Johnson deserved impeachment.

Ultimately, as Wineapple explains, there was a miserable mismatch between the cramped proceduralism embedded in Congress’s articles of impeachment and the depth of Johnson’s actual transgressions. The man had betrayed the cause of the war. He had desecrated the memories of the dead Union soldiers, black and white. He was, every day that he stayed in office, endangering the lives of freedmen and white unionists throughout the South. But he wasn’t impeached for any of that. He was impeached largely over the fact that he fired a secretary of war who openly hated him.

The true “high crime” that Johnson committed was using the power of his office to promote and pursue a White Man’s Republic. That was a usurpation greater than any violation of a specific statute. And for that, Andrew Johnson deserved impeachment and removal. True then; true now.