By the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth's sublime improvidence, married her! As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little. I like to think of that family group, so different from most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her husband the rudiments of education.
Already, as a result of his lowly birth and the class prejudice he everywhere encountered, young Johnson had conceived that hatred of the ruling class at the South which was to influence his after life so deeply. He had a certain rude eloquence which appealed to the lower classes of the people, and, in 1835, succeeded in gaining an election to the state legislature. He nursed his political prospects carefully, and eight years later, was sent to Congress. He was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee.
It has been said that secession was, in the beginning, a policy of the ruling class in the South and not of the people. It is not surprising, then, that Johnson should have arrayed himself against it, and fought it with all his might. This position made him so prominent, that on March 4, 1862, Lincoln appointed him military-governor of Tennessee—a position which was exactly to Johnson's taste and which he filled well. In this position, he seemed the embodiment of the Union element of the South, and at their national convention in 1864, the Republicans decided that the President's policy of reconstruction for the South would be greatly aided by the presence of a southern man on the ticket, and Johnson was thereupon chosen for the office of Vice-President. On the same day that Lincoln was inaugurated for the second time, Johnson took the oath of office in the Senate chamber, and delivered a speech which created a sensation. He declared, in effect, that Tennessee had never been out of the Union, that she was electing representatives who would soon mingle with their brothers from the North at Washington, and that she was entitled to every privilege which the northern states enjoyed.
Three hours after the death of the President, Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as his successor, but he was regarded with suspicion at both North and South—at the North, because he was believed to be at heart pro-slavery; at the South because of his well-known animosity toward the aristocratic and ruling class. He was also known to be stubborn, high-tempered and intemperate, and he and Congress were soon at sword's point. Johnson was of the opinion that the question of suffrage for the negroes should be left to the several states; a majority of Congress were determined to exact this for their own protection. This was embodied in the so-called Civil Rights Bill, conferring citizenship upon colored men. It was promptly vetoed by the President, and was passed over his veto; soon afterwards the fourteenth amendment was passed, conferring the suffrage upon all citizens of the United States without regard to color or previous condition of servitude. It also was vetoed, and passed over the veto. Johnson was hailed as a traitor by Republicans, and the campaign against him culminated in his impeachment by Congress early in 1868. The trial which followed was the most bitter in the history of the Senate, but Andrew Johnson was acquitted by the failure of the prosecution to secure the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction by a single vote, thirty-five senators voting for conviction and nineteen for acquittal.
Johnson's friends were jubilant, but his power had vanished. The seceded states one by one came back into the Union in accordance with the Reconstruction act which Johnson had vetoed. He failed of the nomination on the Democratic ticket, and after the inauguration of his successor, at once returned to his old home in Tennessee. There he attempted to secure the nomination for United States senator, but his influence was gone and he was defeated. So ended his public life.
It has been rather the fashion to picture Johnson, as an intemperate and bull-headed ignoramus, but such a characterization is far from fair. But for Lincoln's assassination, some such policy of reconstruction as Johnson advocated would probably have been carried out, instead of the policy of fanatics like Thaddeus Stevens, which left the South a prey to the carpet-bagger and the ignorant negro for over a decade. Johnson himself might have accomplished more if he had been of a less violent disposition; but he was ignorant of diplomacy, incapable of compromise, and so was worsted in the fight. However we may disagree with his policy and dislike his character, let us at least not forget that picture of the "poor white" boy teaching himself to read; and that other of the girl-wife patiently instructing him in the rudiments of writing.
A successful war inevitably gives to its commanders a tremendous popular prestige. We have seen how the battle of New Orleans made Andrew Jackson a national hero, how William Henry Harrison loomed large after the battle of Tippecanoe, and how Zachary Taylor was chosen President as a result of his victories in Mexico. The country was now to undergo another period of military domination, longer lived than those others, as the Civil War was greater than them—a period from which it has even yet not fully recovered.
In 1868, the Republican party nominated unanimously for President the general who had pushed the war to a successful finish, and who had received Lee's surrender, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and he was elected by an overwhelming majority. For the first time in the history of the country, a man had been elected President without regard to his qualifications for the office, for even Jackson had had many years' experience in public affairs. Of such qualifications, Grant had very few. He was egotistical, a poor judge of men, without experience in statesmanship, and unwilling to submit to guidance. As a result, his administration was marked by inefficiency and extravagance, and ended in a swirl of scandal.
Born in Ohio in 1822, and graduated at West Point, he had served through the war with Mexico, resigned from the army, remained in obscurity for six years, during which he made an unsuccessful attempt to support himself in civil life, and entered the army again at the outbreak of the Civil War. From the first he was successful more than any other of the Union generals, not so much because of military genius as from a certain tenacity of purpose with which he fairly wore out the enemy. But a people discouraged by reverses were not disposed to inquire too closely into the reason of his victories, and early in 1864, after a brilliant campaign along the Mississippi, he had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Union army, and began that series of operations against Richmond which cost the North so dear, but which resulted in the fall of the capital of the Confederacy and in Lee's surrender.