Reverdy Johnson

Reverdy Johnson
21st United States Attorney General
In office March 8, 1849 – July 21, 1850
Preceded by	Isaac Toucey
Succeeded by	John J. Crittenden
Born	May 21, 1796(1796-05-21) Annapolis, Maryland, U.S.
Died	February 10, 1876 (aged 79) Annapolis, Maryland, U.S.
Political party	Whig, Democrat
Spouse(s)	Mary M. Johnson
Alma mater	St. John's College
Profession	Lawyer, Politician

Reverdy Johnson (May 21, 1796 – February 10, 1876) was a statesman and jurist from Maryland.

[edit] Early life

Reverdy Johnson's house in Annapolis, Maryland.

Born in Annapolis, Johnson was the son of a distinguished Maryland lawyer and politician, John Johnson (1770 - 1824). He graduated from St. John's College in 1812 and then studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1815, and then moved to Baltimore, where he became a legal colleague of Luther Martin, William Pinkney and Roger B. Taney. From 1821 until 1825 he served in the Maryland State Senate and then returned to practice law for two decades.

[edit] Federal politics

From 1845 to 1849, he represented Maryland in the United States Senate as a Whig, and from March 1849 until July 1850 he was Attorney General of the United States under President Zachary Taylor. He resigned that position when Millard Fillmore took office.

A conservative Democrat, he supported Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential election of 1856. He represented the slave-owning defendant in the famous 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford. He was personally opposed to slavery and was a key figure in the effort to keep Maryland from seceding from the Union during the American Civil War.

The Zachary Taylor Administration, 1849 daguerreotype by Mathew Brady. Left to right: William B. Preston, Thomas Ewing, John M. Clayton, Zachary Taylor, William M. Meredith, George W. Crawford, Jacob Collamer and Reverdy Johnson, (1849).

He served as a Maryland delegate to the Peace Convention of 1861 and from 1861 to 1862 served in the Maryland House of Delegates. During this time he represented Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter at his court-martial, arguing that Porter's distinguished record of service ought to put him beyond question. The officers on the court-martial, all handpicked by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, voted to convict Porter of cowardice and disobedience.

After the capture of New Orleans, he was commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln to revise the decisions of the military commandant, General Benjamin F. Butler, in regard to foreign governments, and reversed all those decisions to the entire satisfaction of the administration. After the war, reflecting the diverse points of view held by his fellow statesmen, Johnson argued for a gentler Reconstruction effort than that advocated by the Radical Republicans.

In 1863 he again took a seat in the United States Senate, serving through 1868. In 1865, he defended Mary Surratt before a military tribunal. Surratt was convicted and executed for plotting and aiding Lincoln's assassination. In 1866, he was a delegate to the National Union Convention which attempted to build support for President Johnson. Senator Johnson's report on the proceedings of the convention was entered into the record of President Johnson's impeachment trial. In the Senate, he also served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 1867, Reverdy Johnson voted for the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the only Democrat to vote for a Reconstruction measure in 1866 or 1867. In 1868 he was appointed minister to the United Kingdom and soon after his arrival in England negotiated the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty for the settlement of disputes arising out of the Civil War; this, however, the Senate refused to ratify, and he returned home on the accession of General Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency. Again resuming his legal practice, he was engaged by the government in the prosecution of cases against the Ku Klux Klan as well as work compiling the reports of the decisions of the Maryland Court of Appeals.

In 1876, he fell from a balcony at the Governor's Mansion in Annapolis and was killed instantly. He is buried in Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore. Johnson had been the last surviving member of the Taylor Cabinet.

In the 2010 film The Conspirator Reverdy is played by Tom Wilkinson.[1]

[edit] Further reading

• Steiner, Bernard C., Life of Reverdy Johnson, New Library Press.Net. ISBN 0-7950-2452-5

[edit] References and external links

• Reverdy Johnson at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
•  Hugh Chisholm, ed (1911). "Johnson, Reverdy". Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Reverdy Johnson at Find-A-Grave

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v • d • e Cabinet of President Zachary Taylor (1849–1850) Vice President Millard Fillmore (1849–1850) Secretary of State John M. Clayton (1849–1850) Secretary of the Treasury William M. Meredith (1849–1850) Secretary of War George W. Crawford (1849–1850) Attorney General Reverdy Johnson (1849–1850) Postmaster General Jacob Collamer (1849–1850) Secretary of the Navy William B. Preston (1849–1850) Secretary of the Interior Thomas Ewing (1849–1850)

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