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all'introduzione di "Gone with the Wind"President Andrew JOHNSON
(1808 – 1875)
He was the 17th President of the United States, from 1865 to 1869. Born in North Carolina (Raleigh) on 29th Dec. 1808, he supported the Democrats and the Unionists. His parents were nearly illiterate and he received a very little formal education: until the age of 17 – when he met Eliza McCardle, the woman that will be his wife – he had rough basics of reading, grammar and math. If it is said Lincoln was the greatest president of the USA, Johnson is considered one of the worst.
As a young boy he worked as a tailor and Eliza actually educated him and helped him in his investments in farmlands and estates. Being seriously ill, she had been wisely operating behind the scenes to help and advice his husband during all his husband’s term at the White House and she was very well remembered by the staff of the presidency.
When he was 22, even if he was only a tailor, he aspired to be a politician and became the mayor of Greenville (Tennessee). He was soon supported by the local mechanics, artisans and common people. He entered the House of Representatives as the governor of Tennessee. By the beginning of the Civil War, he was a senator and aligned with the states’ rights and, above all, with the proslavery faction of the Democratic Party. In spite of his view in favour to slavery, he strongly refused the idea to break the Union, as the Southern states did want and when his state – Tennessee – seceded from the Union after Lincoln’s election, he broke with it and remained as the only Southern senator in the Senate. He was seen a traitor, his property was confiscated, his family driven from Tennessee. But he was supported by the North and considered as a hero by the Northerns.
He aimed at saving the Union, but without believing in the emancipation of the slaves. Lincoln appointed him as the military governor of Tennessee and in his new position he succeeded in convincing the President to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite that, soon he favoured emancipation as a war measure. Lincoln appointed him as his vice president.
Lincoln was murdered just after the end of the Civil War and Johnson was the new president. Unexpectedly the "racist Southern" Johnson had to face and organize the Reconstruction of the smashed and losing South, including the extension of civil rights and suffrage to black Southerns. He aimed at blocking any effort to force the South to guarantee equality for blacks. He allowed the South to set up the so-called "black codes" by which those states substantially maintained slavery, but under another name and the Republicans tried to stop the President. Congress passed the "Freedmen’s Bureau Bill" which provided shelter and provision for former slaves and protection of their rights and also the "Civil Rights Act" by which any person born in the USA was defined US citizen. Congress also passed the "Fourteen Amendment" to the Constitution which assured the federal protection to the rights of any US citizen with the specification that no state should "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". The Amendment was ratified by all the former Confederate States, except Tennessee. However all these reforms – except the Amendment – passed in spite of Johnson’s veto. Finally Congress passed the "Tenure of Office Act" according to which the President was forbidden of the power to remove federal officials without the approval of the Senate and established a military Reconstruction programme in favour of social and political rights for the blacks in the Southern states.
President Johnson’s reaction to all these reforms and initiatives was furious and, as an attempt to regain his authority, pronounced many speeches to attack the Republicans openly. The effects of his speeches were disastrous: it is reckoned that he lost almost one million Northern votes (that is to say among those former supporters of him during the Secession Crisis) and many people were convinced he had spoken under the effect of alcohol. An account of his behaviour Johnson lost both congressional and popular support and his initiatives were continuously stopped until he decided to challenge the Tenure of Office Act by dismissing Secretary of War E. M. Stanton. As a result of that, Congress voted eleven articles to impeach the President due to his violation of the law. By a margin of one vote only, Johnson was saved from the humiliation of being dismissed and ended his term of office in 1869. In 1875 he went back to the Senate to represent Tennessee but died a few months later on 31st July. He is buried in Greeneville, Tennessee.
However during Johsnon’s term, the Reconstruction Acts (1867) had the following consequences:
During all these changes some terrorist organization, like the Ku Klux Klan, attacked black people and those who supported their rights and the physical abuse on them was massive.