Impeachment of a President Series Coming

"[T]he President....does continue to do the most provoking things. If he isn't impeached it wont [sic] be his fault."

150 years ago, the president, Andrew Johnson (left), and Congress were on a collision course toward a constitutional crisis when Henry Dawes (top right), a moderate Republican congressman from Massachusetts, wrote his wife about the toxic situation in Washington. For nearly two years, Johnson and the Republican Congress had locked horns over the power to control Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South. Spurred on by a pugnacious and defiant president who relished thumbing his nose at his enemies, the contest for power in the South expanded in the summer of 1867 to control over both the military and the presidency. Johnson's "August Massacre," the removal of three key administrative and military officials for their disloyalty or collusion with his enemies, sprung a trap set by Congressional Republicans that led to the first impeachment of an American president.

This is the event in American history that led me away from 20th US and Diplomatic history to study the post-Civil War era. The year was 1998 and the Republican Congress was steaming the country down the iron horse's tracks toward the second impeachment of an American president and I thought choosing impeachment as the topic of my political science and history research papers was a clever way of sort of killing 2 birds with 1 stone. I had no idea then that my decision would lead me to a Ph.D. and a passion for 19th century American history, even a quirky interest in one of our nation's most controversial presidents.

Over the course of the next 10 months (beginning tomorrow) I'll randomly trace the events leading up to Johnson's impeachment in the House and acquittal in the Senate. You will even find out what Johnson ate to cope with the news of his impeachment.