Jeremi Suri
speaker
329 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2023
last heard 7 Sep
Jeremi Suri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's not from Nashville, but he's from the hill country.
And he has a small number of slaves.
He's not a large slaveholder.
He was a tailor by background.
Andrew Johnson is a terribly tragic figure.
He is someone who never should have been president, never expected to be president.
He was drunk at Lincoln's second inauguration.
And no one expected that he would have any role to play.
He was a tailor by trade.
He was a man who revered Andrew Jackson, who had also come from Tennessee, of course.
And so even though he owned slaves, a small number of slaves, and was pro-slavery, he was pro-union.
So he was the one Southern senator who did not secede.
And therefore, he was made vice president by Abraham Lincoln.
But this was exactly the problem.
When the Civil War was over and the Union was restored, Andrew Johnson believed that although slavery by the 13th Amendment was prohibited, that there was no further role for the federal government in dealing with the former slave problem.
Andrew Johnson hated the large plantation owners, the white elite in the South, but he also hated and feared African-Americans, free African-Americans who would compete with tailors like him.
And so he used the presidency and the six to eight months when he was in kind of virtual control.
He had all of Lincoln's powers without Congress being in session in the middle of 1865.
He used that power, really, to try to bring back the states, bring back the country together in a way that did nothing to help the former slaves.
And that was exactly the opposite of what Congress wanted him to do.
Showing 141–160 of 329 · page 8 of 17
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