Star-Spangled Men by Nathan Miller

Author:Nathan Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Published: 1998-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

*The most famous expression of this view was D. W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, which was shown in the White House and supposedly hailed by Woodrow Wilson, who grew up in the post—Civil War South, as “like writing history with lightning.”

In 1942, in the movie Tennessee Johnson, Van Heflin portrayed Johnson in heroic dimensions.

*Johnson in his December 1867 annual message to Congress insisted that blacks possessed less “capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, whenever they have been left to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” Eric Foner calls this “probably the most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American President.” Reconstruction, 180.

*Nativism, or antiforeign sentiment, was rife in mid-nineteenth-century America as a result of a rising tide of immigration, particularly of Irish Catholics and Germans. Similar to the anti-immigrant hysteria of our own day, it expressed itself in the American or Know-Nothing party—so called because its members, if asked for the party’s beliefs, were instructed to answer, “I know nothing.” While the party was especially strong in the cities, nativism also overflowed into rural areas.

*Two of Johnson’s sons were serving with the Union army, and his son-in-law was fighting as a guerrilla in the Tennessee mountains.

*John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, had assigned George Atzerodt, a German-born carriage maker, to murder Johnson. But Atzerodt lost his nerve after renting a room at the Kirkwood directly above that of the vice president and went out and got drunk. He was later captured and was among the four conspirators hanged. On April 26, 1865, Booth was cornered by federal troops in a Virginia tobacco barn and killed.

*All but a handful later received individual pardons.

*The “swing around the circle” was the first presidential whistle-stop campaign in American history.

*Several others were said to be ready to switch their votes to Johnson if necessary. See Foner, Reconstruction, 336.

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