By Stephen Smoot
Some records and all-time statuses are unassailable. For example, under current practices, no baseball player will ever approach Cy Young’s 511 career victories and 749 complete games. No football player will likely equal Jim Brown’s record of eight rushing titles, especially since running backs rarely even last eight seasons anymore.
At one point, one could say that the status of Andrew Johnson as the worst president in the history of the United States was among those statuses that would never fall to another. One would have to work at wresting that title away from Johnson and the other president bearing that last name certainly tried.
Joe Biden has worked quickly and furiously, however, to claim that designation as America’s worst ever.
Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Few considered the vice president as a position of any significance. John Adams called it “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.” Before Lincoln, no president suffered assassination and only John Tyler had come into the chief executive’s position through the death of the man elected to the office.
Lincoln selected Johnson before the election of 1864 to replace his initial vice president. Hannibal Hamlin came from Maine, but Johnson hailed from Tennessee. It made perfect political sense for Lincoln, who envisioned his second term to be one of unifying the nation again after four years of tragic and destructive civil war.
After Lincoln’s murder, Johnson followed what he interpreted as his predecessor’s vision. He discarded rhetoric about forcing traitors to pay the price of rebellion and embraced an easy peace ideal that offered almost nothing to the freed slaves and other blacks in the South while giving former Confederates a quick path not just back to the citizenship they renounced, but also political power.
Lincoln also desired an easy peace and quick reunification, but the destiny of the freed slaves remained part of his plans. The South’s price for allowing its people to return quickly to the Union would be recognizing at least some basic and fundamental rights of all men.
Johnson instead took aim at Northern political figures such as Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and the historically overrated Thaddeus Stevens. He only stopped a quarter of an inch shy of completely equating them with Jefferson Davis during his Washington’s Birthday speech in 1866 while coming the same rhetorical distance to comparing himself to Christ on the Cross.
According to Eric McKitrick, author of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, the best defense that his friends could summon of the spectacle was that the President must have been drunk.
“Must have been drunk” likely truly describes the bulk of the Andrew Johnson presidency that waged bitter warfare against Congress, the Secretary of War, and almost anyone else who irritated his thin skin. Mixed messages and bad policy choices animated a South that ended the war docile and ready to accept almost any price for peace. It led to generations of Jim Crow and other evils that bedeviled the South for generations and still cast some shadows to this day.
The only accomplishment of those four years lay in Secretary of State William Seward’s policy to purchase Alaska.
As it turns out, a president suffering from dementia may be the figure that topples Johnson from his less than illustrious perch. It’s not clear how much of the administration’s work came from Biden and how much came from close advisors better deemed handlers.
One need not go over the many failures both foreign and domestic that have occurred under Biden, right down to the seeming desire to “burn it all down” as he leaves office. And history has not yet had an opportunity to see which of these will have significant lasting impact. Johnson’s presidency, like Biden’s, gave way to a popular figure successful in a field other than politics who had no fear of courting controversy, moving decisively, or appointing subordinates based on perceived loyalty above other considerations.
Both Ulysses S. Grant and Donald Trump also endured the ire of media and cultural elites who hated both the style and substance of their presidencies. Marshall historian Jean Edward Smith wrote that perception of Grant’s presidency was too long colored by the almost ubiquitous hostility of the media who did not understand him or his ideals.
America’s role in the world changed much between Andrew Johnson and Joe Biden, which means now that the consequences of a bad presidency resonate internationally as well as domestically. Wars halfway around the world started because the United States had a palsied hand at the wheel of the ship of state.
The final analysis won’t be complete for years as the ripple effects of Biden’s presidency play out. And the nation may never fully know what kind of cabal elevated him into position and enjoyed power with his confused visage as the face of it.
What is clear, however, is that the Republic cannot endure with so much power and responsibility tied up in one person holding one office. The lesson of Joe Biden teaches the absolute need of breaking up the presidency as completely as Ma Bell, distributing most of the powers back to the states, the Congress, and the people.
Donald Trump will likely find success and the nation may thrive in the next four years, but that does not undo the fact that too much power lies in one set of hands.
The Republic, however, will likely not outlast another “worst president in American history” with the powers that the office has now.