A Brief for Andrew Johnson
Milton, George Fort
July3I, x929 THE COMMONWEAL 333 A BRIEF FOR ANDREW JOHNSON By GEORGE FORT MILTON T IS with some trepidation that I essay the task of reviewing Mr. Lloyd Paul Stryker's Andrew...
...Johnson listened to their pleas and exhortations, and responded very little...
...It is a pity that these evidences of good writing are imbedded in a mass of verbose quotation...
...He was opposed to interference with the rights of the states...
...Unfortunately, he has used them too freely...
...His own campaign methods laid him open to attack...
...The birds have ceased their twittering...
...On the swing around the circle, he was lied about and vilified by the press of the country...
...As early as the fall of I865, the President had ample information of this...
...Lloyd Paul Stryker's Andrew Johnson (New York: The Macmillan Company...
...I can only love your son for shaping this blue Out of the robe you wore when he was young with you...
...I may add that one likewise discovers with delight many fine sentences, many gleaming bits of portraiture and literary art...
...In the high fever of their exultation at Lincoln's passing, Sumner and his cohorts interpreted Johnson's silence to mean that he agreed with their views...
...They made a dead-set on Andrew Johnson the first month he was President...
...Had Johnson acted in I865 or I866 and dismissed the Secretary at that time, impeachment might never have come...
...By having failed to act promptly and with decision, he was responsible for it himself...
...Stryker quotes the Colonel as of great value in limning the background of an authority on Johnson's conversations with Jeremiah Sullivan Black during the Alta Vela episode, one doubts if the authority is sufficient...
...It likewise shows the fruit of a very extended reading...
...The truth is Johnson never had agreed...
...There is the entirely insufficient account of the national union convention at Baltimore in I864, at which Johnson was nominated on the Lincoln ticket...
...A historical character who, in this decade of revision of biographic estimates, can attract the interest of men of such different backgrounds and view-points must indeed have been possessed of great qualities of character, and must have been a worthy actor in the tragic scene of his Presidency...
...One finds insufficient acknowledgment of this Johnson error in the Stryker book...
...Had Johnson only made this plain to Sumner, Chase and Wade they would not have entertained their delusion, and maybe much toil and turmoil could have been averted or overcome...
...Equally dissatisfied with Lincoln's plan of peace was Ben Wade of Ohio, Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, and others of this rabid radical crew...
...My lifted hands are a soft song Of its beauty, Madonna, of its silent beauty...
...I cannot make a prayer, Madonna...
...Stryker's book...
...One of his constant speaking themes was a denunciation of aristocrats...
...He was not opposed to the 334 THE COMMONWEAL July 3 t, i929 voting of intelligent Negroes...
...His work indicates great loyalty to Andrew Johnson...
...It is a powerful appeal, but Mr...
...Even the wind has furled Its banners and is still...
...One further matter: Mr...
...Viewed by this test Mr...
...6.oo) in view of a biographic enterprise of my own about this same Andrew Johnson...
...Why should I utter words...
...You know I cannot pray, There is no whisper of prayer in my heart--I but belong To this blue seal of dusk set upon the day...
...The whole world Is a great blue bell...
...Stryker wrote the huge brief in this appeal of Andrew Johnson's case to the highest court of last resort, the court of public opinion, an appeal to be heard after contemporary bitternesses had been lost in the limbo of the feuds of yesteryears...
...His written letters, messages and talk bear the stamp of statesmanship, but in his off-hand talks to crowds he seems to have thought the type of give and take which had served so well on the stump in Tennessee befitting the dignity of the President...
...Stryker has overdone it a little...
...How could I bend my head now...
...As a staunch state-rights Democrat, Johnson never wavered from his fundamental position that the state was the sole authority entitled to determine the qualification of its voters...
...Stryker could have found many very significant documents in the Johnson manuscripts in the Library of Congress, which would have illuminated this Aha Vela affair quite as thoroughly and much more accurately than the Reeves recollections could have done...
...Stanton converted himself into little more than a radical spy, an agent of obstruction in Johnson's Cabinet...
...The tailor-statesman had made himself the idol of Lawyer Stryker's heart and, as an advocate, Mr...
...In this same connection the diary of Colonel Moore, Johnson's secretary, could have been profitably employed to reveal the President's contemporary attitude of mind...
...The Reeves account is based on his recollections in I928 of what Johnson told him in I874...
...Stryker has not written a good biography...
...Of this one gets a very insufficient hint in Mr...
...Vespers It is dusk, Madonna, it is blue dusk...
...He was a prince of procrastinators...
...George L. Sioussat, the eminent University of Pennsylvania historian...
...While in the Cabinet, he drafted bills designed to emasculate the powers of the very President in whose Cabinet he served...
...But the task of writing so imposing a volume should have led its author to make the necessary research...
...how would I dare To close my eyes to aught of this...
...Who am I to shatter this with prayer...
...For instance, he has young Andrew Johnson apprenticed to Tailor Selby in Raleigh, at the age of ten...
...Stryker's book would reveal that the author is a lawyer, were we otherwise unacquainted with the fact...
...For it might seem a rather cruel fate for any biographer to have the critical appraisement of the fruit of his years of labor entrusted to the hands of a colleague or a rival in the same pasturage...
...Indeed, Andrew Johnson must have been a remarkable and a many-sided man, thus to enlist the biographic devotion of such diverse writers as Robert W. Winston, the distinguished North Carolina jurist...
...Dr...
...Jefferson Davis accused Johnson of having the most malignant type of pride--"the pride of having no pride at all...
...Stryker seems to have depended upon the recollections of Colonel E. C. Reeves, of Johnson City, to too great an extent...
...But it is unnecessary to indicate further instances of what seem to us Mr...
...Stryker's lapses in his appraisal of evidence and in his scrutiny of conflicting facts...
...Throughout his life he seems to have suffered from an inferiority complex, which made him belligerently proud of his humble birth and of the fearful struggles of his younger years...
...Claude G. Bowers, whose graphic pen has already illumined the dark corners of earlier days of the republic...
...Stryker, devout Republican and member of New York's exclusive Union League Club...
...He had faults, and grave ones...
...Stryker is not so much to blame for this, for it is a very involved and little-known chapter in American political history...
...For it is virtually a lawyer's brief for Andrew Johnson...
...Parenthetically, it may be remarked that some courage is required to read it, for it is of a frightening size...
...When Johnson first assumed the Presidency, he was beset by the leading radicals--Charles Sumner, that matchless Massachusetts theorist who had soared aloft in a cloud of idle speculation, and had lost all contact with the earth, in the van...
...But when Mr...
...It cannot be doubted, however, that he has written a persuasive brief...
...They thus reported to a radical caucus...
...Stryker has appropriately subtitled his volume, A Study in Courage...
...Johnson was a plebeian...
...No one who examines the record with care can fail to be impressed with his sturdy courage and essential rightness...
...deserts...
...the vesper bell demands I kneel and pray, Madonna...
...time Is hung in a blue void...
...July3I, x929 THE COMMONWEAL 333 A BRIEF FOR ANDREW JOHNSON By GEORGE FORT MILTON T IS with some trepidation that I essay the task of reviewing Mr...
...These faults we do not see in the pages of this book...
...It is an old man's reminiscence, bound to have become inaccurate through the lapse of fifty years...
...Stryker seems to have accepted without sufficient investigation fables about Johnson's early career...
...The volume is thus a lawyer's brief and not the considered decision of a judge...
...It was Johnson's tardy dismissal of this unfaithful constitutional adviser which brought on the famous impeachment test...
...I fold my hands Over its peace...
...In this he followed Savage and one or two other contemporary biographers...
...Stryker has examined and made use of hundreds of books written by and about the characters of the period...
...This overweening pride had a powerful influence upon his earlier political career...
...the whole world is a vesper chime...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Stryker probably became so impressed by Johnson's points of merit--and there were far more of merit than of demerit--that he ignored the faults...
...Stanton became quite shameless in his obstructive tactics...
...Andrew Johnson was a human being...
...I hold in my hands its quietness...
...As to another point of Johnson's character...
...Originally intended as a two-volume production, the publishers compressed it into a single volume of eighty-nine chapters and 88I pages, a great mass of about 35o,ooo words...
...In doing so, he overrode the repeated advice of his shrewd counselors--such men as old Francis Preston Blair, the veteran of Andrew Jackson's political warfare, Reverdy Johnson, Donlittle, of Wisconsin, Dixon, of Connecticut, and Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, the noblest Roman of them all...
...leaves are soundless...
...Had he only taken the trouble to read Judge Winston's book, he could have seen the court order for the indenture, showing the age was not ten but fourteen...
...Johnson's Tennessee campaigns and his reactions in the Senate against the slave-state leaders, must have arisen in part, at least, from this feeling...
...Much of the grief of his White House incumbency would seem to have been quite unnecessary...
...It is my duty Now to pray, Madonna...
...the moon is a husk Of white on the rim of sky...
...For the reviewer, intimately acquainted with the minutiae of the task, might be too much impressed with minor variations in detail treatment, and thus fail to accord the volume its just...
...It has seemed to this reviewer a true test of biographic composition that the facts set forth shall inerrantly indicate their own conclusions, and the reader himself shall form them, without their needing to be said by the author in strident words...
...There are one or two details in which Mr...
...One gets the flavor of a scrap-book, of the throwing together of a mass of quotations opposite and the reverse...
...The crux of the argument was whether the federal government would force the southern states to permit the freed Negroes to vote...
...DOROTHY BELLS FLANACAN...
...The case of Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, soon after Johnson's accession, affords another instance of the evil effects of procrastination...
...Colonel Reeves, who was a sort of acting secretary to Johnson during some of his Tennessee political battles following the Presidency, has a remarkable memory...
...Johnson played right into the unscrupulous radical's hands...
...Edward McMahon, of the University of Washington, and now Mr...
...May I mention a few points about which I am inclined to disagree with Mr...
...The Tennessean added to the grave vice of superprocrastination, the further fault of lack of restraint in his impromptu speeches...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 13
