Johnson’s vetoes of major Reconstruction laws passed by the Republican Congress, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act, as well as his intransigence in implementing Congressional Reconstruction in the South, played a major role in provoking Radical Republican attempts to impeach and remove the President from office.

Harper’s Weekly, led by editor George William Curtis and cartoonist Thomas Nast, supported the Radical Republican policies for Reconstruction. In his editorial of April 29, 1866, Curtis delineated the Radical and Conservative positions on Reconstruction filtered through his perspective as a leading Radical. He presented arguments for the reasonableness of the Radicals’ case and the limitations of the Conservatives’ case.

Curtis discreetly distanced Harper’s Weekly from more acrimonious and extreme Radicals, such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler, who were early advocates of impeachment. The newspaper held forth the same Radical ideals as Stevens and Butler, but Curtis was more temperate in his rhetoric and, at times, policy recommendations. Instead of overtly criticizing Johnson, as other Radicals were already doing, the editor reminded the President of his own words and the vision of racial equality under the law that they evoked. Instead of berating Johnson, Curtis encouraged the President to do that which in his heart he knew to be just and right.