Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14th, 1865. Johnson was selected to be Lincoln's vice president because Lincoln was trying to run on a unity ticket that would be inclusive of southerners. Johnson was the only sitting senator from a state that seceded (Tennessee) who did not surrender his seat in the United States Senate and who remained firmly in favor of the Union. As President, however, Johnson favored policies adopted by the southern states that restricted the freedom of former slaves, and he came into conflict with the Republican-controlled Congress. The Congress would pass legislation overrriding actions of the former confederate states, then Johnson would veto that legislation, only to have Congress override the veto. Eventually, Johnson was impeached by the House and acquitted by one vote in the Senate. LNo President has inherited a worse situation than Abraham Lincoln, and no President has achieved so much in the way of protecting our country and advancing its ideals. For that reason, Abraham Lincoln ranks as our greatest President in almost every commonly referenced poll of political scientists, historians and journalists that I have seen. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration, seven states had already seceded and six of those states had united under the banner of the Confederate States of America. Yet Lincoln, in his inaugural address alone, did more to try to avert the Civil War than either Pierce or Buchanan--his two predecessors--had done during their entire terms. Even as he refused to recognize the legality of the secessionist state governments, he expressed willingness to amend the Constitution. He was firm that slavery not be extended to new states and territories, but he was willing to guarantee its continuation within the states where it existed at the time of his inauguration. Among so many of Lincoln's quotations that capture the essence of America like no other President has ever done, there is this beautiful passage from his first inaugural address: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies ... The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." But there was to be no compromise. The failures and active collusion of Buchanan and Pierce with pro-slavery factions had set the course of secession too far down the track. Five weeks after Lincoln's inaugural address, Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumpter and started the Civil War. From that point on, Lincoln was resolute in his determination to defeat the Confederate States and restore the Union. From directing the grand strategy of the war effort to managing the diplomacy of defusing foreign plots to aid the South to rallying the people of the North with his matchless oratory, America could not have had a more talented or capable president during this crucial period. And Lincoln did all this while suffering serious personal setbacks, including the death of his son Willie in 1862. Lincoln was re-elected in a landslide in the election of 1864. Tellingly, even with the heavy casualties and brutal fighting that characterized the war, nearly 80 percent of the soldiers who voted, voted for President Lincoln. Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address in March of 1865: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." General Lee surrendered to General Grant on April 9th,1865, effectively ending the Civil War. On April 14th, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C. President Buchanan is viewed by most as one of the worst presidents because of his failure to address the immediate causes of the Civil War. He was indeed, as bad as Pierce, and maybe worse: (1) He exercised improper influence on the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, widely considered one of the worst judicial decisions* in American history, in order to gain stronger support for his pro-slavery views; (2) he failed to recognize the legitimate democratic processes of anti-slavery forces in the Kansas Territory and used federal power to advance the cause of pro-slavery forces; (3) he actively opposed the doctrine of popular sovereignty in determining whether a territory was "free' or "slave," completely contradicting the quotation attributed to him in the attached photograph: "The ballot box is the surest arbiter of disputes among free men;" (4) he not only failed to use force to confront secession, he also voiced sympathy for secessionists even while stating that secession was illegal. I tend to think strong action by Buchanan's predecessor, Pierce, would have been more likely to avert the Civil War than anything Buchanan could have done, but, that said, Buchanan simply made a bad situation worse. After Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860 on a platform of excluding slavery from the western territories, southern states began to secede. Buchanan did nothing, leaving his successor a house divided. *Tomorrow, March 6th, is the 161st anniversary of the Dred Scott decision. When you follow the inexorable march from the ratification of the Constitution to the outbreak of the Civil War, it is hard not to place a great deal of blame on Franklin Pierce for the final breakdown of peaceful processes of government. At the same time, slavery was the original sin of the American Republic--the glaring hypocritical exception to the founding principle that we are all endowed with inalienable rights. Many of the founders recognized that hypocrisy, but they needed the vote of at least one slave state to achieve the ratification requirement of nine states: two-thirds of the thirteen states. And in fact, they probably needed more than that, given that the Articles of Confederation under which the states had operated since 1781 required the unanimous consent of all states. In other words, the Constitution may have been ratified if only the minimum number of states had approved it, but it is questionable whether the non-approving states would have cooperated under the new framework. As it happened, due to a number of compromises that gave the slave-holding states a disproportionate representation in Congress and restricted the power of the federal government to ban the importation of slaves for 20 years, all thirteen states did ratify the Constitution. And the federal government did ban the importation of slaves at the earliest possible moment allowed by the Constitiution. But by that time, importation was no longer necessary to sustain the practice of slavery. And despite fervent hopes on the part of some of the founders that the example of non-slave states banning the practice of slavery would inspire a universal ban, there was really no chance that was ever going to happen. So the country moved through the first half of the 19th century, achieving a series of precarious balancing compromises. Time and again, the protests against the immorality of slavery clashed with the representative power of the slave states in Congress. First the Missouri Compromise, then the Compromise of 1850, held out the hope, for some at least, that time would allow the country to outgrow the slave legacy without bloodshed. Then came President Pierce. And the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, enraged the abolitionists in the north and led to widespread violence and the breakdown of democratic processes in the new territories. Now, instead of a strong declaration of the will to use federal power to defeat and punish secessionists, like the declarations made by Presidents Jackson and Taylor (both southerners), we had Franklin Pierce and his "best and dearest earthly hopes." In spite of a congressional investigation that found widespread fraud had illegally tilted elections in favor of slave-holders, Pierce sent the Army in--not to re-establish proper order through martial law--but to disband the legislature elected by anti-slave settlers in Topeka. The violence continued to spin out of control, and further compromise became more and more unlikely. Of course, for the people suffering under the yoke of slavery, it might seem that another compromise itself would have been a moral failure as great as slavery itself. Sixty years after the ratification of the Constitution, sixty years after the compromises that enabled the birth of an American Republic proclaiming inalienable rights for all while denying them to African Americans, perhaps time had simply run out. But I think I would feel better about President Pierce if he had at least tried to use the power of the federal government to enforce legal process over gang violence in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. On July 9, 1850, for the second time in ten years, an American Vice President took the oath of office to replace a president who had died in office. Millard Fillmore was a Whig politician from New York who had risen to prominence as a self-taught lawyer turned state legislator. As President, Filmore supported the package of legislation that became know as the Compromise of 1850, one of the last legislative initiatives to achieve a temporary truce in the escalating crisis over slavery in America. Fillmore was the last Whig president. He failed to win the nomination of his party for the 1852 election.
Only a few short years after the death of William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor became the second US President to die while in office. Taylor, a successful army general with distinguished service in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War, the Second Seminole War, and the Mexican-American War, died of cholera a mere sixteen months into his term. To his credit, Taylor spent his time in office focusing on how to preserve the union in the face of secessionist threats. In spite of the fact that he was from a slave-holding state--Taylor was the only president ever elected from the state of Louisiana--he increasingly sided with anti-slavery forces, and helped set the stage for California to be admitted directly as a state rather than following the route of territory, then statehood. The Gold Rush and other events played a role in bringing California's statehood to fruition, but Taylor's strong anti-secessionist position certainly helped set the stage for the Compromise of 1850, signed shortly after his death. The timing of Taylor's death and the intense controversy over slavery and statehood led some to suggest that he was poisoned, but there has never been any evidence to support this hypothesis. Also, Taylor's predecessor died of cholera in Tennessee just over a year before Taylor succumbed to a similar fate--cholera was a major threat in the United States at this time. Pursuant to the standard set when Harrison died, Taylor was succeeded by his Vice President, Millard Fillmore, in July of 1850. |
AuthorAuthor of Thy King Dumb Come and Accountability Citizenship, Stephen P. Tryon is a businessman and technologist with extensive experience in e-commerce, a retired Soldier, and former Senate Fellow. Archives
January 2024
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