Andrew Johnson's drunken vice-presidential inaugural address

Andrew Johnson was drunk when he made his inaugural address as vice president of the United States on March 4, 1865. Multiple sources suggest Johnson had been under the influence for at least a week prior to the inauguration, that he drank heavily the night before the inauguration, and that he consumed either three glasses of whiskey or a glass of French brandy the morning of the ceremony. Correspondents for the Times of London, Washington Star, New York Herald, New-York Tribune, and the Cincinnati Enquirer variously described Johnson's speech as hostile, inane, incoherent, repetitive, self-aggrandizing, and sloppy. He kissed the Bible when he took the oath of office and in his drunken state was unable to administer the oath of office to incoming United States Senators. The incident was partially covered up, and newspapers selectively glossed over the speech or claimed it could not be clearly heard. There are no substantive claims in either primary or secondary sources that Johnson was sober at his inauguration as Lincoln's vice-president; some later biographers claimed the incident was the result of an unlucky one-off overdose of medicinal whiskey, unrepresentative of Johnson's conduct generally.

There is no known surviving transcript of Johnson's address. The editors of the Congressional Globe were persuaded to use a more dignified fantasy rendition of the speech. Lincoln was present for the second half of the speech and on the way to his own swearing-in told the inaugural marshal not to let Johnson speak outside. Lincoln later pointed out to Johnson that Frederick Douglass was in the audience; Douglass described Johnson's reaction and his drunkenness in his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Among many other accounts of the speech, the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, described Johnson as "drunk" in his diary, later striking out that single word and replacing it with "under the influence of stimulants."

Both the United States Cabinet and U.S. Congress expressed concern but took no action against Johnson, although as a direct consequence of the speech the U.S. Senate did remove two Senators from committee work due to their chronic drinking problems. A parodic song about the incident was performed at Grover's Theater in Washington. According to multiple sources, Johnson spent most of the following month sobering up at the Maryland home of the Democratic-stalwart Blair family. Lincoln dismissed the matter at that time, and the political climate in the final days of the American Civil War made the story of tertiary national importance.

The incident presaged some of Johnson's difficulties when he succeeded to the presidency 42 days later, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Official Washington initially rallied in support of the new resident of the Oval Office, but Johnson never lived down the public humiliation, which seriously eroded whatever political capital he had accumulated. During the impeachment process Thaddeus Stevens quipped, "I don't want to hurt the man's feelings by telling him he is a rascal. I'd rather put it mildly, and say he hasn't got off that inaugural drunk yet, and just let him retire to get sobered." Reconstruction-era political commentary and editorial cartoons often included references to Johnson's alleged alcoholism. In the 21st century, historians like Elizabeth Varon at the University of Virginia, and Annette Gordon-Reed at Harvard University, evince no doubt that Johnson "looked and sounded drunk" that day, with one scholar describing Johnson in an academic study of presidential rhetoric as having been, by all accounts, "plastered."