Arm in arm, the outgoing and incoming vice presidents entered the Senate Chamber. They took their places on the dais. Hamlin began with brief and gracious remarks, thanking the Senate for its courtesies toward him as its presiding officer for the last four years. It was Johnson’s turn. He faced the gathering. A solidly built man of medium height, Johnson was an experienced and confident speaker. His oratorical style was forceful and direct, with an adversarial edge that could inflict injury on his opponents. Johnson spoke that day without notes, as he usually did, but could not be heard well at first. Quickly, the audience could tell that something was wrong. Johnson’s face glowed a luminous red. His sentences were incomplete, not connected to each other. At the biggest moment of his life, on the most prominent stage he had ever occupied, the man was drunk.
“Your president is a plebeian,” Johnson announced. “I am a plebeian—glory in it—Tennessee has never gone out of the Union—I am going to talk two and a half minutes on that point, and want you to hear me—Tennessee has always been loyal.”
Hamlin tugged on Johnson’s coat from behind. “Johnson,” he hissed, “stop!”
Johnson looked down at the Cabinet members arrayed before him. Calling to each by name, he advised them to remember that their power came from the people. When he got to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, memory failed. Leaning over to a Senate official, Johnson asked in a stage whisper, “What is the name of the secretary of the navy?” Johnson continued, reminding the chief justice that his power, too, derived from the people. Hamlin tugged Johnson’s coat again, imploring him to desist. Johnson, elated by the moment or simply oblivious, rambled on.
President Andrew Johnson.
Sitting closest to the dais, the Cabinet Secretaries began to mutter among themselves. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” complained Attorney General James Speed, adding, “The man is certainly deranged.” Speed closed his eyes as Johnson kept on speaking. “Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” whispered Navy Secretary Welles, whose name had eluded the new vice president. War Secretary Edwin Stanton, his features petrified, replied, “There is something wrong.” The postmaster general’s face flushed with embarrassment. A few of the senators and congressmen smirked. Most fidgeted anxiously, shifting in their seats, “as if in long-drawn agony.” One senator placed his head on the desk before him. A Supreme Court justice showed an expression of “blank horror.” Johnson spoke for more than fifteen minutes.
After a period, President Lincoln entered the Senate with several others. Hamlin took direct action. He stood to administer the oath of office to his successor. After mumbling the oath, Johnson grabbed the Bible on which his hand rested. Brandishing it before the crowd, he cried out, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States.” The mortifying spectacle was over.
Luckily, the rain relented, allowing the president to take his oath outdoors, on a platform on the east side of the Capitol. The dignitaries, shaking their heads in dismay, filed out of the Senate. They joined thousands who waited to hear Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The gloom and anxiety of Johnson’s ceremony dissipated in the fresh air, scrubbed clean by the rain. As the tall president stepped forward to speak, an observer wrote, “the sun burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with glory and light.” With biblical cadences and a triumphant sadness, Lincoln’s prepared speech gave Americans the reasons for their terrible sacrifices during the war. He also spoke, stirringly, of peace.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace….
Lincoln’s eloquence could not wash out the stain of Johnson’s rant. Many in the audience knew Johnson from his long public career. They knew he appreciated liquor. A Tennessee rival once recalled uncharitably that Johnson always “enjoyed the meanest whiskey hot from the still,…stuff which would vomit a gentleman.” A visitor to Johnson’s office in Tennessee had concluded that he “took more whisky than most gentlemen would have done, and I concluded that he took it pretty often.”
But Johnson had never been drunk on a public occasion, and certainly not on such an important one. A few days later, Lincoln offered the best defense he could to Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the treasury. “I have known Andy Johnson for many years,” the president said. “He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain’t a drunkard.” More candid was the letter of a Michigan senator to his wife: “The Vice President Elect was too drunk to perform his duties & disgraced himself & the Senate by making a drunken foolish speech.”
The verdict was universal. Johnson’s speech, which he wanted to be the effort of his life, had been a disaster. Treasury Secretary McCulloch thought the new vice president humiliated his friends. A future member of Johnson’s Cabinet wrote that the vice president “disgusted all decent people who heard him.” The appalling quality of his performance was captured by the correspondent from the Times of London, whose reporting was not inhibited by any feelings of national pride:
All eyes were turned to Mr. Johnson as he started, rather than rose, from his chair, and, with wild gesticulations and shrieks, strangely and weirdly intermingled with audible stage whispers, began [his] address…. [Johnson’s] behavior was that of an illiterate, vulgar, and drunken rowdy, and, could it have been displayed before any other legislative assembly in the world, would have led him to his arrest by the serjeant-at-arms…. Mr. Johnson was so proud of the dignity into which fate had thrust him that he boasted of it in the language of a clown and with the manners of a costermonger.
The vice president retired from the Washington scene for several days, recuperating at a nearby estate. He was back in Washington later in March, but rarely presided over the Senate, choosing to stay out of sight. The injury to Johnson’s stature could not be calculated. From that day on, whenever he made a controversial statement, many assumed he had been drunk.
Six weeks after the inauguration, on the morning of April 15, Abraham Lincoln lay dead, struck down by an assassin’s bullet. John Wilkes Booth, an acclaimed actor and Confederate sympathizer, had organized a desperate conspiracy to kill the North’s leaders. Booth himself shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, inflicting the head wound that took the president’s life. At the same time, a second man attacked Secretary of State William Seward in his home, where Seward was recuperating from a broken jaw and dislocated shoulder suffered in a recent carriage accident. The assailant almost crushed the skull of Seward’s son, stabbed two other men, then slashed open Seward’s face and arm. A third conspirator was assigned to kill Andrew Johnson at his room at Kirkwood House. That man, after having a drink to steady his nerves, thought better of the enterprise and hightailed it out of town.
In life, Lincoln had been a controversial figure. He won the presidency in 1860 with only a plurality of the popular vote. His reelection in 1864 was no landslide; he commanded 55 percent of the vote in an election that did not include the Southern states still in rebellion, where he would have been lucky to get one vote in ten. The tragedy of his death began to chip away at any clay feet. The historical Lincoln would eclipse the real Lincoln, rising as a figure of almost mythic resonance for Americans. The president who succeeded Lincoln was bound to be judged by high standards.
Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as the nation’s seventeenth presiden
t between ten and eleven on the morning of April 15, in his room at Kirkwood House. The days were turbulent. The war was ending. Six days before, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina would yield in a week. The states would be reunited. To Johnson would fall great challenges. He would need to relieve the enmity born of four years of vicious bloodletting. He would need to bring North and South together, recreating a shared national identity. He would need to help integrate four million freed slaves into American society. As a Southerner and a Democrat who stood by the Union, he could serve as the bridge between the nation’s warring regions, fostering peace and reconciliation. Or, as a Southerner and a Democrat, he could perpetuate the sectional hatred that brought war in the first place.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON
APRIL 1865
I am for a white man’s government in America.
ANDREW JOHNSON, WINTER 1865
THE NEW PRESIDENT respected Mary Lincoln’s grief, assuring the widow that she could remain in the White House as long as necessary. Johnson set up his temporary office in the Treasury Building, where he remained for the next six weeks. He hired secretaries for the heavy work ahead. Notable among them was Colonel William G. Moore, a thirty-seven-year-old army officer whose diary would provide an invaluable window into Johnson’s presidency.
The nation began to learn about its new president, beginning with his appearance. Johnson was fastidious, always neat in dress and person, and usually struck a serious, thoughtful manner. After meeting the president, British novelist Charles Dickens was impressed, finding his face “very powerful in its firmness…, strength of will, and steadiness of purpose.”
Johnson’s sharp sense of his own dignity had to make the memory of his inauguration all the more painful. By emphasizing his “plebeian” origins, Johnson had granted an unguarded glimpse of his inner heart. Johnson’s father drowned when the future president was a small boy. Apprenticed to a tailor in Raleigh, North Carolina, at age ten, the future president labored for five years at the whim of his master, an experience not all that distant from slavery. At fifteen, the rebellious apprentice ran away with his brother, fleeing into South Carolina for almost two years before returning and resolving matters with his former master. With his mother and stepfather, Johnson led a cart into the Appalachian Mountains, finally settling in Greeneville, Tennessee, to start a new life. Through Johnson’s impressive rise, the rebellious apprentice would continue to dwell within the man, making him angry and resentful at times when it would have been far better not to be.
In an era when politics was never far from violence, Johnson demonstrated ample personal courage. Once, told that an assassin awaited him at a public meeting, Johnson started his speech by placing a pistol before him. After describing the threat, Johnson roared out, “I do not say to him, ‘Let him speak,’ but ‘let him shoot!’” After long seconds of silence, Johnson remarked with satisfaction, “It appears I have been misinformed.”
When Mrs. Lincoln finally left Washington, Johnson’s family filled the White House—Eliza, his wife of almost forty years, two daughters (one married, one widowed), one of his two surviving sons, and five grandchildren. When little ones interrupted presidential meetings, their grandfather indulged them; visitors were expected to do the same. One of the president’s few recreations was to skip stones with the grandchildren in nearby Rock Creek.
An indeterminate illness often kept Eliza Johnson in bed. During the White House years, the president worked across the hall from her sickroom, looking in on her during the day. She, in turn, tried to moderate his searing temper. A White House worker remembered her staving off eruptions by gently touching the president’s arm and saying, “Now, Andrew.” The Johnsons had endured the deaths of a son and a son-in-law. Their older surviving son was a notorious alcoholic.
Though Johnson maintained a warm family circle, he kept the world at bay. In a letter, he advised a daughter “to be friendly with all and too friendly with none.” In times of stress, the self-educated Johnson sought solace in historical and political books. One close aide wrote that the president was “lonely in the center of forty millions of people, and unhappy even to miserable, on that pinnacle of power.” Johnson’s bodyguard remembered his employer as “the best hater I ever knew.”
The new president had little humor. An aide referred to Johnson’s “grim presence,” adding, “in almost daily contact with him for over two years, I never saw him smile but once.” There are no funny Andrew Johnson stories, no recorded flashes of wit or self-deprecation. He once claimed to like circuses and minstrel shows, then added that he rarely attended them because he “never had much time for frivolity.”
When it came to slavery and blacks, Johnson held the conventional views of Southern whites. Some of Johnson’s early statements were virulently racist. In a congressional speech in 1844, he explained that blacks were “inferior to the white man in point of intellect—better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship,” and also stood “many degrees lower in the scale of gradation…between God and all that he had created than the white man.” Johnson opposed one bill that year because it “would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, humpbacked, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly headed ebon-colored negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.” Those who met with Johnson, including former slave Frederick Douglass, concluded that his racist views were strongly held. Johnson did not support emancipation of the slaves until the third year of the Civil War.
His views on race did not change when he became president. He confided to a friend in late 1865 that “everyone would, and must admit that the white race was superior to the black.” In his annual message to Congress in December 1867, Johnson proclaimed that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people,” adding, “no independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands,” but rather ended with “relapse into barbarism.” Stressing “[t]he great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics,” the president warned his countrymen: “Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now [being made] to Africanize the half of our country.” For Johnson, black political power in the South would be a greater evil than the Civil War, or even slavery.
In the first days after the assassination, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio acclaimed the new president. A leading Radical Republican, Wade decided that he preferred Andrew Johnson to Lincoln. “Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness,” he explained, “to deal with these damned rebels.” The new president showed little evidence, at first, of that handicap. Johnson sounded like a man bent on vengeance, repeatedly insisting that “[t]reason must be made infamous and traitors punished.” When Wade suggested hanging a baker’s dozen of Confederate leaders, Johnson objected that the number must be higher.
The president’s enthusiasm for revenge pitted him against General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant. At the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Grant had paroled General Lee and his soldiers in return for their pledge not to take up arms again. The new president bridled at Grant’s leniency. “I frequently had to intercede for Gen’l Lee and other paroled officers,” Grant testified later. “The President at that time occupied exactly the reverse ground…that they should be tried and punished.” The dispute with Johnson placed Grant’s honor at stake. He had given his word to soldiers who would not have surrendered if they thought they could be executed for treason. Ultimately, the president abandoned his effort to prosecute former Confederate officers.
In his first weeks as president, Johnson searched for footing in the difficult political situation. He asked Lincoln’s entire Cabinet to stay on, a course that implied a continuation of Lincoln’s policy of reconciliation with the South. With Secretary of State Seward incapacitated by his accumulated injuries, Johnson relied hea
vily on Edwin Stanton, the able secretary of war.
The greatest challenge facing Johnson was reconstruction: reconstruction of the Southern states, and reconstruction of the Union with the South in it. For months, Northern leaders had argued over this question. Lincoln was inclined to set easy terms for Southerners to create new state governments, and then to return to the Union. During the war, when Union troops occupied large parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, Lincoln allowed the formation of state governments with the participation of only 10 percent of each state’s voters from the 1860 election.
Radical Republicans, a term used to describe the most adamant opponents of slavery, criticized Lincoln’s approach. They insisted that the leaders of the rebellion should be disqualified from the new governments. They argued that the nation must reconstruct the South as something new, not merely restore Confederate state governments. According to Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the Radical chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, what was needed was “a radical reorganization of southern institutions, habits, and manners.” The prospect, he admitted, “may startle feeble minds and shake weak nerves,” but “[s]o do all great improvements in the political and moral world. It requires a heavy impetus to drive forward a sluggish people. When it was first proposed to free the slaves, and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble? The prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting-maids in Congress, were in hysterics.”
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy Page 2
