The galleries erupted in applause. That pleased Johnson. He said he’d always placed his faith in the people. The people would defend the Constitution, and they’d stand behind him. Together, Andrew Johnson and the people would protect the country; it was self-serving politicians who made all the trouble.
Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth American President and the first ever to be impeached, had earlier defied his Southern colleagues when he bravely stood up in the Senate and denounced secession, but after the war, Johnson just as proudly was heard to say, “This is a white man’s government.”
Wasn’t Johnson a politician, Senator Wigfall shot back; hadn’t Andrew Johnson been a professional politician most of his life?
Johnson was unfazed. “These two eyes of mine never looked upon anything in the shape of mortal man that this heart feared,” he shouted.
“Three cheers for Andy Johnson,” someone in the galleries yelled.
Johnson was blunt, he was brash, he was tenacious, and he represented the common folk—which is how newspapers, especially in the North, depicted him. It was also the way he liked to characterize himself before, during, and after the war. “He was free from ostentation and the honors heaped upon him did not make him forget to be kind to the humblest citizen,” an acquaintance recalled. During a political career that by 1861 had already spanned three decades—he was a career politician—Johnson consistently delivered speech after stump speech in praise of “the people,” those unsung (white) laborers who struggled to survive every day and who could not parade “family distinctions on account of superior blood.” “The aristocracy in this district know that I am for the people,” Johnson proudly announced in 1845 when defending his seat in the House of Representatives. To him, the aristocracy was any well-born or connected group, like lawyers, that earned their bread “by fatiguing their ingenuity” rather than by the sweat of their brows.
Why did you allow your sons to become lawyers, a friend baited Johnson. “Because they had not sense enough to be mechanics,” he snapped back.
Johnson’s scrappy populism appealed to those men and women who resented plutocrats who, as Johnson reminded them, possessed unmerited privileges beyond the reach of you and me. Pulling out his plain silver pocket watch, he dangled it in front of the crowd, roaring that his rival owned a timepiece made of pure gold. He said he took his cues from a higher power, which he represented in the same way he represented plain people. “The voice of the people,” he summed up, “is the voice of God.” Such platform histrionics appalled sober politicians who didn’t dangle watches or divinities, and they called Johnson a demagogue. Even Democrats took offense.
Early in his career, Johnson also lashed out against the electoral college, legislative prerogatives, and cabals that rigged political conventions. He fiercely advocated homestead legislation that would give federal land in the western territories to the poor and landless, either at low cost or for nothing, as long as they built a dwelling and lived there for five years. In fact, he’d been pushing a homestead bill since 1846—and he never stopped pushing it even when Southerners and members of his own party tried to block it. Southerners called it the handiwork of Northerners and abolitionists, for they feared that a homestead act would eventually lead to the admission of more free states into the Union. Not Johnson: in 1858, he was quoting Thomas Jefferson on the virtues of agrarianism—large cities are sores on the body politic—and conjuring Andrew Jackson’s image of an independent farmer as the country’s heart and soul. Land for the landless meant remuneration for one’s toil, and it stirred the patriotic soul. “When a man has a home,” Johnson said, “he has a deeper, a more abiding interest in the country, and he is more reliable in all things that pertain to the Government.”
Now, in 1861, Johnson was berating Southern secessionists. “Were I President of the United States,” he exclaimed, “I would have them arrested and tried for treason; and if convicted, by the Eternal God, I would see that they suffer the penalty of law at the hands of the executioner.” On his way home to Tennessee from Washington that April, Johnson clashed with the mobs that inevitably poured onto the railroad platform at almost every stop. A knot of men blocked his train at the Lynchburg, Virginia, station, and when Johnson drew his gun, the conductor swiftly stepped forward and convinced the men to let the train proceed. At Abingdon, Johnson’s hat was ripped from his head and torn to pieces, and at Bristol another throng of men wanted to lynch him.
Delegates from the seceded states had met in Montgomery, Alabama, and had elected Jefferson Davis as provisional president of the newly formed Confederate States of America. Davis had to deal with more than a difficult scrub from East Tennessee. At four-thirty in the morning on April 12, 1861, General Pierre-Gustave Toutant de Beauregard of those Confederate States gave the order for gunners to fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor. As a Confederate state, South Carolina had demanded that the United States of America evacuate the fort. Two days later, on April 14, 1861, Fort Sumter surrendered to the Confederates, and the Civil War had begun.
* * *
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SIX YEARS LATER, in the spring of 1867, as the seventeenth President of the United States, Andrew Johnson triumphantly returned to Raleigh, North Carolina, the city of his birth. The occasion was the dedication of a monument, a tomb, in honor of his father—a ten-foot red limestone structure built to replace the original, small headstone on which only two initials, “JJ,” had been rudely carved.
It was quite a homecoming for a local boy who’d had no schooling, prospects, or fancy connections. But Andrew Johnson had always believed that democracy was the political equivalent of Jacob’s ladder and that any man born in the United States—Johnson meant any white man—could climb that ladder, rung by rung, to the very top, despite whatever disadvantages he may have earlier endured, such as poverty. And Andrew Johnson had been climbing that ladder for a lifetime, pulling himself away from the misery of his boyhood.
Glancing at his father’s towering tomb, he disdainfully asked, where are they now? Where is Raleigh’s upper crust? Neither Johnson nor his father had been a member, for Jacob Johnson had worked as a janitor, constable, and stable-keeper. He had been the sexton who rang the only bell in town—and who’d rung that bell after rescuing three men from an overturned canoe and carrying them to shore. He’d rung the bell but, exhausted, just a few days later, he’d suffered a fatal heart attack.
Andrew Johnson never forgot—he’d never been allowed to forget—where he came from, a family of poor whites rebuffed by the bankers, judges, lawyers, and politicians whose clothes his mother sewed and washed and for whom his father had sacrificed his life.
Born on December 29, 1808 in the kitchen of an inn where his parents then worked, Andrew Johnson grew up in a log cabin and thus shared with Lincoln the privations of a hardscrabble youth. But the comparison between the two men ends there. Lincoln was flexible and kind and brilliant—with a deft, manipulative mind whose point of view kept enlarging over time; Johnson was a brave but obstinate man whose convictions, over time, calcified into a creed.
After the death of his father, his mother, Mary (Polly) Johnson, had remarried but soon farmed out her two sons to a local tailor as indentured servants, or “bound-boys,” as they were called. “Though she sent me out penniless and friendless and did not afford me advantages which you now enjoy,” Johnson softly commented at the foot of his father’s tall monument, “I can say whatever may have been her delinquencies, she is my mother and I love her still.”
Bound-boys had to work twelve hours a day until they turned twenty-one, at which time they’d be set free. Since education was a condition of indenture, they were supposedly taught to read and write. But it’s not clear what Johnson learned in James Selby’s tailoring shop, although Johnson long remembered listening to men who, waiting for their clothes, read aloud. He must have loved those readings, for later
he said he’d missed his vocation. If he’d been educated, he once lamented, he’d have been a schoolteacher—or a chemist. “It would have satisfied my desire to analyze things, to examine them in separate periods and then unite them again to view them as a whole,” Johnson claimed. He also said that as a chemist or a teacher, he wouldn’t have had to “play the hypocrite and indulge in heroics.” Yet though he never seemed to be faking, whether on the stump, in the Senate, or in the White House, Johnson did enjoy something like heroics, for he saw himself as a lone spirit fighting for the good and the right. Andrew Johnson was cut from a martyr’s cloth, one of his cabinet members would say.
While he sewed at the tailor shop, a clerk named William Hill read to young Johnson, whose favorite book was The American Speaker, a compilation of speeches containing sections from Hamlet and Edmund Burke as well as George Washington’s farewell address, the inaugural address of Thomas Jefferson, and several speeches by the chief of the Seneca nation. It was thrilling stuff. Johnson so loved the book that Bill Hill gave it to him, and Johnson said he could read it before he learned to spell. In the White House, he recited sections of it. And he could not have forgotten the book’s preface, which claimed that by studying these speeches, the young reader would almost certainly travel on the royal “road to distinction,” or climb that wonderful ladder.
Still, servitude is servitude, and whatever Andrew Johnson dreamed as he sat in the tailor shop, for the rest of his life he remained exquisitely sensitive to slights, real or perceived. The high-and-mighty planters who sat on the top rung of Johnson’s ladder were his enemies, but so too were the slaves and free blacks whom he considered below him—and whom he feared might clamber up a rung or two and knock him to the ground.
In the spring of 1824, when Johnson was fifteen, his face freckled and his hair golden brown, he and his brother ran away from Selby’s place. There’s no record of where they went or how far; Selby did offer a reward for their capture, much as if the boys had been fugitive slaves. When Johnson returned to Raleigh three years later, he offered to buy out his contract as well as reimburse Selby for time lost. Selby apparently demanded more money than Johnson could afford, so Johnson left town again, no doubt further embittered against the man and the class that demeaned him. This time, his mother and stepfather joined him, all headed west for Tennessee, in a two-wheeled wooden car pulled by a blind horse. They settled in the rural village of Greeneville in the eastern part of the state, where Johnson met Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a local shoemaker. The young couple married. Johnson was eighteen and Eliza a little over sixteen, and his worldly possessions were said to consist of that blind horse, a cot, and five dollars.
At the time Johnson was rather handsome. He was five foot ten; his eyes were dark, intense, and, according to one friend, “sparkling.” His cheekbones were high, his mouth firm and not yet locked into a perpetual frown. Unfortunately, very little is known about Eliza McCardle Johnson, an only child apparently educated at the local school, who disappeared from public view once Johnson became President. She suffered from poor health after the birth of their fifth child in 1852—but gossips heard that Eliza Johnson lived apart from her husband, who treated her badly. He spent long periods separated from her, both when he went to Nashville as a young legislator and after he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Years later, Eliza Johnson’s prospective biographer concluded that “in the end, I did not know whether she loved Andrew or hated him.”
First Lady Eliza McCardle Johnson was seldom seen during the Johnsons’ White House years.
Eliza Johnson did prove herself to be made of strong stuff, particularly during the early days of war when Johnson was in Washington. East Tennessee had remained Unionist after the rest of the state seceded in June of 1861, and so the Confederates naturally considered the Johnsons to be enemy aliens. They seized the Johnson home in Greeneville, removed their slaves, and smashed or sold their possessions. Forced to leave town, Eliza Johnson and her ten-year-old son traveled on rugged, desolate roads to cross Confederate lines, sleeping beside railroad tracks when no one would offer shelter. But Andrew Johnson expected from his family no less than he expected of himself. “We must hold out to the end, this rebellion is wrong and must be put down let cost what it may in the life and treasure—” he would instruct his wife. “You & Mary [their daughter] must not be weary, it is our fate and we Should be willing to bear it cheerfully—” he added. “Impatience and dissatisfaction will not better it or shorten the time of our suffering.”
When Johnson entered the White House, Mrs. Johnson’s sick-room was located across the hall from the library. The President could hear his wife cough or moan, and Johnson’s private secretary recalled that he could hear the First Lady weeping in her bedroom. Johnson’s bodyguard circumspectly noticed that she had seemed “far more content when her husband was an industrious young tailor.” In those days, Eliza Johnson had helped Andrew with his writing, or so it was rumored. (Johnson’s spelling was atrocious.) And the couple had prospered. Johnson was known to create stylish clothes, and young men from the nearby college so admired his coats and pants that he hired a staff of tailors to keep up with the orders. He himself always dressed simply in black broadcloth, though in later life he wore dark brocade waistcoats to match his black doeskin trousers, and to keep his linen crisp, he changed it more than once a day.
He also developed a taste for public performance. “He was naturally and inherently disputatious, cautious, and pugnacious, and opposition was his delight,” a contemporary remembered. Evidently at his wife’s urging, Johnson joined a debating society at the local college and on Friday nights walked the four miles from his home in order to compete. It was said that he was initially timid and his voice weak. That changed fairly soon when he realized people were listening. He ran for office. In 1829, he was elected alderman, then town mayor, and in 1835 was sent to the state legislature after a blistering campaign during which he typically called his rivals ghouls, hyenas, and carrion crows. His foes—there was an ever-growing number—said he catered to the prejudices of whatever crowd he addressed. If they liked, he liked; if they hated, he hated more.
But in a slave-holding state, the exercise of manual labor was considered beneath the dignity of a white person, and as one historian has noted, the tailor’s profession was regarded as effeminate. Plying a needle as you sat cross-legged on a table or fitting clothes to another man’s body was not the same as splitting rails, and Johnson, alert to any form of ridicule, also cultivated a reputation for scrappiness and physical strength. And since success included, for him, the ownership of others, when serving in the state legislature in Nashville in 1835, Johnson bought a fourteen-year-old girl named Dolly. In all, Johnson would own about nine slaves, and after the war he proudly claimed more than once that he never sold a single one of them. Mainly, he was proud to have acquired them in the first place. It was another rung on that ladder.
Dolly recalled that she’d been for sale at auction when it was she who spotted Johnson. Liking his looks, she asked him to buy her, which he did. Whether Dolly’s account is true or not, it does suggest there may have been attraction between them—or that Dolly preferred a story in which she was not passive. Whatever happened, by the laws of the day Johnson was her owner, the master. Years later a rumor circulated to the effect that Johnson had fathered at least one, if not all three, of Dolly’s light-skinned children—although it was also said that Johnson’s son Robert had fathered Dolly’s youngest. Such allegations would surprise no one, then or later. It’s also true that political enemies often accused one another of miscegenation.
But Johnson could brag that he’d climbed out of illiteracy, poverty, and Greeneville. Having successfully invested in real estate, the penniless apprentice was now as successful as the local gentry, even if the gentry wouldn’t embrace him. As if in retaliation, Johnson constantly referred to that success, flaunting his bleak persistence to anyone who migh
t condescend to him. He thus converted grievances into political advantage. Johnson was a champion of the underprivileged, the enemy of snobbery and affectation, a plain person, without frills, earthy and ungilded. What you saw was what you got. Or what he wanted you to see.
Johnson lost only one election, and that was to the Tennessee statehouse in 1837, and he returned to the state legislature two years later. “He was always a candidate for Something,” a Tennessee congressman reminisced. Johnson served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1843 to 1853, where he opposed government spending; he even argued against a resolution to pave the muddy streets of Washington. Similarly, he fought federal support for railroads, which he foresaw as ruining the livelihood of those who ran wayside inns or depended on wagons to bring their goods to market. In this, he nurtured an idyllic view of the countryside, one partly shared by such eastern writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom,” Emerson warned in 1844, “but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest benefit.” For Johnson, the nostalgic dream of the country as small, white, and mythically pastoral was to a large extent his fantasy about the childhood he never had. Later, one of his favorite books was The Lost Cause Regained, a jeremiad, written just after the war, about the South’s return to its former lily-white glory.
A states’ rights defender who rigorously championed the institution of slavery and a Democrat wary of executive privilege or power, Johnson did support the President’s right to veto bills, a right Johnson would exercise years later when he reached the White House. The contradiction did not bother him. Unsurprisingly, he did not see eye to eye with all Democrats. “Party, to him, as to most politicians, was valuable because it enabled him to mount upon the shoulders of his followers and thus rise to power,” noted a Greeneville judge. Fellow Tennessee Democrat and former President James K. Polk never liked Johnson, complaining that “he is very vindictive and perverse in his temper and conduct.” Johnson had supported Polk’s war with Mexico, just as he firmly opposed the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit slavery in any of the territories annexed as a result of that war.
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