‘The Impeachers’ minutely recounts the first presidential reckoning
When Brenda Wineapple started her research for “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation” six years ago, she had no idea how topical her book would become.
She grew interested in the first impeachment trial in the United States while working on her previous book, “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877,” which explored political and cultural events leading up to and during the Civil War and into Reconstruction.
Andrew Johnson was an accidental president, a Tennessean whose Constitutional absolutism left him an anti-secessionist, pro-Union politician despite what
