Commanders-in-Heat VII: Dead on Arrival
Andrew Johnson: No home in the North. No myth in the South. Just a grave and a grudge.
Dear History Cranks and Fiends,
They say you should never return to the scene of a crime but it seems I’ll be in D.C. just as much over the coming year. I’ve just signed on for a third year at New America, a bi-partisan think tank. I floated “Senior Fellow, Squared,” “Super Senior Fellow,” and—since I’m three-for-three in the America @250 program—”Senior Fellow: The Trilogy,” but alas, the contract noted “Senior Fellow.”
And another milestone that spins the carousel: In today’s paper, I make my print debut as the New York Times Book Review’s American history columnist. If I’m not picking up a paper with my own byline above the fold, check for vital signs.
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A subscription costs slightly less than a pint of fancy ice cream and lasts a whole lot longer—but SMK’s “Presidential Clearance Season” special won’t. (For the record, I absolutely hate this bit, but for the newletter to exist...)
For my subscribers—thank you, deeply. I want to know what you actually want—more subscriber-only posts, other perks and exclusives, burial plot locations, etc.
Speaking of the departed: we’re careening toward the end of summer’s annual presidential body count. Don’t fret—every calendar month but May has claimed a commander in chief, so I never run out of material.
And with that, let’s get to it. Andrew Johnson’s death is on the autopsy table: not mourned, not missed.
Questions about the series—or anything else that haunts you? Drop them in the comments. I love to hear from you.
x Alexis
Dead on Arrival
Table of Contents
Scene One: Death Without Ritual
Washington doesn’t flinch. No funeral. No fanfare. No regrets.Scene Two: The Anti-Comeback
Impeached, despised, and back for revenge—until he wasn’t.Scene Three: Used by the South
A Union man turned Confederate crowbar. Still unloved.Final Scene: Rejected by All
No home in the North. No myth in the South. Just a grave and a grudge.
ICYMI
Commander-in-Heat: A Republic, If It Can Survive You
Commander-in-Heat II: Is June James Season?
Commander-in-Heat III: The June 6
Commander-in-Heat IV: James Madison Declined to Die for the Bit
Commanders-in-Heat V: Manuscript or Morphine (Part I)
Commanders-in-Heat VI: Manuscript or Morphine (Part II)
Scene One: Death Without Ritual
The 19th century loved a good funeral. Abraham Lincoln’s body traveled 1,600 miles by train for a nation to say goodbye. A million mourners lined the streets for Ulysses S. Grant. But on July 31, 1875, Andrew Johnson died the way he governed: unwelcome, uncelebrated, and inconvenient for the capital that had once tried to remove him.
He received nothing. No rites. No rotunda. No state funeral. No Senate resolution. Not even a moment of silence in the chamber he once presided over as vice president. The president who survived impeachment by a single vote didn’t even get a ceremonial pause.
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This wasn’t an oversight. It was a verdict. A deliberate silence—a refusal to honor a man the nation wished it could forget.
His body never left Tennessee. He was buried in Greeneville with his head resting on a copy of the Constitution and wrapped in the American flag—less a national tribute than a piece of self-authored propaganda. The crowd was sparse. The message was desperate. Johnson had spent his presidency vetoing civil rights, enabling white supremacists, and undermining Reconstruction. By 1875, the country had moved on. He had not.
Scene Two: The Anti-Comback
Andrew Johnson remains the only American president ever elected to the Senate after leaving the White House. It sounds like a comeback. It wasn’t.
He had left office in 1869 as one of the most despised figures in national politics—impeached by the House, barely acquitted by the Senate, and unwelcome even in his own party. He returned to Tennessee not as an elder statesman, but as a pariah.
Still, he nursed a singular ambition: to vindicate himself in the arena that nearly ended his presidency. He tried and failed to win a Senate seat in 1869 and a House seat in 1872.
By 1875, Johnson had one political asset left: his rage. His opposition to Reconstruction, Black suffrage, and federal authority fit neatly into the white Southern counterrevolution known as Redemption. Tennessee’s Redeemer Democrats didn’t love Johnson—they barely tolerated him—but he could still serve a purpose.
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He had defied Lincoln’s legacy. He’d gutted civil rights laws. He knew how to hold a grudge. So he was elected to the Senate was out of sheer personal obsession, good timing, and a razor-thin margin. Even so, it was a narrow win—56 votes to 51 in the state legislature.
So they sent him back to Washington—not in triumph, but as a blunt instrument. He won the Senate seat by just five votes, thanks less to nostalgia than to timing: the Union was retreating, white supremacy was reasserting itself, and Johnson was suddenly useful again.
The symbolism was striking—an ex-president returning to the very chamber that nearly ended him—but he was not John Quincy Adams. Johnson wasn’t there to legislate. He was there to settle a score.
Fittingly, he never made it to the floor. He died just months into his term, felled by a stroke at his daughter’s home during a family reunion—a collapsed man, a quiet hemorrhage, and a vanished opportunity.
Johnson didn’t get a redemption arc. His presidency—born of assassination, defined by obstruction, and concluded in disgrace—never found its closing note. Even his final act refused him the spotlight.
Scene Three: Used by the South
Did the South care about his death? Not really. It used Johnson like a crowbar. When the job was done, they put him down.
He had stayed loyal to the Union during the war. That was unforgivable to many. The Confederacy had long memories. Johnson’s sabotage of Reconstruction earned him allies, not admirers. He was never mythologized like Robert E. Lee or even Jefferson Davis.
His burial was local. His funeral was small. His grave a minor historic site.
Empires fall. So do newsletters.
Final Scene: Rejected by All
In life, Johnson couldn’t unite the country. In death, he didn’t even gather a quorum. Washington wouldn’t honor him. The South wouldn’t glorify him. His grave sits in Tennessee, marked by a flag and a Constitution, but there is no mythology, no pilgrimage, no pageantry.
He didn’t just fail to earn the nation’s reverence. He failed to earn any one side’s loyalty.
The North despised him for dismantling Reconstruction. The South never forgave him for staying with the Union. His presidency ended in isolation. His afterlife began the same way.
Give me liberty and a dental plan.
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He was probably a problem child as well!
Very interesting and, a good humanizing of history. Humanization? Maybe it would have been better to have left Hannibal Hamlin as veep, no? He was a former Democrat, after all. Life is lived forward and understood backwards....