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Trump is up there as worst president of all time. Only president who was worse was Andrew Jackson. If this ICE stuff gets any worse he my become the king of worst presidents.
Andrew Johnson was by far the worst of all time for sabotaging Reconstruction. Basically every problem we have now including Trump/fascism is a direct result of Johnson's actions.
Johnson didn't invent racism. Even with Reconstruction proceeding properly, ALL those racists would have still been there, gumming up the works.
They got the three post-war Constitutional Amendments that formed the foundation of Reconstruction, and that was probably the biggest lift.
So Johnson was bad, but not the worst. Until now, the worst were those pre-war presidents like Buchanan that moved America toward Civil War.
Now, however, we have an actual traitor in the office, who is an asset for a hostile foreign enemy, has attempted an Insurrection, stole hundreds of classified documents, is mind-bogglingly and openly corrupt, and is a proven pedophile to boot. There is no doubt that Trump is solidly in last place, and it isn't even close.
In fact, when he's finally out, and we find out what was really going on behind the scenes, his last place position will only solidify.
If Reconstruction had proceeded properly, the United States would have hung all of the Confederate officers and government officials and at least pulled up the root of the problems in the South. Johnson allowed them to fester and re-emerge, and we have been living with those problems since.
Not punishing heinous crimes like chattel slavery and violent insurrection is how we get precedent for not punishing even more crimes. Like Ford pardoning Nixon so "the country can heal" and then Reagan using that precedent for Iran-Contra and then Bush using that precedent to steal the 2000 election and commit the US illegally in Iraq etc etc. And now Trump realizing that laws don't matter at all and doing whatever he wants with impunity. Most of the Supreme Court justices are direct descendants of politics Johnson enabled. Roberts clerked for Rehnquist ffs, an avowed segregationist who wouldn't have been politically viable if Reconstruction had succeeded.
But would Lincoln have hung all the Confederates? I doubt it. Certainly, some should have swung, like Davis and Lee, but I doubt it would have been as across the board as you suggest. Lincoln's humanity likely would have prevented it, and he would have put the emphasis on healing, more than punishment.
I grant you, things would have been far different under Lincoln, but the lack of technology would have prevented the Federal government from dealing with many of the same inevitable problems that occured anyway. You can deal with governmental issues in the courts, but when it comes to the ground level, face-to-face interactions between people, in towns and small cities, which is where most of real life exists, especially back then, the authorities were likely to be enthusiastic about supporting racists and racist policies, and the Feds weren't going to be much help in the best of circumstances. You could Federally squash a problem in one place, but it's still going on in a thousand other places.
The point is that just saying Reconstruction would have gone perfectly under Lincoln, and prevented all our current problems, is a bit optimistic. I think the systemic racism of the South (and everywhere else), was going to make a fully successful Reconstruction an impossibility.
Getting the three Reconstruction amendments was the important part, because it gave us the legal foundation to constantly chip away at the systemic racism that still exists today.
But yeah, I can fully agree that Johnson was still an awful shithead.
It certainly wouldn't have gone perfectly but I think the best evidence that it would have eventually worked out for the better is how much political power former slaves had shortly after the Civil War ended while Reconstruction, in whatever diluted form, was actually being attempted. This is the period we get the first black senator, Hiram Revels from Mississippi. Further, In 1868 black Americans made up a majority of the South Carolina's state legislature and opened the South's first public school system. Former slaves started taking up tons of local political offices as well. They wielded true local political power and although there were still racists opposed to their inclusion in society, it was much harder to extract former slaves from that society and subjugate them again. Once federal troops withdrew from the South all of these reforms were taken away, violently and illegally, by the people who weren't punished under Johnson, the violence and subjugation became much easier. This is how we get Jim Crow etc.
I mean, if this period had gone on for long enough for white Southerners to benefit from it, maybe a generation or so, we wouldn't even have the modern Republican party since it only exists today as an extension of white Southern racism that was enabled by Johnson. Instead, we get generation after generation of white Southern children being indoctrinated into racist beliefs because the leaders of the Confederacy were allowed to spread their hateful ideals throughout their society after they lost the war. We'd live in a much more egalitarian society as a whole if that hadn't happened. Again, not without its problems, but we would have solved the major problem. It's most of my issue with people today jumping to Trump being the worst president, not only is it recency bias but he's just the obvious result of decisions made by Johnson et. al. during Reconstruction.
Absolutely phenomenal points, especially how the growing political power of black citizens would have made a much larger impact on their futures in society, had it not been arrested by racist Southern state governments, and that was due to the Federal government pulling out, and letting the South govern themselves.
We can't do anything about it now, but we can learn from it, and not let the current MAGA government, an outgrowth of the worst racist policies our nation has ever tolerated, survive to live another day, once they've been stopped. We will need to crush MAGA, and fully purge it from American government and society. We can't make the mistake of letting these traitors off the hook, again, or we'll be back here in a other 100 years. We can't keep letting these moronic losers suppress our nation's progress any longer.
Yes I fully agree, and thank you for the conversation. However I am deeply cynical American society will excise their fascist tumor since they have such a long history of refusing to punish criminals, enforce laws, and enact meaningful reform.
I totally understand that, which is why I'm saying that this UNPRECEDENTED situation will require unprecedented solutions, and we have to FORCE our elected officials to not fall back on the old patterns of following the easiest path of least resistance, and leave the same poison in our system.
IF we get out of this, we will have a once in a lifetime opportunity to move forward with entirely new strategies that will truly reconfigure our society to support American Citizens, and not just Sociopathic Oligarchs (many foreign) and their amoral, trans-National corporations. We can't squander that opportunity this time. Our citizens, the world, and history require that to redeem our Nation.
Or James Buchanan for allowing America to devolve into Civil War.
The war was inevitable by the time Buchanan took office. He could have forestalled it or prepared the Union for it more adequately, and deserves blame for basically doing neither of those things, but he isn't a direct cause. In fact, many of his political options for corralling the South in the antebellum period could have caused the war to start earlier than it did. It's just a personal belief of mine that he gets more hate than he really deserves, especially compared to people who could have easily been better like Johnson.