1 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. 6 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 1 Century, January, 1913. 3 Ibid. 4 'Defence and Vindication,' Taylor-Trotwood Magazine, September, 1908. 5 Ibid. 2 Crook, 83. 6 Men and Measures, 374. 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. 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. pressive and effective. The critical sneered at his grammatical errors and jeered at his stinging sentences, but there never was a time that his enemies did not fear their effect upon a crowd. That is the reason, as we shall see, that they organized mobs to howl him down on his memorable journey to Douglas's tomb. X 2 He was unfashionable among public men of the period of his Presidency because of his meticulous honesty. His declination of a fine equipage with a span of horses proffered by a New York City group, on the ground that he had always made it a practice to refuse gifts while in public station,1 was criticized as not without vulgarity. Handling millions as Military Governor of Tennessee, he was poorer on leaving than on taking office, and this was intolerable stupidity to not a few patriots of the time. His absolute integrity made an impression on Benjamin R. Curtis, who came to know him intimately in the days of the impeachment.3 A member of the Cabinet, of notable personal integrity, found that 'in appointments money was not potent, offices were not merchandise,' and that he 'never permitted himself to be placed under personal obligations.' His enemies were to subject his character and career to a microscopic examination for three years, without finding a single incident on which so much as to hang an insinuation. Scarcely one among his traducers could have stood the test, and this itself made him impossible. Nothing depressed and alarmed him more than the moral laxity in public life; and he foresaw that the railroad grants would mean 'nothing but a series of endless corrupting legislation.' Thus he was thought vulgar in the house of Cooke. It were bad enough to be a plebeian and champion of labor; it were intolerable that he should be an enemy of favor-seeking capital. By instinct he was the soul of candor, but, surrounded all his life with enemies, he had acquired a touch of craftiness. One of his most trusted friends found that 'he gave his confidence reluctantly,'' Dickens thought his manner 'suppressed, guarded, 1 New York Herald, May 25, 1865. Quoted by Woodburn, 330. 5 Ibid., 405. 2 Winston, 239. 4 Men and Measures, 377. anxious,'' and a famous journalist found him 'crafty to a degree.' 2 Thus, while assuming a haughty indifference to personal criticism, he was, at heart, supersensitive to abuse or snubs. At times in utter depression he wished that 'we [himself and family] were all blotted out of existence and even the remembrance of things that were.' Then he could unbosom himself to an intimate with appalling bitterness and strike back at his enemies in Greeneville as 'the God-forsaken and hell-deserving, money-loving, hypocritical, backbiting, Sunday-praying scoundrels of the town.' And yet he seldom whined; he was too combative for that, and he fought with a ferocity and zest which never failed to inflict wounds. He gave no love-taps in battle, but used the battle-axe. One of his most inveterate foes conceded that 'his courage passed far beyond the line of obstinacy.' He would side-step neither man nor devil; and yet he nursed no resentments and could grasp the proffered hand of Ben Butler after the impeachment fiasco, offer his hand to Morton, who had deserted his standard to become one of the most ferocious of his foes, and speak kindly of Parson Brownlow, who had called him 'the dead dog in the White House.' He flared in a fight, but his momentary bitterness died with the occasion; and this was to be denounced as a vice by his enemies when his bitterness toward the men of the Confederacy turned to sympathy when they fell. 4 Nor was he merely a creature of prejudices and emotions. We have seen his method of preparing speeches. One of the soundest historical scholars of the period found that, 'in the formation of his opinions on great questions of public policy,' he was 'as diligent as any man in seeking and weighing the views of all who were competent to aid him.' A tireless worker all his life, the attachés of the White House were to be amazed at the industry of a man who kept six secretaries busy, and 'except for an hour or so in the afternoon and at meal times rarely left his desk until midnight.' 7 On his tremendous tasks he brought to bear an intellect far beyond the average. His worst enemies reluctantly conceded that 'he was not deficient in intellectual ability,' and, as an old man, 1 Forster, III, 424. 8 Boutwell, n, 104. |