Andrew Johnson's Civil War and Reconstruction

Introduction

Introduction “No public man in the United States has been so imperfectly understood as Andrew Johnson. None has been so difficult to understand.”1 This observation by Hugh McCulloch, Johnson’s secretary of the treasury, is as true today as it was 120 years ago when he wrote it.There have been many attempts by scholars and biographers to unravel the mysteries of Johnson, but we still have a partial or “imperfect” understanding of the man who followed Lincoln in the presidency. Contributing to this difficulty of deciphering Johnson is that he was a controversial figure in the nineteenth century who marched across the national stage at a turbulent time in America’s history. On a cold day in late December 1808,Jacob and Mary McDonough Johnson welcomed the birth of Andrew, their third child. Consigned to the ranks of Raleigh’s urban poor, the family never rose above that status. Compounding their difficulties, less than a week after young Andrew’s third birthday, Jacob died from an illness contracted from his heroic rescue of three men from a pond. From the beginning, Andrew’s life was one of relentless struggle, caused by poverty and lack of education . Apparently having no other option, his mother apprenticed him to a Raleigh tailor in late 1818. In those early years, Andrew learned two valuable skills: tailoring and reading. As an adventuresome teenager,Andrew moved west to East Tennessee in 1826. Once there he established himself as a successful tailor in Greeneville and married Eliza McCardle in May 1827; she was sixteen, he was eighteen. Within two years, Johnson launched his climb up the political ladder when the Greeneville citizens elected him as alderman, a post he would hold through 1834. From there he moved to the larger Introduction 2 stage in 1835 with his election to the state legislature, where he served until 1843 (with the exception of a two-year break). On his election as U.S. representative in 1843, Johnson entered the national arena for a ten-year stint. He returned to the Tennessee scene in 1853, when voters chose him as their governor, a position he would hold for four years. Finally, in 1857, he returned to Washington, this time to serve as U.S. senator. He vacated this office in March 1862 when President Lincoln appointed him as military governor of his home state.Throughout this saga, Johnson moved from poverty to prominence, a road marked by personal and political struggle and accomplishment—perhaps a fit subject for one of Horatio Alger’s novels. Johnson came of age as a politician in the 1830s,a time of confusion, tumult, and transition in Tennessee politics. The anti-Jackson movement (subsequently Whigs) sprang up almost overnight in the middle of the decade and captured supporters throughout the state, much to the chagrin and dismay of Andrew Jackson’s followers.Ushering in this new movement was Hugh Lawson White of Knoxville, arguably the second most popular and prominent figure in the state next to Jackson. White presented himself as a stronger, more authentic Jacksonian than Old Hickory himself. Such a stance swayed a majority of Tennessee voters to back him in the 1836 presidential election. Johnson, who admired White and valued their East Tennessee connection, flirted fleetingly with the anti-Jackson movement and supported White. But within three years he switched back to his earlier Jacksonian allegiance. Shortly thereafter, the Democratic committee rewarded Johnson by designating him as one of the two state at-large electors in the 1840 presidential contest. From that point forward, he never wavered in his devotion to the party of Jackson.2 Various elements of the Jacksonian ideology, notably an emphasis on the “common man,” attracted Johnson. He eagerly identified with a political group that sought to recruit artisans and “mechanics” to its cause. For Johnson, however, the corollary of this was hostility toward so-called aristocrats. He subscribed also to the Jacksonian insistence on a limited government, whether local, state, or national. Like most Democrats, therefore, he abhorred the eventual Whig position in favor of governmental assistance to the economy, specifically the support of Introduction 3 banks,tariffs,and internal improvements.Laissez-faire thus became the great watchword of Jackson’s followers.Devotion to a strict rendering of the U.S. Constitution was likewise one of the hallmarks of Jacksonian ideology, as well as one of Johnson’s core convictions. Closely allied to that was a belief in the superior rights of the states, rather...