ent. Andrew Johnson
occupied a position in some ways analogous to that of Tyler a generation
earlier. He had been chosen Vice-President as a concession to the War
Democrats and to the Unionists of the Border States whose support had
been thought necessary to defeat McClellan. With the Northern
Republicans who now composed the great majority of Congress he had no
political affinity whatever. Yet at the beginning of his term of office
he was more popular with the Radicals than Lincoln had ever been. He
seemed to share to the full the violence of the popular mood. His
declaration that as murder was a crime, so treason was a crime, and
"must be made odious," was welcomed with enthusiasm by the very men who
afterwards impeached him. Nor, when we blame these men for trafficking
with perjurers and digging up tainted and worthless evidence for the
purpose of sustaining against him the preposterous charge of complicity
in the murder of his predecessor, must we forget that he himself,
without any evidence at all, had under his own hand and seal brought the
same monstrous accusation against Jefferson Davis. Davis, when
apprehended, met the affront with a cutting reply. "There is one man at
least who knows this accusation to be false--the man who makes it.
Whatever else Andrew Johnson knows, he knows that I preferred Mr.
Lincoln to him."

It was true. Between Johnson and the chiefs of the Confederacy there was
a bitterness greater than could be found in the heart of any Northerner.
To him they were the seducers who had caught his beloved South in a net
of disloyalty and disaster. To them he was a traitor who had sold
himself to the Yankee oppressor. A social quarrel intensified the
political one. Johnson, who had been a tailor by trade, was the one
political representative of the "poor whites" of the South. He knew that
the great slave-owning squires despised him, and he hated them in
return. It was only when the issues cut deeper that it became apparent
that, while he would gladly have hanged Jeff Davis and all his Cabinet
on a sufficient number of sour apple trees (and perhaps he was the one
man in the United States who really wanted to do so), he was none the
less a Southerner to the backbone; it was only when the Negro question
was raised that the Northern men began to realize, what any Southerner
or man acquainted with the South could have told them, that the attitude
of the "poor white" towards the Negro was a thousand times