Jack of Harts

The administration Democrat President Johnson inherited after Republican President Lincoln’s assassination was aggressive in the form of Reconstruction it wanted to pursue. The Republicans wanted to erase Slavery and replace it with a true Free Society forever divorced from the one that came before. Johnson wished a far more modest Reconstruction that would allow the Southern States to map their own futures, and further wished to reshape his administration in his image. So the Republicans passed a law that forbade him from removing anyone the President and the Senate had placed in position without first asking the Senate to agree. When President Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Stanton in a direct challenge to the law they had passed over his veto, the House of Representatives voted to Impeach him. The Senate failed to convict him by one vote, and he remained in office until the end of the term he and Lincoln had been elected to, but his political star had been brought low. Even the Democrats did not want him, and the election of 1868 proceeded on without him.