well-wishers and dignitaries took their toll. Reporters found Grant stealing a nap in the baggage car. Johnson's stamina seemed about to give out when the tour reached Cleveland, where he came to the balcony of the Kennard Hotel exhausted, maybe a bit tipsy, his voice feeble. After he asked the crowd to tell him when he had ever been false to his own principles, a heckler cried, "New Orleans!"
"Let the negroes vote in Ohio before you talk about negroes voting in Louisiana," Johnson scolded.
"Never!" someone shouted back.
"Hang Jeff Davis!" another voice hollered.
Johnson initially ignored the remark but a few minutes later suggested rhetorically, "Why not hang Thad Stevens or Wendell Phillips?" This prompted the crowd to gasp.
When someone cried "Traitor!" Johnson, in unkind words, chastised his listeners for being cowards who did not volunteer to fight in the war.
"Is this dignified?" a voice asked.
Johnson had never been known for statesmanlike restraint. His political style, honed in the village squares of rural Tennessee, was to give as good as he got, to spar and debate anyone who challenged him. At the moment, such instincts seemed misplaced, and unfortunately the popular Grant, whose appearance always soothed a crowd, had temporarily left the entourage, promising to rejoin it in Detroit.
"President Johnson, in his speech at Cleveland, remarked that he 'did not care much about his dignity,'" observed the
New York Times
. "In our judgment this is greatly to be regretted ... The President of the United States cannot enter upon an exchange of epithets with the brawlers of a mob, without seriously compromising his official character and hazarding interests too momentous to be thus lightly imperiled."
A few days later in St. Louis, the president was on the defensive again, challenged once more about New Orleans. Apparently stewing about the press coverage of the earlier exchange in Cleveland, Johnson launched into an explanation of how the riot in New Orleans had been caused by Radicals, then lapsed into a self-pitying denunciation of his critics:
I have been slandered. I have been maligned. I have been called Judas Iscariot ... If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ ... Was it Thad Stevens? Was it Wendell Phillips? Was it Charles Sumner? Are these the men that set up and compare themselves with the Savior of Man, and everybody that differs with them in opinion and that try to stay and arrest their diabolical and nefarious policy, is to be denounced as a Judas?
The
New York Tribune,
like much of the country, was dismayed. "We had thought the President had exhausted his power to offend a national sense of decency," the paper scolded. "This was a mistake. In his speech at St. Louis he passed from vulgarity to blasphemy with a boldness
which is almost appalling...[and] disgusted every Christian in the land. He has dragged that which is dearest to our hearts into the dirt of his politics and his outrageous defense of the massacre at New Orleans."
Belligerent banter with hecklers, the nation agreed, was not what a president did. Yet the pattern was established; in town after town they descended, interrupting Johnson, demanding that Grant appear, even ordering the president of the United States to "shut up." In the Ohio town of New Market, when Johnson was shouted down, General Custer assumed the role of presidential protector, striding onstage to deal with the harassers. "I was born two miles from here," he fumed, "and I am ashamed of you!" By the time the tour reached Pittsburgh, all was lost; Johnson refused to come to the podium, and after an hour of jeers from the crowd, Grant appeared, only to tell people to go away.
"Never in history had a President gone forth on a greater missionâto appeal for constitutional government and the restoration of union through conciliation and common sense," the historian Claude Bowers would write, "and never had one been so scurvily treated." The newspapers had a
"Let the negroes vote in Ohio before you talk about negroes voting in Louisiana," Johnson scolded.
"Never!" someone shouted back.
"Hang Jeff Davis!" another voice hollered.
Johnson initially ignored the remark but a few minutes later suggested rhetorically, "Why not hang Thad Stevens or Wendell Phillips?" This prompted the crowd to gasp.
When someone cried "Traitor!" Johnson, in unkind words, chastised his listeners for being cowards who did not volunteer to fight in the war.
"Is this dignified?" a voice asked.
Johnson had never been known for statesmanlike restraint. His political style, honed in the village squares of rural Tennessee, was to give as good as he got, to spar and debate anyone who challenged him. At the moment, such instincts seemed misplaced, and unfortunately the popular Grant, whose appearance always soothed a crowd, had temporarily left the entourage, promising to rejoin it in Detroit.
"President Johnson, in his speech at Cleveland, remarked that he 'did not care much about his dignity,'" observed the
New York Times
. "In our judgment this is greatly to be regretted ... The President of the United States cannot enter upon an exchange of epithets with the brawlers of a mob, without seriously compromising his official character and hazarding interests too momentous to be thus lightly imperiled."
A few days later in St. Louis, the president was on the defensive again, challenged once more about New Orleans. Apparently stewing about the press coverage of the earlier exchange in Cleveland, Johnson launched into an explanation of how the riot in New Orleans had been caused by Radicals, then lapsed into a self-pitying denunciation of his critics:
I have been slandered. I have been maligned. I have been called Judas Iscariot ... If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ ... Was it Thad Stevens? Was it Wendell Phillips? Was it Charles Sumner? Are these the men that set up and compare themselves with the Savior of Man, and everybody that differs with them in opinion and that try to stay and arrest their diabolical and nefarious policy, is to be denounced as a Judas?
The
New York Tribune,
like much of the country, was dismayed. "We had thought the President had exhausted his power to offend a national sense of decency," the paper scolded. "This was a mistake. In his speech at St. Louis he passed from vulgarity to blasphemy with a boldness
which is almost appalling...[and] disgusted every Christian in the land. He has dragged that which is dearest to our hearts into the dirt of his politics and his outrageous defense of the massacre at New Orleans."
Belligerent banter with hecklers, the nation agreed, was not what a president did. Yet the pattern was established; in town after town they descended, interrupting Johnson, demanding that Grant appear, even ordering the president of the United States to "shut up." In the Ohio town of New Market, when Johnson was shouted down, General Custer assumed the role of presidential protector, striding onstage to deal with the harassers. "I was born two miles from here," he fumed, "and I am ashamed of you!" By the time the tour reached Pittsburgh, all was lost; Johnson refused to come to the podium, and after an hour of jeers from the crowd, Grant appeared, only to tell people to go away.
"Never in history had a President gone forth on a greater missionâto appeal for constitutional government and the restoration of union through conciliation and common sense," the historian Claude Bowers would write, "and never had one been so scurvily treated." The newspapers had a
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