A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 6, Part 2: Andrew Johnson

The raw, unfiltered voice of the most controversial president to occupy the White House before the 20th century. This volume contains the actual messages, proclamations, and papers of Andrew Johnson, the man who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln's bullet and then nearly destroyed the nation he inherited. Here are Johnson's own words on Reconstruction, his battles with Congress, his defiance of the radicals, and his vision for a reunited America that never quite materialized. The documents capture a president embattled from day one, fighting for his political survival while the country he led hemorrhaged from its wounds. What emerges is not the villain of popular memory or the martyr his defenders claimed, but something more unsettling: a man of genuine conviction whose principles happened to be catastrophically wrong. For historians, students of American government, and anyone seeking to understand the Reconstruction era not as history books describe it, but as the man who lived it wanted posterity to remember.