What History Gets Wrong - And Right - About Andrew Johnson, Conclusion: His Complicated Legacy

 

Andrew Johnson’s ranking as a President has shifted dramatically in my lifetime. As a child in the 1980s, I remember that historians were mixed on Johnson’s Presidency; it ranked as high as the ‘near greats’ and as low as ‘below average’. Since the turn of the century Johnson is now considered a failure as a President, at the level of one of his immediate predecessors James Buchanan and his immediate successor Ulysses Grant.

I believe in Johnson’s case much of his reputation comes from the judgment of hindsight rather than previous ones. That he was too lenient on the Confederacy seems clear to present-day historians but was never clear to his contemporaries. For over a century and a half he has been accused as a failure because he blundered the goodwill Lincoln had amassed when in fact his predecessor would almost certainly have faced many of the same obstacles dealing with the Radical Republicans that Johnson did. Lincoln had spent much of the leadup to Appomattox refusing to accommodate their harsher versions of Reconstruction to the point that several of them had wanted Fremont as an alternative candidate before the war began to turn towards the Union. Throughout the Civil War, they had served as armchair generals on every step of policy. It is hard to imagine they would have shared his conciliatory vision in peacetime, considering that Johnson’s version was closer to it than men like Stevens and Benjamin Wade’s had been.

Johnson made many blunders in the year leading up to the 1866 midterms but he was guided by support for his initial decisions at the start of his term. And it’s also worth noting that the provisions for equality supported by the Radical Republicans were viewed as a bridge too far for most Northerners. Men like Stevens and Charles Sumner clearly had a vision for the future light years ahead of their contemporaries but they were still just a fragment of what even many abolitionists believed in during that time and their inability to compromise had cost much of them any possibility of higher office during the leads up to the Civil War. Even leading up to the impeachment, they spent much of their time arguing over the idea of the moderates in their own party.

That Johnson might have bungled Reconstruction does not change the fact that the version that followed is referred to by historians as Radical Reconstruction. Many of the triumphs that so many African-Americans have clung to for over a century and a half – African-Americans winning elected office, having the kind of legislative power not far removed from slavery – does not change the fact that they were a bridge too far for many of their white counterparts across the country, including the North. It also overlooks a fact that most historians do not recognize that Congress, with its supermajorities, had superseded its powers over the legislative branch and for two years decided to ignore the President.

 This legacy actually lasted far past Reconstruction. Because of the aftermath of the impeachment of Johnson, for the next half a century, few Presidents ever openly challenged Congressional leadership even when they disagreed with it. Theodore Roosevelt managed to succeed because of his immense popularity with the public, something the Old Guard of the Republican Party disliked so much they attempted to nominate Mark Hanna over him leading up to 1904. And in the aftermath of World War I Woodrow Wilson’s battles with Congress, combined to his own fallacies, led to America’s failure to enter the League of Nations. It was not until another national crisis – the Great Depression – that the executive branch would resume control over how legislation proceeded in Congress and FDR would have his own struggles with Congress during much of his term.

The failures of Reconstruction are, as I mentioned, something that many historians and African-Americans tend to blame on White America for giving up on civil rights and the freedman. While there is some truth to that, it does not acknowledge what was happening the South. Johnson’s successor, Grant, vigorously supported Reconstruction  - but that almost always met that when there was chaos or disorder in the South, he would sent the military down to restore order. Once order was restored, he would withdraw the Army and before long, more civil unrest would break out. This speaks volumes to the fact that the only way the rights of the freedmen could be guaranteed was under what was essentially periodic outbreaks of martial law. This was no way to enforce equality and it was certainly no way to stop the resentment of former Confederates to accept the rights of their former slaves.

In the controversial election of 1876 Democrats more or less allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes – who had lost the popular vote and whose electoral majority could only have been achieved through fraud – assume the Presidency with the understanding that, once he did so, he would end Reconstruction and more or less leave the South to govern itself. Everything that followed for the next eighty years involving Jim Crow is a result of that.

What this leaves out is the idea that Reconstruction could have somehow existed in perpetuity. The general reason so many Republicans opposed the election of Samuel Tilden was the understanding that if he – or indeed, any Democrat – became President, that administration would withdraw troops and end Reconstruction as a sop to the Southern wing of the party. By 1875, most white Americans wanted to move on from the Civil War and the sole reminder of it was the constant unrest in the South. There were many other considerations to be given – a national depression had hit the nation in 1873 – and America needed to move on.

Contemporary African-Americans and revisionist historians constantly consider Reconstruction a failure and ignore the very real measure of how it was working. If the only way to ensure equality is by making a section of the country under sporadic occupation, then it’s not equality by any measure of the term. Furthermore, just how long could the state of affairs have lasted even if the Union had been more committed? Ten years? Twenty? How far into the 20^th century should America have allowed it to continue? Until the next generation of the South was ‘used’ to the military coming in every time there was a disturbance? Until the North published textbooks making it clear that the South had been on the right side of history and made sure they ‘learned’ it? Until the last survivor of the war had died? That is not remotely plausible in a free and fair society. And if you think that this would make white men less resentful of the freedmen, your opinion of human nature is more optimistic than mine.

Yes, it was wrong of the North to leave the freedman to fend for themselves, but the fact remains it was eventually going to happen. Perhaps not in 1877, but in 1887 or 1897. Equality can not be enforced at the barrel of a gun. Eventually even the most devoted practitioners of civil rights – and again, such ideas were not incredibly popularly held by most white Americans – would have had to know that they would have to cross their fingers and hope for the best. That it failed is a fact; that it could have succeeded at a time when the rest of America was clearly not ready for it is also a reality.

The horrors of Jim Crow South are manifest and have clearly left scars that have never healed and has made many contemporary African-Americans and several leftists  to argue that there was a better way. However, the only way they see this working on this site is that they should have just let the South secede as if that would have solved anything. Absent that, they have chosen to essentially harp on the fact that this proves that America was always a white supremacist nation and that they chose to let this end because they never believed in it. They frequently rant how revisionists deny slavery was the cause of Civil War while at the same time arguing that the Union never cared about African-Americans to begin with and then argue that the aftermath proves it.

In recent years they have even come to turn on those freed blacks who did everything they could to try and live in the South. Booker T. Washington has become much maligned by contemporary African-Americans because he tried to find a way of accommodation and helping his people become self-sufficient. In their minds, he is an ‘Uncle Tom’.

But what was the alternative? For the African-Americans to band together and try to fight for their rights on their own? What chance would they have had? If Jim Crow was willing to lynch and murder African-Americans because they thought they were a threat, how would they have acting if African-Americans had decided to form the 19^th century equivalent of Black Power? We saw how that ended up going in the 20^th century; what do you think would have happened within years of the Civil War?

I can imagine a more plausible scenario. After the equivalent of one such attack, outrage in the South leads those in the North – who never believed that much in black rights to begin with -  to react in horror. A horrified President Cleveland, backed by a Democratic Congress sends troops to the South – to repress African-Americans and enforce Jim Crow.

Meanwhile in the North, where black businesses are beginning to form, white America starts viewing all African-Americans with suspicion in a way they had not even during the war. How do you know that your African-Americans neighbor doesn’t haven’t a gun or isn’t using the proceeds to his Southern relatives? Trust, never a great quantity even before the War, becomes a commodity that most African-Americans are viewed with suspicion.

North and South begin to wonder why they ever fought about such a thing as slavery when it was clear all along the ‘Negro’ could never be trusted left to his own devices. Stevens and Sumner are viewed as misguided traitors and Lincoln a fool for willing to keep the war being fought as long as he did. Reconstruction is considered a failure and images of Nat Turner as campaign slogans for decades to come.

There are clearly greater consequences to be played out, I can assure you – in an America with this legacy, would Nazism find a greater sympathy – but I’ll leave it here and get back to my original point. Men like Washington embraced the idea of accommodation in the South because it was the only plausible option. It might have been a terrible one – many Negroes in the North viewed it as such – but it was the least dangerous one for African-Americans in Alabama.

Johnson’s horrible reputation these days is built on many faulty principles. His decision to turn Reconstruction to his own political benefit was clearly a horrible one from the point of view of a post-Civil War America. But other presidential campaigns have been run on similar crises; from the Whig’s campaign to defeat Van Buren in the aftermath of the panic of 1837 to FDR’s campaign against Herbert Hoover to LBJ’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin to pin down Barry Goldwater in 1964 – and Nixon’s secret plan to end Vietnam for years later. For better or worse, the Presidency is an elected office and the holder of it will try to use it for whatever political advantage they can. This has been the case of nearly every campaign in history and it will not change any time soon.

Furthermore Johnson had the misfortune of being the only President in history to be the opposite party of the man of the ticket he was part of. From his swearing-in under the worst of circumstances to the day he left office, Andrew Johnson was in an enemy camp and his opponents in Congress never left him forget it. His decision to challenge them was misguided but given the makeup of both houses of Congress, confrontation was inevitable and it was always going to be disastrous.

And his impeachment – the one dubious distinction of his Presidency for 130 years – was clearly a partisan witch hunt designed by men who did not agree with his agenda and wanted to replace him with an unelected (and lame duck) member of their party. The consequences of Johnson’s acquittal may have been surrounded in corruption; the circumstances that led to it were far less savory then the history books lead us to believe.

And as a result Johnson’s stands before the war as well as the bravery he showed in staying with the Union when his state of Tennessee seceded, taking a job as military governor that could have gotten him killed on many occasions, and agreeing to sacrifice his political future in order to preserve the union, have been mostly forgotten by historians as is the fact that the Civil War ended peacefully under his watch when it could have, in fact, become a perpetual conflict. Instead, he is the caricature of a Southern racist, who was unsuited for an office he never had a chance of winning on his own, and who blundered the opportunity of Reconstruction because he did not believe in the policies of a fringe group of the opposing party.

Johnson does not deserve to be remembered as a great President, but I can’t consider him a failure the way that men like Buchanan or Hoover or Nixon clearly were. He did the best he could for a job he was ill-prepared for and managed to get our nation through what might have been the greatest crisis it has faced yet in April of 1865. Whatever failings he had during Reconstruction and in regards to civil rights should be weighed against both the mood of the nation at the time as well as the circumstances of his confrontation. Andrew Johnson was more than the sum of his failures and I hope these articles point that out.