How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country by Daniel O'Brien

Tennessee, but that didn’t stop the people from hanging A NDREW J OHNSON: T RAITOR banners all over town. Believing that “Despised Military Governor” was at least sort of a step up from “Powerless, Pretend Governor,” Johnson again kept his head down, worked hard, and continued to do what he thought was right.
    Unfortunately, if you ask the average person what they think of when they think about Johnson, they’ll talk either about his impeachment or his drunkenness. Johnson was a good man and a hard worker but developed a reputation for being a drunk. Why? Probably because he was drunk as hell when he delivered his inauguration speech as vice president. That’s probably the reason. Lincoln, for his second term, chose the Democratic Johnson as his vice president as a display of strength and unity to the wounded nation. Then Johnson gave a long, repetitive, and ridiculous inauguration speech as a display of how much whiskey is too much whiskey.
    Johnson’s speech, described by the
New York Herald
as “remarkable for its incoherence,” was all about the important lessons he learned growing up poor, and how great the country is, and how he loved America because of the
people
, man, and how “I swear it’s not just because I’m drunk, but fuck it, we should all just start a band.” Various staffers tried to shush or pull him offstage, but he wasn’t having it, speaking ten minutes longer than he was scheduled to. A senator at the time, Zachariah Chandler, said, “The Vice President Elect was too drunk to perform his duties & disgraced himself & the Senate by making a drunken foolish speech. I was never so mortified in my life, had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.” Johnson wanted to make America feel beautiful thatday, and concluded his speech by saying, “I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States,” and then
drunkenly kissing the Bible on which he took his oath
.

    Of course that’s only half the story. The thing about history is that it’s written by the winners (also by me!). Even though Johnson was completely shitfaced for his wild, rambling speech, it wasn’t because he was an alcoholic by any means. Most people who knew Johnson knew him to have a drink or two once in a while, but that’s about it. In this particular case, Johnson had been sick for several months with typhoid fever, and his doctor prescribed him a few shotsof whiskey. (Medicine in the 1800s, man. What a fun time.) Obviously the combination of the whiskey and his illness produced that absurd speech and ill-advised Bible-frenching. The story could have ended there, but history is written by the winners, and all of the winners
hated
Andrew Johnson. His critics were loud and persistent, and that’s how Andrew Johnson, a self-made man who picked himself up and worked hard his whole life, went down in history as the drunken vice president.
    Even the fact that Johnson was made president when he was is completely unfair in some grand, cosmic sort of way. Being president is never easy, but Johnson had to step up and fill in for one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had, during Reconstruction, one of the roughest periods in our history. If Johnson had followed, say, Fillmore or Pierce or one of those other assholes, history would likely remember him more fondly. Unfortunately, his opening act was Lincoln, and that’s a performance
no one
can follow. It would be like following the Beatles, except the audience hates you, and instead of being as good as or better than the Beatles, your band is
Andrew Johnson
.
    As president, Johnson was as disrespected as he was as governor, military governor, and human being, which is to say, very. His secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, vocally opposed Johnson’s reconstruction efforts and actively undermined his president’s decisions in the South (Johnson wanted civil authorities to have control over the South, Stanton wanted generals and