Reverdy
Johnson was a U.S. attorney general, U.S. senator, and
diplomat. He was the only congressional Democrat to support
major Republican Reconstruction policies, including the
enfranchisement of black men.
Johnson was born on May 21, 1796, in Annapolis, Maryland, to
Deborah Ghieselen Johnson and John Johnson, state legislator and
member of a prominent legal family. Reverdy Johnson graduated
from St. John’s College (Annapolis) in 1811, served briefly in
the War of 1812 at the rank of private, and then began reading
law under his father’s tutelage. After being admitted to the
Maryland bar in 1815, he began practicing law in Upper
Marlboro. In 1816-1817, he worked as the state’s deputy
attorney general, and then established a law practice in
Baltimore.
Johnson soon earned recognition as a skilled trial lawyer in
civil suits, known for his thorough preparation, cogent
reasoning, rigorous cross-examination, and articulate
expression. In 1827, he argued his first case before the U.S.
Supreme Court, Brown v. Maryland, which began his
reputation as a leading constitutional lawyer. Johnson also
served in the state senate from 1821 until 1828, when he
resigned to dedicate himself to his expanding legal practice.
He accumulated great wealth as legal counsel to the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad. In 1835, Johnson faced public hostility for
leading the legal effort to block payments from the failed Bank
of Maryland (for which he was a director) to small depositors,
who retaliated by burning down his house.
In 1845, the Maryland legislature elected Johnson to the U.S.
Senate as a Whig. The next year, he broke party rank to support
the War with Mexico, declared by President James K. Polk,
although the new senator criticized the Democratic president’s
policy of gaining territory from Mexico. Having freed slaves
inherited from his father, Johnson opposed both the expansion of
slavery into the West and federal interference with the
institution in the South, as advocated by the abolitionists. In
1849, the new Whig president, Zachary Taylor, appointed Johnson
as the U.S. attorney general, but he resigned following the
president’s unexpected death in July 1850. During his brief
tenure as attorney general, Johnson became embroiled in a public
scandal when he decided a land dispute in favor of a Georgia
family that was suing the federal government. Johnson’s
decision allowed Secretary of War George Crawford to earn a
large legal fee as the claimants’ lawyer. Johnson denied
knowledge of Crawford’s role, and a congressional investigation
cleared him of all charges of wrongdoing.
Returning full-time to his legal practice, Johnson won a
patent case for the McCormick reaper before the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1854. In the
Dred Scott case (1857), he served on the legal team that
convinced the Supreme Court to rule against both the citizenship
of blacks and federal government authority over slavery in the
territories. Johnson affiliated himself with the Democratic
Party when the Whig Party collapsed in the mid-1850s, and he
campaigned in 1860 for Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the
presidential nominee of the Northern Democrats. As Southern
slave states left the union between the election and
presidential inauguration of Republican Abraham Lincoln, Johnson
stood firmly for national unity and condemned the secessionists
as “rebels and traitors.” In early 1861, he was a member of the
Washington Peace Conference, which failed to find a workable
compromise between the sections. He was instrumental in
preventing his home state of Maryland from seceding.
In 1860-1861, Johnson served in the Maryland lower house, and
in 1862, the state legislature elected him again to the U.S.
Senate, where he took his seat in March 1863. During the Civil
War, Johnson was unswervingly committed to the Union war effort,
and backed President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the
arming of blacks, and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which
abolished slavery. However, the senator used constitutional
arguments to criticize Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
(1863) and federal intervention in state elections.
After the war, Johnson initially endorsed the lenient
Reconstruction program of President Andrew Johnson (no relation)
and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on constitutional
grounds. However, when Republican opposition proved
insurmountable, Senator Johnson hoped to expedite the
Reconstruction process by supporting the Republicans’ major
policies: black manhood suffrage in the former Confederate
states, the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the
Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which granted citizenship to
blacks.
After helping to convince Senate Republicans not to remove
Andrew Johnson from office (1868), the president rewarded the
senator with appointment as U.S. minister to Great Britain.
Reverdy Johnson’s primary task as U.S. minister was to negotiate
a settlement over the Alabama claims, the American
grievance against Britain for allowing construction of
Confederate warships during the Civil War. The resulting
Johnson-Clarendon Convention only provided financial restitution
to private American citizens for specific damages, and did not
cover general harm caused by the British-built Confederate
warships against the Union military cause. Presented to the
U.S. Senate in January 1869, the treaty was fiercely opposed by
President-elect Ulysses S. Grant and was defeated decisively,
54-1.
At the end of Andrew Johnson’s administration in March 1869,
Reverdy Johnson returned to the United States to resume his law
practice. Although primarily involved with corporate
litigation, he participated in some high-profile civil rights
cases. He defended members of the Ku Klux Klan and, in U.S.
v. Cruikshank (1875), successfully convinced the U.S.
Supreme Court that the equal protection and due process clauses
of the Fourteenth Amendment only applied against states, not
individuals. The Cruikshank decision was a major setback
to enforcement of Reconstruction and the federal protection of
civil rights. Johnson died on February 10, 1876, when his skull
was crushed after an accidental fall in Annapolis. |