Andrew Johnson’s mixed legacy

The legacy of Andrew Johnson has run the gamut from excellent to abominable. In the early twentieth century, the Republican Party of the 1860s was seen as beholden to business. In that light, Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, was viewed as a “man of the people” and held in high esteem. A century later — by the 1960s — he was reviled as a president with southern sympathies who held back the civil rights movement.

The truth lies somewhere in between. Johnson was the only Southerner in Congress to remain loyal to the Union, and seems to have held the continuation of the Union as his highest priority in his work toward rapid North-South reconciliation after the war. To this end, he staked out a centrist path and kept his distance from the Radical Republicans. This move, however measured, inevitably placed him ideologically closer to the former Southern opposition than Northerners would have preferred.

President Johnson’s most marked failure was his lack of action in addressing the social and economic status of recently-freed slaves: it took significant effort from the Republican Congress, without much help from Johnson’s administration, to pass the Freedman’s Bureau and other laws.

This 1867 Harper's Weekly illustration, "The Georgetown Election," mocks President Johnson's (left) stance in opposition to suffrage for freed slaves.

Johnson did oversee the purchase of Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and forced the French out of Mexico (where France was attempting to establish a satellite state and exploit the nation’s resources). France’s withdrawal ended the reign of Maximillian I of Mexico, the Austrian archduke installed by France.

Even considering these foreign policy accomplishments, Johnson’s failure of domestic post-war leadership and his disregard for civil rights places him squarely in our bottom tier of presidents.

For what it’s worth, the Congress at the time agreed — there were two formal efforts to impeach President Johnson: the first, in 1867, failed to pass the House; the second, in 1868, passed the House but failed (by a single vote) to receive the required two-thirds majority in the Senate.