Least Contrarian Contrarianism Ever
By I have no idea if the jacket copy is an accurate description of the contents, and the book seems interesting anyway, but this made me laugh when I came across it in a bookstore recently:
In 1868 Congress impeached President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the man who had succeeded the murdered Lincoln, bringing the nation to the brink of a second civil war.
David Stewart challenges the traditional version of this pivotal moment in American history. Rather than seeing Johnson as Abraham Lincoln’s political heir, Stewart explains how the Tennessean squandered Lincoln’s political legacy of equality and fairness and helped force the freed slaves into a brutal form of agricultural peonage across the South.
My question: who the hell thinks Johnson was Lincoln’s political heir? Perhaps I’m wrong, but my impression is that the Dunning School didn’t think that Lincoln and Johnson shared a vision; they just preferred the latter’s.
Anyway, back to work on my book that uses Marbury v. Madison to challenge the conventional view that Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall were best friends working together to implement a common vision of national government.