Andrew Johnson

With the secession crisis intensifying, Senator Andrew Johnson left Washington D.C. on a train bound for his home state of Tennessee. Before he made it home, Johnson would be assaulted and nearly lynched. Branded as a traitor, he would eventually have to flee from Tennessee.

In a referendum in February 1861, Tennessee voters had rejected secession. But in the aftermath of the Fort Sumter attack, Tennessee, like the rest of the middle south, was electrified and alarmed by President Lincoln’s call for the states to provide troops to “suppress the rebellion.”

Across Tennessee the sentiment turned suddenly from pro-Union to decidedly pro-secession. “Not a single man will be furnished from Tennessee!” Governor Isham Harris proclaimed, in response to Lincoln’s call for troops. Seeing the danger that Tennessee might also secede, Johnson hurried home. Like Tennessee, Virginia had also voted against secession, but after Ft. Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, she reversed course and seceded on April 17. Johnson was determined to keep that from happening in Tennessee.

Johnson was a Democrat, but he was also an ardent Unionist. A tailor who had grown up dirt poor in North Carolina and east Tennessee, he despised the planter class. And most of the people of the east Tennessee mountains shared his views. Johnson’s hope was that enough people in middle Tennessee could be convinced to join with east Tennesseans to stop the rush toward secession, and to keep Tennessee in the Union.

Word got out in Virginia that Johnson was on the train to Tennessee, and the rumor spread that he was going there to help raise the contingent of troops demanded by Lincoln. When his train stopped in Lynchburg an angry crowd surged aboard and pushed its way to Johnson, intent on removing him from the train. One of the men in the group even tweaked the senator’s nose—a particularly abusive insult at the time. As the conductor and other railroad employees intervened in an effort to rescue Johnson, the senator pulled a pistol and stared down the mob. It was an explosive situation, but railroad officials were able to clear the attackers from the train and it continued on. Johnson returned his pistol to his pocket. Another mob gathered at Bristol, intent on taking Johnson off the train and lynching him. But having become aware of the situation, Johnson’s former colleague Jefferson Davis (who didn’t want to see any martyrs created while Tennessee secession hung in the balance) telegraphed Bristol, demanding that Johnson be allowed to pass safely, and Johnson made it into Tennessee without further incident.

The following day, the Richmond Times Dispatch reported:

“LYNCHBURG, Va., Sunday, April 21.

ANDY JOHNSON, late United States Senator from Tennessee, passed through here today on his way from Washington to Tennessee. A large crowd assembled and groaned him, and offered every indignity he deserved, including pulling his nose. Every effort was made to take him of the cars.

The demonstrations were first suggested by Tennesseans. Great difficulty was experienced in restraining the populace. JOHNSON was protected by the conductor and others, who begged that he might be permitted to proceed home and let his own people deal with him.

He denied sending a message asserting that Tennessee should furnish her quota of men.”

Back home in Tennessee, Johnson campaigned diligently against secession, giving fiery speeches (included at least one in which he called for Jefferson Davis to be hanged) but the efforts of him and those like him weren’t enough. In May the Tennessee legislature passed an ordinance of secession and in June Tennessee voters approved it. Tennessee became the eleventh and final state to secede.

Johnson refused to accept the result of the referendum. He escaped into Kentucky and made his way back to Washington, where he resumed his seat in the Senate. He became the only senator of a seceded state who refused to resign his seat, and his actions made him a hero in the North.

In 1862 President Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of the parts of Tennessee in Federal control. And in 1864, when he decided to symbolize national unity by running for reelection with a Democrat as his running mate, Lincoln tapped Johnson as his Vice-Presidential candidate.

As the candidates of the “National Union Party,” Lincoln and Johnson were elected. And after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States, initiating a controversial and unsuccessful presidency that never would have happened had events gone differently on that train car in Lynchburg, Virginia, on April 21, 1861.