When Tennessee’s capital was occupied by Union troops in late February 1862, President Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as the new Military Governor of the state. This was, I argue, the beginning of the Reconstruction of the South, and it placed one of the most enigmatic figures in America at the center of it all. Johnson faced a precarious balancing act between his oft-stated Jacksonian principles of states rights Unionism and wartime exigencies to shepherd the state through civil war. Johnson’s Constitutional position was to treat secession not as an act of sovereign states, but as the collective action of individual traitors. This position bolstered the support of Southern Unionists early in the war. But it would later provide a basis for Johnson’s refusal to accede to civil and voting rights for African Americans after the war.
Here is my piece on Johnson’s role as Military Governor of Tennessee in today’s New York Times Disunion blog.
Also, my book on the transformation of grassroots black and white politics in Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War and Reconstruction is out now. It’s called Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri.