Brenda Wineapple, "The Impeachers"

Brenda Wineapple discusses her book, "The Impeachers", at Politics and Prose.

The challenge of reuniting the nation after the Civil War was as fraught as the conflict itself. As Wineapple, award-winning author of Ecstatic Nation, shows in her detailed history, Congress was divided over questions including restoring the South to its ante-bellum status, punishing former Confederates, and granting the vote to freed Blacks. President Andrew Johnson, however, felt that Reconstruction was unnecessary, opposed civil rights, and, flouting Congress, invoked executive orders to swiftly pardon the rebel soldiers. In response, the House of Representatives voted to impeach him—a decision not taken lightly. Following this unprecedented event step-by-step, Wineapple examines questions of the separation of powers and the meaning of the nation’s core values, as well as bringing to life a host of fascinating and complex figures such as William Seward, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Brenda Wineapple is the author of several books including Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, named a best book of the year by The New York Times, among other publications; White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award for Best Biography of the Year; and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her numerous other honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, and, most recently, a National Endowment Public Scholars Award. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of American Historians and regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation.

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Produced by Tom Warren