Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was a Tennessee politician who became the seventeenth president of the United States after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. A Southern Unionist, he had remained in the U.S. Senate when Tennessee seceded and served as military governor of the state during the Civil War.

Johnson’s lenient approach to restoring former Confederate states brought him into repeated conflict with the Republican-controlled Congress over Reconstruction and civil rights. He was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1868 but avoided removal from office when the Senate fell one vote short of conviction.

John Jakes’s Heaven and Hell places Andrew Johnson in the political background of Reconstruction after the Civil War. His presidency frames the struggle over how the defeated South will be restored to the Union, what rights freedpeople will possess and how far federal authority will confront former Confederates, while the fictional Main and Hazard families experience those questions through ruined plantations, occupation, racial violence and western military service.