The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  “Please say to Mr. Lincoln, that while I appreciate with the fullest sensibility this act of friendship and the compliment he pays me, yet I must decline. Tell him with the prospects of the campaign, I would not quit the field to be Vice-President, even with himself as President, unless he will give me bond with sureties, that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration. Ask him what he thinks I have done to deserve the punishment, at forty-six years of age, of being made to sit as presiding office over the Senate, to listen to debates, more or less stupid, in which I can take no part nor say a word, nor even be allowed a vote upon any subject which concerns the welfare of my country, except when my enemies might think my vote would injure me in the estimate of the people, and therefore, by some parliamentary trick, make a tie on such question, so I should be compelled to vote; and then at the end of four years (as nowadays no Vice-President is ever elected President), and because of the dignity of the position I had held, not to be permitted to go on with my profession, and therefore with nothing left for me to do save to ornament my lot in the cemetery tastefully and get into it gracefully and respectably, as a Vice-President should do.”1

  Johnson had no such contemptuous attitude toward the office or toward the new president’s call to service, and the vice presidency was another step in a long-held ambition for high public office from his humblest beginnings. An unschooled country boy, he literally was born in a log cabin in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808. When he was only three years old, his father, Jacob Johnson, a bank porter and local constable who could not read, died, leaving his mother, Mary, called Polly, a seamstress and laundress, to raise him and a brother. When she remarried, she managed to get the two boys placed as apprentices in a Raleigh tailor shop, from which they fled after an altercation with a neighbor. Next Andrew went to Lauren, South Carolina, to another tailor shop, where his proposal of marriage to a local girl was rejected by her mother. Dejected, he returned to Tennessee, found yet another tailor shop and another girl, and in 1827 married Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a shoemaker in Greenville. Self-educated with help from her, he built a thriving tailor shop of his own, invested in real estate, and started a family. Interested in politics and an enthusiast for Andrew Jackson, he joined a local debating society and was elected an alderman in Greenville in 1829 and mayor in 1834.2

  Young Johnson was a rising star, elected as a Whig to the state legislature the next year, where he introduced homesteading legislation designed to give poor men land to work if they lived on it. In 1837, however, he voted against bringing railroad service to eastern Tennessee and lost his seat. Switching to the Democratic Party, he won the seat back, and in 1840, the party’s state convention appointed him as one of the two Tennessee presidential electors and sent him around the state speaking for President Van Buren and local Democratic candidates.

  Johnson prospered as a tailor in Greenville and bought a large house opposite his shop and a farm on which he settled his mother and stepfather. For service in the militia he came to be called Colonel Johnson and for the first time became the owner of a few slaves.3 In 1843 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was now a strong proponent of Jacksonian policies and an opponent of Whig protectionism, federal expenditures for internal improvements, and all manner of other projects. In the House, Johnson also spoke against anti-slavery petitions and denied the authority of either the federal government or an individual right to abolish slavery.4

  In 1844, he was reelected to the House, where he supported the annexation and statehood of Texas and the Mexican War. In 1846, he introduced his homestead bill giving “every poor man in the United States who is the head of a family” 160 acres of public land to farm “without money and without price.” It got nowhere, but Johnson persevered to its enactment years later.5 In 1852, faced with his House seat being gerrymandered against him, he ran for and won the governorship of Tennessee, with emphasis on his populist roots, and was reelected in 1854. In 1857, the state legislature elected him to the United States Senate, where he again pushed his homesteading bill, finally passing it in 1860, only to have it vetoed by President James Buchanan. His efforts to override fell three votes short.6

  Meanwhile, committed as ever to the preservation of the Union, Johnson was determined to discourage Tennessee’s secession. At a Democratic convention in Charleston in April 1860, the Tennessee delegation was instructed to vote for Johnson as the state’s favorite son for president, and its newspapers joined the call. The Nashville Union and American praised him unabashedly as “a people’s man … unafflicted with crude learning of schools … real homemade man, standing head and shoulders taller than those who have rubbed their backs against a college wall.”7 But Carl Schurz, a German writer and later a U.S. senator, subsequently described Johnson as “sullen … betokening a strong will inspired by bitter feelings” and with a face having “no genial sunlight in it.”8

  At the convention, the Tennessee delegation cast all its votes for Johnson through twenty-six rounds before he dropped out, and Douglas was nominated as the choice of the northern Democrats. In a separate convention, the southern Democrats picked Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, and on Election Day, Johnson voted for him as the best alternative for preserving the Union while opposing him on secession. “The blood of secession at the Charleston convention,” he told friends, “is not on my head.”9 The day before the election, predicting a Lincoln victory, he told friends, “When the crisis comes, I will be found standing by the Union.”10

  Back in the Senate, Johnson took on the basic concept of secession. “I am unwilling, of my own volition, to walk outside of the Union which has been the result of a Constitution made by the patriots of the Revolution,” he said. “I believe I may speak with some degree of confidence for the people of my State; we intend to fight that battle inside and not outside of the Union, and if anybody must go out of the Union, it must be those who violate it.”11 He declared that Tennessee did not intend to go out. “It is our Constitution; it is our Union, … and we do not intend to be driven from it.” He got down to cases: “The Constitution declares and defines what is treason. Let us talk about things by their right name!… If anything be treason … is not levying war upon the United States treason? Is not attempt to take its property treason?… It is treason and nothing but treason.… Then let us stand by the Constitution; and in saving the Union, save this, the greatest government on earth.”12

  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.”13 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.14

  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.”15

  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.”16

  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.”17

  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.18

  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.19 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.20 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!”21

  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.”22

  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.23

  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.”24 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.”25 The conservative Nashville Daily Press editorialized, “Whoever thinks a nigger as good as a poor white man” ought to vote for Lincoln and Johnson.26

 
; 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!”27

  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!”28

  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.”29