Welcome to The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, Season One: Race and the American Legacy! This season explores one of the most pressing issues in all of American history—the country’s troubled and difficult history of race relations. This podcast focuses on the history of the nation’s most powerful office, the President of the United States, and its complex relationship with race. This episode discusses why we felt compelled to create this podcast, why 2020 feels different, and what we hope to learn about race and the American presidency.

Hosts Dr. Sharron Conrad, Dr. Jeffrey Engel, and Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky interview Dr. Maria Dixon Hall, Chief Diversity Officer at Southern Methodist University. Dr. Dixon Hall talks about her work, her teaching, the country's complex racial past, the role of race in American politics, and what she thinks will be necessary for racial healing and progress.

Today’s episode is all about Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, a man whose story is at the center of the defining moment in American history. President during the Civil War, Lincoln saved the union and freed enslaved Americans, and thus casts a mighty long shadow over anyone who held office since. Every President since, historians say, has had to “get right with Lincoln.” But perhaps his story is more complex, as we will learn today.

The war dominated Lincoln's presidency, and with it the question of slavery. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 and eventually promoted the 13th amendment to end slavery nationally. He overwhelming won reelection, thanks in large part to the soldiers’ vote, and his Second Inaugural stands alongside his Gettysburg Address as arguably the two greatest examples of American oratory, ever.

“With malice toward none,” he proclaimed in early March of 1865, “with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

He died mere weeks later, only days after the guns of war fell silent, when felled by an assassin’s bullet. Abraham Lincoln thus became in many ways the Civil War’s last martyr, an American icon of moral strength, and also a global symbol for humanity’s inexhaustible quest for freedom.

But….if that is his legacy….is it accurate? History has a way of rounding out the rough edges of our icons, leaving a useful image for our own times, but at times an inaccurate portrait of the man or woman as they really were. What then, should be Lincoln’s legacy? More accurately, how do historians remember him? To help answer that question and discuss Lincoln’s legacy more broadly, we spoke to two esteemed Lincoln scholars: Dr. Eric Foner and Dr. Edna Medford.

Be sure to check out our show notes for more information on our guests, recommended readings, and more: www.pastpromisepresidency.com.

Today’s episode is all about Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, a man whose presidency is synonymous with the missed opportunities of the post-Civil War era. Never elected, Johnson instead became president after Abraham Lincoln’s tragic assassination. Rather than continuing Lincoln’s agenda, Johnson instead undermined black citizenship, and attempted at every turn to thwart the Republican Party’s Reconstruction efforts in the South. He is today remembered as a bitter, angry, and failed president, and the first ever to be impeached by the House of Representatives. But he wasn’t always remembered so harshly. We will learn why today.

Here’s a quick refresher on Johnson. Born in deep poverty in North Carolina in 1808, he apprenticed as a tailor, settled in Tennessee, and won election to the House of Representatives in 1843. After five terms in the House, he served as Tennessee’s governor and then its senator in Washington, remaining the only Senator from a Confederate State to remain loyal to the Union after secession. Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee as a reward, and then brought Johnson onto the Republican national ticket during the critical election of 1864, hoping inclusion of a Southerner, and a Democrat, might help him win a tough and troubled re-election campaign. No one imagined he’d be President a mere six weeks after Lincoln’s second inauguration.

It fell to Johnson to reunite the nation after the apocalyptic Civil War, but he couldn’t even make peace in Washington DC. Perpetually at odds with Congress, he opposed the 14th amendment made freed black Americans full citizens, supported and even pardoned former Confederate leaders, and undermined the Freedman’s Bureau created to help former enslaved individuals adjust to their new lives of freedom. Years of open political warfare led to his impeachment, which he survived by a single vote in the Senate—a vote historians now believed was bought. Rejected by both major political parties, he left office in 1868 a man reviled in the North he’d supported during the war, and beloved in the former Confederacy he’d fought against.

Why? Because of race, plain and simple.

To help understand his presidency and discuss Johnson’s legacy more broadly, we spoke to two esteemed scholars: Dr. Lesley Gordon and Jon Meacham.

For more information on our guests, show notes, recommended readings and more, please visit www.pastpromisepresidency.com!