DK WHEN THE PRESIDENCY BREAKS DOWN HERE WAS MY COMMENT

Professor

Great comparative assessment.

With someone like Johnson, it seems to me that in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Congress had also broken down, with the sectionalism of the war, into what was called a Radical Republican Congress. 

That Congress would not have implemented Lincoln's expeditious and conciliatory Reconstruction Plan, such as it had been elaborated, both during, and by the end of, the war. 

Johnson mainly tried to carry out the reconstruction plan which Lincoln had sketched, and to which several confederate states had pursued and agreed, before he was killed.

In my view, therefore, if one objects to Johnson's reconstruction efforts, as the Radical Republicans did, for which he was eventually impeached, one in effect objects to Lincoln's ostensible Reconstruction Plan too. 

Possibly, however, Lincoln knew, all along, his plan was a faux plan, a presidential feint, knowing as he did the perspective of the Radicals he had had to mollify already all along, and of the abolitionists who were instrumental in electing him. 

Certainly he had had little problem emancipating the slaves and enlisting them in his army of occupation of the South.

I follow J G Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction, Chs XXX to the end, tempered by the qualifications above about Lincoln's questionable reconstruction plan sincerity.

Certainly Johnson's Presidency did little to hold up the Union occupation activities already under way.

All the best