Andrew Johnson, the impeached president who wanted 'a white man's government'
Travis Dorman, Knoxville News Sentinel Travis Dorman
Before he was impeached, President Andrew Johnson considered himself a champion of the common man — but only when those common men were white.
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/sites/knoxnews/images/favicon.png
Knoxville News Sentinel
This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to critically examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.

Andrew Johnson considered himself a champion of the common man — but only when those common men were white.

The 17th president of the United States was a common man himself. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolina before moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor, owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.

Johnson climbed every rung of the political ladder, from alderman to mayor to state representative to U.S. senator, before President Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee amid the Civil War and then reached across party lines to pick him as vice president for the 1864 election.

When Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet just six weeks after Johnson took office, a fractured country found its stubborn new president lacked Lincoln's ability to navigate the end of the Civil War with nuance and sensitivity. Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he now clashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. He soon grew widely unpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.

"Johnson embodied this sort of common white man resentment of the planter class, but also had this distrust and often fear of Black people," said Aaron Astor, an associate history professor at Maryville College who researches the Civil War-era South. "That’s really the position that he occupied. He had very little tact. He was good as an orator for East Tennessee, for Greeneville. He could manipulate Tennessee politics to his advantage, but nationally he did not have that same touch."

The killings this year of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery have sparked nationwide Black Lives Matter protests and conversations about systemic racism, the role of police in the United States and whether Civil War-era leaders should be memorialized with public monuments. In Tennessee, state officials amid sustained protests took steps this month to move a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader, from the state Capitol to the state museum.

A kind of monument to Johnson exists in downtown Knoxville in the form of the Andrew Johnson Building, an 18-story red-bricked tower on the south end of Gay Street that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Completed in 1929, the building for decades housed the Andrew Johnson Hotel, where country music icon Hank Williams Sr. stayed before his death in 1952. In recent years, the high-rise has housed offices for Knox County Schools. The county approved the sale of the building earlier this year, and now it is set to become a hotel once again.

But who was Andrew Johnson, anyway? And what did he believe?

'The organic structure of man'

Johnson modeled himself after another Tennessee politician: Andrew Jackson.

The seventh president of the United States, Jackson opposed the abolition of slavery and forced Native Americans from the South in a bloody campaign that came to be called the Trail of Tears. At the time, Jackson was generally seen as a populist war hero and a champion of the common man who sought to preserve the Union, ensure states' rights and uphold the U.S. Constitution.

Johnson did not view slavery in terms of whether it was right or wrong. Instead, his changing stance on whether slavery should be abolished was determined "by hardheaded, pragmatic judgment of the way it affected those beacons which guided his life — the Constitution, the Union, the common man, and the democratic process," wrote Paul Bergeron, a late history professor at the University of Tennessee who edited thousands of pages of Johnson's correspondence for the Andrew Johnson Papers Project.

For years, Johnson defended slavery as an inevitable fact of life and even said the right to own slaves was enshrined in the Constitution. In one of his first speeches as a U.S. senator, he explained this idea and spoke of owning several slaves himself.

"Servitude or slavery grows out of the organic structure of man," he said in 1857. "All the talk which we hear in deprecation of the existence of slavery is idle, and a great portion of it mere twaddle. Slavery exists; it is an ingredient of society, growing out of a man's mental and physical organization; and the only question for us to discuss is, what kind of slavery we shall have; not the existence of slavery, for it is in society; it is an element, an ingredient that you cannot get rid of so long as man's organic structure is what it is."

Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" — the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should be above the highest Black man, said Astor, the Maryville College professor. In 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out, Johnson said white Southerners felt so threatened by the prospect of Black freedom that poor men would unite with slave owners to exterminate slaves rather than see them freed.

"Press this question to its ultimatum, and the non-slaveholder will unite, heart and hand, in subjugating the Africans, and if resistance be made, in extirpating the Negro race; and that is where this question will end," Johnson said on the Senate floor.

'A white man's government'

Johnson was one of many East Tennesseans who viewed secession as futile and wrong. In fact, he believed it wasn't even possible for a state to secede from the Union.

In June 1861, the state's second secession referendum ended with Tennessee voting to leave the Union despite East Tennessee voting to stay in it. Johnson cried fraud, condemned secessionists as traitors and refused to give up his seat in the Senate. He would become the only pro-Union senator in the South, leading Lincoln to appoint him military governor of Tennessee after Union soldiers retook much of the state in 1862.

Johnson's priority that year was to persuade others to rejoin the Union — one way or another. That summer, he assured an audience in Nashville that "the Union is the only protection of slavery — its sole guarantee." That winter, he wrote to Lincoln and successfully lobbied the president to exclude Tennessee from the Jan. 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation that ordered slaves be freed in Confederate states. Johnson believed exempting Tennessee from the measure would help him appeal to moderate slave owners, Astor said, but he soon found it didn't have the effect he desired.

By the middle of 1863, Johnson had come out in favor of emancipation as a way to end the war and keep the Union intact. He freed his own slaves on Aug. 8 that year, telling them they could leave his family farm or stay and work for pay. Black people in East Tennessee have celebrated that date as Emancipation Day ever since.

Johnson's change in position pleased Lincoln, who, it turns out, would need to unify the country in picking a vice president for the coming election. "May God bless you," the president wrote in a letter to the military governor. "Get emancipation into your new State government — Constitution — and there will be no such word as fail for your case. The raising of colored troops I think will greatly help every way."

Johnson would become instrumental in ending slavery, but he frequently made clear his primary concern was for white people, not slaves themselves.

"I was then, as I am now, for a white man's government, and for a free, intelligent, white constituency, instead of a Negro aristocracy," he said in a speech in Franklin in August 1863. "You said slavery was above the Government, and in seeking to confirm this your plot recoiled. If in this recoil slavery must go, I say, let it go! I am for my Government with or without slavery, but if either the government or slavery must perish, I say give me the government and let the Negroes go."

Johnson often made the argument, common at the time, that emancipation "will free more white men than it will Black men."

"This is one of the more politically powerful anti-slavery arguments, that slavery was particularly bad for white people because it concentrated all the power, land ownership and capital in the hands of a small aristocratic elite," Astor said. "If you break the power of these large planters, you will allow ordinary white men to have land in the west, a chance to compete for better wages. This was sort of the core of the Republican party."

'A world that no longer existed'

Johnson became president after Lincoln's assassination April 15, 1865, and did — most historians agree — a terrible job.

Even the White House's official website describes Johnson as "one of the most unfortunate of presidents."

With Congress not in session, Johnson began reconstructing the former Confederate states by himself. The man who had spent years railing against elites and swearing he’d punish traitors now promised they could regain their land and receive a pardon so long as they came to him on bended knee. His tactics allowed many Southerners who were in power before the war to return to power after it. Largely left to their own devices, several states soon passed laws that restricted the rights of freed slaves.

"The story of Johnson in 1866-67 comes close to matching the chronicles about the plagues that afflicted Biblical Egypt or the tribulations that beset Job," Bergeron, the UT professor, wrote in the Papers of Andrew Johnson. "But, truth to tell, he brought his troubles upon himself — through his stubbornness, his inflexibility, his pro-southern bias, his erratic behavior (especially on the speaker's podium), and his unshakable convictions about a world that no longer existed."

Johnson seemed to want the U.S. to return to the way it was before the war, with Black people technically free from slavery but still relegated to the underclass in society. Congress, led by the so-called Radical Republicans, tried to help newly freed slaves by passing legislation such as the the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made all people born in the U.S. citizens with certain rights, and the Freedmen's Bureau Act, which aimed to give food, shelter and land to Black people and other displaced Southerners.

Johnson vetoed both bills, saying they unnecessarily violated states' rights. The government shouldn't enact such measures, he argued, because it never had before.

"In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted," Johnson wrote in a veto message for the Civil Rights Act. "They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race."

Congress overrode Johnson's vetoes and rammed the bills through anyway. When the basis for the Civil Rights Act later became the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, granting citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. and equal protection under the law, Johnson opposed that, too. And once again, he lost that fight.

Johnson's years-long war with Congressional Republicans culminated with his impeachment in 1868 after he fired a cabinet official who had opposed his policies. The Senate came just one vote short of convicting him and removing him from office.

Johnson chose not to run for re-election that year and instead returned to Tennessee, where he ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat. Then he won election to the Senate in 1875, only to die of a stroke four months after taking the oath of office.

"I want my reputation to go down clear," the former president said in 1869. "There was not a colored man in Tennessee freed by Mr. Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. Who did it? I did, on the steps of the Capitol in Nashville, in the midst of the excitement and perils of that hour, while the missiles of death were flying. I, myself, proclaimed that slavery no longer existed in Tennessee, and that every man was free by the inherent principles in him."

Email Travis Dorman at travis.dorman@knoxnews.com and follow him on Twitter @travdorman. If you enjoy Travis' coverage, support strong local journalism by subscribing for full access to all our content on every platform.