ExclusiveAndrew Johnson: Rebuilding After Lincoln

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans Every man who steps into the White House has difficult footsteps to follow. He must fill the chair of great names like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. This challenge is even greater for those who must follow extremely great presidents. Today, we're going to talk about the unlucky successor to the president who is considered the greatest of our history, Abraham Lincoln. That man is the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson. More writing has been dedicated to talking about Abraham Lincoln than any other American, not just president. His successful time in office was tragically cut short just a month after his inauguration for his second term when he was assassinated on April 14, 1865. As his death was pronounced the next morning, within a few hours, a new president had been sworn in. Following a pattern which developed by this point, his vice president took over. There was no definite ruling on this in the Constitution, but a precedent had been set after the death of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president, when his vice president, John Tyler, took over. By the time of Abraham Lincoln's death, two previous presidents had died in office, but Lincoln was the first who was assassinated and did not die of natural causes. His vice president was Andrew Johnson. This was one of the rare cases in our history where the president and the vice president did not belong to the same political party. This happened in the earliest days when the vice president did not specifically run alongside the president, but was simply the runner-up for the president. This was no longer the case by the 1860s, and Abraham Lincoln chose his vice president as a very strategic move. His first had been Hannibal Hamlin, who was another Republican, but by the mid-1860s, when he was right engulfed in the Civil War, he wanted to show the whole country that he aimed to welcome the South back in after the victory which seemed imminent. Thus, he chose a Southern Democrat to be his running mate, Andrew Johnson. Andrew Johnson had very humble means. In fact, he was one of the poorest of the presidents up to that point. He was born in North Carolina to a father who was a very poor farmer and who died when he was a young boy. Johnson was only 10 years old when he was apprenticed to a tailor alongside his brother. After around five years with this apprenticeship, the brothers were very discontent, so they ran away, and they were indentured to him until the age of 21. So he was on the run for quite a while, but he didn't want to return to his old master because he wanted to find his own way in the world. He later tried to return to North Carolina and tried to buy his apprenticeship from his former master, but they never could come to a deal. Nevertheless, being a tailor was the profession of choice for Andrew before he got into politics. He moved to a few different states before rejoining his family and accompanying them in their move to Tennessee. They settled in Greenville, Tennessee in 1826, and he immediately fell in love with the place. He would later purchase and plant a tree on the site where he originally camped, making that his home. Once in Greenville, he met the daughter of the local cobbler, Eliza McCardle, and they quickly fell in love with each other. The next year, after courting, they would get married when he was only 18 and she was 16, making them the youngest wed presidential couple in history. Within two years, young Andrew Johnson got involved in politics. He was not a well-educated young man. In fact, he barely learned how to read and write, if at all, during his apprenticeship. Eliza would be his tutor. She taught him, if not the alphabet, which is a debated point, how to form sentences well, counting, arithmetic, oration, and she greatly encouraged his learning because he already had that thirst for knowledge, but she helped him learn more, and he quickly became regarded in his area as a stump orator, meaning he would just stand up on any stump and speak to his fellows, the other common men, about what it meant to be an American. Throughout his political career, he would set himself up as a man of the people, relating to other poor farmers and simple craftsmen, such as tailors, like himself. He began by getting involved with the local Greenville political parties, assembling the common men, and before long, he became the mayor of Greenville. This was just the beginning of his very fruitful political career, which would bring him from one position of prominence to another. They say it was his gifted oration which made him so successful. He is reported as having had a beautiful voice, very low and inspiring. In fact, in his later years, when his speeches were not so well regarded in terms of their subject matter, it was the way he delivered them that made him successful. He was entertaining and captivating, so people would come from miles around to listen to him speak. Yet, in some of these later speeches, when they were then printed in the newspaper, people would read them and think, this man must be some sort of a lunatic. There's just vague ramblings, and he keeps repeating them over and over. To read it, you must imagine he's some sort of a fanatic, waving his arms and shouting. Yet, those who witnessed it observed that he had a very calm, captivating way of speaking. So, apparently, it was this gift of powerful speech which made him an effective politician as early as the age of 20. After becoming the mayor, he became involved in the state legislature. The legislature would then lead him to the U.S. Congress, where he first became a member of the House of Representatives, and then became the Tennessee governor, before eventually serving in the Senate. Along the way, he also served in the Tennessee militia, where he attained the rank of colonel, which was a title he used for a good deal of his life. Early on, he had aspirations of becoming president. Although he didn't always support the current candidate, he would always help campaign for those who were in his same party. When he first got into politics, he didn't specifically subscribe to either political party, which was at that time Democrat or the newly formed Whig, but he did admire seventh president Andrew Jackson, who shaped the Democratic Party, and he modeled his political career after him. Early on, he decided to run as a Democrat for the state legislature, and that became his party. He didn't always vote according to that party line, but he eventually became more and more aligned to it. He quickly proved to be anti-abolitionist at that time, and he would own around 14 slaves throughout his life. He also was against protective tariffs, and he advocated the rights of the individual states, without too much interference or too much funding for infrastructure from the federal government. He thought the government should be small, so that the states and individuals should flourish, especially because he considered himself an advocate for the plebeians, which he called himself, meaning just the common average people. Now, this often meant that he wasn't so supported by the lawyers or the landowners, who were more the controllers of the party, yet he knew how to win votes better than a lot of other people, so that got him elected time and time again, and after one of his first defeats in his very early days for the state legislature, he was undefeated for 30 years in whatever position he tried to fill. By the year 1856, he had aspirations for the White House, and he hoped that he would become a candidate. He did not win the nomination that year, but he continued working behind the scenes, and it was after that that he became a senator. One of his most successful and far-reaching actions while in the senate was the Homestead Act of 1862, which he drafted and advocated. This sought to increase westward expansion and give settlers the right to stake a claim and have 165 acres of their own, which would eventually become theirs if they worked it. This was part of his regular platform of supporting the common man, the individual, giving everyone, no matter how poor he might be, the right to become a landowner and thus to have more power over his own destiny. He is quoted as saying that the government should be poor so that the people could be rich, and that's the kind of politics which you see him advocating. Now, things became much more contentious after Abraham Lincoln became president, winning the election in 1860, because between his election and his inauguration in March, several southern states seceded from the union. Now, nothing Lincoln had specifically said indicated that he was going to ban slavery outright, nor did the southern states indicate beforehand that they would leave if he were elected. Nevertheless, they began to secede, and by 1861, the country was very much engulfed in the Civil War. This put the southern politicians and congressmen in a difficult position. Would they stay with the country to which they had sworn allegiance, or would they be more loyal to their home states and become part of the new confederacy? Well, the decision wasn't too difficult for most of them, because every senator, save one, left his seat once the Civil War began. That one who remained with the union was Andrew Johnson. He remained loyal to the union, and it really was an interesting decision that he made that, because seeing his political history, both before and after this, as I've mentioned, he was in favor of states' freedoms. Yet, above all, he was loyal to the Constitution, and that's something you see him saying again and again throughout his life. So, it was that loyalty which kept him part of the union. He saw that Tennessee shouldn't try to break off, and I believe he also thought that it would be better to try to stay friendly with Abraham Lincoln and to seek some kind of reconciliation, and he saw that, as opposed to what the other southerners were saying, Lincoln was a very reasonable man who wasn't just outright banning all slavery and removing all southern rights. He was trying to find a good compromise, and yes, he did initiate the steps that would lead toward the Civil War, but it had really become unavoidable by that point, having been sort of avoided just by not discussing the issue too much for decades. So, by remaining loyal to the union, Johnson found himself in a very good political position if the union would win. Now, we all know that it did, and apparently he saw that as imminent as well. He tried to talk to Jefferson Davis and some of the other prominent southerners before they had completely left, and he did, in fact, go to Tennessee, and he was part of discussion about whether Tennessee should secede, and he strongly said Tennessee needs to stay in the union, and he feared for his life greatly as he was making these speeches because he received not only death threats but many attacks on his person, and it's said that he made these speeches with a gun on the podium in case he had to defend himself, but after he realized that Tennessee was, in fact, seceding, he had to flee the state, leaving his wife and children at their home, and go back to a safer area in the north. Now, since Tennessee was one of the border states, it wasn't in the deepest part of the south, it was recaptured by the union forces by 1862. Now, some believed that those territories that were won back should be just returned to the state they had been before, but Lincoln thought that the best way to protect those territories was to have a military governor put in charge of each, and he placed Andrew Johnson as the military governor of Tennessee. In this position, Johnson was very close to Lincoln and conferring with him a good deal about political matters and military strategy. With re-election coming up, Lincoln then chose Johnson as his running mate since he would show this attempt at reconciliation being a war democrat and a southerner but a northern sympathizer. Lincoln and Johnson won, but everything changed when Johnson got what he had long hoped to achieve in a manner he did not intend to achieve it. Maybe he no longer had presidential aspirations after seeing the great beating Lincoln was taking. Maybe he hoped to serve in more peaceful times. No man wants to be president right in the aftermath of a war. As the president, his main and almost his only duty, the only thing he could really do was work on reconstruction. Lincoln had his pattern for reconstruction, but naturally Johnson would take a different path being a southerner, a democrat, and not as much of an abolitionist as Lincoln had been. His brand of reconstruction was called presidential reconstruction and it definitely was not as strong. Johnson evidently saw himself as not quite up to the task and he said, I have been almost overwhelmed by the announcement of the sad event which has so recently occurred. I feel incompetent to perform duties so important and responsible as those which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me. Perhaps if he had been elected in 1856, he would have been able to feel more confident as a peacetime president, just holding off the threat of the Civil War as James Buchanan had unsuccessfully attempted to do, but as the president with the reconstruction, he had to deal with a lot of criticism from all sides and the most difficult thing was that Congress was very strongly republican, almost more radical republican than Lincoln had been, so they were at odds the whole time. Johnson quickly gained the nickname the veto president because he vetoed just about everything that Congress tried to do and on the other hand, Congress stopped him from a lot of things he tried to do, so he didn't have a whole lot of power. As part of his reconstruction, he wanted to reinstate the southern states into the same grace they had had before. He didn't punish or execute a lot of the southern confederate leaders except for those who were at the very top or had done the most heinous crimes. He wanted to welcome them in more and to not establish too strong of anti-slavery principles. Of course, it was during his tenure that first the 13th amendment was passed which freed the slaves, then the 14th amendment which was the 1866 civil rights movement which granted former slaves and african-americans equal rights in terms of making them full citizens. He tried to veto the 14th amendment, but the congress didn't let him do that, but what he did do was allow the southern states to establish what were called black codes by not specifically using the federal power to mandate what the rights and positions of former slaves should be. He wanted to leave it in the hands of the individual states. Now, whether this was because he was a southerner and a former slave owner because he had freed all his slaves back in 1863 and he'd been paying them as servants and he also freed the slaves in Tennessee a few years earlier. So, whether it was because of that or because of his long-standing principle that individual states should have rights over what they decide, he wanted to leave this matter in the hands of the individual states and by so doing, he enabled the states to decide whether they wanted to give former slaves certain privileges or rights and they were thus able to put in these laws or principles which were the black codes and allowed the Jim Crow laws and the segregation which would plague the south for the next hundred years. I'm not saying that all was Andrew Johnson's fault. Obviously, he was trying to placate the disgruntled south and trying to get everybody to be together again and be friends under the And he used the same principles and policies that many of his predecessors had in saying, who am I to say that slavery is completely wrong when it's allowed in the Constitution? He brought that up several times, but I think the reason why Lincoln is this beloved, praised president who gets more pages than any presidential book, whereas Andrew Johnson only gets one or two pages and he's not that well remembered, is that Lincoln was willing to interpret the Constitution for his current day and to realize that slavery was considered sort of an unavoidable evil by many of the founding fathers and they didn't feel like they could outlaw it at that time, but he believed that in principle they were against it. So, it was constitutional to be against slavery and to find a way to make that happen through the Civil War. All these difficulties between Johnson and Congress came to a head in 1867 when he went directly against a new congressional act which they had proved, which was the Tenure of Office Act. They specifically created this act to keep him from firing cabinet members whom he didn't like, but he didn't care about this, so he went right ahead and fired the Secretary of War. By doing this, he finally gave Congress enough ammunition to impeach him. He is the first president ever to be impeached. The battle went on quite a while as they had several counts against him, but he went before the Senate according to the principles set forth in the Constitution for how a president should be tried, and in the Senate he received 35 votes of guilty and 19 votes of not guilty, just one short of the two-thirds majority necessary to impeach him. So, he got to stay in office for the rest of his term. One of the less popular things he did during his very unpopular presidency was going on this presidential speaking tour in 1866. It was called the Swing Around the Circle, and it was because he toured in a circle. This was one of, if not the first time, that a president went around really campaigning for himself. He wasn't specifically campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the 1868 election, although he did try to seek it. He was really just trying to defend his policies and gain some public support. This was seen as very undignified and below his office because, at that time, it wasn't considered good form for any high-ranking politician to appear to be seeking an office. So, for him to go around making all these speeches trying to defend himself was seen as very vulgar. The first few speeches he made were quite successful, but then things took a very bad turn, and he became less and less popular. And one of his biggest problems was that he had a terrible temper, and he would get into fights with people in the audience during some of these speeches. On September 3rd, 1866, it particularly took a bad turn when he was speaking, and someone called out from the audience, Jefferson Davis, of course, being the former president of the confederate states. And this just made him really mad, so he shouted back, So that didn't go over very well. And time and time again, his supporter said, But he insisted on having very loose notes, and although he was quite influential with the way he would speak, his words just sounded very strange out of context when they were printed in the newspaper. So, he didn't really win friends and influence people for the good when he made that whole tour, and he did not gain the democratic nomination in 1868, which is unsurprising because neither did the other two vice presidents who became presidents. But that wasn't the end of his political career, surprisingly. Unlike John Tyler and Millard Fillmore, the other two vice presidents turned presidents for him, he did get a bit of political vindication. He ran for the senate again. He didn't win the first time, but in 1875, he won the senate seat again, and that showed that although he wasn't the greatest president, he had been a very good politician beforehand, so he was able to be in the senate again. Now, he died just a few months after he took that position, but I think he was gratified to know that the people sort of accepted him again. Andrew Johnson has been ranked very low, but he did have such a difficult position, not only dealing with reconstruction, but filling the very large and impressive shoes of Abraham Lincoln. He was off to a horrible start with when he was proclaimed to be very drunk at his inauguration to be vice president. This is a debated point, and it was debated greatly at that time and ever since. Was he actually drunk? Well, yes, he was drunk, there's no denying the fact. He definitely had been drinking, but why was he drunk? Some people said it was just the end of a two-week bender. Others said that he had been ill with typhoid fever and had taken either three glasses of whiskey, as some have said, or a glass of brandy to steady himself, and that he had had too much, and that made him drunk. But whatever may be the case, it was enough, because everybody witnessed him seeming very drunk, not speaking coherently. Some people said they could barely hear him when he was speaking, or what they did hear was very incoherent. He was mumbling and hiccuping, he couldn't stand up properly, and then he kind of retired from the public eye for the next two weeks, either to recover from his illness or to sober up. And because of that, many people said that he was an alcoholic and had been for years, and that became a common memory for people or his opponents to bring up. And whenever he spoke badly, they would say, we can only be charitable in assuming that he's not really a bad man, he's just still drunk from his inauguration, and that really became his reputation. I'm inclined to be somewhat sympathetic to him. Now, maybe it's because, interestingly, despite his lack of popularity, he was the subject of a movie, a major Hollywood movie, back in 1942, starring Van Heflin, called Tennessee Johnson. And it's pretty sympathetic, and in that movie, he definitely is ill when he's been drinking. I can't help but have a soft spot in my heart for him, because Van Heflin does such a great job depicting him. And I think that that film was trying to show something which, you see if you really look deeper in his quotes, that just like every other president up to this point, he just was trying to do a good job. He made a lot of mistakes. He had a bad temper. Maybe he did drink too much. Maybe he was really nervous about being inaugurated as vice president, although that seems unlikely, because he had served in a lot of important positions. Wouldn't he know better than to just get drunk for the fun of it before such an important day? Whatever the reason for that unfortunate incident, I believe that he did try to do his very best in every political position he held. Toward the end of his life, he's quoted as saying, I have performed my duty to my God, my country, and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me, it is the mere shadow of God's protecting wing. Here I will rest in quiet and peace, beyond the reach of calumny's poisoned shaft, the influence of envy and jealous enemies, where treason and traitors or state backsliders and hypocrites in church can have no peace. He also is quoted as saying, honest conviction is my courage. The constitution is my guide. He believed, quote, the life of a republic lies certainly in the energy, virtue, and intelligence of its citizens. Although he didn't always succeed, he tried to act with that energy, intelligence, and virtue throughout all his different positions. And I think we should look on him with a bit of understanding and perhaps pity for holding a very unenviable position, coming in the shadow of the greatest president, and trying to rebuild the broken country after the Civil War. For the part he did, such as under his watch, the purchase of Alaska and the Homestead Act, he did make some very important contributions and helped to rebuild the broken nation after the Civil War. For his loyalty during that war, I think we must remember him as one of the less influential but still important American legends. Thank you for watching me, and I hope you'll join me next time.