Andrew Johnson was drunk when he made his inaugural address as vice president of the United States on March 4, 1865. Multiple sources suggest Johnson had been under the influence for at least a week prior to the inauguration, that he drank heavily the night before the inauguration, and that he consumed either three glasses of whiskey or a glass of French brandy the morning of the ceremony. Correspondents for the Times of London, Washington Star, New York Herald, New-York Tribune, and the Cincinnati Enquirer variously described Johnson's speech as hostile, inane, incoherent, repetitive, self-aggrandizing, and sloppy. He kissed the Bible when he took the oath of office and in his drunken state was unable to administer the oath of office to incoming United States Senators. The incident was partially covered up, and newspapers selectively glossed over the speech or claimed it could not be clearly heard. There are no substantive claims in either primary or secondary sources that Johnson was sober at his inauguration as Lincoln's vice-president; some later biographers claimed the incident was the result of an unlucky one-off overdose of medicinal whiskey, unrepresentative of Johnson's conduct generally.
There is no known surviving transcript of Johnson's address. The editors of the Congressional Globe were persuaded to use a more dignified fantasy rendition of the speech. Lincoln was present for the second half of the speech and on the way to his own swearing-in told the inaugural marshal not to let Johnson speak outside. Lincoln later pointed out to Johnson that Frederick Douglass was in the audience; Douglass described Johnson's reaction and his drunkenness in his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Among many other accounts of the speech, the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, described Johnson as "drunk" in his diary, later striking out that single word and replacing it with "under the influence of stimulants."
Both the United States Cabinet and U.S. Congress expressed concern but took no action against Johnson, although as a direct consequence of the speech the U.S. Senate did remove two Senators from committee work due to their chronic drinking problems. A parodic song about the incident was performed at Grover's Theater in Washington. According to multiple sources, Johnson spent most of the following month sobering up at the Maryland home of the Blair family. Lincoln dismissed the matter at that time, and the political climate in the final days of the American Civil War made the story of tertiary national importance.
The incident presaged some of Johnson's difficulties when he succeeded to the presidency 42 days later, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Official Washington initially rallied in support of the new resident of the Oval Office, but Johnson never lived down the public humiliation, which seriously eroded whatever political capital he had accumulated. During the impeachment process Thaddeus Stevens quipped, "I don't want to hurt the man's feelings by telling him he is a rascal. I'd rather put it mildly, and say he hasn't got off that inaugural drunk yet, and just let him retire to get sobered." Reconstruction-era political commentary and editorial cartoons often included references to Johnson's alleged alcoholism. In the 21st century, historians like Elizabeth Varon at the University of Virginia, and Annette Gordon-Reed at Harvard University, evince no doubt that Johnson "looked and sounded drunk" that day, with one scholar describing Johnson in an academic study of presidential rhetoric as having been, by all accounts, "plastered."
Background Abraham Lincoln's first vice president was Hannibal Hamlin from Maine. However, when Lincoln's prospects in the 1864 United States presidential election appeared to be dimming, Lincoln replaced Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a slave-owning Southern Unionist who was the only member of the U.S. Senate from a secessionist state who stayed loyal to the federal government at the outbreak of the American Civil War. Tennessee under governor Isham G. Harris had initially joined the Confederate States of America, but when the state was restored to the Union in 1862, Lincoln had appointed Johnson to be military governor of Tennessee. Lincoln believed that adding a loyal, populist Jacksonian Democrat like Johnson to the ticket might draw the votes of other War Democrats, and that "a favorable impression would be made upon observers abroad by the selection of the vice president from a reconstructed state in the heart of the Confederacy." The Lincoln and Johnson families also had remote kinship ties and friends in common (for example, Lincoln's uncle Mordecai Lincoln had officiated Johnson's 1827 wedding). As one historian put it, Lincoln and his "contemporaries were seduced by a very different Andrew Johnson, who, transformed by the context of disunion, temporarily shed the southern baggage that would come to influence his approach to Reconstruction. This short-term choice and long-term miscalculation would have devastating consequences."
The Lincoln–Johnson ticket of the National Union Party was successful, re-electing Lincoln and returning Johnson to federal office. In January 1865, Lincoln telegraphed Johnson in Nashville asking when he would be able to come to Washington, D.C. Johnson replied with a request that his inauguration be delayed until after the newly organized Tennessee state government was operational, which would not be until early April. On January 24, 1865, Lincoln replied that he had consulted with the Cabinet, and "it is our unanimous conclusion that it is unsafe for you to not be here on the fourth of March. Be sure to reach here by that time." Johnson was reportedly "ill in Nashville for many weeks" before the inauguration "with a fever that was probably malarial."
Pre-inaugural week
Johnson may well have been intoxicated for an extended period of time in the lead-up to the inauguration; in 1885, a former colleague who signed himself "J. L." wrote to The Tennessean: "When he was inaugurated as Vice President on the 4th of March 1865 he had been on one of the most protracted sprees of his life..." Contemporary reports generally described him as having a serious, non-specified illness prior to his move to Washington. Confined to his room with a "severe cold," Johnson had apparently been unable to work for the first half of February 1865. Johnson was still reported to be "seriously ill" in Nashville in the middle of the month. He telegraphed to cancel a planned speaking engagement in New York, and on February 22 received a gracious reply hoping for the restoration of his health. In the Saturday Evening Post in 1929, John Trotwood Moore, citing no source, claimed that Johnson's doctors had told him going to the inauguration "would doubtless be fatal" and that Johnson was "risking his life" by going to Washington. Johnson set off for the national capital on February 25, a week before the inauguration. None of his family were with him.
He was at the Louisville Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, on Sunday, February 26. Two days later the Cincinnati Gazette reported that Johnsonwho had made an impromptu speech thereseemed "somewhat the worse for the wear and tear of the past year or two" and "did not respond in as clear a voice or, it seemed to us, with as clear a head, as we have heard him on former occasions. It was with difficulty we could hear or understand him at all from where we stood." The Cincinnati Enquirer published the following report on Tuesday, February 28: Later, the Manitowoc Pilot of Wisconsin forthrightly stated, "At Cincinnati, when Mr. Johnson was passing through on his way to Washington, he was called out for a speech but was too intoxicated to respond. He seems literally to have continued in that state until the time he was installed in his present office."
After departing Cincinnati, Johnson then traveled east through Pittsburgh, via railroads including the Northern Central Railway. He was traveling in company with his long-time secretary William A. Browning, and several fellow Tennesseans, including General Alvan C. Gillem and future U.S. Senator Joseph S. Fowler (all key staffers during Johnson's military administration of Tennessee). They stopped in Baltimore, dined at the Eutaw House, and then took a special car that departed Camden Depot at 3:30 p.m., delivering them to Washington late afternoon on March 1.
Upon arrival Johnson took rooms at the Metropolitan Hotel. The day after his arrival one newspaper stated that he arrived "in fine spirits and ready to assume his important public duties," while another reported that "the health of Governor Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, Vice President elect, is improving, but he is still unable to attend to his business." He had apparently secured a "new formal black frockcoat, a silk vest, and doeskin pants" for the occasion of his inauguration. As festivities for the upcoming inauguration got underway, on the evening of March 3, Johnson attended a "lavish" party thrown by John W. Forney, "with whom he shared many glasses of whisky," which reportedly left Johnson with a "thunderous hangover." Another description of this party has it that "the wine flowed as freely as the oratory."
Pre-ceremony
On March 4, 1865, Johnson was picked up from his hotel by U.S. Senator James R. Doolittle at 10:30 a.m. and escorted to the Capitol. Johnson was scheduled to be sworn in by Hamlin at approximately noon and to make a seven-minute-long address.
An account of the morning from a biography of Hannibal Hamlin, written by his grandson Charles Eugene Hamlin and published in 1899, stated thatat what would have been at approximately 11 to 11:30 a.m.Johnson consumed three full glasses of whisky (unwatered and un-iced). The whisky had been procured at Johnson's specific request, and Johnson almost knocked over 27-year-old Maj. Charles Hamlin as he dashed back to pour himself the third glass.
The Hamlin testimony reads as follows:
John B. Henderson, a U.S. Senator who drafted the Thirteenth Amendment and later voted to acquit Johnson on the impeachment charges, wrote an account of the morning that was published in Century Magazine in 1912:
Meanwhile, in the Senate chamber, dignitaries found their seats on the floor, and "several hundred women, including Mary Lincoln, and members of the press" made their way to their assigned seats in the gallery above.
Speech
Journalist Noah Brooks, present in the press gallery that day, wrote in 1895 that Johnson's face was "extraordinarily red" and that he was "evidently intoxicated." The Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial wrote, "Drunkenness may be entered as a plea in abatement for him, for he had been crazed with liquor for several preceding days. As he entered the Chamber, his frame shook with the tremor of debauch." According to the Times of London reporter, "He had not uttered two sentences when everyone saw something was wrong." Once he got going, Johnson "proceeded to lecture senators, cabinet members, and justices alike on the fount of power in a democratic society."
The Washington Star report of the speech is a straightforward account that makes no allegations of inebriation but does suggest some incoherence or repetitiveness on the part of Johnson:
Another contemporary account of Andrew Johnson's swearing-in as vice president, as published in a Pennsylvania paper from the "correspondent of the New York Herald, a person sufficiently mendacious to praise Lincoln profusely and ready to go so far as to call his inaugural address eloquent," (meaning that the Herald was known as a relatively liberal, pro-Republican news outlet) reads thus: &