Andrew Johnson: The President Who Wasn’t Lincoln

It was April 1865. The Civil War was finally over. An exhausted, bloodied nation breathed a deep sigh of relief… 

Then, suddenly, shockingly, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, felled by an assassin’s bullet while watching a play. 

To take the reins of power at this tumultuous moment required a great man, a man of compassion, discernment, and discipline. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice president, was not that man. 

This is not to say he didn’t have virtues. He did. He just didn’t have the stuff it took to meet the moment.

Born into abject poverty on December 29, 1808, Johnson was apprenticed — “sold” would be more accurate — to a tailor at the age of 10. Legally bound to serve until he was 21, he ran away after five years. He eventually settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he set up his own tailor’s shop and prospered. 

In 1834, he was elected mayor of Greeneville. From there, he climbed steadily up the political ladder; the state legislature in 1835, the US Congress in 1843, Governor in 1853, and the Senate in 1857. He was still serving as U.S. Senator for Tennessee in 1861 when the Civil War broke out.

Although Johnson was a Democrat and a slaveowner himself, when Tennessee left the Union to join the break-away Confederacy and defend legalized slavery, Johnson denounced his state’s secession on the floor of the Senate. 

“I will not give up this Government,” he thundered in December 1860. “No; I intend to stand by it, and I entreat every man throughout the nation who is a patriot…to come forward, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.” 

After Union military forces occupied large parts of Tennessee in 1862, Lincoln tagged Johnson as the state’s provisional military governor. It was a shrewd move on the president’s part: it demonstrated to Southerners and Democrats that they were welcomed as full partners with Lincoln’s Republican party in restoring the Union. 

Johnson himself joined hands with Lincoln’s policies by freeing his own slaves in 1863.

A Southern Democrat who could embrace the ending of slavery was exactly what Republicans hoped would draw Democratic voters to support Lincoln’s re-election bid in 1864. The Republican nominating convention duly replaced Lincoln’s original vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, with Johnson as Lincoln’s running-mate. 

Johnson’s career as vice president did not get off to a good start, to put it mildly. He showed up drunk at his—and Lincoln’s—inauguration on March 4, 1865. Johnson had an excuse. He was seriously ill with what was probably typhoid fever. Unfortunately, he chose to medicate himself with whiskey. 

No one dreamt that only six weeks later, the Confederacy would collapse, Lincoln would be dead from an assassin’s bullet, and Johnson would become the 17th president. 

At first, Johnson delighted the most radical members of Congress with promises that “treason must be made odious,” and when Johnson’s attorney general moved to indict several dozen of the high Confederate leadership for treason, it appeared as though Johnson would take a hard hand in reconstructing the Union. 

It quickly became evident, though, that Johnson saw the South’s plantation-owning and slave-owning elite as the sole cause of the Civil War; poor Southern whites were merely the victims of a “dangerous aristocracy” of plantation gentry, and he began handing out wholesale pardons to all but the most prominent Confederates.  

His plan for reconstruction required the Southern states to eliminate slavery, but Johnson saw no reason to extend voting rights, or many other rights, for that matter, to the freed slaves. When a baffled Congress tried to seize control by adopting civil rights and reconstruction legislation of its own, Johnson vetoed their efforts.  

Ultimately, the Republican majority overrode those vetoes and imposed a reconstruction plan more favorable to the freed slaves. This only exacerbated the tension between Johnson and the legislative branch, and finally, in 1868, on the paper-thin pretext that he had illegally terminated one of his cabinet officers, Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives; he missed conviction and removal by only one vote in the Senate. 

By that point, however, his presidency was effectively finished. After the election of Ulysses Grant, Johnson returned to Tennessee where he still enjoyed some popularity. 

In January 1875, he staged a political comeback by winning election once more to the U.S. Senate. But in July, he suffered a fatal stroke. 

He was buried in Greeneville, wrapped (by his own request) in an American flag. 

I’m Allen Guelzo, Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, for Prager University.