The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  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.”30

  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.31

  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.”32

  Johnson then called out to the cabinet members William Seward, Edwin Stanton, “and you too, Mr.——,” forgetting the name of cabinet member Gideon Welles and asking John Forney, the secretary of the Senate, for it. He reminded all of them that their power, as his own, came from the people, not from Lincoln, which was not precisely correct. Hamlin was seen tugging on the new vice president’s coattail in a vain effort to get him to desist. Finally Johnson took the oath of office, placing his hand on a Bible.33 When it came time for him as the new president of the Senate to swear in the new members, he completely botched the job, finally turning to a clerk and telling him, “Here, you swear them in. You know it better than I do.”34

  After Lincoln had taken his oath and delivered his second inaugural address with its historic line, “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” Hamlin took Johnson by the arm and led him from the chamber. For days afterward, Washington was abuzz over Johnson’s remarks and behavior. But Lincoln himself told his secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, “I have known Andy for many years; he made a bad slip the other day, but you needn’t be scared. Andy ain’t a drunkard.”35

  The New York World said that journalistic obligation required the report of Johnson’s conduct. It went on: “The pity of it is that the life of this chief magistrate [Lincoln] should be made precious to us by the thought that he at least excludes from the most august station in the land the person who defiled our chief council chamber with the spewing of a drunken boor.” The next day, the same newspaper added that compared to Johnson, “even Caligula’s horse was respectable.”36 For the next two weeks, Johnson remained closeted in the suburban home of two friends. Fortunately the Senate was not then in session. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts composed a resolution calling for Johnson’s resignation, but the Republican caucus did not adopt it.

  The storm over Johnson’s faux pas soon was engulfed by climactic developments in the war. At Five Forks, Virginia, the last great battle was fought when General Philip Sheridan drove the forces of General Robert E. Lee from Richmond, together with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and four days later Lincoln walked victoriously through the abandoned Confederate capital. In Washington, a suddenly resuscitated Johnson joined the wild street demonstrations.

  On the night of Friday, April 14, Johnson had dinner at the Kirkland House, where the former governor Leonard Farwell of Wisconsin invited Johnson to join him at Ford’s Theater, a few blocks away, to see Laura Keene in Our American Cousin, which Lincoln and Grant would also be attending. Johnson declined, saying he never went to the theater and wanted to read a bit before turning in, and did so. The next thing he knew, Farwell was urgently rapping at his door, informing him that Lincoln had been shot. Johnson brushed aside the protecting troops already outside his door and rushed to the Petersen house across from the theater, where Lincoln now lay diagonally across a bed too small for his gangling figure.37

  The next morning church bells began to chime, announcing Lincoln’s death, and a few hours later Chief Justice of the United States Salmon P. Chase administered the presidential oath of office to Johnson in the hotel parlor in the presence of the assembled cabinet members and a few friends. The new president spoke briefly, commenting, “The only assurance that I can now give of the future is reference to the past. The course which I have taken in connection with this rebellion must be regarded as a guarantee for the future.… I shall ask and rely upon you and others in carrying the government through its present perils.”38 He then held his first cabinet meeting and asked all members to stay in their posts. In the assassination plot that claimed Lincoln’s life and severely wounded Secretary of State Seward, Johnson himself had been targeted to be killed by one George Atzerodt, who was captured with three other conspirators, tried, convicted, and executed.39

  The hope and expectation of the Radical Republicans was that Johnson, who had dealt harshly with slaveholders in Tennessee as military governor and had talked of being Moses to that black rally in Nashville before the election, would govern as a prodder of fellow southerners to accept the new order. Instead, he bent over backward to assist in the restoration of much of what had been the Old South, dealing with reconstruction as in the purview of the executive branch, not the legislative, in keeping with this “presidential reconstruction.” Only a month into his accidental presidency, he issued a proclamation granting amnesty to Confederates who would take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, with their seized property, except for previous slaves, restored to them. Then he laid out the steps for North Carolina, and presumably other Confederate states, to rejoin the Union by having an appointed provisional governor call a state convention to amend its constitution, again with seized property returned to pliant Confederates. This return of property was seen by abolitionists and freedmen as an abrogation of the functions of the Freedmen’s Bureau to allocate farmland to former slaves.

  Before long, prominent white political figures of the South were returning as members of Congress, governors, and other state officials, many bent on maintaining as much of the prewar social order as possible. South Carolina simply “repealed” its secession rather than acknowledging that the act was unconstitutional. At the same time, Johnson was granting pardons willy-nilly to ranking Confederate officers and officials who were rapidly getting themselves elected to state posts. Many who didn’t bother to seek pardons were granted clemency in order to assume office, including the Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, elected to Congress from Georgia. Soon the leniency extended to southerners evolved into their arrogance and often a return of hatred toward their benefactors and the freedmen.

  Radical Republicans were outraged at Johnson. Thaddeus Stevens wrote Charles Sumner: “Is it possible to devise any plan to arrest
the government in its ruinous career? When will you be in Washington? Can’t we collect bold men enough to lay the foundation for a party to take the helm of this government, and keep it off the rocks?” And a few days later: “Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President in Washington?”40 When Congress reconvened in December 1865, the Republican majority created the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to rival Johnson’s “presidential” version. Radical Republicans and moderates joined in February 1866 and enacted two bills, extending the life and increasing the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau and passing the Civil Rights Act providing legal protection for the freed blacks. Johnson promptly opposed both as unconstitutional. He vetoed the first, and the veto was narrowly sustained by Congress.

  Many other similar actions by moderates to advance legislative reconstruction or to counter Johnson’s efforts to restore aspects of the old order marked his accidental presidency. In June 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed, categorically prohibiting the deprivation of “life, liberty, or property without due process of law” or denial of “the equal protection of the laws.” Almost a year later, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, establishing five military districts embracing ten Confederate states, where state constitutional conventions were held as a prelude to readmission to the Union. Again Johnson vetoed the legislation, and again Congress overrode the veto. Fearful that this president would use his power as commander in chief of the armed forces to further disrupt its reconstruction plan, Congress passed the Army Appropriations Act, requiring the president to function through the military governors in the Confederate states, and the Tenure of Office Act, which kept him from firing cabinet members opposed to his program.

  Johnson had retained Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, as the only member sympathetic to the Radical Republicans. While Congress was in recess, he fired Stanton and appointed General Grant as his replacement, but upon return the legislators refused to agree to Stanton’s removal. Grant left the War Department, and Stanton returned to his old office and barricaded himself inside, in consultation with this Radical Republican friends.

  On February 24, the House of Representatives’ majority voted unanimously to impeach Johnson for “high crimes and misdemeanors in office” in his ignoring the Tenure of Office Act and attempting to bring Congress into contempt and reproach. In the ensuing Senate trial, his lawyers argued in his absence that Johnson had not broken the law, because Stanton had been appointed by Lincoln and had served beyond Lincoln’s tenure. Johnson was saved by a single Senate vote.

  Afterward, Stanton resigned, and Johnson completed his term. His hope of shaping a party of Union preservationists, War Democrats, and a grateful recovering white South with which to win a second term in 1868 proved wildly illusionary. Out of office for the first time in thirty years, he ran for the Senate again that fall but was defeated. He ran again in 1875 and won, returning to the scene of his impeachment and his near miss of conviction. At the end of the short winter session, Johnson went back to Tennessee, where four months later he suffered a stroke and died at age sixty-six.

  Johnson’s passage from the scene was marked in his home state with customary honors, but his presidency consigned him to a starkly negative place in his country’s history. His vice presidency, far from being a stepping-stone to greater esteem in the White House, was more a gateway to condemnation for his repressive treatment of the freedmen of the South. His impeachment was the first such presidential censure; his greater repudiation was in the wide condemnation of his reconstruction policies that violated Lincoln’s second inaugural pledge of a presidency committed to “malice toward none, with charity for all.”

  SCHUYLER COLFAX

  OF INDIANA

  The calamitous presidency of Andrew Johnson, which shook the Republican Party over Reconstruction, assured that he would not be offered a term of his own in 1868. Nor was there, as a result of his early ascendancy to the first office, any incumbent vice president waiting in the wings to claim it. Still, the party did not have to look far for its nominee, as General U. S. Grant, the Northern hero of the Civil War, was riding high in public acclaim. Among those prominently mentioned as his running mate was the Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, who had played a significant role in the congressional resistance and eventual challenge to Johnson’s assumption of presidential reconstruction of the war-torn Union.

  Colfax was born in New York City on March 23, 1823, a descendant of General William Colfax, who had fought in the Revolutionary War, from the Battle of Bunker Hill to Yorktown. The general was a member of George Washington’s Life Guard and became its commander near the end of the war. Afterward he married Hester Schuyler, a cousin of another revolutionary general, Philip Schuyler. Their son, the first Schuyler Colfax, married in 1820 but died two years later, four months before his own namesake son was born. Young Schuyler attended school until his teens, when he had to drop out to help his mother. They moved to Brooklyn, where in 1834 she was remarried, to George W. Matthews, who was then only fourteen years older than his new stepson, and they became close friends.1

  The family moved in 1836 to New Castle, Indiana, a frontier town far removed from the city life with which the boy had become familiar. He clerked in the family store, which shared space with the village post office, and also worked on neighboring farms. In 1841 the family moved to South Bend, another village of fewer than a thousand souls, which remained Colfax’s home the rest of his life. Matthews was elected a county auditor as a Whig and made his stepson a deputy. Schuyler was a small lad of medium height with a genial disposition, which may have brought him the nickname “Smiler.” From an early age, he developed an inordinate interest in newspapers, particularly political news. By sixteen he was writing articles for the Indiana State Journal on the state legislature and at nineteen was hired by the local Whigs to edit the South Bend Free Press. Eventually he wrote to the editor of the New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, inquiring whether he might submit articles about his section of the country. The prominent Whig editor wrote back, “I shall be happy to hear from you on the terms so generously proposed by you as often as you think proper.… Let me hear what you see and learn about Politics, Business, Crops, etc.”2

  Young Colfax and Greeley remained lifetime friends, as the young man wrote long and fluidly about local political figures, especially about his early Whig and western hero, Henry Clay of Kentucky. He also joined a temperance society in South Bend, took a teetotaler’s oath, and stuck to it all his life. He wrote his fiancée of the pledge: “Thus far I have kept it strictly, and in all my gayety and blithesomeness no temptation shall ever lead me to pollute my lips with the liquid fire.”3 In due time, however, he found other routes off the straight and narrow.

  In 1844, Colfax got married and the next year purchased the local paper, renaming it the St. Joseph Valley Register. Now a confirmed Whig, he became a delegate to the party’s national convention in 1848 and to its state convention in the following year to write a new Indiana constitution. There he led an effort against a provision barring blacks from settling in the state and those already there from buying land. His labors failed, but the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally achieved the same end.4

  In 1851, as the Whig candidate for Congress from his district, he narrowly lost to the incumbent Democrat. Then in 1854, with the Whigs in disintegration, he ran again and won, but this time as an anti-slavery Know-Nothing, an emerging new nativist party that more prominently opposed alcohol, immigrants, and Catholics. The first Know-Nothing lodge was opened in the state that year, and Colfax specified he would remain in the ranks only for its anti-slavery plank. The Know-Nothings, a hodge-podge of disaffected Republicans, Democrats, and Whigs, split over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and quickly fell apart, and in 1856 Colfax retained his seat as a Republican.

  As the threat of secession over the slavery issue grew, his voice in the House and in the party against its extension into the West
became more prominent, and he traveled widely, speaking in support of preservation of the Union. When the war came and the Southern states did pull out, the House Republicans took over the majority, and his chairmanship of the House Post Offices and Post Roads Committee positioned him as a major dispenser of patronage within the House. In 1863 he was elected Speaker, and with his power to appoint committee chairmen, his popularity and support climbed.

  As Speaker, Colfax proved to be a fair and cordial arbiter of the House rules, with an occasional flair for the dramatic, and he frequently directly counseled President Lincoln on matters of state. As the war’s end approached, Colfax discussed Lincoln’s plans with him for reconciliation with the South and for its reconstruction. On April 14, 1865, with the armed conflict over, Lincoln invited the Speaker to join his party that night at Ford’s Theater. Colfax declined, but when he was awakened later and told of the tragedy, he rushed to the president’s bedside, across the street from the theater.5

  After Lincoln’s funeral, Colfax was soon obliged to confront the reconstruction plans of the new president, Andrew Johnson, which did not square with his own understanding of what Lincoln had been considering and with what Colfax himself favored. In his campaign for reelection in 1864, he had been happy to have the support of Johnson, who had just been made Lincoln’s running mate for his second term. Colfax had praised him then as “that loyal, Jackson-like and heroic Senator from Tennessee,” and in April 1865 in eulogizing Lincoln he had said of Johnson, “Andrew Johnson, to whom the public confidence was so quickly and worthily transferred, is cast in a sterner mold than he whose place he fills. He has warred on traitors in his mountain home as they have warred on him; and he insists, with this crowning infamy filling up their cup of wickedness, that treason should be made odious, and that mercy to the leaders who engendered it is cruelty to the nation.”6