Once in the White House, Johnson appointed his handsome young son as his private secretary, and Robert loved the job. Men and women were always offering him all manner of reward for access to the President, so much so that soon gossips were talking about prostitutes hanging about Robert’s office in broad daylight—even alleging that Robert procured them for his father as well. Johnson tried to arrange a long sea voyage for his son, to no avail. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, that staunch and cantankerous Johnson ally, fretted about Robert’s continuing unreliability and finally threw up his hands. The young man was incorrigible. The Johnsons sent their son to what passed for treatment programs, also to no avail.
About a year after Andrew Johnson exited the White House, Robert Johnson purchased a bottle of laudanum from the local Greeneville pharmacy and swallowed its entire contents. He was thirty-five.
* * *
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IN 1864, REPUBLICANS across the political spectrum understood that to win the war and abolish slavery they needed to re-elect Abraham Lincoln. Even though several had toyed—and some had more than toyed—with nominating a different candidate, Republicans did not want to risk losing the election by splitting the party. Radicals acknowledged they needed to entice disgruntled conservatives. And since Vice President Hannibal Hamlin brought nothing new to the ticket, they’d have to replace him.
Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, a Southerner, a Democrat, seemed too good to be true. Yes, Johnson had owned slaves; yes, he had never cared a fig about abolition. That made his Unionist credentials impeccable, his propaganda value indisputable. Even Charles Sumner had doffed his hat, hailing Johnson as the very “faithful among the faithless.”
It’s been said Lincoln refused to tip the scales against Hamlin. John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s secretaries, claimed Lincoln kept his distance—because that’s what Lincoln told them. Journalist Noah Brooks, who also knew Lincoln, recalled that he’d been studiously silent on the matter of his running mate until after the Republican convention, when he said, “Andy Johnson, I think, is a good man.”
Other accounts of how Johnson came to be Vice President similarly suggest that Lincoln stayed impartial. But these accounts don’t seem credible. Why would a sitting President, a gifted political tactician rightly concerned he might not be re-elected, a man who deeply felt the deaths by war of so many men, and who devoted himself to abolishing slavery, why would this President leave the selection of a running mate to others—unless of course he knew that his vaunted impartiality served to camouflage his handiwork.
A more plausible point of view is that Lincoln worked diligently, but covertly; he did not wish to appear disloyal to Hamlin. Yet whether Lincoln pulled strings or stayed genuinely impartial, he didn’t protect Hamlin. Reportedly, he asked journalist John Forney to help nominate Johnson, and presumably he said much the same to Republican lawyer and convention delegate Abram Dittenhoefer, who claimed he knew “from the President’s own lips,” that Lincoln preferred Johnson. Johnson’s private secretary claimed Johnson was privy to these secret machinations. “I know it to be a fact that Mr. Lincoln desired the nomination of Johnson for Vice President,” the secretary asserted, “and that [William G. ‘Parson’] Brownlow and [Horace] Maynard went to Baltimore at request of Lincoln and Johnson to promote the nomination.”
Parson Brownlow and Horace Maynard were Tennessee Unionists who’d been among Johnson’s most vocal enemies, but they’d recently worked closely with him to quash the rebellion in Tennessee. And they did speak persuasively at the Baltimore convention on Johnson’s behalf. “I have battled against Andrew Johnson perseveringly, systematically and terribly, for a quarter of a century,” Parson Brownlow said. “[Now] we are hand-in-hand fighting the same battle for the preservation of the Union. We will fight for each other against the common foe. He is now at the head of our new State Government; and I take pleasure in saying that he is the right man in the right place.”
There were others who worked for Johnson because they assumed they were doing the President’s bidding, whether they were or not, and because they had their own motives. Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, and Seward’s friend Thurlow Weed, along with Henry Raymond, editor of The New York Times, both known as “Seward men,” wanted to prevent New York War Democrat Daniel Dickinson from getting the vice-presidential nomination. If Dickinson was on the ticket, and Lincoln won, Seward would have to resign from the cabinet: two men from New York could not traditionally occupy such powerful positions in the administration at the same time. So Seward men turned into Johnson men—and Seward remained a Johnson man, which continued to suit his purposes.
At the convention, Andrew Johnson won the most votes on the first ballot (200, as compared to Hamlin’s 150 and Dickinson’s 108), but they weren’t enough. Pennsylvania threw its votes to him, and Kentucky too, and then the stampede began, giving Johnson 494 votes, and Hamlin 17, Dickinson 9. The nomination was made unanimous, and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was announced the vice-presidential candidate.
“Can’t you find a candidate for Vice-President in the United States,” Thaddeus Stevens griped, “without going down to one of those damned rebel provinces to pick one up?”
Manton Marble, editor of the Democratic newspaper the New York World, wasn’t happy either, though for completely different reasons. “The age of statesmen is gone,” Marble wailed. “The age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors and fanatics has succeeded. God save the Republic!”
* * *
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IN NASHVILLE, CANNONS boomed out the good news. Vice-presidential nominee Andrew Johnson addressed a jubilant crowd in front of the St. Cloud Hotel. “Let the war for the Union go on,” he shouted, “and the Stars and Stripes be bathed, if need be, in a nation’s blood, till law be restored, and freedom firmly established.”
But he wanted nothing to do with negro equality. Work, yes: the freed people might work—and “make something for themselves”—if they could. He said it again: he wanted nothing to do with equality. As for slavery and those rebels who accused him of helping to abolish it, he reminded the crowd that he had warned everyone that slavery would be better protected inside the Union than out of it. And it wasn’t Lincoln who’d freed the slaves. And certainly he didn’t free the slaves. The South freed the slaves. The decision to secede had freed them.
A huge torchlight parade of black men and women then landed at the steps of the Capitol, where Johnson again spoke out. “Looking over this vast crowd of colored people,” he boomed, “and reflecting through what a storm of persecution and obloquy they are compelled to pass, I am almost induced to 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.”
A reporter on the scene heard shouting. “We want no Moses but you!”
“Humble and unworthy as I am,” Johnson shouted back, “if no other 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.”
Although Johnson did not specify the exact whereabouts of this fairer future, several of his supporters advised Moses to locate fair Canaan somewhere beyond the Rio Grande—near Texas perhaps, but at the least far, very, very far away.
CHAPTER FIVE
The South Victorious
“Peace if possible. Justice at any rate.”
—WENDELL PHILLIPS
In the summer of 1865, a few miles north of Decatur, Alabama, a paroled Confederate soldier lured a former slave into the woods. The man was said to have gotten too “saucy” when he learned he was free, so the ex-soldier shot him three times in the head and hurled his body into a river. In Mobile, white men and their dogs guarded the roadways, and they crisscrossed waterways by boat in search of black men and women who’d left plantations where they’d once worked. If captured,
they could be shot or hanged. “The white people tell them that they were free during the war,” a white man said, “but the war is now over, and they must go to work again as before.” Andrew Johnson had been President fewer than four months.
Near Hilton Head, South Carolina, a former Treasury agent named Albert Browne heard of the young black boy who’d been ambushed by a pardoned Confederate soldier who shot him fifty-seven times, mostly in the face and head. “What most men mean to-day by the ‘president’s plan of reconstruction’ is the pardon of every rebel for the crime of rebellion, and the utter refusal to pardon a single black loyalist for the ‘crime’ of being black,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson tersely observed.
A black woman, pregnant and too sick to stay at her spinning wheel, was stripped naked, gagged, kicked, and whipped by her white employer for not spinning more. Traveling south in the summer of 1865, Clara Barton saw that the lashes had cut so deep into the woman’s back she could barely put on a dress. This was said to have been an isolated incident—deplorable, yes, but isolated.
Black men and women in Andersonville, Georgia, were told that because Abraham Lincoln was dead, they were no longer free. Mary Stewart, a former slave, was working for Thomas Day in Tangipahoa, Louisiana. When Day’s son told her “he was going to kill the damned free niggers,” he wasn’t exaggerating. He then grabbed her, cut her several times with his pocket knife, and dragged her into his mother’s house. Lucky for Mary Stewart, Day’s mother put a stop to it and Stewart ran away. This too was supposed to have been an isolated incident.
In Twiggs County, Georgia, a white man fired at a black man strolling down the street—“apparently for the fun of the thing,” said a person who witnessed the killing. This was an isolated incident, the witness said. “These negro-shooters and their accomplices were no doubt a small minority of the people,” he claimed. The “better class” of white men and women, he also noted, didn’t “deem it prudent” to assist in the arrest, never mind the trial, of the murderers. “The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing a white man before a tribunal!” a member of this better class exclaimed. “The Southern people a’n’t going to stand that.”
In Norfolk, Virginia, a black soldier was hanged near the black children’s school so that the children could see his body when they looked out the classroom window. When federal troops were removed from Attala County, Mississippi, two black men and two white Union-sympathizers were murdered. In Nashville, Tennessee, where Johnson had been military governor, a Union man told a federal soldier that “if you take away the military from Tennessee, the buzzards can’t eat up the niggers as fast as we’ll kill ’em.” Similarly, in Columbia, South Carolina, Major-General Adelbert Ames, future governor of Mississippi, said that if military left the area, the black population would be at serious risk. “They will be in a much worse condition than when slaves—for then they were worth from five to ten hundred dollars and were objects of care—now they are not worth the ground in which they are buried.”
Journalist Whitelaw Reid, traveling through the South for a year right after the war, discounted as hyperbolic most of the tales he’d heard of shootings and whippings. Regardless, he relayed the story of a physician near Greenville, Mississippi, who threatened to shoot his employee, a black man, when the man didn’t perform some small task. The employee ran, and the doctor did shoot him, dead. The doctor’s wife had tried to stop her husband so he shot her too. This was also said to be an isolated incident.
One local paper accused Northerners of “seizing upon isolated instances of violence and crime in the Southern States—especially if the negro is in any way a victim—and commenting upon them to the prejudice of the returning loyalty and sense of justice of the Southern people.” But Reid began to wonder. “People had not got over regarding negroes as something other than human,” he decided.
There had been an epidemic of such apparently isolated incidents since Andrew Johnson took the oath of office, but Johnson declared he didn’t believe the “sensation letter-writers and editors, who were endeavoring to create the impression that there exists in the South disaffection and dissatisfaction.”
“The ‘situation’ is not decidedly smooth, yet, all things considered it is much better than could be expected,” William Holden, North Carolina’s provisional governor, accounted for the murders. “There are malcontents, radicals, & not good men who are engaged in misrepresenting facts & fermenting strife for certain purposes.” Holden warned Johnson about a “Conflict of races” if the “old order of things” wasn’t quickly restored, or if federal troops weren’t removed from the South.
Everyone agreed about one thing: the situation was serious.
* * *
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GRASS HAD SPROUTED up between the broken paving stones, and almost everywhere you looked, there were burned-out fields, trackless railroads, and trees that had been blown apart. In Charleston, South Carolina, white men and women, gaunt and worn, drifted aimlessly along the splintered wharves. Although the cannons had not destroyed the stately homes near the harbor, their windows had been smashed, their floors had buckled, and the walls lurched at ridiculous angles, while wagons rolled into a city already overflowing with refugees, black and white, desperate for jobs and shelter and food. According to Whitelaw Reid, residents of the city were fast becoming as vituperative and treasonous as they had been before the war.
In Richmond, the police stopped black men and women as they walked to market or to church, demanding they show the pass recently issued by Provost Marshal General Patrick. If they didn’t have a pass, he ordered that they be arrested, and soon about 250 people were detained. Workers too were frequently seized, the police claiming that their passes must be counterfeit. One such man was Albert Brooks, a former slave who owned a livery stable that employed several black men. The police demanded Brooks shell out over $1,100 if he wanted to get out of jail.
In June of 1865, a delegation of seven black residents of Richmond arrived at the White House to protest the treatment of the black population. Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, was an unrepentant Confederate, the delegation told President Johnson, and “our old masters have become our enemies, who seek not only to oppress our people but to thwart the designs of the Federal Government.” Journalist Thomas Morris Chester, also black, read the petition aloud. “When we saw the glorious old flag again streaming over the capitol,” it concluded, “we thought the power of these wicked men was at an end.” President Johnson listened, received the accompanying affidavits, promised to look into the complaint, and told the men to be patient. He forwarded the petition to the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau while a writer for the Richmond Commercial Bulletin scoffed at the grumblers, who’d poked “their woolly heads inside of the executive doors.”
Later that month, the President also received a petition signed by almost fifteen hundred black people from South Carolina, asking that they be allowed to vote to protect themselves against the “unjust legislation” threatening their safety and their freedom. Johnson was courteous but impassive.
At the same time he was pardoning former rebels or rebel sympathizers at an alarming rate of almost one hundred a day, and now these pardoned Confederates were beginning to hold state offices. Colonel J.P.H. Russ of Raleigh, appointed postmaster, said his position on the slavery question was clear: if he had the power, he’d re-enslave everyone now free. Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, was expected to return to Congress in the fall. “The present pardoning process will restore and unite the South and reinstate the worst Rebels in power,” said a leading Republican.
Throughout the country, black men and women were meeting in assemblies, town halls, small gatherings, freedmen’s conventions, and churches to discuss their rights and their future. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, and in Natchez, Tennessee, blacks prepared petitions claiming their right to vote. In Nashville, the Reverend James D. Lynch, a free black ma
n who would later serve as Mississippi’s secretary of state, reminded folks that “when the nation stood trembling on the precipice, the black man came to the rescue.” In New Orleans, the National Union Republican Club, composed of both black and white men, arranged a celebration of freedom for the Fourth of July, and then under the auspices of the Friends of Universal Suffrage, black and white together backed voting rights for all adult men; they sent the young lawyer Henry Clay Warmoth, a white Radical formerly from Illinois, to speak for them in Congress. Black men and women drafted resolutions that they hoped would receive a hearing. One such, by a group of black men who met at the Union Street Methodist Church in Petersburg, Virginia, claimed they were entitled to vote as “true and loyal citizens of the United States, who had contributed militarily to the Revolution and the recent war.”
The black citizens of Alexandria, Virginia, delivered a petition to President Johnson asking that the federal government retain control over the Alexandria city government, lest they be deprived of their civil rights. Johnson politely referred the petition to the War Department. James Gloucester, a black clergyman in New York, told the new head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver Otis Howard, that the Bureau should be staffed with “intelligent, experienced, uneducated, upright colored men”—but it had not been; it was staffed with white men. Though he was temperamentally conservative, Howard listened carefully and then confidentially told his wife that, after talking frequently with the President, he was “quite apprehensive, that the freedmen’s rights will not be cared for.”
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