Lincoln's Folly

Lincoln’s folly

By BRETT WARNKE

If Lincoln is consistently ranked as one of the country’s preeminent presidents—earning endless historical attention, novelization, fanfare kitsch, and now even Hollywood dramatization—Americans should also recognize Abe’s lesser addressed contribution to American politics: Andrew Johnson. 

Lincoln’s little-discussed choice for Vice President was the worst decision of a successful candidate in American history.  The Siena College Research Institute has asked 238 presidential scholars to rank presidents five times since 1982.  Johnson, Lincoln’s successor has had a consistent place on the sea floor of presidential rankings, alongside Lincoln’s cockeyed predecessor James Buchanan.  In 2011 he was dead last. 

In her 2011 biography of Johnson, Annette Gordon Reed called Johnson “spectacularly unsuited” to be President in 1865, citing him as the man who “botched Reconstruction, who energized and gave aid and comfort to the recently defeated enemies of the United States, the first president to be impeached by the House of Representative.”  It is simple.  “America went from the best to the worst in one presidential term,” she wrote

Steven Spielberg, ever cursing his films with optimistic endings, did give Andy a silent cameo behind the yarn-spinning Lincoln at the conclusion of his new film.  A Spielberg sequel, however unlikely, disclosing the dysfunction of American politics, which reached its paramount with a President Johnson, would be more appropriate today.  Or, at least, more necessary for “change in Washington” than a soothing flick about unity, sacrifice, and compromise.  Especially, as our politicians peddle austerity to us as if it were necessary. 

The trivia night facts about the senator from Tennessee might include his impeachment by what he labeled “Radical” Republicans and his rescue by one vote.  But with a shamefully low number of 33, Andy Johnson has fewer likes than Frito’s on facebook.  And even the National Park Service is currently looking for someone (anyone!) to be an interpreter at his home in Greeneville, Tennessee.  

Little about Johnson has leaked into contemporary popular culture, despite his crashing failure whose consequences were felt deep into the twentieth century. 

 Lincoln’s selection of Andy Johnson should sully the sixteenth president’s bright legacy a bit more than it does.  By diluting, obstructing, and delaying necessary social legislation during nascent Reconstruction, ripping at the seams Lincoln spent his best years spinning.  

If Lincoln ever remotely suspected assassination during the twilight hours of the Civil War, the obsessed Johnson’s selection was even more reckless.   Lincoln, who could warm up an Arctic night, was the perfect blend of pragmatism and principle.  Meanwhile, the racist Johnson who believed in a “White Man’s government,” was “self-sufficient, grim, impervious,” according to biographer Clifton Hall.  Hall writes: 

No man was ever less qualified than Johnson to overcome prejudice by virtue of his personality…He possessed none of the appealing gentleness, broad sympathy, and deep understanding of and love for humanity, none of the saving humor which made up so much of the greatness and power of Lincoln. His mind was narrow, bigoted, uncompromising, suspicious; his nature solitary and reticent; his demeanor coldly repellant or violently combative. 

 Recent books have been written about Lincoln’s proclivity for friendships (We Are Lincoln Men by David Herbert Donald.) Yet his Vice President was notoriously friendless and wary of southern aristocrats for very different reasons than Lincoln--class envy and personal resentment.  Jaded Johnson was the most intriguing kind of antihero—a small man in power who thought he was the little guy.  However, in Hall’s words, Johnson did have three admirable qualities “singleness of mind, tenacity of purpose, and indomitable persistency.” 

But these traits were borne of an inflexibility Lincoln might have imagined as a roadblock to the compromises necessary in a postwar era. 

 Branded the “Tennessee Tailor” for his humble illiterate upbringing, Johnson is, after all, the godfather of trust your gut, strict-constructionist absolutism.  And if he is scorned by contemporary Democrats and forgotten by his fellow conservatives, he was the heir to an eerily familiar form of American “limited government” fanaticism.  (You know, one of those “self-made” boors who never miss an opportunity to tell you about how they never missed an opportunity and why you should act accordingly.) 

In a disastrous speaking tour Johnson mysteriously labeled “The Swing Around the Circle,” he campaigned to unite northern and southern conservatives.  He failed miserably, splitting even his own Cabinet.  From town to town, with Grant and Seward forced to be at his side, Johnson recited the same speech with the repeated refrain “I stand on the Constitution!”  The Nation’s editorialists got it right in 1866 after his huge Congressional defeat:  “The conductor of the train, as Mr. Seward so felicitously termed [Johnson], has found out that the train has run over him, instead of his having run away with it.” In the same article, the writers described how “passion and prejudice” “are the staple of [Johnson’s] political sentiments.”

The man couldn’t set a foot right:  As commander in chief he opposed universal black suffrage, was nearly removed from office, constantly compared himself to Jesus, nullified legislation, ignored the Senate’s rights at confirmation, and savaged the Freedman’s Bureau (which educated former enslaved people) as costing “more than the entire sum expended in any one year under the Administration of the second Adams.”  (In an ironic reversal, the sixth president sought major infrastructure and education investments but was blocked at every turn by Congress.) 

Johnson’s was a record worth of more attention by Lincoln and his staff.  In today’s parlance, Johnson needed a bit more vetting.  His was a noisy form of status quo apologetics and stump-top windbaggery; in 1869 The Nation called him a “skill of a veteran honeyfugler and inveigher” and his voting record would have made Rand Paul look indulgent:  He tried to cut white-collar public employee salaries, voted against aid for hunger-ravaged Ireland, fought to limit funds to the Smithsonian, opposing infrastructure in his own district, he sought a cap on the number of public clerks, and even voted against raising pay for Mexican War soldiers during wartime.

                All this, by the way, was part of the record by Lincoln’s selection of Johnson in 1864. 

True, the VP selection process sordid, especially then.  In 1864 Lincoln had dumped the useless party hack, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, in favor of a Vice President Johnson in what must have seemed a savvy gesture at reconciliation:  Not only was Lincoln selecting Johnson, a Democrat and a southerner, he was offering himself as a post-party unifier.  (He previously offered the slot to the much maligned but quite efficient former occupier of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler). 

How did this collision of lives occur?  Both Lincoln and Johnson were ambitious storytellers, raised by women, from humble origins in America’s rural interior.  In fact, Johnson’s resume looked better than Lincoln’s, having an unbroken chain of successes:  He was an alderman, governor, representative, a noted military governor of a southern state, Vice President, and a senator whereas Lincoln had only served in the Illinois legislature and gone to Congress for a single term.  

Johnson’s life, according to one east Tennessee opponent, Oliver P. Temple, was “one intense, unceasing, desperate, upward struggle.”  But while Americans now adore “the outsider” status of politicians, Johnson entered Washington in 1864 unable to lead his own party and with few connections.  Yet, in blood-spattered 1862, Johnson did show competency and resolution in governance; traits which Lincoln might not have predicted would be impediments in a period of legislative compromise.  In fact, Secretary of War Stanton wrote to Johnson after the war, “With patriotic promptness you assumed the post [of governor], and maintained it under circumstances of unparalleld trials, until recent events have brought safety and deliverance to your state, and to the integrity of that constitutional Union for which you so long and so gallantly periled all that is dear to man on earth.”

The key to the contrast between Lincoln and his heir, according to historian Eric McKitrick, was not success:

It lies rather in the way success was conceived.  For Johnson, personal fulfillment had long since come to be defined as the fruit of struggle—real, full bodied, and terrible—against forces specifically organized for thwarting him.  Not for Lincoln.  Johnson, all his life, had operated as an outsider; Lincoln in most of his world dealings, and temperamentally as well, was an insider. 

                Frederick Douglass sized-up Johnson nicely quite early, inauguration day 1864. Johnson spotted Douglass and the latter described a returned glance filled with scorn before Johnson flashed “the sickly smile of the demagogue.”  But give Johnson some credit, he was drunk.  After three glasses of undiluted whiskey, the ailing Johnson embarrassed himself in front of the filled Senate chamber—so much so that Lincoln was forced to comment saying “Andy ain’t a drunkard.” 

                The little-known Johnson was the worst man for the worst period in American presidential history as well as Lincoln’s greatest but least known blunder.  The New York Times obituary read that “undoubtedly the greatest misfortune that ever befell Andrew Johnson was the assassination of President Lincoln…his posthumous fame would have been brighter without this high honor and the consequences it entailed.” 

True, a man is responsible for his own choices; a burden Johnson’s legacy (and his future historical interpreter in Tennessee) will heavily bear.  But Lincoln did disastrously choose Johnson for the country.  America has selected men with worse and slimmer resumes for the White House.  But Johnson was insulated from review by a cocoon of hasty process, strained politics, and war.  Luckily, few subsequent elected embarrassments—save Nixon—have marked the country and presidency so deleteriously after being selected as the executive’s number two. 

The Eagleton, Quayle, Ryan, and Palin selections should give voters pause.  If our pitiful party duopoly offers us nothing worthier, perhaps Hollywood could at least produce a feature film that—if not a historical cautionary tale—offers the public more than the politics of healing.  Perhaps revealing the true politics of obstruction by individuals like Johnson or his many heirs is the surest path to reform.