Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (2 page)

This Johnson is a queer man.

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN, EARLY
1865,
AFTER
J
OHNSON PROPOSED TO SKIP HIS OWN INAUGURATION AS VICE PRESIDENT

A
NDREW JOHNSON OF
Tennessee felt shaky on the morning of March 4, 1865. Despite the cold rain that was drenching Washington City, it should have been the most gratifying day of his fifty-six years. At noon, he would be sworn in as vice president of the United States. A man who never attended a day of school would become the nation’s second-highest official. Still, despite the excitement of his own Inauguration Day, Johnson did not feel right. It might have been the lingering effects of a fever that had struck him over the winter. Or it might have been nerves—a month before, he had proposed not to attend the inauguration at all, only to be overruled by the president, Abraham Lincoln. Or it might have been the residue of a hard-drinking celebration the night before.

Johnson had a good deal to celebrate. With determination and talent, he had built a tailoring business in his home town of Greeneville in the hill country of East Tennessee. He prospered in real estate deals and rose steadily through every level of government, serving as alderman, mayor, state senator, congressman, governor, and senator. Now he would become vice president, one step from the pinnacle of American politics. He was proud of his plain origins and his high achievements. He had a right to be.

Banner for the Lincoln-Johnson ticket in the 1864 election.

It was a daunting time to come to the highest level of the American government. After almost four years of slaughter that took 600,000 lives on both sides, the Civil War was coming to its ghastly close. Somehow the nation would have to be reunited—“reconstructed” was the favored term. President Lincoln worked to temper the military victory with compassion for the defeated, to quench both the rebellion and the fiery politics that kindled it, knitting together the bitter enemies of a long war. To restore a shared sense of being Americans, he preached national unity. Lincoln’s Republican Party had changed its name to the “Union Party” for the 1864 election. Picking Johnson—a Southerner and a Democrat—to run for vice president had been part of that message of national unity.

Until the Republicans nominated him for vice president, Johnson was best known for a single courageous act. In 1861, the senators and congressmen from eleven Southern states had to decide whether to follow their states into rebellion. Only one, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, stood with the Union. Since 1862, Johnson had been Tennessee’s military governor, struggling to manage a state crisscrossed by contending armies. By adding Johnson to their ticket, Republicans hoped to appeal to Democrats and show that they were not just a Northern party. Though Lincoln’s modern reputation now towers over the era, he feared the judgment of his countrymen in the 1864 election. On August 23, just a few weeks before the voting began, he confessed in a private memorandum that he expected the voters, weary of the long and bloody war, to reject him and return the Democratic Party to power.

In the election, Lincoln and Johnson won 55 percent of the vote, carrying all but three states, while the Republican Party won dominating majorities in Congress. Republicans had a 149-to-42 margin in the House of Representatives and controlled the Senate, 42 to 10. Having Johnson on the ticket probably helped, though far more important was a rush of Union military successes—the fall of Atlanta, the conquest of Mobile Bay, and victories in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

The procession for the Lincoln and Johnson inauguration stepped off from the White House at 11
A.M.
Thousands of marchers, dripping wet, plunged into streets thick with mud. The military escort included units of white soldiers and some of Negro troops, followed by brass bands, fire companies drawing their engines, and the lodges of Odd Fellows and Masons. Lincoln and Johnson did not march. They were already in the Capitol Building, sixteen blocks away, out of the nasty weather.

The vice president’s ceremony was to be in the Senate chamber, familiar ground for Johnson. Standing in that chamber in the winter of 1861, he had pledged never to abandon his country. “I am unwilling,” he declared then, “to walk outside of the Union which has been the result of the Constitution made by the patriots of the Revolution.” Now, four years later, the Senate was vertically segregated for his inauguration. The galleries above, except for the press and diplomatic seats, were reserved for ladies. The Senate floor held members of Congress, executive officials, and the diplomatic corps. Lincoln’s seven-man Cabinet was at the very front, to the right of the main aisle.

Before the ceremony began, Johnson waited in the office of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, the man the Republicans dumped from their ticket to make room for Johnson. Hamlin, an antislavery man from Maine, had offered too few political advantages for the critical election. Sitting with Hamlin and Hamlin’s son, a Union Army general, Johnson was out of sorts. “Mr. Hamlin,” he said, “I am not well, and need a stimulant. Have you any whiskey?”

Vice President Hamlin, a teetotaler, had banned the sale of liquor in the Senate restaurant. To accommodate his guest, he sent out of the building for a bottle. When the whiskey arrived, Johnson tossed down a tumbler of it, straight. Feeling reinforced, he announced that his speech at noon would be the effort of his life. Then he polished off a second glass of whiskey. Word came that it was time to start. Hamlin offered Johnson his arm. The two men passed a few steps down the corridor when Johnson turned back to the vice president’s office. He quickly poured out a third glass of whiskey and drank it down. Hamlin looked on in amazement, according to his son: “[K]nowing that Johnson was a hard drinker, [Hamlin] supposed that he could stand the liquor he had taken.” Unfortunately, on his own Inauguration Day, he could not.

Arm in arm, the outgoing and incoming vice presidents entered the Senate Chamber. They took their places on the dais. Hamlin began with brief and gracious remarks, thanking the Senate for its courtesies toward him as its presiding officer for the last four years. It was Johnson’s turn. He faced the gathering. A solidly built man of medium height, Johnson was an experienced and confident speaker. His oratorical style was forceful and direct, with an adversarial edge that could inflict injury on his opponents. Johnson spoke that day without notes, as he usually did, but could not be heard well at first. Quickly, the audience could tell that something was wrong. Johnson’s face glowed a luminous red. His sentences were incomplete, not connected to each other. At the biggest moment of his life, on the most prominent stage he had ever occupied, the man was drunk.

“Your president is a plebeian,” Johnson announced. “I am a plebeian—glory in it—Tennessee has never gone out of the Union—I am going to talk two and a half minutes on that point, and want you to hear me—Tennessee has always been loyal.”

Hamlin tugged on Johnson’s coat from behind. “Johnson,” he hissed, “stop!”

Johnson looked down at the Cabinet members arrayed before him. Calling to each by name, he advised them to remember that their power came from the people. When he got to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, memory failed. Leaning over to a Senate official, Johnson asked in a stage whisper, “What is the name of the secretary of the navy?” Johnson continued, reminding the chief justice that his power, too, derived from the people. Hamlin tugged Johnson’s coat again, imploring him to desist. Johnson, elated by the moment or simply oblivious, rambled on.

President Andrew Johnson.

Sitting closest to the dais, the Cabinet Secretaries began to mutter among themselves. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” complained Attorney General James Speed, adding, “The man is certainly deranged.” Speed closed his eyes as Johnson kept on speaking. “Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” whispered Navy Secretary Welles, whose name had eluded the new vice president. War Secretary Edwin Stanton, his features petrified, replied, “There is something wrong.” The postmaster general’s face flushed with embarrassment. A few of the senators and congressmen smirked. Most fidgeted anxiously, shifting in their seats, “as if in long-drawn agony.” One senator placed his head on the desk before him. A Supreme Court justice showed an expression of “blank horror.” Johnson spoke for more than fifteen minutes.

After a period, President Lincoln entered the Senate with several others. Hamlin took direct action. He stood to administer the oath of office to his successor. After mumbling the oath, Johnson grabbed the Bible on which his hand rested. Brandishing it before the crowd, he cried out, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States.” The mortifying spectacle was over.

Luckily, the rain relented, allowing the president to take his oath outdoors, on a platform on the east side of the Capitol. The dignitaries, shaking their heads in dismay, filed out of the Senate. They joined thousands who waited to hear Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The gloom and anxiety of Johnson’s ceremony dissipated in the fresh air, scrubbed clean by the rain. As the tall president stepped forward to speak, an observer wrote, “the sun burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with glory and light.” With biblical cadences and a triumphant sadness, Lincoln’s prepared speech gave Americans the reasons for their terrible sacrifices during the war. He also spoke, stirringly, of peace.

Lincoln’s eloquence could not wash out the stain of Johnson’s rant. Many in the audience knew Johnson from his long public career. They knew he appreciated liquor. A Tennessee rival once recalled uncharitably that Johnson always “enjoyed the meanest whiskey hot from the still,…stuff which would vomit a gentleman.” A visitor to Johnson’s office in Tennessee had concluded that he “took more whisky than most gentlemen would have done, and I concluded that he took it pretty often.”

But Johnson had never been drunk on a public occasion, and certainly not on such an important one. A few days later, Lincoln offered the best defense he could to Hugh McCulloch, secretary of the treasury. “I have known Andy Johnson for many years,” the president said. “He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain’t a drunkard.” More candid was the letter of a Michigan senator to his wife: “The Vice President Elect was too drunk to perform his duties & disgraced himself & the Senate by making a drunken foolish speech.”

The verdict was universal. Johnson’s speech, which he wanted to be the effort of his life, had been a disaster. Treasury Secretary McCulloch thought the new vice president humiliated his friends. A future member of Johnson’s Cabinet wrote that the vice president “disgusted all decent people who heard him.” The appalling quality of his performance was captured by the correspondent from the
Times
of London, whose reporting was not inhibited by any feelings of national pride: