Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson: The Tailor Who Broke Reconstruction

He could barely read when he married. He owned a tailor's shop in a Tennessee hill town, hated the planters who ran the South, and was the only senator from a seceding state who refused to give up his seat. Then Lincoln was murdered, and Andrew Johnson inherited the reconstruction of a conquered country. Elizabeth R. Varon of the University of Virginia records the settled verdict of the profession: he was "the worst possible person to have served as President at the end of the American Civil War."

Raleigh, and a Runaway Apprentice

Johnson was born on 29 December 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into genuine poverty. His father Jacob died when Andrew was three, and his mother supported the family as a weaver and spinner. At fourteen he and his brother were bound as apprentices to a local tailor. They ran away. Johnson spent two years as a fugitive from the indenture before returning to Raleigh in 1826, then moved at seventeen to Greeneville, Tennessee, and opened a tailoring business of his own.

His literacy was rudimentary. In 1827 he married Eliza McCardle, who was, in the Miller Center's phrase, "well educated and had an eye for money," and who taught him spelling, writing and the handling of accounts while he sat at his bench. It is one of the more remarkable educations in American political history — a president schooled by his wife over a tailor's table.

The Politics of Class Resentment

Greeneville made him an alderman and then its mayor by 1834. He went to the Tennessee legislature in 1834 and again in 1838, to the state senate in 1841, to the United States House as a Democrat from 1843 to 1853, and served two terms as governor of Tennessee from 1853 to 1857.

His politics were the politics of the small white farmer against the great landowner. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements but pushed hard for homestead legislation to put western land into the hands of ordinary settlers. He detested the planter aristocracy and, as the Miller Center puts it, "raged against the interests of his state's planter class." That rage was economic, not racial: he began his career backing the proslavery positions of his party.

The Loyal Southerner

Elected to the United States Senate as the Civil War began, Johnson became the only senator from the seceding South who would not resign his seat. It was an act of physical as well as political courage, and it made him a Union hero. Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee with the rank of brigadier general, and he governed the state with a hard hand. By 1863 he had freed his own slaves and was calling slavery "a cancer upon the body politic." In 1864 the Republicans put this War Democrat on the ticket as Lincoln's running mate.

Presidential Reconstruction

Lincoln's assassination in 1865 handed Johnson the task of reconstructing the defeated South, a task that the Miller Center notes included "the extension of civil rights and suffrage to black Southerners." Johnson did the opposite. With Congress out of session he handed out thousands of pardons "in routine fashion" and let the Southern states erect the Black Codes — laws which, in the Miller Center's blunt description, "essentially maintained slavery under another name."

Congress came back and went to war with him. It passed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over his vetoes and framed the Fourteenth Amendment to write citizenship and equal protection into the Constitution beyond a president's reach. Johnson took his case to the country in the 1866 midterm campaign and destroyed himself doing it: on the stump he "personally attacked his Republican opponents in vile and abusive language," and observers thought him drunk. The elections returned a Congress overwhelmingly against him.

Impeached

Congress then passed the Tenure of Office Act, which stripped the president of the power to remove federal officials without the Senate's consent. On 21 February 1868 Johnson removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in clear contravention of it, installing General Lorenzo Thomas in his place. Three days later, on 24 February, the House impeached him 126 to 47, with 17 members not voting — nearly every Republican for, every voting Democrat against.

Eleven articles followed. The first eight concerned Stanton's removal; the ninth charged a violation of the Command of the Army Act for pressuring General William H. Emory; the tenth accused Johnson of attempting "to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress"; the eleventh, of trying to delegitimise the Thirty-Ninth Congress and nullify its laws.

The Senate tried him from 5 March to 26 May 1868 under Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. On 16 and 26 May it voted on Articles XI, II and III. Each vote came out identically: 35 guilty, 19 not guilty. Conviction required 36 of the 54 senators. Johnson survived by a single vote, saved by seven Republicans — William P. Fessenden, Joseph S. Fowler, James W. Grimes, John B. Henderson, Edmund G. Ross, Lyman Trumbull and Peter G. Van Winkle — who crossed their party, along with all nine Democrats. The Senate then adjourned without ever voting on the remaining eight articles.

Why Andrew Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit, and the honest thing is to say so at once. Varon's verdict is that Johnson displayed "gross incompetence in federal office," that he was "a rigid, dictatorial racist who was unable to compromise," and that his determination to obstruct political and civil rights for African Americans was "principally responsible for the failure of Reconstruction to solve the race problem." His "bullheaded opposition" to the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment did not merely fail — it united a fractious Congress against him and forfeited every chance of a workable settlement. Historians reckon Lincoln's superior political skill would have produced far better outcomes for Black Americans. There is no cognitive gift here that survives inspection.

What Johnson genuinely possessed was something else: an extraordinary, self-generated will. A boy who fled an indenture, could scarcely write at nineteen, and learned his letters from his wife in the back of a tailor's shop climbed to mayor, congressman, governor, senator, vice president and president. He was a formidable stump speaker in the rough Jacksonian style, and he had real physical courage — in 1861 he stayed in the Senate when every other Southern member walked out, at obvious personal risk. He also read the grievances of the non-slaveholding white South accurately, which is why his homestead advocacy landed. The tragedy is that the same immovability that made him brave in 1861 made him useless in 1865. Between the 1870s and the Second World War some historians praised him as a defender of executive authority against congressional overreach; Varon notes that reading is now "much out of vogue."

Legacy

Johnson's presidency is the great counterfactual of American history: the moment when the country, having won the war, lost the peace. He supported, in Varon's summary, "the return of the prewar social and economic system — except for slavery," and in doing so foreclosed land redistribution and lasting reform in the South. What survives of him is not a body of policy but a warning about the fit between a man and a moment — and the impeachment precedent his conduct created, decided by one vote in a Senate chamber in May 1868.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1865–1869)
• United States representative (1843–1853)
• member of the State Senate of Tennessee
• member of the Tennessee House of Representatives