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“R. Johnson Shaking Hands With An English Boot-Black”
Boot-Black.--"Black yer boots? Shine 'em up!"
R. Johnson.--"May that feeling of amity and good-will which now exists between our two great countries never be disturbed. Allow me to shake hands!"
This
cartoon gently pokes fun at the very courteous Reverdy Johnson, the new
U.S. minister to Great Britain, who has just arrived in England. In a determined effort to make a good impression and lay a
solid foundation for improving Anglo-American relations, Johnson even
offers his hand and a diplomatic greeting to a British bootblack boy.
Reverdy
Johnson was born on May 21, 1796, in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a
state legislator and member of a prominent legal family. He 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 passing the state 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, begun 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.
That result let Secretary of War George Crawford 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 campaigned for Senator
Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the presidential nominee of the Northern
Democrats in 1860. As
Southern slave states left the union between the election and
presidential inauguration of 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, and 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 14th 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 14th
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.
Robert C. Kennedy
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