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Is Andrew Johnson the worst president in American history?
This weekend marks the
birthday of perhaps the most-maligned president in American history. But
was Andrew Johnson really that bad, or just the target of some
second-guessing historians?
Johnson was born on December 29,
1808 in North Carolina. He served in the Senate and the House and as
governor, and then military governor, of Tennessee. It was when he was
serving as military governor that Abraham Lincoln asked him to replace
Hannibal Hamlin as vice president in the 1864 campaign. A Democrat,
Johnson switched parties for the election.
Already an enigma because of his
well-known independent streak and his earlier support of slavery,
Johnson turned heads when he was apparently drunk at his own
inauguration in 1865. (Another theory was that Johnson was ill and he
hadn’t been known for drinking in public.)
Johnson suddenly found himself as
president when Lincoln died just after starting his second term. His
policies during Reconstruction were controversial and caused his
newfound party to impeach him in 1868. Johnson kept his job by one vote
in a Senate trial.
In his official biography on the White House website, Johnson’s term is summed up politely.
“Although an honest and honorable man, Andrew Johnson was one of the
most unfortunate of presidents. Arrayed against him were the Radical
Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics.
Johnson was no match for them,” says a bio prepared by Michael Beschloss
and Hugh Sidey.
Looking back at historians who
have ranked Johnson (and other presidents) since 1948, he appears to be
the one president who has suffered at the hands of revisionist
history—either because more facts are available about his term, or
because his place in the history of race relations has been
re-evaluated.
In 1948, historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. ranked Johnson as a middle-of-the-pack president: a
respected 19th out of 29 presidents.
Since then, some presidents have risen in the eyes of historians, like James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Johnson’s ratings have
plummeted like a rock. In a recent 2010 Siena College survey, Johnson
was called the worst president in history. A 2011 survey from a British
academic institute ranked Johnson as 36th out of 40 presidents.
In general, two presidents who
died early in their terms—William Henry Harrison and James
Garfield—aren’t considered in presidential rankings.
Johnson has been tossed into the
bottom rung of presidents, including James Buchanan (who served before
Lincoln), Franklin Pierce (who preceded Buchanan), and Warren Harding.
Buchanan, Pierce, and Harding
have always been considered really bad presidents by historians. Andrew
Johnson has taken the place of Ulysses S. Grant, who has received an
upgrade from “bad” to “mediocre” in recent years.
In Johnson’s case, Lincoln was a
tough act to follow, and his failed role in obstructing much of the
GOP’s Reconstruction plans was a tough pill for historians to swallow.
After becoming president, Johnson
fought with his own Cabinet and party members over the scope of
readmitting secessionist states and the voting rights of blacks.
Johnson favored a very lenient
version of Reconstruction and state control over who could vote,
according to their race. He also openly opposed the 14th Amendment.
Although Johnson had supported an
end to slavery in the 1860s, he was a white supremacist. “This is a
country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall
be a government for white men,” he wrote in 1866.
In the end, the Radical Republicans won control over Reconstruction and Johnson became a pariah.
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Bill, but Congress overrode the veto in an unprecedented move.
Somehow, Johnson survived the
impeachment trial, possibly because there was no vice president to
replace him, and moderates feared Benjamin Wade, the Senate president
pro tempore who would have replaced Johnson.
The Radical Republicans also
eventually failed, and Reconstruction had ended within a decade. Racial
discrimination continued on into the middle of the following century.
And not everyone is convinced Johnson was a one-dimensional figure.
Dr. Robert Orr, a historian in North Carolina,
told a local newspaper in 2008 that “the modern hostility to Andrew
Johnson, I believe, mostly comes from comments he made that are racially
insensitive.”
Among historians today, James
Buchanan is the one president who is consistently ranked as low as
Johnson. Buchanan’s seeming indifference to the onset of the Civil War,
and his own failings as a president, were monumental.
source:yahoo
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