Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 | Page 7

it as a fortunate circumstance
that Mr. Lincoln's successor was from the South, though a much larger
number in the North found in this fact a source of disquietude. Mr.
Johnson had the manifest disadvantage of not possessing any close or
intimate knowledge of the people of the Loyal States. It was feared
moreover, that his relations with the ruling spirits of the South in the
exciting period preceding the war specially unfitted him for
harmonious co-operation with them in the pending exigencies.
The character and career of Mr. Johnson were anomalous and in many
respects contradictory. By birth he belonged to that large class in the
South known as "poor whites,"--a class scarcely less despised by the
slave-holding aristocracy than were the human chattels themselves.
Born in North Carolina, and bred to the trade of a tailor, he reached his
fifteenth year before he was taught even to read. In his eighteenth year
he migrated to Tennessee, and established himself in that rich upland
region on the eastern border of the State, where by altitude the same
agricultural conditions are developed that characterize the land which
lies several degrees further North. Specially adapted to the cereals, the
grasses, and the fruits of Southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, East
Tennessee could not employ slave-labor with the profit which it
brought in the rich cotton-fields of the neighboring lowlands, and the
result was that the population contained a large majority of whites.
Owing much to a wise marriage, pursuing his trade with skill and
industry, Johnson gained steadily in knowledge and in influence.
Ambitious, quick to learn, honest, necessarily frugal, he speedily
became a recognized leader of the class to which he belonged. Before
he had attained his majority he was chosen to an important municipal
office, and at twenty-two he was elected mayor of his town.
Thenceforward his promotion was rapid. At twenty-seven he was sent
to the Legislature of his State; and in 1840, when he was in his
thirty-second year, he was nominated for the office of Presidential
elector and canvassed that State in the interest of Mr. Van Buren. Three
years later he was chosen representative in Congress where he served

ten years. He was then nominated for governor, and in the elections of
1853 and 1855 defeated successively two of the most popular Whigs in
Tennessee, Gustavus A. Henry and Meredith P. Gentry. In 1857 he was
promoted to the Senate of the United States, where he was serving at
the outbreak of the civil war.
While Mr. Johnson had been during his entire political life a member of
the Democratic party, and had attained complete control in his State,
the Southern leaders always distrusted him. Though allied to the
interests of slavery and necessarily drawn to its defense, his instincts,
his prejudices, his convictions were singularly strong on the side of the
free people. His sympathies with the poor were acute and
demonstrative--leading him to the advocacy of measures which in a
wide and significant sense were hostile to slavery. In the early part of
his career as a representative in Congress, he warmly espoused, if
indeed he did not originate, the homestead policy. In support of that
policy he followed a line of argument and illustration absolutely and
irreconcilably antagonistic to the interests of the slave system as those
interests were understood by the mass of Southern Democratic leaders.
The bestowment of our public domain in quarter-sections (a hundred
and sixty acres of land) upon the actual settler, on the simple condition
that he should cultivate it and improve it as his home, was a more
effective blow against the spread of slavery in the Territories than any
number of legal restrictions or provisos of the kind proposed by Mr.
Wilmot. Slavery could not be established with success except upon the
condition of large tracts of land for the master, and the exclusion of the
small farmer from contact and from competition. The example of the
latter's manual industry and his consequent thrift and prosperity, must
ultimately prove fatal to the entire slave system. It may not have been
Mr. Johnson's design to injure the institution of slavery by the advocacy
of the homestead policy; but such advocacy was nevertheless hostile,
and this consideration did not stay his hand or change his action.
Mr. Johnson' mode of urging and defending the homestead policy was
at all times offensive to the mass of his Democratic associates of the
South, many of whom against their wishes were compelled to support

the measure on its final passage, for fear of giving offense to their
landless white constituents, and in the still more pressing fear, that if
Johnson should be allowed to stand alone in upholding the measure, he
would acquire a dangerous ascendency over that large element in the
Southern