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guillotine to be set up in a republican form of government?' It was his devastating crusade of defiance against this spirit that first established his leadership, by right, of the Tennessee Democracy in 1854. 'Show me a Know-Nothing,' he shouted to bigots, pale with fury, and to the sound of the cocking of pistols, ‘and I will show you a loathsome reptile on whose neck every honest man should set his heel.'1 In replying to an attack on Catholics charged with responsibility for the defeat of Clay in 1844, he left no doubt of the liberality of his views. "The Catholics had the right secured to them by the Constitution of worshipping the God of their fathers in the manner dictated by their consciences. . . . This country is not prepared to establish an inquisition to try and punish men for their religious beliefs.'

To measure the depth of his feeling on religious liberty and against proscription, it must be remembered that he represented a district containing but few Catholics and permeated with a prejudice against them. Nothing could better illustrate the courageous intellectual honesty of Andrew Johnson.

VIII

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'But Andrew Johnson was a drunkard' — and he was nothing of the sort. This slander grew out of his unfortunate condition at the time of his inauguration as Vice-President. There were extenuating circumstances to the incident that reduce a scandal to a misfortune.

Previous to the inauguration, he had been so ill that he determined to take the oath at Nashville, but Lincoln, wishing the psychological advantage in the North of a Southern man being sworn in at the capital, urged him to reconsider. Under these conditions he reached Washington one or two days before the ceremonies.2 The night before, he attended a party given by Colonel Forney, where there must have been some drinking.3 A short time before the hour for the inaugural ceremonies the next day, he entered the office of Vice-President Hamlin, complaining of feeling faint and asking for a stimulant. A messenger was

1 Winston, 72.

2 'Defence and Vindication,' Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, September, 1908. 3 B. C. Truman, Century Magazine, January, 1913.

dispatched for some brandy, and Johnson drank a glass, and, in the course of conversation while waiting, two more. When he rose to enter the Senate Chamber, he was perfectly sober, but the heat of the crowded room had its effect, and when, after much delay, he was sworn in, he was in a befuddled state of mind.1 One witness writes that Lincoln sat facing Johnson with an expression of 'unutterable sorrow,' but that he did not join in the condemnation of others. We have it on reliable authority that he had sent an emissary to Nashville to report on Johnson's habits. 'It has been a severe lesson for Andy,' he said, 'but I do not think he will do it again.' Another talked with Lincoln about the incident. 'I have known Andy Johnson for many years,' he said. 'He made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared. Andy ain't a drunkard.' While it was an age of hard drinking among public men, and a drunken Senator on the floor of the Senate was not unusual, there was a simulation of outraged dignity among Senators, and Sumner even suggested impeachment.

Such was the unhappy incident, and out of this was created the myth of Johnson's habitual drunkenness. A penniless and obscure youth, without family prestige or influential friends, who, within a few years, accumulated a modest fortune, and through sheer ability rose to a position of authority, could not have been a drunkard. However, his enemies made the most of the 'slip,' and within two weeks of his accession to the Presidency a London paper was referring to him as 'a drunken mechanic.' This impelled the 'London News' to publish the result of its investigation. 'We are assured,' it said, 'by those who cannot but know the facts... that that incident cannot without injustice... be taken to represent Mr. Johnson's character. Those who know him well describe him as a man of real capacity and temperate habits.' 5 From Benjamin C. Truman, who sat with him at the same table in Nashville at least once a day for eighteen months, we have it that he never took wine or liquor with a meal, 'never drank a

1 Life of Hamlin, 497; Sherman, Recollections, 1, 351.

Truman, Century, January, 1913.

'Men and Measures, 373.

Forney, 1, 177.

'London News, April 27, 1865: quoted, New York Herald, May 11, 1865.

cocktail in his life, never was in a barroom, and did not care for champagne.' He did, however, 'take two or three or four glasses of Robertson County whiskey some days; some days less, and some days and weeks no liquor at all.'1 A White House attaché who served through five administrations testifies that, while the cellars were always stocked with fine wines and liquors which were served to guests, Johnson 'never drank to excess.' 2 'Except in the time of his absence in the fall of 1865,' continues this dependable witness, 'I saw him probably every day... and I never saw him once under the influence of liquor.' In reply to a direct question by Chief Justice Chase concerning Johnson's reputation for sobriety in Tennessee, Parson Brownlow, his most vituperative foe, replied that, while he was not a total abstainer from liquors, 'nobody in Tennessee ever regarded him as addicted to their excessive use'; and that while the speaker had denounced him for everything of which he was guilty he 'had never charged him with being a drunkard because he had no grounds for doing so.' 4 To this the Chief Justice replied that with the one exception he had never seen Johnson intoxicated. 'I knew him in the Senate before the war,' Chase continued, ‘and then I knew he was not a dissipated man. While he was President I saw him very often, frequently late at night, and sometimes on Sunday, but I never saw him under the influence of spirits in the slightest degree.' 5 To the testimony of his foes we may properly add that of a member of his Cabinet. 'For nearly four years I had daily intercourse with him,' said Secretary McCulloch, 'frequently at night, and I never saw him when under the influence of liquor.' The fact that he was habitually described in the press and from the platform through the bitter struggles of his régime as a 'drunkard' measures the appalling turpitude and reckless dishonesty of his enemies.

Thus we have brushed aside a few favorite falsehoods used against him in his time and preserved by some historians since. He was not a traitor to the Republican Party, for he never belonged to it; he was not slovenly in his dress, but the direct

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6 Men and Measures, 374.

3 Ibid.

4 'Defence and Vindication,' Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, September, 1908.

5 Ibid.

opposite; he did not change his view of the purpose of the war, but held to it; and he was not a drunkard.

IX

The oratory of Johnson was that of the frontier, elemental, without finesse, graceless, void of humor, overcharged with intensity, but often overpowering in its sincerity, and persuasive in its downright honesty. Only his finely modulated voice suggested art, and it was natural. No man spoke at critical moments with more tremendous power. In youth he had read over and over the orations of Fox, Pitt, and Chatham, and no one knew the qualities of a great oration better. If he failed to attain the highest standards, it was due, in a measure, to the limitations of his education. Thus he fell into occasional grammatical errors, but, when not overwrought by feeling, he was a master of forceful rhetoric. To read his early congressional speeches is to marvel that one unable to read well at the time of his marriage could have spoken with such flowing fluency or have mastered such an extensive vocabulary.

The weakness of his speeches, the lack of humor and the lighter tones, was, in a sense, his strength in most of his tremendous struggles on the stump and in Congress. No audience ever heard him, to doubt the depth of his convictions or the sincerity and absolute candor of his utterance. Throughout his life it was his destiny to speak generally on subjects that fired human passions and involved profound fundamental principles that were, to him, as sacred as the Gospel. Fighting his early battles in a section where men took their politics in deadly earnest and carried them to the limits of personalities, he was forced to master the art of the rough-and-tumble repartee. Time and again he was to speak at the peril of his life, and he never faltered or moderated his tone. More than once his speaking was interrupted by the cocking of pistols. Speaking once under such sinister conditions, he was warned that the repetition of his speech would injure his party. 'I will make that same speech to-morrow,' he replied, 'if it blows the Democratic Party to hell.' A difficult orator, if you please, but an honest one. Told that he would be assassinated if he spoke in one community that teemed with enemies, he appeared upon the

platform with the comment that he understood shooting was to be one of the preliminaries, and that decency and order dictated that these be dispensed with first. Drawing a pistol from his pocket, he paused expectantly. There was a dead silence. 'Gentlemen, it appears I have been misinformed,' he said, quietly returning the pistol to his pocket, and launching forthwith into an uncompromising speech.

He was familiar with mobs long before he made his 'swing around the circle.' He met them when thundering against the Ordinance of Secession in his canvass of Tennessee in the midst of frenzied crowds mustering into the service of the Confederacy. It was his fighting speeches that captivated the North until he turned them against the disunionists of that section. Speaking often in Indiana during the war, he was greeted by enormous throngs of wildly enthusiastic men.1 This, however, should be kept in mind - he was never a demagogue. This breed does not bare its breast to bullets. Nor were his speeches frothy and unsubstantial things they were packed with substance. Laborious and exhaustive research preceded his public appearances. In Congress he haunted the Congressional Library in search of facts. He had a passion for evidence. When preparing for the stump, his office had the appearance of a factory at the close of day. It was filled with pamphlets, works on economics, speeches, histories, and always at hand a copy of the Constitution. A huge scrapbook preserved newspaper clippings that might prove useful. His method strangely resembled Lincoln's.

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The height of his eloquence was reached in the impassioned appeals for the Union and the Constitution in the Senate on the verge of war. No one then approached him in sheer eloquence, for there was a heart-throb in every word. Strong words and hard, biting phrases and harsh, and yet through all something very like a sob.

Thus, with his insight into the heart of the masses, his great personal magnetism, his musical voice and fighting presence, his rapidly marching sentences a little undisciplined and undecorated like the citizens' army of the French that marched to the protection of the frontier against the embattled world, he was im

1 Men and Measures, 372.

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