There is much debate to this very day as to how Abraham Lincoln might have handled the issue of Southern reconstruction had he survived to see out the remainder of his second term in office. Unfortunately for the nation as a whole, though, Lincoln survived only a few more days after the official end of the war which had raged throughout his entire time in office.
Into the White House stepped Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a Southern Democrat who had been one of the few such men to never lose faith in the union, nor pledge allegiance to the Southern Confederacy.
It was as a result of this noble quality, in fact, that led Lincoln to bring Johnson onto the ticket in the 1864 election, momentarily setting aside his own Republican partisanship and forming a new party - the National Union Party.
While Johnson was surely a great political choice for the job, Andrew Johnson was otherwise a truly unlikely choice for the position only a heartbeat away from the highest in the land.
The Trials of Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson faced many hardships in his youth. Raised in North Carolina, his father died when the boy was only three, leaving his family impoverished.
Johnson never attended any form of school, though taught himself to read and write. For a time, Johnson was bound as an indentured apprentice in order to support his family, though he broke this indenture at 16 or 17 (elements of his early life are disputable), and ran off to Tennessee, where he married and worked as a tailor.
A decade later, Andrew Johnson entered the political arena as an alderman (member of the city council) of Greeneville, Tennessee, and then mayor in 1833.
Politically, Johnson was considered an every-man Democrat in the image of the highly popular Andrew Jackson. He was a good public speaker and gained popularity by providing straight talk, not having been raised in a highly political environment.
This popularity allowed Johnson to quickly move up the political ladder, moving from Greeneville Mayor to the state legislature in 1834, moving from the state's lower house to the higher senate in 1841. Two years later, Johnson earned his first position in national politics, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served for ten years.
In 1853, Johnson left Washington for a time, heading back to Tennessee as the state's governor, and then, as the Civil War threatened, he moved back to the nation's capital as state Senator during the last years of the Buchanan administration.
Political Views
Johnson was, in most respects, a fairly typical Democrat in the Jacksonian vein. He was opposed to federal funding of internal improvements and supported the annexation of California and Oregon under President Polk. As a southerner, he found himself opposed to laws which would regulate slavery, and supported the compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska act, and the Fugitive Slave laws. All very typical for an 1850's southern Democrat.
Where Johnson differed from his peers - and the reason for his ascendency in national politics during the Civil War - was his break from both his party and his state as the Civil War loomed. He was a strong proponent of preserving the national Union (as was Andrew Jackson before him, who threatened military action to preserve the union during the Nullification Crisis of 1832).
When Tennessee and the rest of the southern states seceded from the union, Johnson, in keeping with his beliefs that such an action could lead only to anarchy, became the only Southern senator not to resign his seat.
It is this brave act which made Johnson a national figure, and the perfect man (from a political standpoint) to stand with Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the National Union party. Thus, in 1865, Johnson, despite a humble childhood, had achieved the rank of Vice Presidency, and only a few months later, he was President himself.
It was a position for which Johnson, even with his many years of administrative experience, could not possibly have prepared himself sufficiently.
The Presidency would be both the high and low point of Johnson's career.
References:
"Andrew Johnson." American Presidents: An Online Reference Resource.
"Biography of Andrew Johnson." U.S. Senate.
 |
