Andrew Johnson alcoholism debate

According to two histories of alcohol in the United States, the country had three alcoholic presidents during the 19th century: Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S. Grant.[4][5] A broad overview of the human use of intoxicants asserts that Johnson was thought to "be rarely sober."[6] A scholarly examination of the consequences of illness in national leaders states, "The best-known instance of alcohol abuse in high office is that of Andrew Johnson, whose alcoholism figured in the debate concerning his impeachment."[7]

"Drunkenness, of Johnson" has 16 mentions in Andrew Johnson: A Biographical Companion, which puts the topic on par with "Election of 1866" and "First Military Reconstruction Act."[8] The Biographical Companion, citing the editors of The Papers of Andrew Johnson and Hans Trefousse, states that all charges/claims of Johnson being drunk "were false except for one incident [the March 4 inauguration]...Johnson was not intoxicated. He was merely falling back into ingrained stump-speaking habits...His actions did not conform to many people's ideas about how a president should behave."[8] The most famous case of Andy drunk was at his 1865 inauguration as vice president of the United States under Abraham Lincoln, but it was not the first or the last time he appeared intoxicated in public, and per historian Elizabeth Moran, "He never lived these incidents down, although historians contend that they were greatly exaggerated."[9] As he set out on his Swing Around the Circle tour as president, a Pennsylvania newspaper summarized the general perception (amongst his enemies, at least) of the intersection of Johnson's drinking and his politics: "From the day that Andrew Johnson took his seat as Vice President of the United to the present moment he seems to have improved every opportunity to belittle himself and disgrace the position he holds, by either bacchanalian revels, or the retailing of vile slang in partisan speeches...His stooping to blackguard private citizens was thought to be lowest depth to which drunken recklessness could drag him down, but a lower depth has been found."[10] A 1916 thesis on Johnson's era as military governor of Tennessee argued, "The habit of indulging in intoxicants, afterwards reputed as Johnson's most conspicuous personal failing as President, had, of course, been formed long before. There is no evidence that it interfered seriously with the performance of his duties, but it occasionally betrayed him into extravagance of action and expression which did him no credit."[11]

Nonetheless, after examining recollections of Johnson by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, a historian of alcoholism found that Andrew Johnson most likely met the criteria for problem drinking, based on accounts that suggest he indulged in benders, drank in "enormous" quantities, gulped down hard liquor as if it were water, drank in the morning, drank after drinking, and consumed excessive, inebriating quantities of alcohol at inappropriate times.[5] The author, James Graham, argues that "ugly behavior is symptomatic," and states that "It's probable that [Johnson's] alcoholism-driven ego played a more important role in his clash with Congress, which led to the attempted impeachment, than alcoholism-ignorant modern historians realize."[5] He also argues that alcoholism is often "not noticed outside the home until the alcoholic reaches the advanced stage of the disease and starts showing the bizarre behavior associated with the condition—such as showing up drunk on the job."[5]

"Robert Johnson, son of Andy Johnson, died in Greeneville, suddenly, a few days ago. He was dissipated." (Fayetteville Observer, Fayetteville, Tenn., April 29, 1869)

Additionally, while it is hardly evidentiary, it may be relevant that all three of Johnson's sons struggled with alcoholism, quite publicly in the case of Robert Johnson—he was in the New York State Inebriate Asylum at the time of Grant's inauguration.[12] Robert died of an overdose of alcohol and laudanum, but by some historians theorize that alcohol was also involved in the deaths of Charles and Frank, which are otherwise attributed to accident and tuberculosis, respectively.[13] Hans Trefousse, who wrote the most recent major biography of Johnson, argued, "...although his sons suffered from alcoholism, and he himself was constantly accused of it after his inauguration, it seems evident that, unlike a true alcoholic, Johnson could take or leave his liquor at will."[14]

Chronic alcoholic abuse or character flaws?

On the whole, historians seem to have concluded that Johnson's problems were not solely a consequence of whisky. W.E.B. DuBois described him as "drunk, not so much with liquor, as with the heady wine of sudden and accidental success."[21] However, "The Atlantic Monthly thought Johnson 'Egotistic to the point of mental disease,'"[2] and the two issues may have overlapped, as "Studies have shown links between narcissistic behavioral patterns and substance abuse issues."[22] In analyzing speeches that seemed like the drunken harangues of a half-deranged misanthrope, historians often find as much evidence for self-obsession as inebriation, as determined by audits of Johnson's favorite topic: himself. For example, in the official transcript of Johnson's vice-presidential inauguration speech, historian Stephen Howard Browne found "extraordinary use of the pronominal and possessive first person. In a speech of approximately 800 words, such constructions run to 28 'I's and nine 'my's. Indeed, in the first paragraph alone 'I' is deployed no less than 20 times. Now, a certain preoccupation with the self is no doubt to be expected under such circumstances, but as his audiences would learn soon enough, Johnson's phrasing here foreshadows an almost pathological fixation on his personal identity."[2]

"President Johnson addressing his fellow-citizens at Washington, February 22, 1866" (Harper's Weekly, March 10, 1866)

Similarly, lowlights of the notorious Washington's Birthday speech of 1866 included its long duration, apparent ignorance of political reality, persecutory delusions, sullen resentment, thin-skinned "intolerance of criticism," egotism ("Who, I ask, has suffered more for the Union than I have?"), and more than 200 self-references.[23][24][25] Per historian Eric McKitrick in his ground-breaking Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1961), what the audience saw and heard was not the President under the influence of mind-altering substances but "Andrew Johnson the man, fully true to his themes of his career and character."[26]

Wherein America jumps from the frying pan into the fire...According to political scientist Gautam Mukunda: "His combination of weakness, rigidity, and racism was exceptional even by nineteenth-century standards. The South was able to successfully win the peace after losing the war because Johnson inspired recalcitrant southerners to keep up the fight longer than a war-weary North was willing to maintain the pressure...Johnson's selection as vice president in 1864 was Lincoln's greatest mistake. Given the scale of Johnson's damage, Lincoln's assassination may be the greatest tragedy in American history."

The incident that set the stage for almost all later evaluation of Johnson's drinking habits was his floridly drunk speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate on the occasion of his swearing-in as Vice President of the United States. Serious historians describe him as "plastered,"[2] and recount that he "humiliated himself before everyone of importance in Washington."[33]

Excuses were later made that Johnson had typhoid and his obvious intoxication was the result of medication, or that outgoing V.P. Hannibal Hamlin manipulated him into drinking to excess.[3]

These formulations ignore a salient fact: Andrew Johnson was a grown man and responsible for his actions. If he was seriously ill before one of the most important events in American political life—at perhaps the most critical juncture in the nation’s history—he should have taken better care of himself, and known that drinking multiple tumblers of whiskey was not a good idea. If he was the kind of person whom another man could ply with drinks against his will before he participated in what was, until then, the crowning achievement of his career, he was even less qualified to be president than he showed himself to be.

— Andrew Johnson: The 17th President, 1865-1869 by Annette Gordon-Reed (2011), page 87[3]

A contemporary account of Andrew Johnson's swearing-in as vice president, as published in the Lancaster, Penn. Intelligencer Journal from the "correspondent of the New York Herald, a person sufficiently mendacious to praise Lincoln profusely and ready to go so far as to call his inaugural address eloquent" (meaning that the Herald was known as a relatively liberal, pro-Republican news outlet) reads thus: "[The Senators began] to look at each other with significance as if to say, 'Is he crazy, or what is the matter?'...It was not only a ninety-ninth rate stump speech but disgraceful in the extreme...the Democratic senators leaned forward and appeared to be chuckling with each other at the figure made by the Republican Party through their Vice President-elect...the sentences so incoherent it is impossible to give an accurate report of the speech...("Who is the Secretary of the Navy?"—was then heard, in a voice of less volume. Someone responded 'Mr. Welles'.)...'Has he no friends?'...It is charitable to say that his condition was such that he was unfit to make a speech...The effort of the Vice President elect to go through with the form of reading the sentences [of the oath] as read by Mr. Hamlin was painful in the extreme. He stumbled, he stammered, he repeated portions of it several times over..."[34] He was also apparently too disoriented to administer the oath to incoming Senators, and did not return to the Senate after Lincoln's speech to conduct further business of the Senate.[34]

Johnson's biographer Hans L. Trefousse wrote that Johnson, loudly and theatrically pronounced, "I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States."[14] A Cincinnati paper reported that he had "driveled over the Holy Book as he took the oath of office," and editorialized "This cannot be covered up as a private infirmity...Mr. Johnson made a similar exhibition of himself here, and we then refrained on commenting on it because we thought it might only be a lapse in the interval when he was free from public duties."[35] Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was apparently present, "He saw the Bible whirled by the incoming V.P. about his head, like a cap when a man gives three cheers...The spectacle of an inebriated Vice President hiccoughing out his oath of office furnished such a text for discourse on temperance as hardly turns up once in an age."[36] Someone working in the Ordnance Department wrote in a private letter to his father that Johnson had been "disgracefully drunk."[37]

Multiple accounts had it that the "reporters for the Congressional Globe are said to have been tampered with" in order to prevent the release of an accurate transcript.[38][34] According to the Andrew Johnson Biographical Companion, news reports of the content of the speech tended to itemize the topics as bullet points and/or assert that "there was so much noise in the galleries" that Johnson could not be heard.[8]

As for Lincoln, he apparently simply slumped down in his seat during the speech and closed his eyes, and later told his Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch not to worry about it: "I have known Andy Johnson for many years; he made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain't a drunkard."[3][lower-alpha 1] The New York World, meanwhile, read the entrails and saw augurs of doom: "And to think that only one frail human stands between this insolent clownish drunkard and the Presidency! May god bless and spare Abraham Lincoln! Should this Andrew Johnson become his successor, the decline and fall of the American republic would smell as rank in history as that of atrocious monsters in human shape as Nero and Caligula."[38]

The spectacle inspired a song performed at a theater on E Street:[18]

And there Great Andy Johnson got
And took a brandy-toddy hot,
Which made him drunk as any sot,
At the Inauguration.

And now to wipe out the disgrace,
The President has closed the place,
Where Andy Johnson fell from grace,—
At the Inauguration!

After the fact, Johnson retreated to the Silver Spring estate of the Blair family in Maryland, "where he recuperated and hid from the press."[8] He made no public appearances until April 3, when he made a speech in front of a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel about the fall of the Confederate capital.[8] There were rumors that he had been in a binge but he wrote letters explaining that he was in fact "prostrated" by typhoid.[8] According to James G. Blaine, Johnson returned to Washington from Maryland about April 9, 1865 and "when Mr. Johnson arrived from Fortress Monroe on the morning of April 10, and found the National Capital in a blaze of patriotic excitement over the surrender of Lee's army the day before at Appomattox, he hastened to the White House, and addressed to the unwilling ears of Mr. Lincoln an earnest protest against the indulgent terms conceded by General Grant."[39] In 1866, a newspaper account had it that Lincoln met with Johnson on April 11, 1865, forgoing a family carriage ride to take the meeting, and when he returned, "remarked with much apparent concern 'That miserable man; I cannot imagine the trouble he will cause during my second term of office.'"[40] According to the standard account, Johnson and Lincoln supposedly did not meet again until the afternoon of April 14. That night Lincoln was shot in back of the head by John Wilkes Booth; the 16th president died the following morning. Johnson's 42-day vice presidency would be the second-shortest V.P. term in American history.[8]

In the end, whether or not he exhibited clinically significant symptoms of alcoholism during his Presidency, after the March 4 spectacle at the U.S. Capitol, "it did not much matter what the truth was about his drinking habits. The truth that mattered was that he had set himself up, made himself vulnerable to charges of drunkenness at virtually every crisis that beset his late political career."[2]

Most of what we know about the swearing-in of Johnson comes from one wire report

In 1908, former U.S. Senator William Morris Stewart published his Reminiscences, and most of the 20th chapter of the book is devoted to the abbreviated second term of Abraham Lincoln. One of the Chapter XX subtitles is "How a drunken man was sworn in as President." Hans L. Trefousse, Johnson's most recent major biographer, discounts Stewart's account entirely, writing, "The falsity of these assertions is evident. Stewart's account of the swearing in is contradicted by most other contemporary sources, including a memorandum in the chief justice's papers prepared the next day. The fact that the president took his oath at a later time than eight in the morning is well attested by various newspapermen, who failed to see any sign of drunkenness or a hangover. Moreover, the cabinet meeting at noon, which Welles recorded in his diary as well as in other memoranda, is proof positive of Johnson's condition and whereabouts on the fifteenth."[14]

According to Stewart's telling, there were but three witnesses to Johnson's inauguration (Stewart himself, Chief Justice Chase, and Senator Foot of Vermont) and "all statements to the contrary are absolutely false."[lower-alpha 2] Stewart claimed that Johnson had been in a "half-drunken stupor" since he arrived in Washington, D.C. in "January or February" 1865 and continued drinking following the debacle at the Capitol, and made at least one speech to a "great crowd of street hoodlums and darkies congregated...about the City Hall steps. He was intoxicated...It was quite common for Johnson to make these open-air speeches; and as he delivered them whenever he had been drinking, naturally he became the most persistent orator in the capital."[41] Following the death of Abraham Lincoln, Chase, Foot and Stewart found Johnson in his rooms on the third floor of the Kirkwood.[41]

After some little delay Johnson opened the door and we entered. The Vice-President was in his bare feet, and only partially dressed, as though he had hurriedly drawn on a pair of trousers and a shirt. He was occupying two little rooms about ten feet square, and we entered one of them, a sitting-room, while he finished his toilet in the other. ¶ In a few minutes Johnson came in, putting on a very rumpled coat, and presenting the appearance of a drunken man. He was dirty, shabby, and his hair was matted, as though with mud from the gutter, while he blinked at us through squinting eyes, and lurched around unsteadily. He had been on a "bender" for a month.

According to Stewart, Johnson's response to the news that he was to be sworn in was "I'm ready."[41]

Then, per Stewart again, after going to find Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and informing him of the state of the President:[41]

Stanton and I were driven back to the Kirkwood House, and, accompanied by the coachman, we went directly to Johnson's room. He was lying down. We aroused him, dressed him as well as we could, led him down stairs, and put him in Stanton's carriage. We took him to the White House, and Stanton sent for a tailor, a barber, and a doctor. He had a dose administered, and the President was bathed and shaved, his hair was cut, and a new suit of clothes was fitted to him. He did not, however, get into a condition to be visible until late in the afternoon, when a few persons were permitted to see him to satisfy themselves that there was a President in the White House.

This account was disputed at length by Tennessee Congressman Walter P. Brownlow (a nephew of Johnson's old political enemy Parson Brownlow) in an article the following year. Brownlow had the article entered into the Congressional Record of February 25, 1909.[lower-alpha 3] Brownlow's rebuttals included:

• if the story were true it would have been revealed at the contentious impeachment hearings
• Johnson was always known to be an immaculate dresser (fact check: true),[14] so he couldn't have been disheveled that morning
• Johnson did not move into the White House until six weeks after Lincoln's death (fact check: true)[20] so he couldn't have been taken to the White House to be cleaned up and have meetings
• Salmon P. Chase was a "consistent member of church and it is defamation of his character to say that he would have consented to administer to Johnson the oath had he been in the condition Stewart falsely says he was."[42]

Brownlow also pointed to an account by Lincoln and Johnson's Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch that repeated the traditional account of Cabinet members and Senators and stated that Johnson's hand rested on Proverbs 22 and 23 when, "with all due solemnity," he took the oath.[43] McCulloch has been described as "the only real defender of Johnson."[15] James G. Blaine also repeats the standard version, although in his account, the swearing of the oath was attended by all of Lincoln's cabinet except Secretary of State Seward (who had been gravely wounded by the conspirators against Lincoln's government), meaning that Gideon Welles, John Palmer Usher, and William Dennison Jr. would also have been present.[39]

According to a 1928 biographer named Robert W. Winston, who was granted access to the Johnson papers by his grandson Andrew Johnson Patterson,[16] the newly elevated President kissed the Bible at verse 21 of Ezekiel 11.[16][lower-alpha 4]

According to historians Dorothy Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt in 1965, "Stanton ran the country single-handedly for the first days after the assassination, and no one looked to the newly sworn-in Johnson to make decisions. Johnson merely received delegations at the Treasury Building, seemed to mention the name Lincoln very seldom, and assured people he would punish treason."[45]

When Andy was really Governor of Tennessee to save money he boarded in a Livery Stable but since he is no Ass—though he "often felt his oats and oftener his rye"—he took his forage upstairs.

— Unsigned, Knoxville Daily Register, 1862[53]

• Moses speech at Nashville on the night of October 24, 1864; a historian writing in 1916 seemingly suggested that Johnson freed the slaves of Tennessee by fiat because he was drunk: "Johnson addressed the crowd at the capitol in a speech of which we have several highly colored and garbled reports, the most favorable of which does him no credit as a statesman. Rather, to have resorted to the devices of the demagogue to sway the ignorant and excited blacks, and his extravagances of expression suggest his too-constant friend, the whiskey bottle, as the inspiration of his unfortunate diatribe."[11]
• In 1866, Rev. Beecher reported that Samuel C. Pomeroy, a U.S. Senator from Kansas "had called at the White House and found the President, his son [and private Secretary Robert Johnson] and his son-in-law [U.S. Senator David T. Patterson] all drunk and unfit for business. When questioned about it, Pomeroy denied having said he had seen the President drunk, but he had seen Robert Johnson very much so."[13][18]

• According to the Biographical Companion "many people suggested" he was drunk when he made speech made in honor of Washington's birthday in 1866 "but Johnson was not intoxicated".[8][54] Johnson's sworn enemy in Congress, Benjamin F. Butler, agreed that he was sober on that occasion, stating, "Can there be anything more indecent and degrading to the office of the President of the United States than the exhibition made by Andrew Johnson on the 22nd of February last, for which there is, unfortunately for the honor of the country, not the apology that he was drunk?"[55]
• Per Milton in his 1930 Age of Hate, "The claim was made that the President had been 'dead drunk' when he made his Cleveland speech, although it was later proved at the impeachment trial that this charge was a slander."[18]
• Delaware newspaper in the midst of the Swing Around the Circle tour: "The Vice President is as incapable of appreciating the reparation which he owes to the country as he shows himself to be incapable of appreciating his own insult to the country. He is reported in the Washington telegrams to be indulging still another debauch. Nothing better is to be expected of him. These are the habits of his lifetime, they were known to the politicians who nominated him, they were proclaimed in the face of the party which elected him. It is idle to ask the stream to rise higher than its fountain."[56]
• In August 1866 a Kansas paper suggested that the true cause of Andrew Johnson's tears at accounts of the pro-Johnson 1866 National Union Convention was not merely a surfeit of maudlin patriotism but a surfeit of whiskey: "It has been, observed that men bordering upon a state of delirium tremens, are affected to tears by trivial circumstances, and in a manner to make them appear silly in the extreme. Is not A. Johnson in that fix?"[57]

Thomas Nast's "Effect of the Vote on the Eleventh Article of Impeachment" was, compared to his grand Amphitheatrum Johnsonianum, a "simpler but meaner" depiction of Johnson. At the nadir of Nast's reputation as a Johnson hater, one art historian described this cartoon as Johnson "in crown and ermine, capering with joy over his single-vote margin in the impeachment trial. From his waist dangles a pair of scissors" (which is a mocking reference to Johnson, a former tailor, as "the knight of the goose and shears") and the bottle of bourbon that he "flourishes aloft...turned his untimely lapse from sobriety into as a symbol of habitual drunkenness. It took two generations to correct the false impressions about Johnson that these cartoons helped to create."[58]

• In a private letter to his father in October 1866, F. W. Drury of Alton, Illinois wrote of Johnson's recent Swing Around the Circle tour: "His speech, his drunken driveling slobbering harangue at the Southern Hotel at St. Louis was the straw that broke the camels back it was the most disgusting tirade that ever emanated from any man—it would have disgraced Ben Peake, or General Pomeroy. He was drunk, drunk!"[1]
• John S. Wise, a former U.S. Congressman and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, recollecting approximately 1875, in his book published 1906: "My next sight of Mr. Johnson was probably a year or so later, shortly before his death. It was soon after his campaign before the Tennessee Legislature for the Senate. At that time his habits had become exceedingly dissipated, and one of his peculiarities was that he appeared to select very young men as his companions in his debauches. His headquarters were at the Maxwell House at that time...A band serenaded him and the street was thronged with an immense crowd, cheering and calling loudly for a speech. After a long delay the ex-President appeared upon the hotel balcony and acknowledged the compliment, but his condition was such that he was totally unable to speak coherently and, in fact, found difficulty keeping his feet. It was a pitiful sight to see him standing there, holding on to the iron railing in front of him and swaying back and forth, almost inarticulate with drink...It was a sight I shall never forget—the bloated, stupid, helpless look of Mr. Johnson, as he was hurried away from the balcony to his rooms by his friends and led staggering through the corridors of the Maxwell House...He died shortly after the occurrence just related."[59]

• Historical reputation of Ulysses S. Grant § Drinking
• William A. Browning – American political staffer (1835–1866)