Attention: open in a new window. PrintE-mail  Presidential
Impeachment and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy 4/29/10  “With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in, ” Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
Address March 4, 1865  How did President Andrew Johnson, a
conservative Democrat and white racist, apply those principles
to the four million freed black slaves, to the Americans who had
fought to preserve slavery, to the Americans who had fought to
save the Union, and to those who fought to end the vestiges of
slavery after the American Civil War? How did a dispute about
President Johnson’s application of those principles result in
his impeachment by a Radical Republican House of
Representatives? Were the few United States Senators who voted
not to remove the impeached President “profiles in courage” or
were they something less noble? What lessons does the
impeachment have to today’s disputes between the A