The presidency of Andrew Johnson

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To broaden the base of the Republican Party to include loyal “war” Democrats, Johnson was selected to run for vice president on Lincoln’s reelection ticket of 1864. His first appearance on the national stage was a fiasco. On Inauguration Day he imbibed more whiskey than he should have to counter the effects of a recent illness, and as he swayed on his feet and stumbled over his words, he embarrassed his colleagues in the administration and dismayed onlookers. Northern newspapers were appalled. His detractors later seized on this incident to accuse him of habitual drunkenness. Less than five weeks later he was president.

Thrust so unexpectedly into the White House (April 14, 1865), he was faced with the enormously vexing problem of reconstructing the Union and settling the future of the former Confederate states. Congressional Radical Republicans, who favored severe measures toward the defeated yet largely impenitent South, were disappointed with the new president’s program with its lenient policies begun by Lincoln and its readmission of seceded states into the Union with few provisions for reform or civil rights for freedmen, who, although emancipated, were destitute, uneducated, and subject to exploitation and mistreatment. This element in Congress was outraged at the return of power to traditional white aristocratic hands and protested the emergence of restrictive Black codes aimed at controlling and suppressing the formerly enslaved. The Republican majority refused to seat the Southern congressmen and set up a Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction. Johnson viewed their actions as a usurpation of his power, and he believed that continued punitive measures in the South, along with a guarantee of suffrage to Black Americans, was not supported by majority opinion nationwide. He was reluctant to insist on suffrage for Black residents in the South when it had not been granted in the North. He believed that placing power over whites in the hands of the formerly enslaved would create an intolerable situation.

Johnson’s vetoing of two important pieces of legislation aimed at protecting Black Americans, an extension of the Freedman’s Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was disastrous. His vetoes united Moderate and Radical Republicans in outrage and further polarized a situation already filled with acrimony. Congress at first failed to override the Freedman’s Bureau veto (a second attempt carried the measure) but succeeded with the Civil Rights Act; it was the first instance of a presidential veto’s being overridden. In addition, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, conferring citizenship on all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteeing them equal protection under the law. Against Johnson’s objections, the amendment was ratified.

In the congressional elections of 1866, Johnson undertook an 18-day speaking tour into the Midwest, which he called “a swing around the circle,” in order to explain and defend his policies and defeat congressional candidates opposing them. His effort proved a failure. His speeches were often rabble-rousing and ill-tempered as he tried to deal with hecklers sympathetic to the Radicals. In Indianapolis, Indiana, a confrontation with a crowd led to violence in which one man was killed. A result was sweeping electoral victories everywhere for the Radicals. With strong majorities in the House and Senate, they would now have sufficient votes to override any presidential veto of their bills. The president was unable to block legislation that tipped the balance of power to the Congress over the Executive.

In March 1867 the new Congress passed, over Johnson’s veto, the first of the Reconstruction acts, providing for suffrage for male freedmen and military administration of the Southern states. With Reconstruction virtually taken out of his hands, the president, by exercising his veto and by narrowly interpreting the law, managed to delay the program so seriously that he contributed materially to its failure. He maintained that the Reconstruction acts were unconstitutional because they were passed without Southern representation in Congress. Aloof, gruff, and undiplomatic, Johnson constantly antagonized the Radicals. They became his sworn enemies.

Impeachment

Johnson played into the hands of his enemies by an imbroglio over the Tenure of Office Act, passed the same day as the Reconstruction acts. It forbade the chief executive from removing without the Senate’s concurrence certain federal officers whose appointments had originally been made by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The question of the power of the president in this matter had long been a controversial one. Johnson plunged ahead and dismissed from office Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton—the Radicals’ ally within his cabinet—to provide a court test of the act’s constitutionality. In response, the House of Representatives voted articles of impeachment against the president—the first such occurrence in U.S. history. While the focus was on Johnson’s removal of Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, the president was also accused of bringing “into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States.” The evidence cited was chiefly culled from the speeches he had made during his “swing around the circle.” What was at stake in the trial was not only the fate of a president but the very nature of the federal government. If Congress were able to remove the president, then, many Americans believed, the United States would be a dictatorship run by the leaders of Congress.

In a theatrical proceeding before the Senate, presided over by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, the charges proved weak, despite the passion with which they were argued, and the key votes (May 16 and 26, 1868) fell one short of the necessary two-thirds for conviction, seven Republicans voting with Johnson’s supporters. These men had been placed under the keenest pressure to vote to convict. One of them, Edmund Ross of Kansas, declared that, as he cast his ballot, “I almost literally looked into my open grave.” When a messenger brought Johnson the news that the Senate had failed to convict him, he wept, declaring that he would devote the remainder of his life to restoring his reputation.

Despite his exoneration, Johnson’s usefulness as a national leader was over. During his remaining days in office, he extended his grants of amnesty to all of the former rebels. The vexing problem of Black suffrage was addressed by Congress’s passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified during the ensuing administration of Ulysses S. Grant), which forbade denial of suffrage on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” At the 1868 Democratic National Convention, Johnson received a modest number of votes, but he did not actively seek renomination.

After returning to Tennessee, Johnson finally won reelection (1875) as a U.S. senator shortly before he died (he had unsuccessfully run for a Senate seat in 1869 and in 1872 lost a race for a seat in the House of Representatives). Ironically, none of the senators who voted to acquit him was returned to office. In 1926, in the case of Myers v. United States, the Supreme Court handed down an opinion on the tangled question of the president’s power to remove officials from office that, in effect, vindicated the position Johnson had taken, declaring the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional.

Cabinet of Pres. Andrew Johnson

The table provides a list of cabinet members in the administration of Pres. Andrew Johnson.