A Monument to Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction

Over the summer, I was blessed to explore Civil War sites such as Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania Court House, and Manassas. Despite the heat, humidity, and worst of all, mosquitoes, that time of year is when I get away to explore and hone my craft as a historian.

What I have never seen until recently were monuments dedicated to Reconstruction, and in this specific case, one in honor of Andrew Johnson. Not much is known about when precisely the monument was erected. UNC-Chapel databases say that it was placed sometime roughly after 1922.[1] While sources are skeptical about when and why this was placed, the words etched into the plaque give a better understanding of how Civil War and Reconstruction memory was interpreted in early 20th-century North Carolina.

Located in front of the Historic Moore County Courthouse in Carthage, North Carolina, a slab of granite holds a bronze plaque of the Tennessee Tailor that depicts his likeness and describes him as a “One time resident of Carthage.”[2] This had perplexed me because I knew Johnson was born in Raleigh, but rose to political prominence years later when he moved to Tennessee.

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote in 2011 a short biography on Johnson, which helps connect the dots for Carthage’s significance. When Johnson was a young man, roughly three to five years into his apprenticeship to a local tailor in Raleigh, he ran away from Oak City with his brother William.[3] Young Andrew ran away partially because he was unhappy in his position, and due to allegedly running into trouble with local police.

The brothers stopped in Carthage for a few months, where Johnson apparently made a name for himself as a tailor in his own right. James Selby, the tailor that the future president was apprenticed under, eventually put in the newspapers that a cash reward would be given to anyone who would return the brothers.[4] Fearing arrest and being treated like a criminal by the police, or worse by Selby, Andrew ran away from Carthage and into Laurens, South Carolina. He eventually tried to buy his way out of his apprenticeship, but Selby would disagree with it. This made Johnson decide to push west, where his political path officially began. It is not lost on me that Johnson’s (one might say delinquent) past and his reasoning for leaving Raleigh were reduced to “one-time resident.”

Although Johnson’s early life was fascinating to research, what caught my eye while reading the bronze plaque was the rest of Johnson’s description:

A STALWART UNION MAN, YET HE THREW HIMSELF

INTO THE BREACH AS A BULWARK, IN FAVOR OF

THE PROSTRATE SOUTH AGAINST FANATICISM IN THE BITTER DAYS OF RECONSTRUCTION.

LET HIS MEMORY BE EMBALMED

IN EVERLASTING FAME[5]

Johnson was, despite other issues with the plaque, a Union man and opposed secession during the Winter Crisis of 1860-1861. Johnson was also the only Southern member of Congress not to resign his position when the crisis was in full swing. According to historian Eric Foner, even though Johnson was a slave holder before the war, he “had sincerely embraced emancipation as military governor.”[6]

Johnson was also a man who despised the wealthy planter class of the South. As someone who came from poor parents and had worked as a tailor’s apprentice before politics, he was a man who never connected with the Dixie aristocracy. He was a man who despised them even further when war broke out in 1861. He berated secession when he proclaimed that “were I the President of the United States, I would have them arrested and tried for treason; and if convicted, by the Eternal God, I would see that they suffer the penalty of the law at the hands of the executioner.”[7] Because of these beliefs during the war, Lincoln would pick him as his running mate in the 1864 election.

Andrew Johnson may have been for emancipation, but that did not mean he was an advocate for black civil and voting rights. In fact, he was a man who believed in the inferiority of recently freedmen and was known to be just as bigoted against them as former Confederates. In August 1865, an Illinois constituent wrote to their congressman, Elihu B. Washburne. It warned him, “I have grounds to fear President Johnson may hold almost unconquerable prejudices against the African race.”[8]

Johnson gave truth to these fears very openly when he remarked to California Senator John Conness, “White men alone must manage the South.”[9] At one point in January 1866, a delegation of black civil rights advocates, including Fredrick Douglass, met with Johnson to argue that the cause of the freedmen was central to the future goals of Reconstruction. Johnson disagreed and claimed during the meeting that the advancement of African Americans was a threat to the poor whites of the South. Once the delegation left, Johnson’s personal secretary confirmed for the press that the president spewed venom, saying that Douglass and those with him are “just like any other n*****, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”[10] For Johnson, freedmen’s citizenship, right to vote, and ability to run for public office were, in the plaque’s own words, “fanaticism.”

As historians have recently interpreted Reconstruction as a time in American history where recently enslaved men and their supporters in Congress fought for fundamental civil and voting rights after the Civil War, this was not the case in the 20th century. By the 1920s, the Lost Cause and organizations that supported it had stretched the historical revisionism into schools and education systems across the nation. Although the Lost Cause has deep ties to Southern memory of the war, it was born during Reconstruction and was itself a key pillar in the interpretation. To many Lost Cause founders and their later generations, Reconstruction was seen only as a time when Radicals in Congress sought to oppress white Southerners and the alleged incompetence of black politicians ruined their way of life.[11] This, in turn, made white resistance, like the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts, necessary for protection. In other words, Johnson and men like him were seen as the “bulwark” during the “bitter days of Reconstruction.”

As of writing this, the monument still stands in front of the courthouse, hardly acknowledged by those otherwise interested in public history, memory, or monuments in general. It is, however, a stark reminder that the memory of Reconstruction, along with the war itself, has been an ever-changing landscape and that one should always take what is written on them with a grain of salt.

[1] “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina,” March 19, 2010, https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/310/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Annette Gordon-Reed, Andrew Johnson, First edition., American Presidents Series (New York, NY: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2011), 25-28.

[4] Ibid, 27.

[5] “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina”.

[6] Eric Foner, Reconstruction Updated Edition: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-18 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014), 179.

[7] Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (Random House Publishing Group, 2019), 46.

[8] Foner, Reconstruction Updated Edition, 179.

[9] Ibid, 180.

[10] Robert S. Levine, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, First published as a Norton paperback (New York, NY London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 95. It should be noted that Levine discussed the validity of this quote, as it comes from Johnson’s personal secretary. Although it might not be word for word, the sentiment toward the freedmen, according to Levine, is the same.

[11] Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era, 1. U.S. ed (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 326-330.