the scourge of Black lynchings in the country. Everything he fought for seemed to be in jeopardy. This is the lecture was printed as a pamphlet in 1894. That's when he gave the lecture. He has a lot of things to say about the horrors of lynching, but these are his concluding words. And these will be my concluding words as well. Put away your race prejudice, banish the idea that one class must rule over another, recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as those of the highest, and your problems will be solved. And whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity or adversity, whether it shall have foes without or foes within, whether there shall be peace or war based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your republic will stand in Florida forever. So I love this conclusion because he's basically saying fight, continue the good fight and continue the good fight based on the ideals of the nation as he understood them. Ideals of democracy and ideals of freedom. So I'm going to stop there and thank you. This one is going to take questions that are on chat. So let's see if I can see them. Question from YouTube. Did Andrew Johnson ever visit speak at Fisk University? It's a good question. My answer is, I want to say I don't know, but I also want to say that I am an English professor who reads a lot and I read the 15 volumes of Johnson's papers. And if I had seen that he was speaking at Fisk University, I think I would have noticed. So I'm going to say no. And another question. Do we know if the Freedman's Bureau aided formally enslaved in registering to vote? And I think that that did happen. So that would have been around 1870. But the Freedman's Bureau shortly thereafter was decommissioned. And that decommissioning allowed for the upsurge of Jim Crow practices and efforts to stop Black people from voting. So at this point, these are the only two questions. I'd be happy to take more questions. I will be looking at the chat. I can emphasize a few things about the book that I didn't emphasize during the talk. One thing is that I try to offer a nuanced portrayal of Andrew Johnson. So it's not just kind of mannequin, fable of good versus evil. And when I gave the manuscript to friends in literature and history to read, people were saying, you know, some people are going to say you're taking a risk here because we do know that Johnson was an awful precedent who failed in the job that we all wish that he did. At the same time, I just was struck by his efforts that I say more between 1863 and 1865 to reach out to Black people and to challenge slavery. And he even at one point said suggested that he would be open to the possibility of Blacks voting. Those of you who know your American history know that Abraham Lincoln himself never actually did not live to see the day when Blacks could vote. But in his very last speech before he was assassinated, he said that he could imagine giving the vote to two groups of Black people. The first is quote, the intelligent. And so what is that? You know, how do you determine that? And the second is those who fought in the Civil War. So he shared with Johnson at least in 1865 the idea that Blacks who fought in the Civil War could vote. Johnson also thought the Blacks who held property could vote. Lincoln came up more with this idea of the intelligence, which would have been hard to figure out. All of us would have loved to see what Lincoln would have done as president. Lincoln was more pragmatic than Johnson. If Johnson could pick a fight, he picked a fight that generally isn't what Lincoln did. Lincoln listened to Black people. Johnson, we could say, entertained Black people, but he didn't listen. And the examples, so as I kind of lay out a book, Johnson had plenty of visits with Black groups in the White House in 1865, but he basically spoke to them. Abraham Lincoln had visits from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney, other Black leaders during the Civil War, and whatever they said he responded to and at some points changed his policy. So the first time that Douglass visited Lincoln, he pointed out that wages weren't the same for Black and White soldiers. Lincoln responded by saying there's a pragmatic reason for that. I don't want to alienate White people, but I'm going to take that into consideration. At least he listened. Martin Delaney, Black Nationalist, visited the White House in 1864 and proposed that militant Blacks go in the South and leave guerrilla expeditions against the Confederates. And Lincoln makes him the first Black major. So I didn't see in Johnson evidence of the same kind of listening. Another thing that I emphasize in the book, and again if you have questions you can post them, but I think this is an important point that's worth making that I didn't make all that well perhaps in the talk, is that Douglass and other Black activists are constantly dealing with racism from people, from White people other than Andrew Johnson. And I think it's a mistake to say or to believe that Johnson was the only White racist in the United States. His views were pretty much supported by White people. From 1865 to 1868, whenever the question of whether Black people should have the vote came to a ballot in places like New York and Minnesota, the answer was no. I mean the proposals were defeated. The radical Republicans themselves, like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, Charles Sundar, could at times be paternalistic. And Benjamin Wade in particular, who was among the most radical of the radicals, regularly used the N word and in letters to his wife that I had read, ranging from 1850 into 1870, regularly used the N word and talked about how he was done with, I will use the word Black people, done with Black people. And he also said that when he has food cooked by Black people, he can taste that Blackness in the food. It's not all about, it's not just Andrew Johnson. And in a chapter of the book that I didn't discuss, there was a Republican convention in Philadelphia in September of 1866 that Douglas wanted to attend. And Thaddeus Stevens in particular didn't want him there. He didn't want a Black person there. And was this racism? I mean, Thaddeus Stevens might have been involved with a Black woman in the final 20 years of his life. It was his racism or pragmatism. The pragmatic argument was it's not good for the Republican party to be perceived as a Black party. Anyway, Stevens wrote to his colleagues that Douglas shouldn't be there. Douglas attends anyway. He is shunned at first, but then his speeches draw people in. And on the final day of this convention, the group actually votes to support Black voting rights. And Douglas very dramatically describes this convention in his 1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. And it's one of the proudest days of his life. Not kind of facing down Andrew Johnson, but facing down the white Republicans and kind of talking up to them. I do not think that Johnson supported or attended performances by the Jubilee Singers. And actually, Douglas, Johnson became much more reactionary by the end of 1865. And I've been told it's time to wrap up. But I'll just say by way of conclusion that when Johnson went on the road in 1869 attempting to become a congressman, Blacks by then must have had the vote in Tennessee and suddenly he needed them. And then all of these speeches that he gives about being a Black Moses, he is about as paternalistic as you can be. But you could also say he's kind of needy. He wants love. He wants love from Black people. And yet he is doing the worst possible thing to Black people while he's president. And then the irony is precisely because he is, the radical Republicans had to speed up the passage and ratification of the 1450 amendments. So by 1870, Blacks have rights of citizenship. Ulysses S. Grant is president and he is someone who cared about Black people. And then the question is where did things go wrong? Andrew Johnson wasn't there. He wasn't involved. So it's not just about Johnson. And when you talk about reconstruction from a Black perspective, you get a larger sense of the white racism everywhere that they had to fight. And Douglas was one of the great fighters against that racism to the time of his death and was inspired by the founding documents of the nation. So it's been a real honor to be here and thank you. And you can certainly read more about all of this in my new book which was published last week by W. W. Norton called The Failed Promise. Thanks again.