The American Vice Presidency (28 page)

The very next day, South Carolina gave its answer. The state declared its secession from the Union, and four days later Governor Francis Pickens
proclaimed the state a sovereign and independent entity. In rapid order over the next six weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed suit. Then, five days after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, on April 12, Virginia joined the exodus, followed the next month by Arkansas and North Carolina.

Alexander H. Stephens, soon to be vice president of the Confederate States of America, said of Johnson’s oration, “I know of no instance in history when one speech effected such results, immediate and remote, as this one did.”
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The Tennessean was hanged and burned in effigy in Memphis, Nashville, and other cities in his own state. Still, when a state convention was called to consider secession, it was roundly rejected. A spectator in the visitors’ gallery rose and called for “three cheers for the Union!” and “three cheers for Andy Johnson!” Finally the Senate sergeant-at-arms was ordered to clear the gallery.

In Tennessee, a Lincoln order to dispatch Union troops to the state finally fired up secessionist sentiment in the middle and western counties, to the point that when Johnson responded to pleas from Tennessee Unionists to return home, he was jeered by crowds. At the town of Liberty a mob boarded his train, with one man threatening him until Johnson pulled a pistol from his coat.
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In Nashville, the legislature authorized Governor Isham Harris to raise fifty-five thousand troops for the Confederate army. Harris also set June 8 for a statewide vote on secession, against which Johnson barnstormed in his native east Tennessee. While that area sided with him for staying in the Union, middle and west Tennessee voted heavily to get out, and the statewide secession carried. With threats to assassinate Johnson spreading and Confederate forces occupying most of Tennessee, he left the state by open carriage for neutral Kentucky. Eventually he returned to Washington as a senator from a seceded state. When the Union forces suffered a defeat in the battle of Bull Run, at Manassas, Virginia, Johnson supported Lincoln’s war aims, saying, “I have hitherto warred against traitors and treason, and in behalf of the government which was constructed by our fathers, I intend to continue to the end.”
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In March 1862, with much of Tennessee now occupied by Northern forces, Lincoln sent Johnson back as a military governor with the rank of brigadier general and with sweeping powers to restore Union authority
and return the state to the fold. Johnson rationalized his own authority by holding that Tennessee was still part of the Union and that repression of the secessionists was wholly legitimate. He went to Nashville and issued a proclamation of assurance that he came not on a mission of vengeance but to restore civil order. While promising to “punish intelligent and conscious treason in high places,” he said he was empowered to offer “full and complete amnesty” even to those citizens who had “assumed an attitude of hostility to the government.”
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Still, allegiance to the Confederacy in east Tennessee nagged at Johnson as he attempted to administer the state. Nashville’s social circle cold-shouldered him, and threats to his life abounded against this “traitor to the South.” When the mayor and city council refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Union, he had them arrested and appointed replacements. Preachers who agitated for rebellion were jailed. He instructed the local Union general, “There must be a vigorous and efficient prosecution of this war. The burdens and penalties resulting from it must be made to rest upon the rebels, and they to feel it. Treason must be made odious, traitors punished and impoverished.”
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When a siege of Nashville was expected, Johnson refused to leave. His wife, Eliza, and other family members, harassed by Confederates at home in Greenville, managed to get to Nashville, where they all survived the threat. Not until late November 1863 was Tennessee cleared of Confederate forces, and as the presidential election year of 1864 began, state political leaders decided to send a delegation to the Republican National Convention in Baltimore in June, to be drawn from Tennessee’s three geographical divisions. They decided also that the ten delegates would recommend Johnson for the vice presidential nomination to run with Lincoln, with Johnson neither seeking nor rejecting the possibility.

By now, Lincoln had decided to find a running mate other than Hannibal Hamlin to bolster his chances for a second term. He wanted, obviously, a Union loyalist but also someone who might strengthen the Republican ticket, now carrying the label of the National Union Party. Johnson, as both a Democrat and a southerner, seemed the obvious choice, but rumors of Johnson’s overbearing manner and excessive drinking obliged Lincoln to check them out. He sent an aide, Charles A. Dana, to call on Johnson at the state Capitol, where Johnson greeted him with a bottle of whiskey and
glasses for both of them. After several days of inquiry, Dana concluded that while Johnson drank a fair amount he found nothing to indicate that the military governor exceeded the imbibing of a normal southern gentleman of sober and responsible demeanor.
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Within the new National Union Party, many radicals were unhappy with Lincoln’s prosecution of the war and what they feared was a too conciliatory posture toward the South in considering postwar reconstruction of the Union. His Proclamation of Amnesty on Reconstruction, issued in December 1863, offered a full pardon and the return of all property except slaves to Southerners who would repudiate rebellion and pledge allegiance to the Union. It provided that any state in which 10 percent of its citizens took the pledge could form a government and be readmitted. And in April 1864 the Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery everywhere in the country.

In May, the Radical Republicans held a convention of their own and nominated the 1856 standard bearer, General Fremont, but could not draw any significant support for a challenge to the incumbent president.
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At the regular Republican convention in June, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania denied the right of Tennessee to send delegates, because Southerners had no right in the Union, which they had now deserted. “Can’t you get a candidate for Vice President without going down to a damned rebel province for one?” he thundered.
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But the Tennessee delegation was seated and nominated Lincoln and Johnson for the two top positions in the National Union Party.

The
New York World
, bitterly opposed, declared in its lead editorial, “The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics, has succeeded.… A rail-splitting buffoon and a boorish tailor, both from the backwoods, both growing up in uncouth ignorance, they afford a grotesque sight for a satiric poet.” Butler, in whose vast contempt the vice presidency was beneath, wrote his wife, “Hurrah for Lincoln and Johnson! That’s the ticket! This country has more vitality than any other on earth if it can stand this sort of administration for another four years!”
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Johnson himself preferred to see the result of the Baltimore convention as confirmation of “a principle not to be disregarded. It was that the right of secession, and the power of a State to place itself out of the Union, are not
recognized.” He explained his party’s choice of a Southerner for vice president: “The Union party declared its belief that the rebellious States are still in the Union, that their loyal citizens are still citizens of the United States.”
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The convention’s platform called for defeat of the Confederate rebellion, restoration of the Union, and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, but it did not satisfy many radicals. In July, they pushed their own tougher reconstruction plan, called the Wade-Davis Bill, advocating readmission only when 50 percent of the citizens of a state had signed an “iron-clad oath” that they had never voluntarily supported the Confederacy and that freedmen would be assured of their rights in federal courts. Lincoln killed it with a pocket veto as a means of ruling out retribution that would undercut the desire of Southerners to want to rejoin the Union, and Johnson commended him for his action. Johnson’s support suggested that he was onboard with Lincoln’s approach.
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In August, the Democrats convened in Chicago and adopted a platform of a negotiated peace and a return to the prewar Union. They nominated the former general George B. McClellan for president and Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio for vice president. The Democrats deplored anti-slavery issues, including the Emancipation Proclamation, and labeled Lincoln a dictator.

Meanwhile Johnson, returning to Nashville, declared an end to clemency toward foes of the Union. In September, a state party convention discussed reconstruction and bringing Tennessee back into the Union in time to vote in that year’s presidential election. Voters had to swear allegiance not only to the Union but also to state opposition to all armistices or negotiations for peace with rebel forces.

At the request of the Republican campaign manager, Henry Raymond, Johnson agreed to make campaign speeches for the ticket in several Northern states. In Logansport, Indiana, he pointedly declared his legitimacy despite coming from a state that had seceded. “Fellow citizens,” he began, “and I trust I shall be permitted to call you such, notwithstanding I reside in a state that was said to have rebelled and separated itself from the United States, for I hold to the doctrine that a State cannot secede.”
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He then proceeded to explain revealingly how as a son of the South he could embrace emancipation of the slaves. He argued that more whites than blacks were being freed, because blacks were thus given the opportunity to find their
own place in what he vowed was still a “white man’s government.”
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The conservative Nashville
Daily Press
editorialized, “Whoever thinks a nigger as good as a poor white man” ought to vote for Lincoln and Johnson.
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On October 24, after a large torchlight parade of blacks before the Tennessee Capitol, Johnson lashed out at white slaveholders who consorted with their female slaves in conduct “compared to which polygamy is a virtue.” He mockingly challenged anyone to “pass by their dwellings, and you will see as many mulatto as Negro children, the former bearing an unmistakable resemblance to their aristocratic owners!”
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The blacks had suffered so much, he said, it “almost induced a wish that, as in the days of old, a Moses might arise who should lead them safely to their promised land of freedom and happiness.” When a cry of “You be our Moses!” rose from the crowd, Johnson, carried away, replied, “God no doubt has prepared somewhere an instrument for the great work He designs to perform in behalf of the outraged people, and in due time your leader will come forth, your Moses will be revealed to you.” Again the shout was heard: “We want no Moses but you!” Johnson responded, “Well, then, humble and unworthy as I am, if no better shall be found, I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace!”
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On Election Day, the ticket of Lincoln and Johnson won 55 percent of the popular vote to 45 percent for McClellan and Pendleton, with many Northern soldiers voting from the field, and the Republicans trounced the Democrats in the electoral college, 212 to 21. Meanwhile, the war went on, with a rebel thrust into Tennessee led by General Breckinridge, the former vice president, which was finally turned back at Nashville in mid-December, sending Confederate forces into retreat toward Alabama.

On February 22, 1865, under the guidance of Johnson, Tennessee held a statewide vote ratifying state constitutional amendments abolishing slavery for all time, annulling the previous secession and all of the legislation passed during it, and repudiating all debts incurred by the rebel government. Retiring as military governor, Johnson proclaimed, “A new era dawns upon the people of Tennessee.”
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The new civilian administration in Tennessee was to be inaugurated on March 4, the same day as the national inauguration of Lincoln and Johnson. The vice president elect hoped he could be in Nashville for the
auspicious occasion toward which he had labored so long and hard. But on January 14 he received a telegram from Lincoln: “When do you expect to be here? Would be glad to have your suggestions as to supplying your place as military governor.” And then another: “It is our unanimous conclusion that it is unsafe for you not to be here on the 4th of March. Be sure to reach here by that time.”
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So Johnson had no choice but to head for Washington on February 25 in order to arrive in time. As his train rolled through Kentucky with the war still on, there were warnings of a possible attack on him, and he arrived looking haggard and ill. On the night before the swearing in, Johnson attended a reception in his honor and awoke the next morning with a hangover. He was also recovering from an attack of typhoid that would have kept him from the inauguration ceremony but for Lincoln’s insistence.

The retiring vice president, Hamlin, rode with Johnson by carriage to the Capitol, where they went to Hamlin’s office. En route, Johnson confided to him, “I am now very weak and enervated, and I require all the strength I can get. Can you give me some good whiskey?” Hamlin told him he was not a drinker and didn’t keep any liquor in the office. At just that moment the caterer arrived, and a bottle was produced, from which Johnson poured himself a large drink and downed it. Shortly afterward, as he and Hamlin started to leave for the inauguration, Johnson poured himself another glassful and drank it neat.
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At the ceremony in a crowded and hot Senate chamber, Hamlin delivered a brief thanks and introduced Johnson. Obviously affected by what probably was a combination of his fever, a hangover, and the two stiff drinks, he proceeded to deliver the most startling and embarrassing inaugural remarks on record. Unleashing an old-fashioned country harangue, he began, “I am a-goin’ for to tell you here today; yes, I’m a-goin’ for to tell you all, that I’m a plebian! I glory in it; I am a plebian! The people, yes the people of the United States have made me what I am; and I am a-goin for a to tell you here today, yes, today, in this place, that the people are everything.”
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