Why Every President Sucked

No. 17 · The Presidents

Andrew Johnson’s Biggest Failures

1865–1869

He sided with the old South, fought Congress for four years, and became the first president impeached.

Who was Andrew Johnson?

Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States, serving from April 15, 1865 to March 4, 1869. He took office after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, six weeks after being sworn in as vice president, and that first ceremony had gone badly. Johnson arrived ill with typhoid, drank whiskey the night before and again that morning, and delivered a rambling speech in the Senate chamber. Senator Zachariah Chandler wrote that he was “too drunk to perform his duties.” Most biographers treat it as a one-time disaster rather than chronic alcoholism, but it set the tone with the Republicans around Lincoln.

He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1808 to a poor family and never attended school. Apprenticed to a tailor as a boy, he built a tailoring business in Greeneville, Tennessee, and climbed through local office, the Tennessee legislature, five terms in the U.S. House, the governorship and the U.S. Senate. He was a Southern Democrat who stayed with the Union when Tennessee seceded, and in 1864 Lincoln put him on the National Union ticket as a gesture of national unity.

Why is Andrew Johnson considered one of the worst presidents?

C-SPAN’s 2021 survey of historians ranked Johnson 43rd out of 44 presidents, with only Buchanan scoring lower. Siena’s 2022 survey of presidential scholars put him dead last, 45th of 45. Siena also noted that Johnson, Buchanan, Harding and Pierce have been in the bottom five in every one of its seven surveys, going back to 1982. In 2006, historians named his opposition to racial equality after the Civil War the second-worst mistake ever made by a sitting president.

In short: with the war over and the country deciding what freedom would mean, Johnson sided with the former Confederate order, fought Congress at every step, and then got himself impeached over a fight about firing a cabinet secretary. In my book, Johnson’s entry is about that last part. What follows is the record around it, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: Capo 4 · Em, G, D/F♯

the tenure of the office act
required that the senate back
anyone the pres would want to boot

1. He restored the old order and called it Reconstruction

Johnson wanted the seceded states back in the Union quickly. On May 29, 1865 he issued an amnesty proclamation pardoning most ex-Confederates who took a loyalty oath, and named a provisional governor for North Carolina that same day, the template for the other states. The proclamation excluded fourteen classes of Southerners, including anyone with taxable property worth more than $20,000, who had to apply to him personally. Then he pardoned planters by the thousands.

The governments his plan restored passed Black Codes in 1865 and 1866, laws that restricted where freedpeople could work, travel and testify. Johnson treated this as a matter for the states. Congress refused to seat the Southern representatives elected under his governments, and the fight was on.

2. He owned slaves, freed them, and fought Black citizenship anyway

The record on Johnson and slavery is a paradox worth stating plainly. He owned enslaved people, including Dolly, Sam, Liz, Florence and William, and in 1857 he bought a thirteen-year-old named Henry. In a December 1859 Senate speech after John Brown’s raid, he argued that the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” was never meant to include Black Americans. During the war he persuaded Lincoln to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation.

By oral tradition, he freed his own enslaved people on August 8, 1863, a date Tennessee still marks as Emancipation Day. Sam Johnson organized the celebration in 1871, and Johnson himself spoke at it. The National Park Service notes the date rests on tradition, though Johnson’s own words show he had freed some of them by early 1864. None of this changed what he did as president.

3. He vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act

In February 1866, Johnson vetoed the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency set up to help formerly enslaved people. The Senate’s own history says that veto “broke the final ties” with his Republican opponents in Congress. He then vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on March 27, objecting that “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 him, the first time it had enacted a major law over a presidential veto.

Historian Eric Foner argues that Johnson played on a fear of reverse discrimination in his veto messages, and that northern voters overwhelmingly rejected his outlook in the 1866 elections. He also opposed the Fourteenth Amendment and encouraged Southern legislatures to reject it. Every former Confederate state except Tennessee did, which pushed Congress toward the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.

Johnson vetoed it straight it down
the senate overrid his crown
but Johnson said I'm bigger than all you

4. Memphis, New Orleans and the Swing Around the Circle

In May 1866 a white mob in Memphis killed 46 Black residents and two white people, and burned 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools, according to the congressional committee that investigated. Most of the Black dead were Union veterans. Two months later, a riot in New Orleans left dozens of Black and white Republicans dead. Johnson blamed Radical agitation and offered the North no new guarantees for Black Southerners.

That fall he took his case to voters on a speaking tour known as the “Swing Around the Circle.” It went badly. He traded insults with hecklers, and in Cleveland he asked why Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips should not be hanged. The House later turned those speeches into Article X of his impeachment, which accused him of bringing the presidency into “contempt, ridicule, and disgrace.” Republicans made huge gains in the 1866 elections.

5. The Tenure of Office Act and the Stanton fight

In March 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act over Johnson’s veto. It barred the president from removing Senate-confirmed officials without the Senate’s consent, and it was aimed mainly at protecting Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who ran the War Department that administered Congress’s Reconstruction program. Removing Stanton was widely seen as an attack on Reconstruction itself.

Johnson suspended Stanton in August 1867 and put Ulysses S. Grant in as interim secretary. When the Senate refused to concur, Grant handed the office back. On February 21, 1868, Johnson dismissed Stanton outright and named Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to replace him. Stanton barricaded himself inside the War Department.

dismissed ol' Edwin Stanton
said you undermined me
but what Johnson didn't mind was federal law

6. He was impeached, and survived by one vote

On February 24, 1868, the House voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson, with 17 members not voting, according to the House Journal. He became the first president ever impeached. The House adopted eleven articles over the next week, most of them about Stanton and the Tenure of Office Act. The managers carried the articles to the Senate on March 4, and the trial opened the next day with Chief Justice Salmon Chase presiding.

the senate said you serious?
you think you can get away with this?
who in your name do you think you are?

Conviction required two-thirds, or 36 votes. On May 16, the vote on Article XI came to 35 guilty and 19 not guilty. On May 26 the votes on Articles II and III came out exactly the same, and the Senate adjourned without voting on the other eight. Seven Republicans joined the twelve Democrats to acquit: Fessenden, Grimes, Ross, Van Winkle, Henderson, Fowler and Trumbull. Johnson’s own son-in-law, Senator David Patterson of Tennessee, was among the Democrats voting to acquit. When Johnson heard the May 16 result, the Library of Congress records, he wept.

Edmund Ross of Kansas is often called the one vote that saved him, but that story comes largely from John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Any of the seven could claim it, and historian David O. Stewart documented patronage and alleged bribery pressure around the acquitting senators. Treat that as alleged rather than proven.

Was the law even valid?

Congress repealed the Tenure of Office Act in 1887. In Myers v. United States (1926), Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president, wrote for the Supreme Court that the Act had been unconstitutional. So on the narrow legal question, the Court eventually sided with Johnson, fifty-eight years later. That is the one point in his favor, and it is a narrow one. The impeachment came after two years of fighting Congress over the rights of the people Reconstruction was supposed to protect.

impeached, impeached
it's not an ice cream flavor
it's a political wager saved for scum

After the White House

Johnson sought the 1868 Democratic nomination but lost it to Horatio Seymour, who lost the general election to Grant. In his final months he issued sweeping pardons, including one for Samuel Mudd, and refused to attend Grant’s inauguration. Back in Tennessee, he won election to the U.S. Senate in 1875, the only former president ever to serve there. He died on July 31, 1875, about five months into the term.

Historians have flipped on him. From around 1900 into the 1940s, the Dunning School and works like Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era and the 1942 film Tennessee Johnson cast him as a constitutional hero fighting vindictive Radicals. Revisionists from Eric McKitrick to Hans Trefousse, Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed and Brenda Wineapple argue that his racism and inflexibility squandered the chance to secure Black citizenship. His ranking slid from 40th in C-SPAN’s 2000 survey to 43rd in 2021 as that view took hold.

just because you're president
don't mean you're king of government
you presican't do anything you want

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, read more articles, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published