Andrew Johnson

by Peter Cates

Andrew Johnson

Seventeenth President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), by his own hard-working ethic and insatiable desire to honorably better himself, became the kind of speaker that one New York Times correspondent would write with grudging admiration how this individual “cut and slashed right and left, tore big wounds and left something behind to fester and remember. His phraseology may be uncouth, but his views are easily understood and he talks strong thoughts and carefully culled facts in quick succession.”

As with several other presidents, Johnson was born into poverty; his early years were spent in North Carolina, his father died when Johnson was three, and his mother apprenticed the boy to a tailor.

He became a very skilled tailor but disliked his boss and ran away, eventually relocating in the Tennessee mountain village of Greeneville where he set up his own very successful tailoring business.

When 15 year old Eliza McCardle (1810-1876) first saw Andrew, she commented to a friend, “There goes my beau;” they were married a year later in her mother’s house, the ceremony being presided over by Mordecai Lincoln, the uncle of the former 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.

She helped immensely with her husband’s education, especially in arithmetic and writing. And, when her husband became interested in politics, she fully supported his ambition, but rarely joined him in public appearances.

Johnson was elected mayor of Greeneville, served in the state legislature and five terms in the House of Representatives, and as governor and U.S. Senator before being picked by Abraham Lincoln to replace Maine’s own Hamilton Hamlin as vice-president when Lincoln was elected to a second term in 1864.

Andrew Johnson’s speeches and convictions resonated with the farmers and day laborers of the Tennessee mountains and valleys, a constituency that had little use for the wealthy plantation slave owners. Johnson was against high tariffs and wasteful government spending because they raised the cost of living for working people, spoke up for freedom of speech and religion and, although a Democrat, maintained a feisty independence in what was morally right.

Before Bill Clinton, and later Donald Trump, Andrew Johnson was the only president to undergo an impeachment trial, due to the obnoxious Radical Republicans who were doing their best to subvert the executive and judicial branches in attempts to pursue their own agendas, especially in relation to revenge against the former Confederate states and its citizens. Johnson, like his predecessor Lincoln, believed in a more moderate policy of healing and reconciliation as best for the country, which antagonized most of Congress; his acquittal was due to the vote of one man, Senator Edmund Ross, of Kansas, who was one of the subjects of JFK’s 1956 book, Profiles in Courage.

Droves of fascinating material on Johnson’s own presidency exists and could prove that his ranking as one of the worst presidents is grossly unfair.

In 1874, Johnson became the only former president to be re-elected to the U.S. Senate, was strangely given a hero’s welcome by the entire chamber including his former political enemies. Being a gentle forgiving man, Johnson shook hands with these enemies.

He died within six months of a stroke while visiting his daughter in July 1875, at the age of 66.

A visitor to the White House, Charles Dickens described Johnson’s face as “remarkable…indicating courage, watchfulness and certainly strength of purpose.”

Abraham Lincoln

by Peter Cates

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) first met Mary Todd (1818-1882) at a formal dance in Springfield, Illinois, in late 1839 where he had been practicing law for two years, while she had just recently moved in with an older sister from their home state of Ken­tucky.

Mary Todd Lincoln

Despite their vast differences in background – she having grown up in wealth and he in poverty – they took an instant liking to each other and visited constantly; they shared mutual interests in literature, especially reciting and rereading Shakes­peare tragedies, along with history, geography and politics and swapping anecdotes of their early years in Kentucky.

Both of them also had a keen sense of the absurd and shared much laughter as a result.

Within a year the two were engaged but then, due to an ongoing fear of marriage, he broke off the engagement. They went their separate ways for two very long years, however, not at all losing their affection for, and commitment to, each other. Mary, already knowing of Abe’s tendencies to melancholy, prayed for that glorious day when “Hamlet will be himself again,” as she confided to a close friend.

“That glorious day” finally arrived. The couple announced their intention at the very last minute and they were joined in marriage in her sister’s parlor.

Libraries of material abound on Lincoln’s rise as a politician in Congress, his horrifically challenging presidency during the Civil War and his assassination with its radical reconstruction aftermath.

His wife had her manic/depressive ups and downs but the couple loved each other up to that fateful night of April 14, at Ford’s Theater. Of their four sons, Edward died at 4 years old, in 1850, Willie at 12, in 1862, at the White House, and Tad at 18, in 1871. The oldest son Robert died at 84 in 1926.

Losing the youngest son is believed by many to have caused several breakdowns in her mental and physical health. Robert had his mother institutionalized for a few months in 1876 but her older sister eventually secured her release and freedom, after which Mary moved to France for four years.

By late 1880, due to a paralyzing fall from a chair while hanging a picture, she moved back to the states and moved in with her sister back in Springfield, Illinois, where she died in July 1882, from a stroke.

Mary Todd Lincoln was 63.