Taking Impeachment Seriously
The framers of the Constitution understood impeachment as a vital, potent legislative check on abuse or misuse of power or other serious misconduct.
George T. Brown, sergeant at arms of the Senate, serving the summons on President Andrew Johnson, from Harper's Weekly, March 28, 1868. Courtesy Library of CongressThe Sectional Politics of Reconstruction
Gold and Freedom is an ambitious account of Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War interwoven with national currency and tariff policy. Nicolas Barreyre, Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, views Reconstruction as a reordering of the American republic that exceeded in scope the constitutional-legal problem of restoring the former Confederate states to the Union. According to Barreyre, the Southern project called for a redefinition of the American nation, citizenship, the relationship of the people to the body politic, and “the economic model and the type of social relations on which it depended.” In short, “it is…
The Reconstruction Statesmen
In his last public address, April 11, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln defined the problem of Reconstruction as how to end the war, re-inaugurate the national authority, and get the seceded states back into “their proper practical relation with the Union.” No provision in the Constitution explained how this should be done. There was no government to make a treaty with as in a war between independent nations. Lincoln observed: “No one man can give up the rebellion for any other man. We must simply begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements.” In Statesmanship and Reconstruction: Moderate Versus Radical Republicans…
