sworn to serve. The impeachers believed that with Andrew Johnson, a man who was not an adroit leader, not a supple thinker, and not a humanitarian but a man who’d repeatedly vetoed postwar legislation, imperiled the lives of at least four million people, sought to inflame racial tensions, render black citizens defenseless, and restore civic power to slaveholders, who’d insulted Congress as well as individuals, and who had coarsened public discourse—that with this man, this President who would and did break the law, no future worth the many hopeful lives lost on the battlefield, in the cities
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