Lecture focuses on 'Raleigh's president'

RALEIGH -- Raleigh-born President Andrew Johnson, the first U.S. chief executive to be impeached, will be the subject of a free noon lecture Monday in the State Capitol's Old House Chamber by Dan T. Carter, one of the nation's premier Southern historians.

"Andrew Johnson was a man of contradictions," says Dr. Jeffrey J. Crow, deputy secretary of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. The nominal Democrat ran for vice president with Lincoln in 1864, and his relationship with Congress was rocky.

"He bitterly opposed secession, harbored class resentments against Southern planters and threatened to hang traitors. Yet at war's end, he adopted a policy of leniency toward the South," Crow said. "Johnson's stubbornness, brittle pride, and political ineptitude helped to make Reconstruction a political crisis second only to the secession winter of 1860-1861."

The lecture is sponsored by the Office of Archives and History, part of a yearlong theme called "Telling Our Stories." A Capitol exhibit on Johnson's roots and turbulent times, "Raleigh's Own President: Andrew Johnson's Life in North Carolina," is on view until Jan. 16.

Carter is a professor emeritus in history at the University of South Carolina, holds a doctoral degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and lives in Western North Carolina. His latest book is "From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994." His other works include "Scottsboro: a Tragedy of the American South" and "The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics."