two hour wait at City Hall
150 years ago today President Andrew Johnson’s Swing Around the Circle tour concluded. According to the September 16, 1866 issue of the The New-York Times crowds in York Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Washington were mostly supportive with no reported heckling. From York: “Here, as at all other places on the route, the cheers for Gen. GRANT exceeded.”
But not everything went according to plan. “The Presidential Party came back in a somewhat straggling fashion”. An extremely ill Secretary Seward got back early and was to brought to his home by ambulance. General Grant did not attend a banquet in Baltimore and also got back to DC before the president’s train. Secretary Welles and Admiral Farragut hung with Mr. Johnson all the way to the White House. The reception in Washington was not as impressive as it might have been because the presidential train was two hours late. Many people at the depot and City Hall got tired of waiting and went home. Even so, crowds were large and quite enthusiastic all along the procession and at the White House, where President Johnson thanked the crowd (daily eye-witnesses to how he performed on the job)and stuck to the message he asserted all along the tour:
… All I can promise you for the future is that that [sic] there will be a continuance of my conduct in the past. I have tried to discharge my official duties in compliance with the Constitution and the principles which I deemed to be right. I will add that the sentiment which you exhibit to-night is not peculiar to yourselves, but that which pervades the country wherever I have been. My own opinion which has gone abroad to the country with regard to sustaining a government of constitutional law is unmistakable and not to be misunderstood; and I believe the day is not distant when the judgment of the American people will be made manifest that this Union must be restored – that peace and prosperity and harmony must again prevail throughout the United States. I believe I can safely testify that the greater portion of your fellow-citizens that I have visited, and I have seen millions of them since I left you, will accord with you in sustaining the principles of free Government in compliance with the Constitution of the country. …
An American History textbook states that many people got tired of President Johnson harping on the Constitution and shows a Harper’s Weekly political cartoon in which Mr. Johnson is portrayed as a parrot repeating “Constitution”. [1]
home sweet home
- [1]Garraty, John A., and Robert A. McCaughey. The American Nation: A History of the United States, Seventh Edition. New York: HarpersCollins Publishers, 1991. Print.page 455.↩
