Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America by Fergus M. Bordewich (Knopf, 480 pages, $32.50) Most Civil War students realize that Congress was ahead of President Lincoln on matters such…
Donald Trump is not the first president whom opponents tried to drive from office almost from the start of his term. Radical Republicans targeted Andrew Johnson only a few months after he assumed the presidency following Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in…
The Constitution stipulates that impeachment is confined to a president’s high crime or misdemeanor, not his unpopularity. To date, the House Intelligence Committee is showing Americans nothing more than Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats, which most of the press amplifies with…
A decade after the 2008 taxpayer bailout, Americans remained skeptical of banks. According to a 2018 survey, one-third of the public had “hardly any confidence in bank leaders” as compared to 10 percent before the bailout. In reality, the rescue…
Ignored among current reparations discussions is the fact the South has already paid them — if not for slavery, then for losing the Civil War. For at least 25 years after the war, over half of the federal budget was…
Trump critics increasingly compare him to Andrew Johnson, who, in 1868, was the first president to face impeachment. Like Trump, Johnson was easily provoked into unruly speech and considered morally inferior by his opponents, who regarded themselves to be sincere…
Two years after the Civil War ended in 1865, a Republican Congress gained a veto-proof majority in both chambers. They almost immediately began trimming the powers of the executive and judicial branches. First, they replaced President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction plan…
Texas novelist William Humphrey revealed how Confederate statues animate the Southern tradition: “If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a…
