Andrew Johnson and the Tennessee State Museum

Andrew Johnson, seventeenth president of the United States, died today, July 31st, in 1875. He was

sixty-six years old and had recently been elected to the United States Senate by the Tennessee state legislature. Johnson is generally considered among the bottom, and quite possibly worst, among the presidents of the United States. Granted he inherited a difficult situation upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln six weeks into his second term, but Johnson managed it as disastrously as one could with his racism; his opposition to the extension of civil rights during Reconstruction, a move that encouraged white resistance and the violent repression of blacks in the South; his complete lack of sympathy for the freedmen; his impeachment and escape of removal from office by a solitary vote in the U.S. Senate; and his demonstrated pattern of unfitness for office through his behavior. My view of Johnson has always been much colored by Eric McKitrick’s Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, which is, admittedly, a dated work almost sixty years old. It is not the only work that I have read on Johnson, to be sure, but McKitrick’s emphasis on his subject’s psychological shortcomings sticks with me. 

While Johnson was a terrible president, he seemed to be an ingenious vice-presidential candidate in 1864 on the National Union Party ticket, the name that the reflagged Republican Party used to appeal to war Democrats. As a pro-war Democrat from a southern state who opposed secession and was the only member of the entire southern congressional delegation that remained in his seat after his state seceded, and who served as war governor of Tennessee, Johnson offered a powerful example of national unity during civil war to the ticket. By showing up to his inauguration as vice president visibly intoxicated, Johnson got off on the wrong foot. With the exception of receiving some well wishes and support following Lincoln’s assassination, it was almost all downhill for Johnson.  

How is Johnson portrayed in the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville? I only ask because I was there earlier this month. And I must say upfront that it is a large and impressive museum that examines the Volunteer State's history from pre-history through to the current day. First, the museum celebrates him as one of the state’s famous sons and one who became president, like Andrew Jackson

and James K. Polk before him. Second, they emphasize that he was a common tradesman who worked his way from illiterate poverty to the White House. He was a tailor know for always being well dressed (unlike his gangly predecessor who often appeared slovenly). The suit to the right is an example of Johnson’s handiwork. Third, they illustrate his work as a pro-Union war governor and emphasize his role in pushing for the ratification of the 13^thAmendment. Yes, he used readmission as a lever to obtain ratification and the ultimate end of slavery, but he also failed to use that same power to ensure civil rights and welcomed state constitutions containing the infamous Black Codes that so restricted the freedom of blacks that it was a form of pseudo slavery. Although the Radical Republicans and President Ulysses S. Grant did much to undermine the Black Codes, many of their features would re-emerge in the post-Reconstruction segregated, Jim Crow, South.