ABSTRACT

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Kenney of Philadelphia, in a letter to her father, expressed her visceral reaction to President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill on February 19, 1866. The same event is captured in a Harper’s Weekly satirical cartoon “King Andy I,” published just prior to the 1866 midterm election that flipped Congress in favor of the “radical Republicans” and set in motion a series of constitutional conflicts that culminated in Johnson’s impeachment in 1868. Lizzie, her letter, and the politics of the times are examined in this article. Johnson’s eventual impeachment is eerily analogous to current events.

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