When redistricting in Tennessee made it obvious that he could not win another election to the House of Representatives, Johnson ran successfully for governor, and he ran for governor again in 1855, bitterly attacking the American, or “Know-Nothing,” party. With his talent for the stump, as well as his willingness to cut deals with Whigs, Johnson won a surprising victory. By then he was forty-seven years old, heavier, his hair slightly thinning, his brow wrinkled. Two years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
In Washington, he kept mainly to himself. Jefferson Davis later recalled that Johnson used his “plebeian origins as a bar to warm social relations.” A friend recalled that Johnson “had no sense of humor.” One of his White House secretaries said he saw Johnson smile only once, and though he seemed polite enough at official receptions, his eye “lacked the luster of a light heart.” In fact, there was nothing light about him. A zealous autodidact, he larded his speeches with quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, and John Milton, and he so admired Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” that he often recited it. He read Alexander Pope with pleasure, quoting,
“Unlearned, he knew no schoolman’s subtle art,
No language but the language of the heart.
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance and exercise….”
He often returned to Joseph Addison’s 1713 tragedy Cato, committing much of the play to memory. Like Cato resisting the imperial Caesar, Johnson said that after the war, he wanted only to “restore the commonwealth to liberty,” and during his impeachment trial, he told his secretary that “Cato was a man who would not compromise with wrong but being right, died before he would yield.”
Though he easily took offense, while campaigning he could brush aside most slurs. When Parson William G. Brownlow called him a toady whose father was indicted for pilfering poultry—and that he came “from as mean a family as any rake who ever came from North Carolina”—Johnson shrugged it off. When vilified as an atheist and a Roman Catholic, Johnson sharply countered that no one could be a Catholic and an infidel at the same time. The only smear that bothered him was the charge that he was born a bastard.
He avoided organized religion, but during his impeachment trial, he started attending St. Patrick’s Church in Washington to hear the sermons of Bernard Maguire, the Irish-born president of Georgetown College, whom he admired. Overall, though, he said his “faith” was “based on the eternal principles of right”—which he felt he could ascertain himself. If he needed to refer to a Bible, he turned to the Constitution. Politics was his religion. “The passion of his life was the desire of power,” an acquaintance reminisced.
In the Senate, Johnson often dreamed of occupying the Executive Mansion. And why shouldn’t he? A clairvoyant had whispered to him that Old John Brown, the raider of Harper’s Ferry, sent word from Hell, where Brown now lived, that said Andrew Johnson would be nominated President. The clairvoyant may have bungled the message a bit, but Johnson heard what he wanted to hear, for the White House was the highest rung on his ladder, and by 1860, it may have seemed in reach.
At the State Democratic convention in Nashville, Tennessee, he maneuvered allies hoping to secure enough delegates to nominate him for President at the national convention, but he hadn’t reckoned on Democrats spinning out of control. When the party met nationally in Charleston the issue was slavery, the issue was secession, the issue was the Republicans. Southern Democrats marched out of the national convention. Reconvening in Baltimore, those Democrats who hadn’t bolted the party nominated Stephen Douglas for President; the rest proceeded to nominate John Breckinridge. Realizing he didn’t stand a chance, Johnson withdrew his name and without much enthusiasm endorsed Breckinridge. He was not optimistic about the future of the country.
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TENNESSEE GOVERNOR ISHAM Harris once said that if Andy Johnson was a snake, he’d bite the heels of rich men’s children. Like Johnson, Harris was an outspoken, raucous man, but unlike Johnson, he was an unapologetic secessionist who slammed Lincoln as a bloody tyrant. When Lincoln told Governor Harris that he needed soldiers to crush the rebellion, the Tennessee governor instead instructed the state legislature to adopt an ordinance of secession, which would be submitted to the voters for ratification in early June.
Andrew Johnson, who hated Harris as much as he loathed secession, spoke against secession at a Unionist convention in Knoxville, even though he’d been told he’d be beheaded if he dared to open his mouth. Johnson was unafraid. When a nearby brass band noisily tried to drown him out, Johnson just raised his voice louder and kept talking. Even his critics admired his guts. But by the late spring of 1861, it was all too late, and when Johnson returned to Washington, he rode out of Tennessee just ahead of the secessionists hoping to assassinate him.
Back in Washington, Johnson was appointed to the joint congressional committee tasked with overseeing the conduct of the war. That July, Congress approved his and Senator Crittenden’s resolution that war be waged only to restore the Union, not to abolish slavery. Thaddeus Stevens did not vote for the resolution, but most congressmen did.
Johnson continued railing against the secessionists: in seeking to break up the Union, this handful of rabid traitors had usurped the will of the people, and these traitors must be defeated. “My wife and children have been turned in to the street,” he said. “My house has been turned into a barracks, and for what? Because I stand by the Constitution.” But after these miserable traitors were defeated, the Southern states could return to the Union because, according to Johnson, the Constitution stipulated that the states could never leave, guns and cannons notwithstanding.
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AFTER THE WAR, he did not change his tune. There was something remarkably consistent about Andrew Johnson, although in his case, and as it turned out, consistency was no virtue.
On February 23, 1862, Nashville citizens gathered along the riverbank to greet General Don Carlos Buell and the Union army, which had forced the Confederates in Tennessee out of the city. That same day, Abraham Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson military governor of Tennessee.
Unsure of what exactly he was supposed to do beyond serving at the President’s pleasure, Johnson was presumably to form a provisional government in Nashville, one sturdy enough to succeed the Confederate government (now situated in Memphis) if and when Union troops removed it. So his assignment was not only vague, it was dangerous, since rebels controlled the western part of the state. “Let Andrew Johnson beware,” they said. “He may find a Corday in every woman he meets; he may expect at every corner, in every crowd, the ball that is to send him to his Maker’s presence, unshrived of his odious crimes.”
Johnson immediately denounced traitors by name, appointed loyal men to government posts, and imprisoned any city official who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Union; that included the mayor of Nashville and eminent clergymen. Enemies accused him of inaugurating a reign of terror, but he was impervious to criticism. He sent General A. C. Gillem into the hills of East Tennessee to rout the guerillas who’d been murdering men and women throughout the state. Newspaper publishers sympathetic to the Confederacy could find themselves in jail, and he levied monthly assessments on rebel-sympathizers on behalf of the wives, widows, and children reduced to poverty. By spring, he was boasting to Lincoln that he had arrested more than seventy rebels. Johnson gave Southerners a chance to pledge their allegiance, and by paroling offenders, he conducted a covert policy of conciliation. “I hardly ever got my hands on a rebel stock of supplies,” said Union General Grenville Dodge, “that I did not find Johnson trying to pull them off.”
Johnson was adamant about fortifying East Tennessee—and Nashville—and kept pestering Stanton, Lincoln, and General Buell for military assistance. He disliked the cautious Buell, who planned to leave Nashville utter
ly undefended in the summer of 1862. Johnson threatened to burn Nashville to the ground before he’d surrender it to the legendary Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest or to John Morgan’s fabled raiders. General William S. Rosecrans (“Old Rosy”) replaced Buell, and when Rosecrans successfully defended the city, Johnson took the credit.
Soon Johnson and Rosecrans were at odds, partly over jurisdiction: who controlled state operations, the railroads, or confiscated goods, the military governor or the military commander? The lines weren’t clearly drawn. To mollify an irritated Johnson, Secretary of War Stanton gave him, as military governor, authority over the completion of the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad and over public buildings and property. Johnson was also in charge of dispersing abandoned lands and plantations, which meant he had to provide for the welfare and employment of former slaves. Lincoln, recognizing an enormous opportunity for propaganda, pressed Johnson to raise black troops. As the President explained, imagine Andrew Johnson, a slaveholder from a slave state, arming black men: “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers upon the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once,” Lincoln told him.
But conservative Tennessee Unionists were fighting to save the Union not to abolish slavery. At the beginning of the war, Johnson had been one of them. “Damn the negroes,” he’d reportedly said. “I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their masters!” Certainly Johnson had never questioned the morality of the so-called “peculiar institution.” Quite the reverse: he insisted that slavery provided far better conditions for black men and women than they would enjoy in Africa and certainly enjoyed better conditions than the Northern wage slave, who had to grind out a pittance in a factory. To Johnson, free blacks were much worse off than Southern slaves. As governor of Tennessee in peacetime, he’d sanctioned the American Colonization Society’s attempt to export freed slaves to Liberia, and now, as Tennessee’s military governor, he’d be happy to shove them right out of his state.
Johnson and other prominent Unionists managed to get Tennessee exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, but of late Johnson’s proslavery rhetoric had cooled. The only way to destroy the Confederacy and save the Union, Johnson came to believe, was to accept emancipation. “If you persist in forcing the issue of slavery against the Government,” he had shouted in 1862 during a Fourth of July rally, “I say in the face of Heaven, ‘Give me my Government, and let the negroes go!’ ”
Johnson’s policy had little to do with any change of heart, for as one of his devoted private secretaries later commented, Johnson “sometimes exhibited a morbid distress and feeling against the negroes.” Rather, he feared the proslavery Unionists who were organizing against him. With another rung on the political ladder to climb, Andrew Johnson, no fool, realized that his political future lay with the Lincoln administration—and with the Unionists of the North, even if he was a Democrat and they were Republicans. (Louis Wigfall had been right when he accused Johnson of pandering to the North.) And Lincoln, who had taken Johnson’s measure, knew how to manage him. “In my opinion the country now needs no special thing so much as some man of your ability, and position, to go to this work,” Lincoln sweet-talked him, referring to the “work” of emancipation.
By the summer of 1863, Johnson supported immediate, unconditional emancipation. His reasoning was consistent with his hatred of the aristocrat: emancipation would liberate the white man from the tyranny of the plutocrat slaveholder. He did not for a minute believe “that the negro race is equal to the Anglo-Saxon—not at all.”
A recruiting agent for black troops, Major George Stearns, was sent to Nashville. Formerly one of the so-called secret six abolitionists who’d funded John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid, Stearns was appalled by what he found there: black men grabbed off the street and pressed into service; if they resisted, they were shot. On his way home from church, one such black man, Armstead Lewis, had been marched to a recruitment camp where he was left out in the cold with other black men, none of them given coats or blankets, none of them allowed to light fires, all of them surrounded by guards. “The colored men here are treated like brutes,” an aghast Stearns reported to Stanton.
Johnson was furious when he learned of the Stearns report. As military governor, he, Andrew Johnson, should have sole jurisdiction over the recruitment of black soldiers, not some pie-eyed philanthropist with airy notions.
Seen in retrospect, Johnson’s anger forecast his conduct in the future, for his racial animus had never wavered, and it would never change.
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GENERAL CARL SCHURZ reminisced that in 1863, when he’d called on Military Governor Johnson at the Nashville State House, he was told that the governor had suddenly taken ill. A few days later, when Johnson did meet with Schurz, he deflected all questions about his health in a way that made Schurz suspicious. Charles Dana also remembered Military Governor Johnson in Nashville. As Stanton’s assistant secretary of war, Dana had been sent to investigate rumors about General Grant’s drinking. Dana went to Johnson’s office, where Johnson offered him a whiskey. Dana took a glass but noticed that Johnson mixed his own drink with water. “The theoretical, philosophical drinker pours out a little whiskey and puts in almost no water at all—drinks it pretty nearly pure—” Dana said, “but when a man gets to taking a good deal of water in his whiskey, it shows he is in the habit of drinking a good deal.”
This too is recollection. So was the story of a Tennessee acquaintance who later called on Johnson in the White House. Learning he was ill, she claimed that she immediately understood him to be “either drunk or recovering from the effects of deep drinking.” Charles Sumner remembered that when Johnson arrived in Washington for his inauguration as Vice President, he brought with him two bulbous bottles that held from three to ten gallons of liquor, which he freely distributed. A soldier staying on the same floor as Johnson at the Kirkwood House counted twenty-six glasses of whiskey go into Johnson’s room.
Most of these stories—and countless others—were offered in a spirit of rancor, and many of the slanders appear to be without foundation. More believable is the point of view of those who said that in Tennessee everyone drank, and Johnson never concealed the fact that he did too, although never to excess. “The Governor had ‘his infirmities,’ ” a companion explained, “but was ‘all right,’ on the whole.” As another old-timer put it, “he never got too drunk to disremember his friends.” Johnson’s private secretary said Johnson did not take wine with his meals, “he never drank a cocktail in his life, never was in a barroom, and did not care for champagne. He did take two or three or four glasses of Robertson County whiskey some days,” the secretary added. “And some days less, and some days and weeks no liquor at all.” The secretary concluded that “Johnson would have been termed a strictly temperate man.” And Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch observed that while Johnson might be intemperate in his speeches, he was never uncontrolled in his drinking. That’s what Abraham Lincoln had reportedly said too. “I have known Andy a great many years, and he ain’t no drunkard.” A drinker, yes; a drunkard, no.
But at his inauguration as Vice President, Andrew Johnson was definitely smashed: “Drunk as a fool & made a fool of himself,” a witness said. The Blair family bundled the mortified man off to their estate in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he could recover from whatever it was that he needed to recover from—malaria or typhoid, Frank Blair, Jr., publicly stated. Privately, they noted “our friend will get out [of] all this if—these things are the result of illness—but if it is followed up—why he is lost—& of this he had been made fully aware.” Shortly after Johnson took the oath of office as President, he broke down again, and Montgomery Blair offered cover while admitting, “I regret the President’s illness very much & still more the whiskey as to the cause of it.”
If Johnson could control his drinking, his two eldest sons could not. Charles, the e
ldest, an affable young man remembered as kind and loveable, went on such a wild bender during the Democratic convention in Charleston in 1860 that his younger brother Robert had to hustle him quickly out of town. Three years later, when Charles was thirty-three, he fatally fell or was thrown from his horse. The word was that he’d been drunk. By then, Robert too had a problem. In 1859, at the age of twenty-four, Robert Johnson had successfully run for the Tennessee state legislature, and during the war, he raised a regiment. But he had a reputation for inebriation, and though drinking in the army usually passed unnoticed, General Rosecrans warned Andrew Johnson that his son’s alcohol consumption had “become a subject of remark everywhere.”
In the spring of 1863, Robert did fight admirably against an Alabama cavalry of about two thousand men and apparently took fifty prisoners, but the following fall, his father, disgusted by more reports of Robert’s drinking, made him resign his commission. “I have said and now repeat that I feared you would be dismissed from the Army unless you reformed and took Command of your Regiment and give Some evidence of determination to Serve the country as a sober upright and honorable man,” Johnson told his son. Robert said he’d do better: “The intoxicating bowl goes to my lips no more,” the young man promised. But a pattern had been set in motion: Robert would swear off liquor, his parents would believe him, then he’d backslide. In the spring of 1865, he wasn’t even sober enough to understand that President Lincoln had been shot.
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