PRESIDENT IN A PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER

By Edwin Cooney

Just think of it! Could a presidential name be any plainer than that of Andy Johnson? That’s what Andy Johnson was—plain (without frills) and direct. He wasn’t nearly as rough, dramatic, or deadly as General Andrew Jackson. In fact, Andy Johnson was often especially helpful to people down on their luck. Ultimately however, he possessed an indomitable determination, which made his personality stand out. He was a Democrat to his very core, which is the heart of his tragic presidential story.

Born to Jacob Johnson and Mary McDonough (her friends called her Polly) in Raleigh, North Carolina on December 29th, 1808, Andy would be fatherless by age three. His dad, Jake Johnson, who served for a time as Town Constable of Raleigh, North Carolina, saved two prominent local men from drowning in nearby Hunter’s Mill Pond one day in December 1811. He dragged the two men to the shore before collapsing from exhaustion. Becoming ill from the effects of the chilled water, he never quite regained his health. On January 4th, 1812, while serving as sexton of the local Presbyterian Church, Jacob Johnson was tolling the church bell for a local funeral when he collapsed and died from the exertion.

Raised by his widowed mother, Andy and his older brother William were indentured to a local tailor when Andy was fourteen. That meant that until they had worked off the cost of their training as tailors, the Johnson boys were virtual property to their boss James J. Selby. However, both boys became disenchanted with the arrangement and made their break one night in the spring of 1824. In June of that year, Selby offered a ten dollar reward for the return of the Johnson boys, but he made it plain in the local newspaper that he’d pay the full reward even if it was only Andy who was returned to him.

However, after short stays in Carthage, North Carolina and Laurens, South Carolina, Andy headed for the hills of East Tennessee. He settled in Greenville sometime in 1826.

Good things happened fast in that east Tennessee mountain town for young Andy. The very day he arrived in Greenville with his mother and stepfather Turner Dougherty, he was spotted by sixteen-year-old Eliza McCardle. She immediately declared, “There goes my beau,” and married him the following spring. The town tailor had just retired, so Andy Johnson’s profession was laid out for him upon his arrival. Two years later, he was a town alderman and, in 1830, just before his twenty-second birthday, he was elected the town’s mayor. He’d come to Greenville in 1826 as an illiterate runaway from indentured servitude and by 1830 he’d begun his profession, married, been elected to public office, and, most important of all, learned to read. His young wife was his teacher; Andy Johnson never attended even one day of school.

He was twenty-six when he went to the State Legislature in 1835. His platform was simple: he was and always would be for the workingman. Yet, he showed his considerable courage early on when he opposed a popular internal improvements bill in the State Legislature. He voted against it -- and his constituents voted against him the next Election Day. They returned him to the legislature, however, in 1839. He would be re-elected in 1840 and elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1842.

For ten years in the House, he supported most of the things other Southern Democrats supported, such as: the annexation of Texas, the Mexican war, the gag rule in the House preventing that body from even considering antislavery petitions, and the Compromise of 1850 which brought California into the Union and instituted the Fugitive Slave Law.

What Congressman Johnson did oppose was spending for federal institutions (such as the Smithsonian Institute) and large expenditures for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Gerrymandered by Tennessee Whigs out of his congressional district in 1850, Johnson decided to run for Governor of Tennessee in 1852. Frustrating his enemies, he won -- and for two terms championed the working folks once again, this time by creating a public school system and a state library.

In 1857, the State Legislature unanimously elected Andrew Johnson to the United States Senate. He proclaimed at the time that the Senate was his highest ambition. No doubt he meant it too! Andy Johnson hated pretentious “high brows.”

As America moved closer to civil war, Johnson became convinced that wealthy planters were causing the trouble and not the people. There were, after all, only about 385,000 slave holders in the South’s entire population of around nine million. It was the fear for their waning power and influence that threatened disunion, not “uppity” slaves. Thus, as Andy Johnson saw it, a civil war would be a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

In 1860, the fifty-one-year-old Tennessee senator was, for a time, a “favorite son” presidential candidate. He was even a prospective vice presidential possibility on a national Democratic ticket. Still, Johnson cheerfully supported Vice President John C. Breckenridge’s candidacy. When Lincoln won and the South rumbled with secession, Andy Johnson declared to a packed Senate gallery that although he, too, had fought against Abraham Lincoln, his blood and his very existence was with the Union and he would be loyal to it. He was the only Southern senator to refuse to secede. Even though many of his original Eastern Tennessee mountain constituents shared his unionist views (most were too poor to own slaves), many did not.

While traveling back to Tennessee, he was twice removed from his train by angry mobs who wanted to hang him. It almost happened on the second occasion, but an old man in the crowd shouted that hanging was something that his constituents should have the right to do, so the crowd let him go back to Tennessee for hanging. Once at home, he faced down angry constituents at a meeting. He began his speech by asserting, as he placed his own pistol on the table in front of him, that if anyone proposed to shoot him it ought to be the first order of business in that day’s meeting. No one shot at him. Andy Johnson was a very brave man.

On March 4th, 1862, his Senate term having run out, Johnson was appointed Military Governor of Tennessee with the rank of Brigadier General by President Lincoln. That meant that Andy possessed all of the military, legislative, executive and even judicial power necessary to establish union civil government throughout the state. Grant had just freed Nashville from rebel control and a brave, experienced, and capable man was needed to complete the task of removing the rebel blight and replacing it with a healthy local Union civil government. Thus, for the next three years, Governor Johnson removed rebel public office holders, arrested Confederate teachers and preachers, shut down rebel newspapers, and taxed sufficiently to raise needed revenue for the war effort. Governor Johnson successfully requested that Tennessee be exempted when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The request was granted and, for the rest of the war, Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware could keep their slaves.

Once he’d gained the nomination for a second term at the June 1864 Republican National Convention, President Abraham Lincoln asked the convention to nominate Andrew Johnson for Vice President. This was three months before the strategic fall of Atlanta and President Lincoln thought he’d need a Union southerner to sufficiently unite northerners behind his appeal for a second presidential term. Thus Republican Vice President Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was out and Democrat Andy Johnson of Tennessee was in.

On March 4th, 1865, Vice President-Elect Johnson was recovering from an attack of Typhoid Fever. He entered the Senate chamber on the arm of outgoing Vice President Hamlin. Feeling faint in the stuffy chamber, Johnson had several drafts of brandy. When he arose to take the oath and give his (then traditional) Vice Presidential address, he was well under the brandy’s influence and proceeded to give a long rambling address about his humble origins. Normally an excellent orator, he delivered an oration that was a disaster and everyone (some insisted President Lincoln as well) was embarrassed for him. The occasion gave Johnson the undeserved reputation of being a “drunkard.”

One of the last people President Lincoln saw on Friday, April 14th, 1865, the final day of his life, was Andy Johnson. The new Vice President carried from that meeting the knowledge that all was well between himself and the man who, as it turned out, would be martyred within about five hours.

Had things gone according to plan on the night of April 14th, 1865, Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward would have been killed along with President Lincoln. George Atzerodt, who, with his mother Mary, would be hung for taking part in John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy, lost his nerve after stalking Johnson. Atzerodt had taken a room in Kirkwood House just below Johnson’s and failed to even attempt to kill the Vice President.

Awakened from a sound sleep and told of President Lincoln’s shooting, Johnson hurried to Petersen’s Boarding House where Lincoln lay totally comatose diagonally (due to his great height) across a bed. The President breathed his last at twenty-one minutes and fifty-five seconds after seven on the morning of Saturday, April 15th. Chief Justice Salmon Portland Chase, who wanted to be President much more than Andy Johnson, administered the oath to Johnson at Kirkwood House at ten that very morning.

When he became President, Andrew Johnson was fifty-six years old. He stood five feet ten inches tall, possessed a stocky build, had a broad forehead, black eyes guarded by bushy eyebrows, a rather large nose, a square jaw and cleft chin, and thick black, but graying hair. He often suffered from kidney stones throughout his presidency, but his health was generally good. Andrew and Eliza Johnson were the parents of two daughters, Mary and Martha, and three sons, Charles, Robert, and Andrew Johnson Jr. (Robert was the president’s private secretary before dying of alcoholism just after Johnson’s presidential term ended.) Andy Johnson, always a tailor in his own mind, dressed neatly, usually in black.

The controversy that would bring President Johnson within one vote of removal as President in May 1868 was largely not of his making. Radical Republicans led by Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senate President Benjamin Wade of Ohio (who stood to succeed Johnson were he convicted during the trial) found it politically and financially profitable to punish rather than peaceably reconcile with the South.

Andy Johnson, who’d placed his very life and that of his family on the line as a Union man was, after all, a man of the South. (All three of his sons, his two sons-in-law and even his older brother William—then living in Texas—opposed secession.) Although he’d never owned a slave and even favored partial equality for “educated” blacks, nevertheless he sympathized with white resentment resulting from the oppressive laws passed over his veto. These laws not only enfranchised blacks, they in many ways subjugated Southern whites to a status as unworthy of American citizenship. Even more, as Johnson knew, these laws meant congressional patronage plus railroad and building contract kickbacks to important Republican leaders. Reconstruction, as it came to be called, wasn’t about the Republican Party’s righteous moral indignation over slavery, not really. It was about political and financial advantages. So, President Johnson vetoed and the Republicans passed laws over his veto. One law in particular, the Tenure of Office Act, forbade the President to fire a Cabinet member without permission of the Senate. After all, the Republicans reasoned, the Senate had to approve all original presidential appointments under the constitution.

President Johnson, who was sure the new law was unconstitutional, wanted to test this matter in the courts. He fired Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton who was clearly sympathetic to the congressional radical Republican leadership.

On February 24th, 1868, by a vote of 126 to 47 in the House of Representatives, a Bill of Impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors was passed against Andrew Johnson for firing Stanton and thereby violating the Tenure of Office Act.

The President, who asked for forty days to prepare his defense, was granted only ten. His trial began on March 5th, 1868 and lasted two months.

There were 54 senators at the time representing 27 states. Twelve senators were Democrats and firmly for the President. Since it takes a two-thirds majority to remove a President from office, the Republicans needed 36 votes. As the trial moved along, however, it became clear that seven Republicans (William Fessenden of Maine, Joseph S. Fowler of Tennessee, James W. Grimes of Iowa, John Henderson of Missouri, Edmund Ross of Kansas, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, and Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia) had serious doubts. None of them personally liked President Johnson. However, they saw the controversy for what it was: a partisan attack on the President, not a legal question or matter of moral principle. Furthermore, the seven realized that if a President could be hounded from office merely because he opposed Congress on a matter important to Congress, the delicate and essential checks and balances built into the constitution by our forefathers would be forever destroyed.

On Saturday, May 16th, 1868, the crucial vote was taken and President Andrew Johnson was found not guilty. Though he hated living in the White House, Johnson had considerable pride. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination that July and received 65 votes on the first ballot, but despite loud and generous speeches of support for the president, the Democratic nomination went to Horatio Seymour of New York.

In March 1875, exactly seven years to the month after his impeachment trial opened in the Senate, Andy Johnson was back in that great chamber, this time as a member rather than as a defendant. It wasn’t easy. He’d lost an 1869 Senate bid and an 1872 Congressional election, but now he was back. Fourteen of his new colleagues who stepped forward to applaud and shake his hand that day had once sat in senatorial judgment of him. Now, however, there was mutual satisfaction. The twelve senators present, who had shouted “guilty” on that May Day of seven years ago, seemed pleased to make amends. Also eager to make amends was that most honorable and courageous of men—Andy Johnson.

It was a good thing, for only a little short of five months later, the former President was dead of a stroke. He was buried on a hilltop in Greenville that August. His winding cloth was an American flag and his eternal pillow was -- you guessed it -- a copy of the United States Constitution.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY