Johnson stammered and had to ask assembled officials nearby who the secretary of the Navy was. Hamlin tried to shut him up and pull him away but failed in both. Shouting, gesticulating wildly, stumbling over his words and shaking his fists, he went into stump-speech mode, declaring violently that he was a man of the people and that Tennessee had never left the Union. The audience noticed, and not just because Johnson’s face had turned bright red and his planned five-minute address stretched to three times longer. “I need all the strength I can get,” he told Hamlin, who was there to hand off the office Johnson would soon assume.
Feeling ill, Johnson threw down three glasses of whiskey right before his swearing-in ceremony and inaugural speech. He picked Johnson, a lifelong Democrat from Tennessee who had been the only senator out of 11 Southern states to remain with the Union in 1861 instead of walking out of the Senate and leaving a vacant seat in protest.īut Johnson turned out to be a poor choice, and the new vice president couldn’t have started his term much worse. To appeal to non-Republicans and show he wasn’t just a Northern leader in the middle of the Civil War, the president instead ran on a new “National Union” ticket. For his 1864 reelection bid, Lincoln had dumped his first-term vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. This is true even though Johnson’s vice presidency remains historically unique.
It also shows that people around the president, from Congress to the Cabinet, have many more tools at their disposal than, say, writing an anonymous New York Times op-ed to stop a leader they consider reckless or dangerous. Their path for managing this choleric man reveals that a president need not be kicked out of office to be removed from holding a firm grip on the reins of power. But the nation’s politicians simply had to interact with Andrew Johnson, for he had become the legitimate, constitutionally ordained chief executive upon Abraham Lincoln’s death by assassination.
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