Johnson and Impeachment

Lincoln's assassination left America with an openly white supremacist president, Andrew Johnson who had been a slaveholder, opposed Reconstruction and voting rights for Blacks, and showed up drunk on inauguration day. After meeting Johnson, no less an authority on character than novelist Charles Dickens declared him “a man not to be turned or trifled with. A man (I should say) who must be killed to be got out of the way.” William Teignmouth Shore, Charles Dickens and his Friends (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 1909), p. 296. Anthony Trollope attended his impeachment trial.