Very few people, even students of history, know the real Andrew Johnson, Perhaps no national figure has been the victim of so much abuse and vilification founded on prejudice and passion. Johnson has suffered much by comparison with Lincoln, the martyred President. Time, however, has shown that he was Just as great, perhaps even greater than the man whose place he had to fill, for Johnson had to go through the fiery furnace of Reconstruction from which a kind Providence delivered Lincoln. |W. S. Woodward in The Monitor, December, 1929, aptly remarks, "The mud so profusely thrown upon Johnson has been fairly well scraped off by his latest biographers." And Winston says that the decision of the Supreme Court in October, 1926, regarding the Myers ease, putting Johnson in the right and Congress in the wrong, has made a fair- minded public anxious to learn the truth concerning such a man.
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