Was Andrew Johnson the Worst V.P. Pick Ever?
The politics that made him Abraham Lincoln's running mate
(This is the second post in a series on the history and politics of the Veepstakes)
Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 re-election campaign
Today, everyone knows Abraham Lincoln as the president who saved the Union, freed the slaves, gave the Gettysburg Address, and was carved into history on Mount Rushmore. Pretty much every poll of presidential scholars has Lincoln ranked first or second on lists of the country’s greatest presidents.
In the summer of 1864, however, when he was gearing up to run for re-election, Lincoln didn’t appear quite as destined for an exalted place in history.
At the time, in fact, he was drawing fire from both ends of the political spectrum and there were many people who wished he’d retire and go back home to Springfield, Illinois. On one side were northern Democrats who wanted him to end the Civil War even if it meant negotiating with the South to preserve slavery, and in Lincoln’s own party were Radical Republicans (the liberals of the mid-19th century) who fumed that the president was far too timid in prosecuting the war and in supporting freedom for Black slaves.
Indeed, as one historian noted about Lincoln, “conservatives thought him a radical and liberals thought him a failure.”1
Moreover, with war fatigue blanketing the nation after more than three years of bloodshed, Lincoln’s re-election prospects looked bleak. Even moderate Republicans, the president’s biggest supporters, were in despair about his chances in the 1864 contest.
“Mr. Lincoln is already beaten,” wrote Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. “He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.”2 The Republican operative Thurlow Weed told Lincoln straight up that his re-election was “an impossibility” because voters were “wild for peace.”3 Some in the party called for a stronger nominee, perhaps Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase or General Ulysses S. Grant.
Yes, the man who today is lionized as possibly our greatest president was opposed in 1864 by members of his own party who thought he was a weak candidate for re-election.
In the end, obviously, Lincoln rounded up enough support to secure another nomination. However, the Radical Republicans in the GOP remained steadfast in their opposition to the moderate Lincoln. They called a separate convention and nominated John Fremont, the party’s 1856 candidate and a favorite of abolitionists, to mount a third party campaign.
Lincoln thus faced a re-election battle against two other major candidates. On his right was the Democratic nominee, General George McClellan, a popular military leader (who had, incidentally, been fired by Lincoln). And on his left was the Republican Fremont, who was certain to pull votes from liberal Republicans that would otherwise have gone to the president.
Staring down the likelihood of losing his bid for a second term, what did Lincoln do? He rebranded himself. Or at least his party.
Lincoln knew that to win that year he would have to attract support from War Democrats. That is, Democrats who opposed Lincoln’s domestic agenda but wanted to preserve the Union and supported the president’s wartime policies. As a result, the moderate Republicans of 1864 essentially merged with the War Democrats and founded the National Union Party. Lincoln that year was officially nominated not as a Republican but as a National Unionist.
This is where Andrew Johnson came in.
The Rise of Andrew Johnson
Johnson was a senator and former governor of Tennessee who had opposed his state’s vote in favor of secession. In this respect he was like many voters in the border states perched between North and South, particularly in the Appalachian regions of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina, who wanted to remain in the Union. But when Tennessee joined the Confederacy, Johnson was forced to flee his home. He remained in the U.S. Senate as the only member from a Confederate state. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee.
When Lincoln and the Republicans formed the National Union Party in 1864, Johnson was therefore a natural choice to be the vice-presidential candidate. During Lincoln’s first term, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was the v.p. But since Maine was safely in the GOP column in 1864, Johnson was seen as someone who could broaden the party’s support with War Democrats and bolster Lincoln’s message of resolve against the South. It was a choice driven entirely by politics.
Lincoln of course went on to win re-election that year, even though he believed for much of the summer that he would lose to McClellan. The president’s fortunes turned in September when General William Tecumseh Sherman’s capture of Atlanta split the Confederacy at a strategic point, while General Grant was attacking the Confederate Army in Virginia. With Union forces in sight of victory, Fremont withdrew from the race on September 22, unwilling to risk splitting the Republican vote and electing a Democrat who might preserve slavery. The stars aligned for Lincoln just in time for the election.
President Lincoln was inaugurated for a second term on March 4, 1865. One month later, on April 9, the Civil War ended when General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Five days after that, on April 14, Lincoln was assassinated.
So, a little more than one month after being elected vice president, Andrew Johnson was suddenly the nation’s 17th president. The previous summer’s decision to make him Lincoln’s running mate would soon have an immense impact on American history.
Johnson as President
Although Johnson was a Southerner who had stuck by the Union against the Confederacy, he was also still a states’ rights Democrat and a white supremacist who saw Blacks as inferior. “White men alone must manage the South,” Johnson said, arguing that Blacks had “less capacity for government than any other race of people … left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”4
As one historian put it: “In a strange twist of fate, the racist Southerner Johnson was charged with the reconstruction of the defeated South, including the extension of civil rights and suffrage to black Southerners.”
The new president battled with Republicans in Congress over legislation to ensure Black equality. While some bills passed on overrides of Johnson’s vetoes, one of the president’s most consequential acts was to rescind an effort that would have provided former slaves with farmland and advanced their efforts to gain economic independence. The relationship between Johnson and GOP leaders eventually led Congress to impeach him, though he escaped Senate conviction by one vote and remained in office.
There is no way to know how Reconstruction might have turned out had Lincoln lived, or had Hamlin remained vice president. But it’s likely, at least, that Blacks in the South would have gained more voting rights and economic prospects. The next century plus of American history might have turned out much differently. But instead of Lincoln or Hamlin, America instead got Johnson, a president who “did more to extend the period of national strife than to heal the wounds of war.”
In the end, Lincoln came to be regarded as one of the best U.S. presidents ever, while Johnson is consistently ranked as one of the two or three worst presidents. It may not be the case that Johnson was the worst choice ever to run for vice president (after all, he did help Lincoln in his battle for re-election), but he may well be the worst one ever to serve in the office if we consider his performance as Lincoln’s successor. Such are the consequences that can sometimes arise from political decisions made during the Veepstakes.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
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(Photo credits: Andrew Johnson photo and 1864 campaign poster from Wikimedia Commons.)
Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977), 381.
John G. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997), 270.
Stefan Lorant, The Glorious Burden: The History of the Presidency and Presidential Elections From George Washington to James Earl Carter, Jr. (Lenox, Massachusetts: Authors Edition, 1976), 265.
Jared Cohen, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 125, and A. James Reichley, The Life of the Parties: A History of American Political Parties (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 134-135.