During the Civil War the state of Tennessee was a continual battleground, with the lines shifting. Greeneville remained in Southern hands during most of the war. On March 4, 1862, President Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson mil itary governor of Tennessee-at least over those portions of the state occupied by Union troops. After U. S. Grant's victory at Fort Donelson, the Union army occupied Nashville and installed Andrew Johnson in the capital. Johnson was known as a harsh military governor, not hesitating to take hostages if the citizens of Nashville balked at his orders. Nashville remained in the center of the fighting, at times being completely surrounded by Confederate guerrillas. Those insur gents regarded Governor Johnson as a traitor and vowed to capture and tar and feather him before hanging him. Fortunately for Johnson, Nashville did not fall. When the Republicans came to nominate their candidate for the presidency in 1864, they of course chose Abraham Lincoln again. In an effort to broaden their party's appeal, they renamed themselves the National Union Party. Lincoln in turn picked Andrew Johnson as his running mate in place of Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, his vice-president during the previous four years. In 1860 Johnson had voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. The northern press had praised him as a Democrat and a Unionist who had risked his all for his beliefs. The radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was so impressed by Johnson that he remarked at the party convention that he wished the presidential and vice-presidential candidates had been reversed. Campaigning in 1864, Johnson characteristically threw aside restraints when his audience responded to his speeches. Once, addressing a group largely com posed of Negroes, he cursed the aristocracy of southern planters and promised that new laws would protect people of color. Then he asked his listeners: "Once these laws are in effect, will you shun the path of lewdness, crime, and vice?""We will! We will!" the audience replied. Johnson shouted back that if they did, a Moses would rise up to lead a downtrodden people to the promised land. "You are our Moses," his listeners responded. "Humble and unworthy as I am, if no better be found, I will indeed be your Moses and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage," Johnson replied. A number of newspapers reported this exchange and gave it wide circulation. The promises Johnson made on his stump speeches somehow did not square with his southern background. At one time, he himself owned eight slaves. He never had a vision of the equality of black and white. He was quoted as having said of the distinguished Negro leader Frederick Douglass: "He's just like any nigger. He would sooner cut a white man's throat than not." His subsequent actions as president hardly qualified him as the Moses who would lead blacks to the prom ised land. The vice-president, who went to Washington with much support within Con gress and the press, shocked the nation by his behavior at the inaugural ceremo nies. He had been suffering from a fever, perhaps typhoid, and had asked Lincoln if he could stay home and take the oath in Nashville. Lincoln wired him to come to Washington. Johnson obeyed and took a room at the Kirkwood House at Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The night before the inauguration, he attended a party at which liquor flowed freely. The next morning he had a headache and was nauseated. He asked the outgoing vice-president for a drink of whiskey and promptly downed three full glasses without dilution.
102 CAROLINA COMMENTS