MORE LIGHT ON ANDREW JOHNSON1

I.

It was not the fate of Andrew Johnson, during his service as President of the United States, to enjoy an overflowing measure of popularity and good repute. The unfortunate exhibition which he made of himself at his inauguration as Vice-president put him under a sinister cloud whose shadow remained over him for some time after his accession to the Presidency in the spring of 1865; and after February, 1866, the incidents of his conflict with Congress made him the object of more wide-spread hatred and more virulent vituperation than has been the lot, perhaps, of any other man in exalted public station. Between the earlier and the later seasons of obloquy, however, there was a period during which President Johnson occupied a singularly high position in general public esteem. During the summer and the autumn months of 1865 the organs of popular opinion were practically unanimous in praise of the dignity, patriotism, and high purpose which were displayed in the conduct of the administration. Though doubt as to the wisdom of the President's policy in the South was deep and wide-spread, there was no disposition to attribute to him other than statesmanlike motives; and outside of a very small number of vehement radicals, a willingness to let his plan of reconstruction have a fair trial was everywhere manifested.

The good judgment displayed by Mr. Johnson and his advisers was an important factor in the pleasant situation in which the administration found itself. Of equal importance, however, were the peculiar conditions prevailing at the time in the field of party politics. The Republican party had practically lost its identity early in the war, and in 1864 its very name had been formally and officially abandoned. The convention that nominated Lincoln and Johnson had deliberately and ostentatiously assumed the character of a constituent assembly for the organization of a new party, and the name adopted was the Union Party. With the successful termination of the war, however, the single purpose which had given coherence to this new party had been achieved, and the whole situation became chaotic. A revival of ante-bellum Republicanism was The first part of this article consists of a paper which was read before the Massachusetts Historical Society in November, 1905.

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out of the question; for by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment during the summer and autumn of 1865 the issue which alone had given existence and character to the Republican party was removed from controversy. What, then, was to hold together the voters who had elected Lincoln and Johnson? Nothing, apparently, save the offices and a traditional hostility to the Democratic organization. But hostility to the Democracy was becoming impossible to those who followed the administration. The course of the President during the summer in reference to the South had brought the Democratic leaders, hesitatingly and cautiously but nevertheless certainly, to his support. A concerted movement had begun to rally the ante-bellum Jacksonian Democracy to the standard of the administration. The letter-files of the President offer abundant evidence of the strength and importance of this movement. There may be read words of confidence and eulogy from such sturdy, if now retired, old war-horses as Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and Francis P. Blair, sr. There may be traced the process through which many of the War Democrats resumed their long-vacant places in the councils of the old party and gradually molded it to the support of Andrew Johnson.

The net result of the party situation just sketched was that overt opposition to the administration could not be said to exist. Though the radical faction of the Union party were busily working to organize in Congress resistance to the President's policy, their activity did not manifest itself openly, and the normal adherence to tradition and to the offices kept the state organizations of the party loyal to Mr. Johnson. At the same time the Democratic organizations also refrained from antagonizing him. Accordingly the President had the agreeable experience-probably unprecedented since nominating conventions developed-of receiving in a number of states the hearty indorsement of both parties in connection with the autumn state elections.

It was while the influence of this unique situation was at its maximum that Mr. Johnson was called upon to prepare his first annual message. The reception which this state paper met with was the climax of the brief popularity which it was his fortune to experience. The verdict of contemporaries was, almost without a dissenting voice, that the message was a model of what such a paper should be. The judgments of the leading New York journals are typical. The Tribune and Times, which under Greeley and Raymond were a priori incapable of agreement on any topic, defied logic and agreed on this. The Times declared the views of the message to be "full of wisdom", and to be expressed "with great

force and dignity". The Tribune doubted "whether any former message has . . . contained so much that will be generally and justly approved, and so little that will or should provoke dissent ". The Evening Post found it "frank, dignified, direct, and manly", with not a "single ambiguous sentence ". To the Herald also it appeared "smoothly written ", "clear", and "frank". The Nation -and here was praise from the very throne itself-declared that any American might read it with pride, and found solid hope for democracy in the fact that such a document should have been produced by "this Tennesseean tailor, who was toiling for his daily bread in the humblest of employments when the chiefs of all other countries were reaping every advantage which school, college, or social position could furnish".

This same tone of admiration was common to observers outside of journalism. Secretary McCulloch considered it "one of the most judicious executive papers which was ever sent to Congress". Charles Francis Adams, minister to Great Britain, thought nothing better had been produced "even when Washington was chief and Hamilton his financier ". The Johnson Papers contain great numbers of congratulatory letters, in which the same tone is manifest, though these, designed for Johnson's own eye, need not be quoted as conclusive of their writers' opinions. Only two of these may be referred to as indicating what was expected to be the effect of the message: George Bancroft wrote that everybody approved the message, and that "in less than twenty days the extreme radical opposition will be over "; and Oliver P. Morton assured the President that his policy would be indorsed by the great body of the people, and urged Johnson to use his patronage unsparingly to crush the congressional opposition.

In running through the mass of comment on the message it is clear that the form and style attracted quite as much attention as the substance; and there is everywhere manifest, in qualified critics, a subdued amazement that Andrew Johnson should have produced just the sort of literature that the paper embodied. In the speeches and miscellaneous papers through which his style was known to the public, the smoothness, dignity, and elegance in expression that ran through the message were conspicuously absent, and there was no like dependence for effect on the orderly marshalling of clear but moderately formulated thoughts. Mr. Johnson had not yet, indeed, gained his unpleasant notoriety as a brawler on the platform; but he had a well-established reputation as a hard hitter in debate, who depended for effect on vehemence and iteration rather than on subtlety and penetration.

The striking incongruity between the message and Mr. Johnson's other papers has never caused, so far as I know, any wellgrounded denial of authorship to the President. In the Washington correspondence of the New York Nation of December 14, 1865, it is said:

Some there are who have an intimate persuasion that the entire message is the composition of Secretary Seward. But those who are nearest to the matter aver that the Secretary of State is only responsible for the portion relating to foreign affairs, with an occasional retouching elsewhere of the expression, while President Johnson can claim full credit for the rest.

Mr. Blaine, when reviewing the period, was evidently impressed by the un-Johnsonese character of the message, and was thus easily led to support the view mentioned by the Nation's correspondent. "The moderation in language [I quote Blaine's words] and the general conservatism which distinguished the message were perhaps justly attributed to Mr. Seward." Mr. Rhodes, in his fifth volume, indicates that his trained critical faculty gave him very serious. doubts in respect to this matter, but that the doubts were almost overcome. "If Andrew Johnson wrote it [he says]-and the weight of authority seems to imply that he did-it shows that he ought always to have addressed his countrymen in carefully prepared letters and messages."

In April, 1905, I spent a few days in looking over the Johnson Papers, now in the Library of Congress. I had no particular object in view, but was on a general foraging expedition through the material, ready for anything that might turn up. Least of all had I in mind the matter of the authorship of Johnson's first message. While going through the files of letters received, my curiosity was momentarily aroused by a note marked "private and confidential (one always is unduly attracted by that label), and signed by a man of wide reputation, whose name had never, however, been prominently associated, so far as I knew, with the career of President Johnson. The note was so worded as to conceal entirely the matter concerning which it was written, but indicated a relation. of a very intimate nature between the writer and the President. I made a memorandum of the letter, with a query as to what it was about, and dismissed it from my mind.

Several days later I was looking through the series of large envelopes containing the preparatory notes and various drafts of each of Johnson's messages. In most cases the envelope devoted to a particular message contains a considerable number of more or less full drafts, in various handwritings, of the treatment to be

given to special topics, while the final draft of the message is in the clear, formal hand of a copying-clerk. The annual message of 1865, however, differs from all the rest. The envelope devoted to it contains nothing of consequence save a complete draft of the message in a uniform hand which is not that of either Johnson or any other person in the executive service at that time. As I was turning over the pages of this manuscript and wondering with mild curiosity why the first message should have come down in a shape so different from the rest, I was joined by Mr. Worthington C. Ford, Chief of the Division of Manuscripts. It is well known to students of American history that Mr. Ford is endowed with a sort of sixth sense by which he can identify at sight the chirography of any man who has figured in that history since 1492. Ford, glancing over the pages before me, observed in his quiet, casual way: "That looks like the handwriting of" so and so. I at once was impressed with the force of the suggestion, since I had seen something of the writing of the person named. But what in a moment struck me as of particular significance was the fact that the name mentioned by Ford was the same name that was signed to the "private and confidential" letter mentioned above. Why this coincidence especially roused my interest will be apparent when the precise tenor of the letter is stated. It runs thus:

My task will be done to-morrow, but as no one knows what I am about and as I am my own secretary, I must ask a day or two more for a careful revision and for making a clean copy, which must be done with my own hand.

Recalling this passage in the letter and my curiosity as to what this task might have been, I hastily looked up my notes to see what the date of the letter was. It proved to be November 9, 1865. This was, of course, the precise time at which the message must have been nearing completion, for it had to be sent to Congress on December 5. The handwriting of the letter was, when compared, beyond all question the same as that of the manuscript draft. There is thus no room to doubt that the task referred to in the letter was the writing of Andrew Johnson's first annual message, and that the manuscript in the Library of Congress is the "clean copy" which the author made about the middle of November with his Own hand". A collation of the manuscript with the text of the message as sent in was made by Mr. Ford last September, revealing that practically the only differences, apart from the insertion of the routine paragraphs summarizing the work of the various executive departments, were such modifications of phraseology as would be likely to be made by the writer himself in proof.