“Conspicuous personalities”
Third in a series on Political Recollections, the memoirs of George Julian of Indiana.
[image error]George Julian. Library of Congress.
Over the course of a political career that began in the song-and-hard cider days of William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign and extended well into the Gilded Age, George Julian met an astonishing number of prominent figures.
[image error]Henry Clay. Library of Congress.
Henry Clay: Few figures dominated antebellum politics like Henry Clay, the Kentucky statesman who embodied the Whig Party in the 1840s but who whose repeated attempts to win the presidency ended in failure. Julian campaigned for Clay in 1844 when the Kentucky statesman was the Whig nominee for president and met him in 1850 in Washington.
Clay was attempting to forge legislation that would patch over the emerging crisis over slavery when Julian numbered among a delegation that called on him at the National Hotel. “He received us with the most gracious cordiality, and perfectly captivated us all by the peculiar and proverbial charm of his manners and conversation,” Julian remembered. “I remember nothing like it in the social intercourse of my life.”
Julian’s believed Clay’s desire to reach a compromise that would have preserved slavery as the price of keeping the Union together was “radically wrong” but nevertheless found himself “drawn toward him by that peculiar spell which years before had bound me to him as my idolized political leader.” In his speeches on the Senate floor, Julian recalled, Clay displayed what he said was a piece of George Washington’s coffin as he argued for sectional reconciliation. Clay’s “devotion to the Union,” Julian believed, “was his ruling passion.”
Zachary Taylor: Julian broke with the Whigs in 1848 to join the ranks of the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party. In that year the Whigs nominated Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and enslaver who had never voted and did not seem to hold positions on any of the issues of the day.
Julian was appalled.
“The spectacle was a melancholy one, since it demonstrated the readiness of this once-respectable old party to make complete shipwreck of everything wearing the semblance of principle, for the sake of success,” he wrote. During the presidential campaign of that year, Julian recalled, he attacked Taylor relentlessly.
[image error]Gen. Zachary Taylor. Library of Congress.
Julian must not have had high expectations when, along with two others, he ventured to the Executive Mansion to meet the president. What he found surprised him.
“I decidedly liked his kindly, honest, farmer-like face, and his old-fashioned simplicity of dress and manners,” Julian recalled. Taylor was not eloquent — indeed his “whole demeanor” illustrated “that he had reached a position for which he was singularly unfitted by training and experience, or any natural aptitude.” But Taylor possessed a simple patriotism, Julian believed — a belief confirmed when Taylor threatened to hang traitors who threatened secession if territories obtained after the Mexican War were admitted to the Union as free states.
“I believe his dying words in July, ‘I have tried to do my duty,’ were the key-note of his life, and that in the Presidential campaign of 1848, I did him much, though unintentional, injustice,” Julian admitted.
[image error]Abraham Lincoln. Library of Congress.
Abraham Lincoln: Julian’s first meeting with Lincoln, recounted in a previous blog post, occurred in Springfield, Ill., as the president-elect prepared to take office. Julian was skeptical of the Kentucky-born former Whig, many of whose backers were far less concerned about ending slavery than preserving the Union.
But the Indiana congressman was won over by Lincoln’s humor and charm. “His face, when lighted up in conversation, was not unhandsome, and the kindly and winning tones of his voice pleaded for him like the smile which played about his rugged features,” Julian recalled.
In the years to come, the former Free Soil lawmaker numbered among the Radical Republicans who strongly opposed Lincoln’s plans for Reconstruction. But Julian believed the president would not have insisted on his plan for returning rebellious Southern states back to the Union in the face of congressional opposition.
It became a moot point on April 15, 1865, when Lincoln died after being shot by John Wilkes Booth. One of the most dramatic sections of Julian’s book details what he saw in the hours after word of the shooting swept Washington.
The city was at once in a tempest of excitement, consternation and rage. About seven and a half o’clock in the morning the church bells tolled the President’s death. The weather was as gloomy as the mood of the people, while all sorts of rumors filled the air as to the particulars of the assassination and the fate of Booth. [Vice President Andrew] Johnson was inaugurated at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 15th, and was at once surrounded by radical and conservative politicians, who were alike anxious about the situation.
[image error]Andrew Johnson, Library of Congress.
Andrew Johnson: Julian and the man who became the seventeenth president were once allies. In the Thirty-First Congress they saw eye-to-eye on making government-owned land in the west available to homesteaders. “Although loyal to his party,” Julian wrote of Johnson, “he seemed to have little sympathy with the extreme men among its leaders, and no unfriendliness to me on account of my decided anti-slavery opinions.”
In 1864, when Lincoln chose Johnson as his running-mate, Julian foresaw trouble. Johnson was a “decided hater” of Blacks and discounted slavery as the underlying cause of the war. Nevertheless, Julian and his radical allies were cheered in the days after the assassination when Johnson declared “Treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished.”
But in the weeks and months to come, Julian’s early misgivings about Johnson were confirmed as the Tennessean backpedaled on his commitment to punish secessionists. Johnson moved quickly to re-admit Southern states and pardoned Confederates so profusely that one Northern newspaper wondered shortly after the new president took office if “the whole confederacy will apply for pardon before the 1st of August.”
By the winter of 1868, Johnson and Congress were completely alienated. One attempt to impeach Johnson had already failed, but when the president dismissed Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, the House moved rapidly — and overwhelmingly — to impeach Johnson. Julian wholeheartedly supported impeachment and called Johnson a “recreant usurper” on the House floor.
In his memoir, Julian bemoans the “acts of executive lawlessness” that led the House to impeach the president but is also critical of the “frenzy” that colored the proceedings. “Andrew Johnson was no longer merely a ‘wrong-headed and obstinate man,’ but a ‘genius in depravity,’ whose hoarded malignity and passion were unfathomable,'” Julian writes. Johnson’s impeachment trial — in which he avoided removal from office by a single vote — “connected itself with all the memories of the war, and involved the Nation in a new and final struggle for its life.”
Books by Robert B. Mitchell are available at amazon.com
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