1856 PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON. Slavery a Constitutional Right and "The" Defining Issue of 1856 Presidential Election.

"I am no compromiser in the present crisis. I am for the South standing firmly and united upon the issues now tendered by the North."  Andrew Johnson

A very rare, robustly pro-slavery Presidential campaign speech by Andrew Johnson, then Governor Tennessee, on behalf of James Buchanan. 

The speech is structured as a systematic takedown of the two rival candidates, John Charles Frémont and Millard Fillmore, with the entirety of the critique organized around a single issue, i.e. that of slavery.

Johnson organizes his argumention almost as a kind of legal brief, marshaling documentary evidence, previous voting records, extracts from letters and speeches, to convict both opponents as enemies of Southern interests.

Slavery is in fact the entire framework through which Johnson evaluates candidates, parties, and constitutional principles. His core critiques are:

First, that Frémont is an abolitionist and therefore disqualified for any Southern vote. This is stated bluntly and treated as self-evident: "he can receive the vote of no Southern man nor Southern State."

Second, and more strikingly, Fillmore is described as an even worse abolitionist than Frémont. This is Johnson's most substantiated claim, and he pursues it with considerable forensic force. He quotes Fillmore's 1838 "Erie letter," in which Fillmore answered anti-slavery society questionnaires in the affirmative; his votes supporting Congress's power to abolish the interstate slave trade, opposing Texas annexation, and favoring slavery's abolition in the District of Columbia. Johnson also cites Fillmore's congressional votes alongside the notorious abolitionist Joshua Giddings, his reluctance to sign the Fugitive Slave Law without seeking an attorney general's opinion first, and his cabinet appointments of men Johnson deems abolitionists. The rhetorical effect is to make supporting Fillmore seem not just misguided, but absolutely absurd. As he notes, any Southern man voting for Fillmore is voting for "the greatest Abolitionist of the two."

By contrast, Buchanan is positioned as the defender of Southern slavery. Johnson catalogs Buchanan's pro-slavery record over thirty years with evident satisfaction. He voted to support the suppression of abolitionist mailings, for Texas annexation, for the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Law, and for the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

One of the most significant passages is Johnson's extended quotation of an 1838 speech by Buchanan. The quoted text argues that slavery is a constitutionally protected property right predating the federal government, that Congress has no power to interfere with it in the states, and that the three-fifths clause makes slavery foundational to political representation. Johnson endorses this view entirely, calling it "the true position upon the subject of slavery, which the South is now contending for under the constitution."

A large section of the speech defends the Kansas-Nebraska Act and popular sovereignty, which Johnson sees as under threat. He frames popular sovereignty not as a neutral principle but as a vehicle for protecting the right of territories to establish slavery. He quotes the Kansas-Nebraska Act's language, that territories shall enter "with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe," and calls it "the true intent and meaning of the Constitution of the United States."

"I am no compromiser in the present crisis. I am for the South standing firmly and united upon the issues now tendered by the North." 

The document is significant also in that it foreshadows Johnson's later catastrophic presidency: the same constitutional logic that defends slavery in 1856,  states' rights, non-intervention, popular sovereignty, becomes his argument against Reconstruction a decade later.

Johnson, Andrew. Speech of Governor Andrew Johnson, on the Political Issues of the Day, Delivered before the Citizens of Nashville, on the 15th of July, 1856. Written Out at the Request of the Democratic Association. Nashville. Printed by G. C. Torbett and Company. 1856. 32pp

Good -, textually complete, side sewn with remainder of early wraps or sammelband at spine. Moderately foxed as shown.