A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents, 1865 - 1881

By Edward O. Frantz

A Companion to Reconstruction Presidents presents a series of original essays that explore a variety of important issues, themes, and debates associated with the presidencies of Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes.

• Represents the first comprehensive look at the presidencies of Johnson, Grant, and Hayes in one volume
• Features contributions from top historians and presidential scholars
• Approaches the study of these presidents from a historiographical perspective
• Key topics include each president’s political career; foreign policy; domestic policy; military history; and social context of their terms in office

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781118607756

Book preview

Part I

Andrew Johnson

Chapter One

Andrew Johnson before the Presidency

Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein

Andrew Johnson is currently one of the least popular of United States presidents because of his racial views, his conservative stance during Reconstruction, and his impeachment. As a result of his extensive office-holding experience at all levels of government beginning in 1829, however, Johnson was actually one of the best prepared presidents. He served nine terms as alderman of his hometown, Greeneville, Tennessee (two of those terms also as mayor); two terms in the Tennessee House of Representatives and one term in the state senate; five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; two terms as governor of Tennessee; more than four years of a term as U.S. senator; three years as military governor of Tennessee; and six weeks as vice president of the United States before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination catapulted Johnson into the presidency.

These offices and most other aspects of Johnson’s pre-presidential life are rarely the focus of an entire book. Most book-length studies are devoted to Johnson’s controversial presidency, his impeachment, or Reconstruction generally. Pre-presidential material is often part of a biography or larger subject study. Otherwise, Johnson’s experiences have been studied in articles as incidents of local history. As a result, many aspects of Johnson’s career have been treated most thoroughly in articles in Tennessee and other history journals. Many of these studies seek to relate Johnson’s pre-presidential attitudes and actions to those he displayed as president. Indeed, it is often hard to separate the material simply by whether Johnson was holding the office of president or not because he did not change character when he assumed a new office.

Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808, the second son of Jacob and Mary McDonough Johnson, a poor white handyman and laundress respectively. Jacob died of an illness on January 4, 1812. Even though Mary remarried later that year, the family remained poor. Andrew was apprenticed to a tailor in 1818 or 1822 (the sources vary), but fled his apprenticeship in 1824, before the end of his term. In 1826 he settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he practiced his trade, and married Eliza McCardle the following year. Never a public figure, Eliza supported Andrew in his political career and bore him five children: Martha (1828), Charles (1830), Mary (1832), Robert (1834), and Andrew Jr., known as Frank (1852). Although Eliza was disabled by tuberculosis from the 1850s on, she survived until 1876.

Almost no materials survive from before Andrew Johnson became involved in state politics in the 1830s. Johnson learned to read while he was an apprentice and probably also gained limited writing skills. His wife, who was much better educated than Johnson, certainly helped him to hone his skills, but not a lot of writing was necessary during his early years as a tailor and small-town politician.

On February 1, 1857 Johnson suffered a serious injury to his right arm in a train accident near Augusta, Georgia. Pain from this broken arm hampered Johnson’s writing for the rest of his life, restricting his output when he did not have a secretary available. In addition, many of his antebellum papers were evidently destroyed during the Civil War when the Johnson home in Greeneville was confiscated by the military and used as a hospital. Consequently, good documentary evidence is sparse or non-existent for some areas of Johnson’s life, making newspaper reports important.

The Papers of Andrew Johnson (16 volumes), edited by LeRoy P. Graf, Ralph W. Haskins, and Paul H. Bergeron (1967–2000), is the key published primary source for the study of Johnson. Volumes 1–7 are within the pre-presidential scope of this chapter. The Papers include anything available written by Johnson, such as letters, other documents, and speeches, as reported in newspapers and Congressional publications. The majority of the material contained in all the volumes was written to Johnson, and includes representative examples of all types of correspondence. Much of it involved letters of recommendation and requests for assistance with pensions and patronage. Graf, Haskins, and Patricia P. Clark elaborated on one aspect of this in a calendar summarizing all the correspondence to Johnson from the pension office in The Pension Office to Congressman Andrew Johnson: A List, 1843–1853 (1966).

The first volume of The Papers of Andrew Johnson covers the longest timespan, 1822–1851, because of the dearth of early materials. Volume 7, the shortest chronologically in the pre-presidential series, spans just ten months, July 1, 1864 to April 30, 1865, and includes the first two weeks of Johnson’s presidency. All seven volumes contain extensive biographical introductions based on the documents, a practice not continued in the presidential volumes. While the student of Andrew Johnson may well need to consult the microfilmed Johnson papers from the Library of Congress and the relevant series at the National Archives, the published Papers are an essential first step to expedite any research.

Volumes 5–8 of the 8-volume set of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), edited by Roy P. Basler, contain correspondence from Lincoln to Johnson, much of which can also be found in the Johnson papers. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a digital editing project located at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois, which is gathering scans of all materials by and to Lincoln, has probably found additional Lincoln–Johnson correspondence, but access to this database is not yet open to the public.

Andrew Johnson: A Bibliography (1992) by Richard B. McCaslin, a former assistant editor with The Papers of Andrew Johnson, is an exhaustive annotated list of any books and articles published before 1990 that contain even a little material about Andrew Johnson. Arranged chronologically, but also topically as appropriate, the book has information on Johnson-related manuscript collections, as well as sections on material pertaining to Johnson’s political associates. Of course, the main emphasis of the bibliography is on the presidency, but information on Johnson’s earlier career is as extensive as possible.

There have been several fairly recent historiographical articles on Johnson’s impeachment or Reconstruction generally. Several older articles, although intended mainly to interpret historians’ changing attitudes toward Johnson and his presidency in various eras, have some small sections that are also relevant to the pre-presidential period. Carmen Anthony Notaro’s History of the Biographic Treatment of Andrew Johnson in the Twentieth Century (1965), analyzes three general perspectives on Johnson that Notaro saw reflected in the historical literature up to the early 1960s. While these are mainly views about the presidency, there is some discussion of Johnson’s humble origins. As with Notaro, Willard Hays’s very astute two-part discussion Andrew Johnson’s Reputation (1959, 1960), focuses on Johnson’s presidency but mentions his activities as military governor and his support for the homestead bill.

Andrew Johnson: A Biographical Companion (2001), which despite its title is actually an encyclopedia, was written by former assistant editors for The Papers of Andrew Johnson Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein and Richard Zuczek. One hundred and eighty-two entries cover family relationships, political offices, attitudes, and contextual events. Of these, about sixty-four deal in whole or part with pre-presidential topics, or matters, such as Johnson’s attitudes toward blacks, which began in the pre-presidential period. This volume is a good starting-place for the new researcher, a quick review for the more experienced, or a place to check particular information. Each entry has references for that topic, and there is also an extensive bibliography at the end.

There were few biographical studies of Johnson before the late 1920s. A Supreme Court ruling helped to spur interest in Johnson. The court ruled that President Woodrow Wilson had had the right to remove an Oregon postmaster from office without consulting the U.S. Senate. The ruling seemed to vindicate Johnson’s actions as president in the 1860s. This apparent vindication led to a more positive attitude toward Johnson generally and three major biographies of the former president published in three years: Robert W. Winston, Andrew Johnson: Plebian and Patriot (1928); Lloyd Paul Stryker, Andrew Johnson, a Study in Courage (1929); and George Fort Milton, The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals (1930). All three tried to rehabilitate Johnson’s reputation, showing his heroic rise from poverty, his self-education, his determined democracy, his advocacy for the common man, and his devotion to the Union and the Constitution. Of the three, Winston, judged by some to be the most balanced, devoted more space, roughly half the book, to the period before the presidency. Milton and Stryker both allotted less than a quarter of their books to the earlier period.

Andrew Johnson and the Uses of Constitutional Power (1980), is a thoughtful, short biography of Johnson written by James E. Sefton. Spending half the volume on the pre-presidential period, Sefton was rather sympathetic to Johnson, but clearly presented the future president’s liabilities, such as his rigidity and vituperative style of dealing with opponents. Sefton believed that Johnson’s experiences as an apprentice and during the early years after he abandoned his apprenticeship had an important effect in developing Johnson’s personal pride and anti-elitism, characteristics that were evident throughout his political career. Sefton tried to view Johnson from the perspective of Johnson’s time, rather than the 1970s.

Hans L. Trefousse’s Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989) is the only full biography of Johnson written in the late twentieth century, and is still considered the standard in 2012. After several decades of writing about Johnson’s Radical Republican enemies such as Benjamin F. Butler and Benjamin F. Wade, Trefousse nevertheless did try to be fair to Johnson although, clearly, the president was not Trefousse’s favorite person. The biography, which is about half pre-presidential, is also stronger in that period because Trefousse was able to use the pre-presidential volumes of The Papers of Andrew Johnson in his research. (The first presidential volume, number 8, was published the same year as Trefousse’s biography.)

A recent short biography, Andrew Johnson (2011), was written by Annette Gordon-Reed. Like most of the volumes in Henry Holt’s American Presidents Series, this one was authored by someone who was not an expert in the period. Unfortunately Gordon-Reed, a specialist in Thomas Jefferson and his alleged relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, made her lack of enthusiasm for Johnson clear, beginning with the dedication page. Five of the book’s eight chapters pertained to the pre-presidential period, and, like most of the book, seemed to draw heavily on Trefousse’s Johnson biography. Quotations were apparently taken from Trefousse rather than Johnson primary sources. Johnson is generally acknowledged by most historians to have been a racist. However, because Johnson did not go against his own character or the general spirit of the time period in order to act for the benefit of blacks as Gordon-Reed decided he should have done, she could hardly find a good thing to say about him at any point in his career. She also speculated on many topics, such as his relationship with his female slave.

Because there are limited Johnson sources of a personal nature, most accounts of his family life tend to be rather basic, short parts of biographies. Several helpful articles elaborate on a few family matters. Ernest Allen Connally, in The Andrew Johnson Homestead at Greeneville, Tennessee (1957), studied the history of Andrew Johnson’s home in Greeneville, which remained in the family until sold to the federal government in 1942. In William P. Johnson, Southern Proletarian and Unionist (1956), Andrew Forest Muir discussed what could be discovered about Johnson’s older brother, who remained poor, with a sizeable family, in Texas. More recently, former Johnson papers editor Paul H. Bergeron examined the life of Johnson’s second son, Robert, including some information about the oldest son, Charles, as well. Robert Johnson: The President’s Troubled and Troubling Son (2001) studied Robert’s relationship to his father, among other topics, and covered Robert’s entire life (d. 1869). About half the article relates to the pre-presidential period when Robert assisted his father politically, before Robert was derailed by alcoholism. Schroeder-Lein and Zuczek’s Biographical Companion also contains short articles on Johnson’s parents, children, and grandchildren.

In ‘Jacob’s Ladder’: The Religious Views of Andrew Johnson (1993), Edward R. Crowther studied Johnson’s speeches and writings to determine that Johnson had some basic Christian and Biblical knowledge that he sometimes used effectively. However, Johnson never discussed any details of religious doctrine (such as baptism) nor was he associated with any particular church or denomination. His religion, which was very individualistic, seemed to focus on promoting democracy and the common man, more of a civil religion than Christianity. Johnson’s closest approximation to a religious affiliation was his active membership in the Masonic order.

Politics was the key aspect of Johnson’s life from 1829 on. Tennessee was a somewhat unusual place to practice politics because of its division into three parts: east, middle, and west. These pronounced divisions were both geographic and economic, contributing to different perspectives on many issues. East Tennessee, Johnson’s section, a mountainous area with smaller farms and fewer slaves, tended to be less respected by the other two divisions. Any study of Johnson must take into account the influence of the fragmented state politics on his attitudes.

Some of Johnson’s interactions with other East Tennessee politicians have been examined in several articles. Thomas B. Alexander’s Strange Bedfellows: The Interlocking Careers of T.A.R. Nelson, Andrew Johnson, and W.G. (Parson) Brownlow (1952) presented a triple biography of the three with the emphasis on Nelson, who was less known. Brownlow and Nelson were Whigs during the antebellum period while Johnson was a Democrat – obviously causing political conflict. All three were Unionists during the secession crisis although Nelson eventually supported the Confederacy. Only the last six pages of the article deal with the postwar period.

Ralph W. Haskins further addressed the notorious conflict between Johnson and Brownlow in Internecine Strife in Tennessee: Andrew Johnson Versus Parson Brownlow (1965). Brownlow, an East Tennessee newspaper editor, tended to be at his most vituperative in his pre-war critiques of Johnson as the two disagreed on many political issues and also ran against each other for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1845 (Johnson won). Brownlow often represented himself as a faithful Christian and Johnson as an infidel. During the Civil War, however, Brownlow worked with Johnson in his Unionist endeavors and as military governor.

Johnson’s terms as alderman and in the state legislature have been examined briefly in biographies and the Schroeder-Lein and Zuczek Biographical Companion. In 1843 Johnson began his first term in Congress. As a Congressman Johnson was a strong promoter of legislation that would provide homesteads, that is, a certain number of acres of unoccupied land in the Western states at a low price per acre to actual white settlers. Although his promotion of these ideas has been discussed, at least in passing, in various biographies, an older article by St. George L. Sioussat, Andrew Johnson and the Early Phases of the Homestead Bill (1918), put Johnson’s interests in the context of previous U.S. land distribution policy.

When Johnson was gerrymandered out of reelection to the seat in Congress that he had held for ten years, he ran for, and was elected to two terms as governor of Tennessee. In that period Tennessee governors did not have a great deal of authority, and the legislature did not necessarily act as the governor recommended, so Johnson was limited in what he could accomplish. W.M. Caskey published two articles on Johnson’s governorship: First Administration of Governor Andrew Johnson (1929) and The Second Administration of Governor Andrew Johnson (1930). In each article Caskey spent quite a bit of time discussing the intricacies of the respective gubernatorial election. The second election (1855) involved Johnson’s strong opposition to the Know-Nothing party. Although the first article focused more on what the legislature did during Johnson’s term than on what he was doing as governor, Caskey, nevertheless, expressed a more positive view of what Johnson was able to accomplish as governor than some later writers have done.

H. Blair Bentley wrote his dissertation on Johnson as governor and later published articles on two specific aspects of his governorship. Andrew Johnson and the Tennessee State Penitentiary, 1853–1857 (1975) suggested that Johnson’s little-known involvement with the state penitentiary may have been the most important aspect of his governorship. Johnson opposed training the convicts in various trades, which then brought them into competition with the skilled mechanics who already practiced those crafts. Johnson’s solution to the problem was very vague, however. He and the legislature had a number of conflicts over the appointment of the three penitentiary inspectors, among the few patronage appointments allowed the governor.

Although Johnson has been called the Father of Public Education in Tennessee, Bentley argued in Governor Andrew Johnson and Public Education in Tennessee (1988) that while Johnson strongly advocated education in his annual message of 1853, he did not influence the passage of the common school bill by the legislature in any other way. Thus, Bentley believed that Johnson did not deserve the title.

Johnson chose not to run for a third and, due to term limits, final term as governor, a post that would have been a political dead end. Instead, he became a candidate for senator. Robert G. Russell, in Prelude to the Presidency: The Election of Andrew Johnson to the Senate (1967), examined Johnson’s motivations as well as how the campaign developed so that enough Democrats were elected to the legislature and then elected Johnson senator, a crucial step on his path to the presidency. It is clear because of this election that Johnson had the support of the common Democrats rather than the state leaders of his party.

Johnson’s focus on the common man, whom he supported and saw as his main constituency, as well as his disdain for elites and his frequent quarrels with party leaders, can hardly be overemphasized. His antebellum background of failing to work well with party leadership surely contributed to Johnson’s problems as president.

Lack of support from party leaders was a major factor in the defeat of Johnson’s presidential ambitions at the Democratic national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, as detailed by Robert Russell in Andrew Johnson and the Charleston Convention of 1860 (1975). Yet the Democratic divisions in Charleston ultimately benefitted Johnson because they led to the election of Abraham Lincoln, to the secession of the Southern states, and to Johnson’s vigorous and public opposition to secession. This stance gave Johnson great publicity in the North and eventually enough support to be selected as vice president in 1864.

Johnson’s Unionism during the secession crisis and Civil War, which was important in furthering his political career, has been the subject of a number of articles. Tennessee’s Congressional Delegation in the Sectional Crisis of 1859–1860 (1960) by Mary R. Campbell, gave a brief background on all the Tennessee senators and members of the House of Representatives who began their session in December 1859, just after the execution of John Brown for his raid on Harper’s Ferry. The only section of this article focusing on Johnson concentrates on a Unionist speech he gave on December 12, 1859, in response to a request for a committee to investigate John Brown’s raid.

LeRoy P. Graf, in Andrew Johnson and the Coming of the War (1960), analyzed how Johnson’s attitudes in the 1850s foreshadowed his views at the outbreak of the war, and, eventually, as president. Graf enumerated and elaborated five areas: (1) Johnson was a spokesman for the people; (2) he was a faithful Democrat but often not in step with aspects of the party; (3) he was a Southerner who was in the South, but not of the South; (4) he was a personally ambitious man; and (5) he was a champion of the Constitution and the Union. Graf, who ultimately spent about thirty years editing documents from Johnson’s pre-presidential period, has summarized Johnson’s attitudes well.

In Andrew Johnson and the Preservation of the Union (1961), Ralph W. Haskins elaborated on the ways Johnson worked for the Union both behind the scenes promoting a border state convention, and in very public ways in the Senate where he introduced constitutional amendments, supported compromise proposals, and made several important speeches. Those Unionist speeches, on December 18 and 19, 1860, February 5 and 6, 1861, and March 2, 1861 (all summarized by Haskins), brought Johnson many letters of support from across the North, and some execration from secessionists and other Southerners, including some Tennessee Democrats. George C. Rable in Anatomy of a Unionist: Andrew Johnson in the Secession Crisis (1973) gave an excellent overview of Johnson’s speeches, activities, and attitudes (to the extent they can be determined from the sources) in 1860–1861.

Two more articles deal with particular aspects of Johnson’s activities during the secession crisis. In The Merchant and the Senator: An Attempt to Save East Tennessee for the Union (1974), Barry A. Crouch discussed the financial efforts of Boston merchant Amos A. Lawrence to keep East Tennessee in the Union. Lawrence admired Johnson and attempted to send him money to help Tennessee. Johnson’s supposed letters requesting funds turned out to be forged, however, probably by the postmaster of Knoxville. They created quite a scandal but ultimately did not discredit Johnson, who was proved to be innocent.

Another prospective means to retain Tennessee in the Union may have been the judicious usage of federal appointments in that state. James L. Baumgardner pointed out in Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and the Federal Patronage: An Attempt to Save Tennessee for the Union? (1973) that Lincoln evidently chose Andrew Johnson over the Whig/Constitutional Unionist John Bell to advise him on Tennessee patronage. Baumgardner suggested that this was a mistake because Johnson’s influence was not statewide but mainly in East Tennessee.

In December 1861 Congress established the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate aspects of the conflict that were not going well. Andrew Johnson was one of two War Democrats appointed to the seven-member committee, which was dominated by Radical Republicans. Johnson served actively until he resigned on March 12, 1862, because Lincoln had appointed him military governor of Tennessee. The most thorough book on the committee as a whole is Bruce Tap’s Over Lincoln’s Shoulder: The Committee on the Conduct of the War (1998). However, Tap merely mentioned Johnson’s activities on the committee a few times. The same is true of Hans L. Trefousse’s The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (1964), which generally examined the committee’s actions in relationship to its reputation and referred to Johnson only in passing. The most thorough study of Johnson’s activities during his few brief months on the committee is Andrew Johnson as a Member of the Committee on the Conduct of the War (1940) by Harry Williams.

With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (1997) by William C. Harris, is a study of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime Reconstruction efforts, examined individually and comparatively by state because Lincoln did not enforce any standard method of Reconstruction. Harris spent several chapters discussing Tennessee and Andrew Johnson, the first appointed military governor. For a variety of reasons, especially because of the military situation in the state, Johnson was unable to produce a quick restoration of Tennessee, as Lincoln had hoped. Another, briefer, comparative approach that provides a good introductory overview for Tennessee and West Virginia, and includes the basics on Johnson, is Unionism and Wartime Reconstruction in West Virginia and Tennessee, 1861–1865 (2010) by Robert Hodges.

Peter Maslowski, in a two-part article From Reconciliation to Reconstruction: Lincoln, Johnson, and Tennessee (1983), examined the pluses and minuses of Lincoln’s appointment of Johnson as military governor (he already had many enemies in the state), and Johnson’s goals and often unsuccessful actions as military governor. Maslowski included several good, concise explanations of some of the issues Johnson faced. Unlike certain other authors, Maslowski was fairly understanding about the situations that delayed Johnson and relatively positive about what the governor was eventually able to accomplish.

The only book-length study devoted to Andrew Johnson’s military governorship is Clifton R. Hall’s century-old Andrew Johnson, Military Governor of Tennessee (1916). Hall based his work mainly on the Johnson papers in the Library of Congress that had recently been opened for use. Hall believed Johnson’s greatest assets were a brilliant, incisive mind and an insatiable ambition, but he lacked breadth of view (Hall, 1916: 20). Hall traced Johnson’s conflicts with the military leaders Don Carlos Buell and William S. Rosecrans at Nashville as well as his later cooperation with Gen. George H. Thomas. Many of the chapters demonstrated the wide variety of matters Johnson had to supervise as military governor, such as: railroad construction for bringing supplies to Nashville; state finances; caring for destitute citizens, refugees, and contrabands (escaped blacks); defending citizens from military injustice and mistreatment; dealing with prisoners; controlling secessionists and Southern sympathizers; raising troops (including blacks); and trying to promote proper local elections. Hall generally affirmed the actions Johnson had taken and believed that the governor had performed as well as possible under the circumstances, but the hostility of Tennesseans against the federal government generally came to be focused against Johnson personally. However, Hall was quite harsh in his depiction of some of Johnson’s personal characteristics and attitudes, which he believed were a result of the deprivation of Johnson’s early life.

Paul H. Bergeron’s recent Andrew Johnson’s Civil War and Reconstruction (2011) dealt only with Johnson in the 1860s, the decade Bergeron believed was most crucial to Johnson’s political career, and focused only on Johnson as a public figure. As a former editor of the Johnson papers, Bergeron was well aware that Johnson had faults. Nevertheless, Bergeron did not think that Johnson should be so uniformly and harshly regarded as a failure simply because he was a racist, as were most other white men at the time. Rather, other issues besides race should be studied in order to understand Johnson more fully. Bergeron focused particularly on Johnson’s experiences with leadership and power – both wielding it and competing for it – and clarified occasions when Johnson was actually successful. The introduction, first two chapters, and several opening pages of chapter 3 consider Johnson before the presidency with a focus on the military governorship. Although Bergeron did not deal with any period or event extensively, he summarized well and commented on the issues in an informed way. The rest of Bergeron’s book was devoted to Johnson’s presidency and the first post-presidential months of 1869.

Walter T. Durham also dealt with Johnson’s military governorship in his two-volume study of Nashville during the Civil War: Nashville, the Occupied City: The First Seventeen Months, February 16, 1862, to June 30, 1863 (1985) and Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union, July 1, 1863, to June 30, 1865 (1987). In general, this study was an account of what happened to Nashville and its people under Union occupation. Johnson figured in the story as his leadership and actions affected the city and its residents. Although he appeared in the books rather often, Johnson was only a part of the overall events, not the focus. Durham tended to be rather critical of Johnson because the Nashville citizens seemed to be.

Several authors also examined particular events of Johnson’s military governorship rather than the whole period. Jesse C. Burt analyzed aspects of the construction of the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad in Sherman’s Logistics and Andrew Johnson (1956). This particular railroad was crucial for getting material to Nashville to supply William T. Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. Other authors have given Johnson credit for developing this railroad, but Burt denied that this was true. Instead, Burt presented Johnson as an obstructionist who feared losing power if Sherman controlled the railroad. The article mostly extolled Sherman’s wonderful logistical talent and devoted a minimum amount of space to Johnson.

An essay by L. Thomas Smith, Jr., Andrew Johnson’s ‘Political and Religious Redemption’: Civil Liberties and the Southern White Churches, 1862–1869 (2005), examined various incidents in which Johnson interacted with and enforced policies upon Southern white clergymen, both while he was military governor and after he became president. The incidents involved Southern white clergymen who were outspokenly loyal to the Confederacy. Although many were Methodists, Southern loyalty, not denomination, was the issue. As military governor, Johnson had several ministers imprisoned who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. In other cases, he had to make decisions about returning confiscated church buildings to Southern congregations, situations that continued to arise while Johnson was president.

William C. Harris, in Andrew Johnson’s First ‘Swing Around the Circle’: His Northern Campaign of 1863 (1989), dealt with Andrew Johnson’s little-known speaking tour to Indianapolis, Indiana; Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Harrisburg and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York City; Baltimore, Maryland; and Washington, DC. This tour in February and March 1863 brought the very popular War Democrat, Johnson, north to counteract the maneuvers of the anti-war Democrats who had been quite successful in the fall 1862 elections in many Northern states. Johnson’s speeches were well received and contributed to his increasing popularity in the North among the supporters of the war. At the end of the article Harris briefly discussed Johnson’s unsuccessful presidential speaking tour of 1866.

Once Johnson had been elected to the vice presidency, he needed a successor, an elected governor of Tennessee. William D. Miscamble in Andrew Johnson and the Election of William G. (‘Parson’) Brownlow as Governor of Tennessee (1978) discussed Johnson’s role in the selection of his antebellum enemy Brownlow for that post.

As previously mentioned, Johnson is widely considered to have been a racist and has been vigorously condemned for those viewpoints. The best and most lengthy discussion of Johnson and the issues of race is David Warren Bowen’s Andrew Johnson and the Negro (1989). Bowen set Johnson’s racial views in context, suggesting that it would be difficult not to be a racist to some degree in mid-nineteenth-century America. Bowen also stressed the importance of Johnson’s personal perspective as a self-made man, and investigated the possible roots of his aversion to the upper class. Although Johnson was opposed to blacks as a group, he had good relationships with certain blacks as individuals, including his own slaves. He favored slavery, but did not build his career on advocating it. Rather, slavery was a means to white supremacy, a rather typical view for Southern poor whites. Bowen discussed Johnson’s struggles as military governor especially, but not exclusively, in relation to issues of race and emancipation. According to Bowen, Johnson never saw blacks as human, never a part of the people whom he so zealously advocated. Although racism was never a conscious motive for Johnson’s decisions, it was always a factor in them (Bowen, 1989: 166).

John Cimprich assessed Johnson’s dealings with blacks while he was military governor in Military Governor Johnson and Tennessee Blacks, 1862–65 (1980). He pointed out that Johnson was pro-slavery before the war, became an emancipationist during the war, and opposed civil rights for blacks while president. These were logical shifts, according to Cimprich, and Johnson, once having made a decision, defended it vigorously and rigidly, whether it was about racial matters or something else. The article concentrated on Johnson’s attitudes and actions toward blacks during the war. He believed that blacks should be free, be able to choose their own job and be paid for their work, as well as be educated, but Johnson never advocated black social, political, or civil equality.

John Y. Simon and Felix James reprinted a November 23, 1863 interview between Johnson and the American Freedmen’s Aid Commission in Andrew Johnson and the Freedmen (1977). Johnson answered various questions about the condition of the freedmen in Tennessee. The governor opposed concentrating them in contraband camps, advocated apprenticeships for young blacks as well as whites, and opposed any legislation that would give blacks an advantage not previously provided to whites.

Responses to Johnson’s racism figure in many of the works previously mentioned in this chapter, particularly those published in the 1960s or later. The most controversy on this issue, however, tends to be in books and articles that study Johnson as president.

One of the most important questions for historians of the period is how Johnson got to be nominated vice president, and thus, in line to succeed Lincoln when he was assassinated. There is a general consensus that Johnson would have certain advantages as a candidate. He was popular in the North because of his heroic Unionist stand in the Senate and throughout the war. Further, as a War Democrat from a border state, he increased the appeal of the party ticket beyond Republicans. It is clear that the party was trying to gain more votes in 1864, both nationally and among Democrats disgruntled with their own party, because the Republicans changed their name to the National Union Party. Those historians who analyzed the issue were most often provoked by the question of to what extent Abraham Lincoln was actively involved in the selection of Johnson as vice president in 1864, replacing the incumbent Hannibal Hamlin.

An interesting perspective and useful historiographical review of the question up to 1969 is presented by Robert L. Morris in The Lincoln-Johnson Plan for Reconstruction and the Republican Convention of 1864 (1969). Morris’s own purpose was to show that Lincoln selected Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate because Lincoln and Johnson had similar views on Reconstruction. In the process Morris traced three general viewpoints that appeared over time. The first group, which Morris called mythmakers, believed that Johnson was Lincoln’s personal preference and the president worked for this nomination because Johnson had more moderate views than Hamlin, who seemed to be leaning more and more to the Radicals. This was evidently the contemporary viewpoint. Later in the nineteenth century, especially about the time of the publication of the multi-volume Lincoln biography by his former secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, the debunkers, evidently influenced by the Radical Republicans’ split with Johnson, portrayed Lincoln as neutral about the vice-presidential selection. The third group, the realists, in the period before 1969 came to a compromise position depicting Lincoln selecting Johnson because of his appeal as a popular War Democrat rather than because of his Reconstruction opinions.

Two studies of the 1864 election were published in the 1990s. David E. Long’s The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery had other priorities and merely mentioned Johnson’s nomination as a compromise candidate who shared Lincoln’s approach to Reconstruction (Long, 1994: 38). John C. Waugh, in his Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (1997) considered the Johnson nomination and the evidence presented for and against Lincoln’s involvement without coming to a definite conclusion.

In his 1995 article The Making of a Myth: Lincoln and the Vice-Presidential Nomination in 1864, Don E. Fehrenbacher analyzed the prevalent idea that Lincoln did a great deal of maneuvering behind the scenes to have Johnson selected as vice president. He traced the evidence to statements made long after the fact by journalist Alexander K. McClure and Illinois Lincoln crony Ward Hill Lamon, neither of whom were known for giving especially accurate information. According to Fehrenbacher, all the contemporary evidence seemed to support Lincoln’s statements that he chose not to interfere in the nomination.

More recently, Matt Speiser has disputed Fehrenbacher’s interpretation in The Ticket’s Other Half: How and Why Andrew Johnson Received the 1864 Vice Presidential Nomination (2006). Speiser saw Johnson’s nomination as an indication of the change in Republican Party views between 1860 and 1864. Speiser insisted that Lincoln maneuvered to have Johnson selected by sending certain people to Baltimore to exert influence. Alexander McClure and former Secretary of War Simon Cameron were said to be involved in the proceedings. Speiser’s evidence does not seem to be as strong as it might be, however.

Paul H. Bergeron, in the previously discussed Andrew Johnson’s Civil War and Reconstruction, believed that Lincoln was actively involved in searching for a replacement for Hamlin before the convention. Lincoln had a good relationship with Johnson as military governor, so the choice of Johnson was logical.

It is clear that historians have not yet found conclusive evidence about Lincoln’s involvement in the search for a vice-presidential candidate in 1864. Nevertheless, Johnson was selected and elected with Lincoln. Biographies and other books that treat Johnson’s embarrassing inebriated speech at the inauguration and his few other known activities as vice president, do so merely in passing on the way to their more thorough examination of the controversies of Johnson’s presidency.

In the period before he became president, Andrew Johnson had many personal and political experiences that influenced the attitudes and actions he displayed during his presidency. Thus, it is important to examine the pre-presidential period as well as Johnson’s presidency itself.

Some historians may find it productive to evaluate Johnson in the context of other self-made, poor white mechanics who became politicians in other states as well as Tennessee. How common was the election of mechanics? Did they share viewpoints based on their early years in the laboring class, such as defense of the common man? Were other such men protective of their increased status by opposing blacks or immigrants? In what ways could comparison with these politicians illuminate and contextualize Johnson’s attitudes both before and during his presidency? Such studies may help to place Johnson more broadly and accurately in his era.

References

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Bergeron, P.H. (2011) Andrew Johnson’s Civil War and Reconstruction. University of Tennessee Press.

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Durham, W.T. (1985) Nashville, the Occupied City: The First Seventeen Months, February 16, 1862, to June 30, 1863. Tennessee Historical Society.

Durham, W.T. (1987) Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union, July 1, 1863, to June 30, 1865. Tennessee Historical Society.

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Gordon-Reed, A. (2011) Andrew Johnson. Henry Holt.

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Graf, L.P. and Haskins, R.W. (1972) The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 3, 1858–1860. University of Tennessee Press.

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Graf, L.P., Haskins, R.W., and Clark, P.P. (1966) The Pension Office to Congressman Andrew Johnson: A List, 1843–1853, East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 38: 97–108.

Groce, W.T. and Ash, S.V. (eds) (2005) Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron. University of Tennessee Press.

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Haskins, R.W. (1965) Internecine Strife in Tennessee: Andrew Johnson Versus Parson Brownlow, Tennessee Historical Quarterly 24: 321–340.

Hays, W. (1959) Andrew Johnson’s Reputation, East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 31: 1–31.

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Hodges, R. (2010) Unionism and Wartime Reconstruction in West Virginia and Tennessee, 1861–1865, Journal of East Tennessee History 82: 53–75.

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Chapter Two

Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction

Erik Mathisen

Even with the healthy distance of a century and a half, Andrew Johnson remains inscrutable, and it is not that we know too little about him. Scholars have analyzed all the salient details: the porter’s son from Raleigh, the apprentice tailor who made good, and the politician, in a career spanning four decades, served at every level of the American federalist system. It is not the lack of material which makes historical judgment of Johnson difficult. Rather, his life and career was so charged with partisan invective that the man gets lost in the din. Johnson beat a path through politics so littered with enemies, championed a plan for reuniting the republic after civil war which proved so unpopular, and served at the helm of an administration whose support evaporated so quickly after assuming office, that his presidency is perhaps the most controversial in American history.

The controversy is due in part to the fact that historians cannot help but compare him to his predecessor. For two men who grew up out of such similar backgrounds, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson could not have been more different. Whereas supporters had anointed Lincoln as a secular saint by the time he lay dying, Johnson was the small man with the giant chip on his shoulder: an egotistical demagogue who lacked both the vision and statesmanship to steer the ship of state. James Ford Rhodes argued that had he lived, Lincoln would have made Reconstruction a model of statecraft. In Johnson’s rough hands, however, the project was doomed to failure (Rhodes, 1919: 517). Though both men cut their teeth in the rough world of frontier politics, Lincoln transcended his surroundings and became a president of substance and gravitas. Johnson, on the other hand, practiced politics as a bloodsport, diminishing both himself and his high office in the process, to the horror of the national press and even his own supporters. While Lincoln grew into his role as a wartime leader, Johnson seemed to shrink from the burden. Lincoln proved an agile executive: flexible and eager to turn political enemies into allies. Johnson, in contrast, stuck to ossified principles and sought retribution from all who opposed him. When Lincoln died, the nation mourned the loss of a leader for whom monuments would be erected. When Johnson died in July 1875, few friends came forward to eulogize him. The nation had come to see him as a symbol of an era many would like to forget. His obituary claimed that his greatest misfortune, and the nation’s, was the moment he became president (New York Times, 1 August 1875).

The other reason why Johnson’s time in office remains so hotly debated is because of the very partisan feeling which he himself encouraged. In the decades following the end of Reconstruction, Johnson became a talisman for historians who saw both his rise and fall as emblematic of the radical determination to punish a benighted South after the Civil War. For those historians who saw Reconstruction as a tragedy beyond measure, at odds with the racial determinism of the era, Johnson was the model statesman: a principled upholder of constitutional principle who was overwhelmed by more determined enemies. By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, the historiographical ground had shifted. Johnson became the bumbling, racist fool who sought white supremacy over black civic rights and, when faced with opposition, clung to his plan in a stand-off with the Republican Party. This confrontation resulted in a political drama which distracted the nation from the hard choices that mattered. If comparisons to Lincoln have made understanding Johnson difficult, the historiographical battles over the meaning of Reconstruction have pushed both Johnson and his presidency to the brink of irrelevance.

Regardless of the opinion writers have of him, most point to Johnson’s early life as the key to understanding his personality. Born on December 29, 1808, he was the third child of a poor family without property. The Johnsons’ circumstances soured that much more after the death of Johnson’s father. Andrew’s mother took on work usually reserved for African Americans and it was the distance between the status of Johnson’s family and their skin color which Andrew worked hard to overcome. Bonded along with his brother, William, to a wealthier family and later apprenticed to a local tailor in Raleigh, Andrew’s experience as an apprentice left a lasting mark. It would drive him in all things, but it would leave an especially deep imprint on his political philosophy. Johnson learned to read and write while an apprentice, while at the same time developing an abiding envy of those for whom wealth and education came easy. Living much of his early life a long way from personal independence, Johnson would also come to see slavery as an institution which prevented men like himself from rising on the strength of their own ambitions. Johnson’s own ambition pushed him to run away from his apprenticeship, where he used what he had learned to set up his own tailoring business in Laurens, North Carolina. When he failed to make amends with his former master, he and his family made a break for Tennessee, where he opened his own shop in Greeneville. There, he met, courted, and married the daughter of a cobbler, Eliza McCardle, in May 1827. The local justice of the peace who officiated at their nuptials was Mordecai Lincoln, second cousin of the president, who would name Andrew Johnson as his running mate more than three decades later (Trefousse, 1989: 17–34; Gordon-Reed, 2011: 18–32).

The other ingredient in Johnson’s personality was a boundless ambition. By the late 1820s and early 30s, he became a prosperous tailor, a member of Greeneville’s middle class, and an eager candidate for elected office. He ran on the Mechanics’ Ticket in 1829 and won a position as local alderman, became mayor of Greeneville in 1834, and secured a seat in the state legislature the following year. Along with the rapid development of his political career, Johnson earned a reputation as a gifted orator and a dogged debater which suited the political culture of his adopted home state. Once in the Tennessee legislature, however, Johnson endeared himself to no one. He opposed the extension of the railroad and almost every appropriations bill, even if the money served his constituents. While Johnson was busy styling himself as the principled representative, likely with an eye for higher office, locals in Greeneville were busy grooming his replacement. He was defeated in 1837: one of the few times in his adult life when he would not hold elected office. Despite this hiccup, Johnson put his skill as an oratorical powerhouse to work, reestablished his support in a successful run for the state legislature in 1840 and, with the help of a down year for Democrats which made him something of a rising star, a seat in the House of Representatives was secured two years later. Once in Congress, Johnson would prove a loud defender of the rights of poorer whites, who had become his primary constituency, and a thorn in the side of his fellow Democrats (Gordon-Reed, 2011: 33–43).

While in Congress, Johnson championed a variety of measures, most notably the Homestead Bill, though for a man with such a long political career, his legislative record was thin. The Homestead Bill would be a losing cause (until it was finally passed in 1862), but it cemented the connection between Johnson and the constituency who had become his core base of support: poorer rural whites. By the early 1850s, Whig opposition within Tennessee ended the first phase of Johnson’s career in Washington. His time out of office would be short, however. A run for the Tennessee governorship in 1853 would be followed by his reelection and a successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 1857. Returning to Washington, Johnson faced the challenge of representing a state at the center of the sectional crisis. He would go on to support the rights of states, while at the same time believing the Union to be indivisible, and while Southern political leaders who were cool to Southern sectionalism backed away from more caustic language, Johnson called those who championed secession little more than traitors. For a man who was by now hard-wired to run for office, this perhaps indicated his desire to run nationally in the 1860 election. Whatever the motivation or influence, Tennessee voters elected not to hold a secession convention following Lincoln’s election, until two months after the first shots of the Civil War had been fired. When voters in the state did opt for secession (by a very narrow margin), Johnson did not follow them (Gordon-Reed, 2011: 43–66).

Johnson and the Union

Whatever his motivations, Johnson’s speeches in early 1861 displayed the iron resolve which would mark his presidency. In February of that year, he delivered a harangue against Southern fire eaters, accusing them of turning their backs on the spirit of the Revolution and declaring secession to be nothing less than heresy. Taking the Unionist argument a step further, Johnson claimed that he opposed secession because the very act of seceding placed any future for the republic in doubt. Secession was destructive of all future confederacies that may be established as a consequence of a disruption of the present one. As with everything that Johnson uttered, principle mixed with partisanship and personal grandstanding. He made it plain that he was the first man south of Mason and Dixon’s line who entered a protest or made an argument against secession, and he used this lonely stand against shifting political winds to tremendous effect (Johnson, 1866: 177–178).

When Union forces secured portions of middle and western Tennessee in early 1862, Lincoln moved quickly to appoint a military governor and Johnson was the obvious choice. Placating Northern Democrats and diehards in his own party with one stroke, Lincoln appointed Johnson in March 1862. While the remit of his position was not made entirely clear, Johnson saw his post as having the broadest possible powers. He was, in every respect, an energetic officeholder and it was his public enthusiasm for the Union cause which he used to justify his every action. Johnson demanded loyalty oaths from public officials, closed newspapers which were hostile to the Union and, when it became an inevitability, the destruction of slavery as well (Foner, 1988: 43–44).

The historiographical view of Johnson’s time in interwar Tennessee was that it was an early indicator of the kind of president Johnson would become. Johnson was a conciliator early on in his time in the governor’s mansion, believing that the temper of white Tennesseans tended naturally towards the Union. When this did not bring the desired result, however, he took a much harder line. By the fall of 1862, Johnson was pushing for a bold policy of forced measures to bring recalcitrant whites to heel (Maslowski, 1978). While this cannot be doubted, it is also true that in the months leading up to his nomination as Lincoln’s running mate, Johnson’s rhetoric also underwent a renovation. His talk became broader and more inclusive. With characteristic bravado, Johnson called on freed slaves in Tennessee to look upon him as their Moses, who would lead them from bondage. This might have been nothing more than political point scoring, but it does indicate a change.

Another clue as to the shift in Johnson’s philosophy of politics and power lay in the new emphasis he placed on loyalty. He demanded it from Tennesseans and those who withheld it he counted as an enemy. Whether freed slaves or whites who proffered oaths of loyalty, Johnson came to believe deeply in the personal act of political contrition, and it would be this act which would form the core of his policies during Reconstruction. As the occupied South’s greatest booster, Johnson mixed support for the Union with support for his own political ambitions. By 1864, he had reconstructed Tennessee’s government to the satisfaction of even the most ardent Unionists, and joining Lincoln on the Republican/Union Party’s platform, Andrew Johnson had become a force in national politics as he had never been before. In many of his policies as governor, Johnson arguably moved beyond Lincoln’s own December 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. It was Johnson’s steadfast Unionism which made him an asset, making his turnaround all the more dramatic.

Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

Lincoln’s assassination catapulted Johnson to power after he had been vice president for only forty-two days. Assuming office in the most chaotic of circumstances required a level of calm and, in contrast to his character, Johnson showed a soft touch in public and in meetings with associates. In the days immediately following Lincoln’s death, Johnson worked hard to court both conservative and radical wings of the Republican Party. He issued strong denunciations of Confederate traitors and brought a variety of personalities (friends and enemies of Lincoln alike) into his confidence. As historian Hans Trefousse (1989: 209) noted in his biography of Johnson: Continuity in administration, a competent staff, great forbearance in not moving into the White House for weeks all created a favorable image of the new administration, and the new man at the helm possessed the broadest support of the public as a result.

The end of the 38th Congress in mid-March 1865 left Johnson in an unusual position, as a new chief executive with a raft of important decisions to make. Paramount among them was the future of the postwar South, decisions over which had been controlled by the executive branch as part of those powers given to the President as the Commander in Chief. For this reason, rather than gaveling Congress back into an early session, Johnson issued two proclamations in late May which laid out the Union’s plan for Reconstruction. The plan, at least to Johnson, was simple, and it built upon both Lincoln’s wartime policies and his own experience in Tennessee. Southern states who ratified the Thirteenth Amendment would be restored to their antebellum position within the Union, under direct presidential authority. At the same time, those Southerners who pledged their loyalty to the Union would be given amnesty, except for a few exempt classes, including those who held a prestigious post within the Confederate government or who owned property valued at or above $20,000 (Richardson, 1896: 310–314).

Johnson’s plan was based upon a particular interpretation of secession. While many white Southerners argued that secession was constitutional – that the Union was a collection of polities who agreed to form a republic without forfeiting their rights to independent action – many Republicans in Congress argued that secession was treason, and states who seceded rendered themselves territories subject to congressional power following Union victory during the war. Between these diametrically opposed positions lay several compromising ones. For a man who had long styled himself the political champion of poor white Southerners, it is not surprising that Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction placed his favored constituency front and center. The position Johnson adopted was that the war had been a rebellion and the result of that rebellion had settled the most pressing reason for it: the abolition of slavery. Those who fomented the rebellion should remain a suspect class in the postwar republic, subject to the direct power of the executive branch. The majority population of citizens, however, who in Johnson’s mind had remained loyal to the Union, should be given their full rights and privileges. In the end, Johnson’s plan was not so much reconstruction as reunion, with the new president acting as national mediator (McKitrick, 1960: 93–119).

Johnson’s Reconstruction plan was also based upon a strict reading of the Constitution, one in which rights for African Americans was a nonstarter. Johnson made no effort to clarify the position of African Americans in the republic because he believed it was not within the federal government’s powers to legislate on these matters. It was also not the kind of cause which would help those poorer white Southerners, whom Johnson believed were his key supporters. Throughout his career, Johnson had been a staunch supporter of strict constitutional principles and because he believed the Southern states had never left the Union, they had not surrendered their rights as states to decide who had the right to vote. In this regard, Johnson badly misjudged the