CHRIS HAYES: They're looking for some technical violation they can nail him on, when the man is presiding over the resurgence of white supremacist terror in the South.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: But think of it. Think of it. It's America in 1867-

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Think of it now. Can you impeach somebody because they're a white supremacist? Don't forget either it's the first ever impeachment. Nobody had gone down this road before, and there's no roadmap. There's no Google Map to say you take a left turn here.

CHRIS HAYES: Hello, and welcome to "Why Is This Happening?" with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

Well, I don't know about you, but for some crazy reason, and I really don't have any explanation for it, I've been thinking a lot about impeachment recently. I know, it's a weird, esoteric thing to spend your time meditating on. In all seriousness, obviously it is the center of the political debate right now about whether the president of the United States has committed, in the words of the Constitution, high crimes and misdemeanors, and should be impeached and then possibly removed from office. And I would say 95 percent of the discussion is colored by two different previous experiences of presidential impeachment, Richard Nixon, who was never actually impeached by the House.

There were articles of impeachment that were passed by the House Judiciary Committee, and he resigned before he was actually impeached by the House, partly because it was clear he was going to be impeached and probably removed, and a bunch of Republican senators walked over, or I don't know, bused over, drove over to the White House, went over to the White House and told Richard Nixon, "It's over buddy." So that's one. So people think a lot about that, and we have a lot of time we'll refer to it, and John Dean, he was The White House council under Nixon, has testified before the House Judiciary Committee now, and Liz Holtzman, who was on the House Judiciary Committee that drafted and passed those articles of impeachment is on our show. So that's one touchstone.

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And the other is Clinton's impeachment. And it's interesting because in some ways there's like different messages from them. The first impeachment of Richard Nixon, I think the consensus was like, "Of course he deserved to be impeached," and it turned out after he was gone that we learned all sorts of stuff about the rampant criminality that was the Nixon presidency that weren't even in the articles of impeachment. They didn't know at that time that people on the payroll of the president broke into the therapist's office of Daniel Ellsberg, who published the Pentagon Papers, to steal the private therapy files. They didn't know that one of the ideas that got tossed around by the “plumbers” in what was called CREEP at the time was to maybe bomb The Brookings Institution. They didn't know the half of how criminal the entire Nixon enterprise was, and so I think history looks extremely favorably on the fact that like the Special Counsel pursued an investigation. They pursued articles of impeachment, and it lead to his removal. And I think people think, "Yeah, right. Good."

I think Bill Clinton's probably goes the other way, largely in the kind of consensus view of history, which is that he didn't really deserve to get impeached even though he did lie under oath, and the impeachment was both a kind of a substantive and political mistake, that it represented this kind of zealous overreach by the Republicans who were so intent on getting Bill Clinton out of office and so motivated by their personal animus and hatred for the man that they got out of head of where public opinion was, and it came back to bite them. Infamously, they lost seats in the 1998 Congressional midterms, which almost never happens for the out party in those second term midterms, and it's gone down in history, I think, as like that was not a smart move. And obviously I think that haunts a lot of the Democrats in Congress right now, but it is worth noting there have not been two beginnings of impeachment proceedings in American presidential history, there have been three.

Image: Rev. Jesse Jackson listens to Bill Clinton at a convention in Atlanta on Sept. 9, 1992.Rev. Jesse Jackson listens to Bill Clinton at a convention in Atlanta on Sept. 9, 1992.Curtis Compton / AP
The first impeachment of a United States president in which he was actually impeached by the House was Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was an election year. It is also three years after the end of The Civil War, and after Lincoln's assassination. It was Lincoln's assassination that made Andrew Johnson president. He was impeached by the House of Representatives and came within one vote of removal. And it's kind of a wild thing to me that that story, the first presidential impeachment, I remember being taught about it in high school, and it was a just like little kind of asterisk that was kind of like, "Well, it very messy, and he was maybe not a great guy, but also the people in Congress were kind of nutty, and really who's to say who was right, who was wrong, and we all moved on after that." That was basically what that moment was taught as in high school history.

It's actually way, way, way, way, way more interesting, way more high stakes, way more relevant to today than that characterization. Nothing less than the fate of the nation post the Civil War was at stake in the fight over Andrew Johnson being impeached and removed from office. Nothing less than the future of America as a white man's republic or as a true multiracial democracy was at stake in the fight over Andrew Johnson's impeachment. The most essential battles of the American political project were all present in this impeachment and subsequent trial. Now, they were largely filtered through a lot of procedural fights about whether he was constitutionally able to fire the Secretary of Defense, and you'll hear about all that in our conversation, but fundamentally there is no better time to go back and examine the first presidential impeachment than right now as we have this discussion, and we discuss it in these very kind of cramped historical terms.

I think there's a case to be made that, actually, Johnson was probably the best analog, even though the times were extremely different, the media environment was different, but there's a lot about Andrew Johnson that you will hear in this conversation you will find familiar if you follow our current president.

And so a few months ago I got an email from The New York Times' book review that said, "Would you like to review a book, a history of Andrew Johnson's impeachment?" I said, "Absolutely." So I got this book called "The Impeachers" by Brenda Wineapple, and it's 500 pages long; read the whole thing. I wrote a review in The New York Times which appeared a few weeks ago, maybe about a month ago. It's a great book. It's a fascinating read. And I thought to myself, "I would love to talk to Brenda about all this on the podcast." So Brenda Wineapple came in. She's a really interesting woman. She's written a whole bunch of books. I mean, this history of Andrew Johnson's impeachment, it's a wild truth about the history of this country, how little of the story of Reconstruction has truly been told from the perspective of the reconstructors, from the perspective of those who were fighting for multiracial democracy as opposed to those who ultimately prevailed who were fighting for the maintenance of white supremacy.

This book is a revolution in our understanding of what that impeachment meant, how important it was. I have to say, almost more than anything I've read, more than the stuff I've read about Nixon, more than the stuff I've read about Clinton, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson echoes in my mind as I think about the moment we are at right now. I think you're going to learn a lot from this conversation with Brenda Wineapple.

CHRIS HAYES: I reviewed this book for The New York Times. I really enjoyed it. I learned a ton from it. It's a capacious ambitious volume. It's not like a slim… just the facts. It's a full sort of look at the circumstances of this event, and-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, what led up to it-

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, as I was reading it-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: ... even what happened after.

CHRIS HAYES: ... I thought to myself ... This was how many years in the making?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: I said six.

CHRIS HAYES: It was six years in the making?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah. Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: What got you started on this six years ago, because you've managed to sort of publish this into-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: I know.

CHRIS HAYES: ... an incredibly-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: I know.

CHRIS HAYES: ... relevant news cycle, but six years ago, not many people were thinking about Andrew Johnson's impeachment.

BRENDA WINEAPPLEE: No one was thinking of it, and when I told people, they would say, "Uh-huh” and they'd walk away from it-

CHRIS HAYES: Do you ever-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: ... because it seemed so boring and dusty and uninteresting, and nobody knew who Johnson was anyway.

CHRIS HAYES: I've sometimes referenced Andrew Johnson-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: And they think-

CHRIS HAYES: ... and people will say, "You mean Andrew Jackson?"

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly.

CHRIS HAYES: "No. No. No, Andrew Johnson."

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Right. Isn't that amazing? So that's the first thing, they don't know who he is, and then the second thing is impeachment, they might think of Clinton. It seems ridiculous, and the conventional wisdom was that the impeachment of Johnson was a horrific mistake. It was embarrassing, let's forget it. I started it because when I was finishing the last book, I realized I really didn't know very much about this impeachment, and it bothered me, because I thought, "How is it there's a major event in American history that I don't know about and other people don't seem to know about? Why is that?"

CHRIS HAYES: So that was the question that got you motivated? When I think back to my high school history education, which was quite good, we studied the impeachment briefly-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: You did?

CHRIS HAYES: ... and it was kind of like, "Oh, it was all very messy," was kind of the takeaway. "Who's to say who was right and wrong. It was just over an obscure Tenure of Office Act, something, and they were mad at each other, and it was all messy," and squabbles basically is what the kind of takeaway. That's the benign-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's a benign version.

CHRIS HAYES: That's the benign version. The malign version is what? What is the malign version?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: The malign version, there was a group of fanatical partisans called radical Republicans, and that was meant almost as an epithet, radical was bad, and they wanted to seize power, and that they were power hungry, and they were diabolical, and they ensnared poor Johnson in this Tenure of Office Act, and tried to impeach him. That was the take from it. That's how I was taught it, and actually that view almost comes out of "Birth of a Nation." That's so bizarre when you think about it. So squabbles, as you said, squabbles is benign, but it's still dismissive of it. It's like, "It was a mistake. Let's move on. Let's move on to something interesting, whether it's Reconstruction or Grant or Jim Crow," or whatever happens to be where you're going, but it was just this blip.

CHRIS HAYES: And the malign, you grew up in Boston, right?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: I just want to be clear, the malign version of this history. You grew up in-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: North of Boston, but it doesn't matter.

CHRIS HAYES: North of Boston in the heart of-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Of abolitionism.

CHRIS HAYES: ... abolitionism, and the history that you got was that "Poor Andrew Johnson was ensnared by a bunch of zealot maniacs."

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly. Maniacs. That's a good word for it-

CHRIS HAYES: Maniacal who tried to arrogate themselves the power-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Power. Mm-hmm.

CHRIS HAYES: ... that's the takeaway that generation of school children are taught this.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: School children got that. Absolutely. And that was maybe 10, 15 minutes of your American History class.

CHRIS HAYES: Right, yes. If that. Yes.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah. And it was strange to me, because some of the people I was reading about, even then I felt they were kind of likable, but I was told, "You're not supposed to like them, and that-"

CHRIS HAYES: They're the villains.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, exactly. And that stays with you, because it makes you feel like an outsider, like you don't really understand things, and so as an adult, that's one of the nice things of adulthood, you go back and you revisit some of this and say, "Why did they think that exactly?" When I worked on the other book and I finished it, I realized there's something unsettling about this, that there's more to it, and I really wanted to know what happened, why did it happen, and also what was so interesting to me is when it happened. That's what's amazing too. When you think of Clinton, you're not thinking about a Civil War, and the first ever assassination of a president, not just any president, not Franklin Pierce, but Abraham Lincoln. That's horrible. Imagine what it was like living then. It must have been terrifying really. The war's barely over. Your president is gone. The country's not put back together. People have basically more or less stopped fighting, but what are you going to do now? And then really in a matter of just a really short amount of time, the president is being impeached. To me, that seemed remarkable.

CHRIS HAYES: It comes across in the book how unstable everything felt-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Felt.

CHRIS HAYES: ... in that moment. The worst tragedy in the history of the country. Well, slavery is the worst tragedy. So just to be clear-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, it's part of it. No. No. No, but that's very much part of it. It is the worst.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. So you have 600,000 dead. You've got wounded. Sherman-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: People dying and hungry.

CHRIS HAYES: ... has made his march, that the South is in flames. Right?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Right. That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: And the president has been murdered. They tried to kill his secretary of state as well. There's this question about the stability of the-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Country.

CHRIS HAYES: ... country, the Union. Will it hang back together? What is it-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: What country? What country even? Because you had 11 seceded states. Now what? Where are they? Are they in the Union? Are they out of the Union? Do you recognize secession? Do you say, "Oh, it was a mistake. Come on back? Come on back, have your seat in Congress."

CHRIS HAYES: So all of those question are presented to the man who was the Vice President, a man named Andrew Johnson. So let's start, as we sort of tell this arc, let's start with who was Andrew Johnson.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Andrew Johnson grew up in poverty, basically. He was born Raleigh, North Carolina, and as a young boy he was sent out as an indentured servant, which makes him just above the class of enslaved people, which means that when he ran away, which he did from the tailor shop where he was indentured, they put out an arrest warrant for him. That makes him really like a fugitive slave. He was a self-made man. That's another way to look at him. He grew up, he was unlettered, unschooled, and found his way into politics, because he loved the Union, he loved to speak, and he was very successful in politics.

So eventually he was in the United States Senate during what was called the Secession Crisis. Lincoln has been elected, he hasn't been inaugurated yet, and the southern states were beginning to succeed. And Johnson, who very courageously stood up against these seceders, they were called Fire-Eaters, and he said, "Secession is wrong. We have to stay in the Union. The South is protected and slavery is protected in the Union not out of it," and he was against it, and it practically could have cost him his life, because in Tennessee he was burned in effigy, and went he left Tennessee, he left it was said in a hail of bullets. He was very outspoken. He was very frank. He believed in the country.

So Lincoln, more or less under the table, authorized him as his vice president, because Lincoln in 1864 was afraid he wouldn't win the election. There was no telling, really.

Image: President Abraham Lincoln delivers his second inaugural address on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in March, 1865.President Abraham Lincoln delivers his second inaugural address on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in March, 1865.Library of Congress via Reuters
CHRIS HAYES: Right. So Johnson, he's white obviously, but he's got this kind of class chip on his shoulder against the southern planter aristocracy, because he is an unschooled former indentured servant. Kind of thinks they look down on him, which they do.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Of course they do, and the whole country's hierarchical and status conscious, but the South is very, very much so, and he was very conscious of being a poor white, and they actually used the term in those days “poor white trash,” but it didn't broaden his horizons, didn't make him sensitive and empathetic. It made him really want to have what other people have. One of the first things that he did when he began to have money, because the tailoring was very successful, is he bought slaves.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. He became a slave owner-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's right. Not a planter, he would never get up that high. He wasn't the aristocracy, but this was a way, somebody called it conspicuous consumption, this is the way that he showed that he had arrived in southern society. They would never accept him in southern society, but you're right. It's really very, very class conscious, and is interesting that way.

CHRIS HAYES: And in some ways, the thing that makes him in that moment, the moment of peak heroism and courage, which is that he, taking literally his life in his hands, stands against the Secessionist Movement, the southern planter aristocracy, and he says, "If you force the question of secession or slavery, I will say, 'Stay in the Union and let the slaves go.'"

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yes, and he was very clear about that.

CHRIS HAYES: And it takes a certain kind of bullheadedness to do that.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, yeah, and that's bullheadedness in retrospect. At the time, especially if you were in the North and an abolitionist, you don't call it bullheadedness, you call it heroism. You know? So it's an interesting phenomenon. When does heroism become bullheadedness?

CHRIS HAYES: Well, because that same character trait that gives him, I think, the inner strength to do that we will later see in very nefarious light. So, Lincoln, who is running in '64 for re-election in the midst of the war, the war is not going great-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No, exactly. That's why he thought he was going to lose, and he knew he was going to up against McClellan and what were called the Peace Democrats who just wanted enough. The war had turned into butchery really, and everybody knew that, and there wasn't any guarantee. You couldn't see the end of it coming, and you couldn't see a northern victory, so he was worried, and he thought a war democrat, which is what Johnson was, and a Southerner would keep the border states in line and help him at the polls. Ultimately, he didn't need Johnson, because the fortunes of the war changed, but it doesn't matter. The other thing that's interesting, and it's so kind of poignant really, Lincoln didn't think he was going to die. All his dreams notwithstanding, who thinks that this is the person who's going to follow me, because you don't think-

CHRIS HAYES: Right. Right. Right. He was not thinking of who do I want to president-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No.

CHRIS HAYES: ... if I'm gone. He was just thinking-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: He was thinking-

CHRIS HAYES: ... in this short-term sense, this is someone who will help me-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Help me stay in office and prosecute the war the way it should be.

CHRIS HAYES: And that ends up being the great question of the '64 election is basically to come to some peace with the Confederate states, or to finish the war.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yes, exactly. And Lincoln was adamant that he wanted to prosecute and finish the war, and he was very powerful about that, and he was respected for that. Even McClellan who was running against him, McClellan had been a general didn't much like Lincoln, but didn't want the war-

CHRIS HAYES: Well, Lincoln fired him.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, why would he like him?

CHRIS HAYES: He was a terrible general.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, well. But nonetheless, McClellan did love his soldiers, and he didn't want all those people to die in vain, and just to say, "Okay, forget it” and have peace.

CHRIS HAYES: So, Lincoln wins, and the second inaugural happens, which is one of the most famous speeches in American history, "the better angels of our nature," right. It's inscribed on his memorial. Johnson also has his inaugural speech.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Well, Johnson does. Johnson gets loaded basically. He has too much whiskey with his cold medicine or whatever he's taking, nobody's quite sure, maybe he was nervous, but he begins to babble, and begins to talk about himself, and plants a sloppy kiss on the Bible, and everybody is mortified.

CHRIS HAYES: He's like making out with the Bible.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly. He said, "Where did this guy come from?"

CHRIS HAYES: Think about this, right-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No dignity.

CHRIS HAYES: ... the study and character, this is like foreshadowing of what we're going to get, because it's probably one of the greatest figures in American history, an icon at the peak of his rhetorical powers extending grace viewing through the kind of moral prophecy into the future of the-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Country -

CHRIS HAYES: ... the egalitarian republic-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly. Well, that's-

CHRIS HAYES: ... and then this drunken weirdo-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Right. From the South, who's kind of, his clothes are nice because he was a tailor, but can't handle the moment at all, and-

CHRIS HAYES: And contemporaneously, people at the time were like-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Oh. Oh, they were horrified. They were whispering. They said, "What is he, crazy?" And Lincoln presumably, it was reported to say, "When we go outside, keep him away from me." In other words, "I don't want to have anything to do with this guy. We've won. That's the end of that." And it was a vice president after all, which meant he was going to be inconsequential. We would never have to-

CHRIS HAYES: He served his purpose. Basically, we-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah. How many vice presidents in the 19th century can you count in that sense. So he'd served his purpose, exactly, and he was an embarrassment, and then low and behold a month later Lincoln is dead and Johnson is taking another oath of office, but this one is to become the president. It should have given more people pause, but people wanted continuity. I mean, how could you not? I mean, you have a dead president, you have a war that's just about finished, but nobody knows the direction of the country. Who is this person? You have to put all your faith in this person.

CHRIS HAYES: In the beginning everyone's like ...

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: "Okay, we have faith in you." They said.

CHRIS HAYES: Pulling for him and trying to see the best in him.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly.

CHRIS HAYES: He was the guy that stood up to the slavers of Tennessee.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Not only that he had said, "Treason is a crime and must be prosecuted." It seemed like he was on the same page as radicals who were basically saying, "We have to change the entire structure, and nature of the South, and we can not let this happen again, and we have to really rebuild the country." It seemed that that was the case and he left Lincoln's cabinet intact too. Even the Democrats, because he was a Democrat, even the Democrats who said, "You got to get rid of some of these guys in the cabinet." Johnson wouldn't do it. He wouldn't. He never listened. Very rarely listened.

CHRIS HAYES: Then you have two major questions that confront the country. What to do with the states that seceded? How to reintegrate them into the Union and what posture, legally-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: And morally.

CHRIS HAYES: ... and morally the government takes towards the millions of-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Four million formerly enslaved people who had been deprived of schooling. Who had been deprived of the ability to move. Who had no jobs, no land. Didn't really, in a sense, own their own clothes on their back. What's going to happen to those people? Where do they go? Where are they going to live? Lots of those plantations had been confiscated. Who owned them? Nobody knew. It's an enormous problem.

What was also a problem, in relation to the first issue, which is how do these states come back, was that people who had been counted as 3/5 of a person are now whole persons. If you count them towards representation in the electoral college but you don't give them the vote then, in a sense, you're repopulating this Southern power structure but not with people who can vote in their own interest.

CHRIS HAYES: This is a really important point. Take away the moral question here and just look at in political terms for-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: I'll try.

CHRIS HAYES: Well I'm just saying for the listener.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: No, no, I know.

CHRIS HAYES: For Republican Northerners who have just fought this bloody war because of these a*****e Southerners, these treasonous Southerners. I'm just saying, take away that people are actual egalitarian. Just the partisan practical. They seceded, they waged a war against our government that cost 600,000 lives.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: 750,000 and counting.

CHRIS HAYES: 750,000.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, that's the latest count.

CHRIS HAYES: If we end up in a situation in which we take them back to the Union-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Guess what-

CHRIS HAYES: ... but the 3/5 are now full but they don't have any political rights, they have basically come back.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: They won.

CHRIS HAYES: They've lost their slaves but we've just given them all this political power.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Exactly. It's exactly right. Everybody knew that. That becomes a tremendous problem.

Then there are two issues that are related to that. One is political power but one is citizenship even. First you have to get citizenship before you even get political power. Political power in terms of the vote.

These are enormous questions, and you're right, taking aside the moral question people in the North would know that and they would be very wary about giving Southerners that kind of authority once again. Even if they were loathe and reluctant to give people the vote. There were many who were because women didn't have the vote so there was an argument, "Why are you not enfranchising women when you want to enfranchise black men? Give them the vote and they can't read or write and we can." You see?

There was a lot that was going on that had to be adjudicated, had to be ironed out. Johnson is in this mix and his position is just basically say that the Southern states never seceded. Just push them back in. End of story.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, just come back in.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Yeah, which means that basically the South will rise again immediately. In fact you have a situation in the South that you still have slavery by another name. In other words you've eventually ratified the 13th Amendment, there's no more institution of slavery but in the South, while he's legislating with our Congress, what he's able to do is allow the South to pass these black codes, which makes it impossible for the formerly enslaved people in the South to move feely, to marry, to have all of the rights and privileges of a citizen.

CHRIS HAYES: Johnson's confronted with this and he starts to take these-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Takes charge.

CHRIS HAYES: ... unilateral actions-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: ... in which he is giving huge pardons. Anyone who comes and says, "I'm loyal now"-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Or pays.

CHRIS HAYES: ... pays, you're back in. He starts appointing these provisional governors in the South.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's right. Some of them are of really dubious backgrounds.

CHRIS HAYES: Confederates. Then you've got ... You document in the book and there's great passages of this, I mean basically they set to work immediately of reconstituting the power of white-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Supremacy.

CHRIS HAYES: Of violent, deadly white supremacy.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: They pass black codes. You have sheriffs roaming around in Confederate uniforms.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: I know. Shooting people.

CHRIS HAYES: Shooting and killing what are-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Black-

CHRIS HAYES: What are, quote unquote, "free men."

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: Right. Quote unquote, "free men." They kill a few white ones on the side too.

CHRIS HAYES: Loyalists. We should say-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: So called loyalists. That's right.

CHRIS HAYES: This is one of the things I think is important that gets the conscience of the North as well, right? It's not just racialized violent. It's also targeted at white loyalists. People perceived-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: That's right. People who were perceived as Republicans and who were against the war effort. Some Southerners were. I mean, to be fair to the South.

CHRIS HAYES: Totally.

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: In that sense the white loyalists, the white Republicans, as well as all black people, were targets.

CHRIS HAYES: The Republicans and the Northern abolition press are watching this happen as Johnson's basically, what they see, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Right? That the war has been won and he's turning around and giving the Southern treasonous slave power back all of its power. Reputting them in power. They are-

BRENDA WINEAPPLE: They're horrified. Congress is out of session. Remember a bunch of Congress people go to Johnson and say, "Don't you think we aught to have a special session? Because really it's Congress' prerogative to decide who is its own members. We decide who goes into the legislature.” He said, "No," so he kept doing this. All the things that you're enumerating, he was able to do that spring, and that summer, and early fall because Congress wasn't in session. I mean, that was ...

Forgetting the press for a minute. I mean to be in Congress and watch your powers being taken away from you is horrific. That's called executive power in a sense or to them it was an abuse of power and a loss of the balance of power.

CHRIS HAYES: That sets the stage for a couple of major incidents that end up pushing impeachment full steam ahead. We're going to get into that right after this.

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