Andrew Johnson: A President Who Compromised, or Was Compromised?

America has long been called the land of opportunity. How many men who began life illiterate rose to the presidency? Andrew Johnson did. His beginnings were as humble as they come.

Born in a Raleigh log cabin in 1808, he was only three when his father, a poor hotel porter, died after rescuing two wealthy men from drowning. His widowed mother worked as a spinner and laundress to keep the family alive. At fourteen Johnson and his older brother were bound as apprentices to a local tailor. After a couple of years the boys ran away; their master posted a ten-dollar reward for their return. Johnson later came back, settled accounts, then gathered what was left of his family—mother, stepfather, and all their belongings—and crossed the mountains into Tennessee in a one-horse cart drawn by a blind pony. In September 1826 they rolled into Greeneville.

There the eighteen-year-old tailor opened his own shop. A local girl named Eliza McCardle, only sixteen, spotted the ragged newcomer leading the cart into town and told her friends, “There goes my beau, girls, mark it.” Within months they were married by Mordecai Lincoln, a relative of Abraham Lincoln. Eliza had more schooling than her husband. While he sat cross-legged on his tailor’s bench sewing coats and vests by hand, she read to him from books of great orations and patiently taught him writing and arithmetic. The shop soon became more than a place of business; workingmen gathered there to argue politics. Johnson walked four miles each way on Friday nights to a debating society at a nearby college, honing the blunt, forceful style that would serve him the rest of his life.

By the time he was twenty he had been elected alderman of Greeneville. In 1834 his fellow aldermen chose him as mayor. He governed as a champion of the town’s mechanics and laborers against the local aristocracy of merchants and slaveholders. The tailor who once fled an apprenticeship now stood as the voice of the common man in a small East Tennessee town.

Johnson’s rise continued. After service in the Tennessee legislature he won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1843 and served five terms. In Congress he became one of the leading advocates of a homestead bill that would give free land to settlers who would cultivate it—a measure he introduced repeatedly and defended for years until it finally became law in 1862. A fiscal conservative and states’-rights Democrat, he opposed high tariffs and supported the annexation of Texas. His success in business had by then allowed him to buy a brick house and to own slaves.

When the crisis of secession came, Johnson stuck with the Union—the only senator from a seceding state to remain loyal. Abraham Lincoln recognized that loyalty by appointing him Military Governor of Tennessee in March 1862, with the rank of brigadier general. Johnson’s task was to restore loyal civil government in the parts of the state under Union control. He required public officials to take strong loyalty oaths, suppressed pro-Confederate newspapers, and worked to fortify Nashville. Though he initially persuaded Lincoln to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, the realities of war changed his course. In August 1863 he freed the slaves he himself owned. In October 1864 he proclaimed freedom for every enslaved person in Tennessee and declared, “I will indeed be your Moses.” By early 1865 he had helped push the state toward a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

It is worth noting that had today’s Democratic Party been in power then, few of its members would have supported the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Compare that record with contemporary fights over election integrity measures such as the SAVE Act. Johnson’s later leniency as president toward the defeated South, however, came at a steep cost. By restoring former Confederate states with minimal federal safeguards, he left many freed people exposed to violence, Black Codes, and the reassertion of white supremacy. Custom and bigotry would delay meaningful constitutional protection of civil rights for another century.

Johnson was impeached by the House but escaped conviction in the Senate by a single vote. He remains the only former president later elected to the United States Senate. He had overcome poverty, illiteracy, an indentured apprenticeship, and the wreckage of civil war. What he could not overcome was the implacable opposition of his own political moment—and, in the end, the limits of his own vision for a restored Union.

English Medieval Royal “Faction” and the Irrational

The facts are facts. Names, titles, the sequence of depositions, marriages, and civil wars can be checked. Readers of historical fiction about the English Middle Ages come wanting a textured sense of the past—costumes that look lived-in, dialogue that does not sound like a modern committee meeting, relationships shaped by hierarchy, faith, and scarcity. They do not, usually, want the full sensory inventory: the state of teeth, the hygiene, the practices that modern sensibility finds unacceptable. That selective appetite is understandable. The problem arises when the modern writer, having been invited into the past, proceeds to rearrange its furniture according to contemporary ideals.

Modern agendas arrive wearing period dress. Sometimes the hooks are useful; they let a present-day audience decode an ancient conflict. Often they become tropes, repeated until they flatten the very strangeness that made the period worth visiting. Consider the faithful Christian who accepts that God may turn a staff into a serpent before Pharaoh, yet finds it jarring that the Egyptian court can perform the same trick. The text presents both. The modern reader is tempted to decide which miracle is “real” and which is propaganda. Historical fiction about medieval queens frequently performs a similar sorting. Elizabeth I’s speech on the approach of the Armada remains powerful precisely because it does not collapse into modern categories. She told Parliament she had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king of England. That claim registered because the audience shared the assumptions it both invoked and overturned. When modern writers give Isabella of France or a Yorkist queen the interior life and rhetorical freedom of a twenty-first-century professional woman, they risk producing characters who would have been unintelligible—or quickly removed—in their own courts.

Two persistent devices illustrate the difficulty. Witches are granted effective powers. Monks are cast as systematic promoters of ignorance. Both choices simplify. In the actual Middle Ages some theologians argued that God could not see in the dark; the practical consequence was not abstract philosophy but a temporary license for behaviour people preferred to hide. Characters in these dramas are rarely allowed the same compromised interiority. They are either enlightened forerunners of us or benighted obstacles to progress. The 2012 miniseries World Without End, drawn from Ken Follett’s novel, supplies a neat example. Edward II’s wound is treated with a poultice of excrement and he loses the arm; a healer figure employs techniques that read as modern medicine in costume. In The White Queen, Jacquetta of Luxembourg is given genuine powers of foresight. The Princes in the Tower, meanwhile, remain as historically unresolved as ever. The supernatural is admitted where it flatters a preferred narrative and withheld where it would complicate one.

We congratulate ourselves on rationality. Yet the evidence of our storytelling suggests otherwise. We cannot consistently grant medieval people the mixture of calculation, superstition, piety, and self-interest that the records show they possessed. We prefer them either as primitive versions of ourselves or as cautionary opposites. The result is faction that feels contemporary even when the costumes are accurate. A more disciplined approach would leave more of the irrational in place—not as decoration or as proof of progressive superiority, but as the ordinary weather of the age. Only then does the past become strange enough to be interesting again.

The Nuking of Nagasaki Has Robbed the West of Legitimacy But a partisan press has protected Democrats from the criticism they would have levelled had the GOP been equivalent.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 did more than end a war. It stripped the West of a lasting claim to moral authority. Hiroshima had already demonstrated the weapon’s power three days earlier. Dropping a second bomb on a second city, when Japan’s capacity to continue was collapsing, crossed a threshold that no later appeal to necessity fully erases. A partisan press and political culture have since protected the Democratic administration that ordered it from the sustained scrutiny that would have followed had a Republican president taken the same decision.

Australia’s experience in the same war reveals a parallel pattern of political convenience and selective memory. At the outset of the Pacific conflict, Australia had already turfed its conservatives. John Curtin’s Labor government took office in October 1941 and immediately began what looked like panic moves: withdrawing battle-hardened divisions from the Middle East. The gesture was presented as national self-defence. In reality it was also political theatre. Australia’s primary defensive stock had been placed in Singapore. That fortress, held by a numerically superior Allied force, surrendered on 15 February 1942 to a smaller but better-led Japanese army. Roughly 15,000 Australians went into captivity; more than 7,000 of them would die as prisoners.

Domestically, democracy itself proved a source of division. Sections of the union movement had opposed robust war measures while the Soviet Union remained aligned with Germany. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR, the political weather changed. Labor won a decisive mandate in 1943. Yet even under wartime conditions, strikes continued in pursuit of industrial advantage. A partisan press that had criticised Menzies for unpreparedness proved far more forgiving of Curtin. The conservative opposition, reduced and cautious, largely supported the national effort while receiving little credit for restraint.

Young, often under-trained Australian troops were thrown into the defence of Papua New Guinea. They helped halt the Japanese southern advance on the Kokoda Track and elsewhere. Their achievement was real. It does not erase the earlier strategic failure at Singapore or the domestic political manoeuvring that accompanied it. American forces, meanwhile, were themselves divided: MacArthur’s South West Pacific command competed with the Navy’s Central Pacific drive, producing duplication and inter-service rivalry even as both pushed toward Japan.

Australia gave general support to American strategy and offered information about its prisoners. There is little evidence of a determined national policy aimed at the early recovery of those prisoners while the war continued. Large-scale rescue was militarily difficult; political will to prioritise it over the broader campaign was limited.

Truman’s decision to use the bomb at Hiroshima failed to produce immediate Japanese surrender. Nagasaki followed. Intelligence and postwar surveys showed that the military toll of the blasts was far lower than the civilian one. Hiroshima’s garrison suffered several thousand dead out of roughly 24,000 present; Nagasaki’s military deaths numbered only in the low hundreds. Total deaths across both cities reached the tens of thousands by the end of 1945, the great majority civilians. Japan surrendered shortly after the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria on 8–9 August. The Soviet entry destroyed Tokyo’s remaining hope of a mediated peace and threatened the home islands from a new direction. Both shocks mattered. The second atomic bomb was not the sole or even the decisive blow.

Counterfactuals sharpen the point. Had the United States withheld the Nagasaki bomb, the combination of Soviet invasion, continued conventional bombing, and naval blockade might still have forced surrender before any invasion of the home islands—though at higher cost in time and further conventional casualties. Had Australia followed Churchill’s demand and sent the returning 7th Division into Burma in February 1942, those troops would likely have been destroyed or captured as Rangoon fell; the New Guinea campaigns would have been weaker. Had the Soviet Union stayed neutral, Japan’s hardliners would have retained a diplomatic lifeline and the military argument for fighting on would have been stronger. In each case the historical outcome was shaped as much by timing and politics as by pure military necessity.

At war’s end the pattern of selective justice continued. Thailand, a Japanese ally that had facilitated logistics for the Thai-Burma Railway, was treated leniently once the Free Thai movement and a late switch of sides were accepted. The railway’s death marches and forced labour remained primarily a Japanese responsibility, yet the broader regional accounting was muted. Japan and West Germany were not subjected to permanent economic suppression. Instead they were reformed under occupation and then rebuilt as industrial hubs, drawing on the same organisational and technical capacities that had served wartime regimes. The Cold War made former enemies into frontline partners against the Soviet Union. Strategic necessity again overrode earlier moral language.

The West still claims the mantle of liberal order and humanitarian restraint. The second atomic bombing, the political protection afforded its authors, and the uneven postwar settlements sit uneasily with that claim. A press and political class that would have demanded relentless scrutiny of equivalent Republican decisions have preferred silence or justification when the responsibility was Democratic. History is not obliged to be tidy. It is obliged to be remembered without partisan filter.