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B.) Jefferson Davis, The Confederate President
[Abridged] Presidential Histories
05/15/21
•57m
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Jefferson Davis was never president of all the United States, but he was president of half of them.
Follow Davis as parlays his status as a Mexican-American war hero into a political career as a fiery southern radical, serves as Secretary of War, get's his dream job as general of the confederate Mississippi armies, and days later gets the job he never asked for nor wanted - President of the Confederacy. We'll take a close look at the major decisions he made that helped shape the outcome of the Civil War
While we're at it, we'll also look at the Myth of the Lost Cause - a bit of pro confederate revisionism that has tinted how we remember the Civil War in the friendliest way possible for the confederates who started it.
Bibliography:
1. Embattled Rebel - James McPherson
2. Abraham Lincoln – David Herbert Donald
3. Grant – Jean Edward Smith
Previous Episode
Six of the seven presidents who followed Lincoln served in the Union Army during the Civil War. In our final look at Honest Abe, join me as I interview Jon White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and author of Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln , on Lincoln's relationship with the army and what its soldiers thought of Lincoln, the GOP, slavery, and the election of 1864.
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17.) Andrew Johnson 1865-1869
June 1, 2021
•50m
In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, former vice president Andrew Johnson was faced with a tremendous challenge: How do you mend relations between the north and south, two regions that had spend the past four years killing each other on the field of battle? And what do you do about the south's 3.5 million newly freed former slaves who owned no land or property and who were surrounded by 5.5 million whites who feared and resented them. And, oh yeah, all those white guys have recent military experience?
It wouldn't have been easy for any president to navigate these challenges peacefully. Unfortunately, when it came to the freedmen Johnson had no interest in that "peacefully" part.
Follow along as Johnson rises from poverty so deep, he was sold into indentured servitude, to city alderman, to the state house, to the White House. Along the way, we'll see how he put himself in a position to replace Lincoln's first-term vice president, how his influence during reconstruction helped cement a post-slavery racist society we're still haunted by today, and how he became the only president in our first 200 years to face an impeachment trial in the senate.
Bibliography
1. Andrew Johnson – Annette Gordon-Reed
2. Grant – Jean Edward Smith
3. Abraham Lincoln – David Herbert Donald
4. Rutherford B. Hayes – Hans. L. Trefousse
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