September 1901, Ira Remsen[1] succeeding him in the office. The medical department, inaugurated in 1893, is closely affiliated with the excellently equipped Johns Hopkins Hospital (opened in 1889), and is actually a graduate school, as it admits only students holding the bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The degree of Doctor of Medicine is conferred after four years of successful study, and advanced courses are offered. The department’s greatest teachers have been William Osler (b. 1849) and William Henry Welch (b. 1850).
The buildings of the university were in 1901 an unpretentious group on crowded ground near the business centre of the city. In 1902 a new site was secured, containing about 125 acres amid pleasant surroundings in the northern suburbs, and new buildings were designed in accordance with a plan formed with a view to secure harmony and symmetry. In 1907 the library contained more than 133,000 bound volumes. Among the numerous publications issued by the university press are: American Journal of Mathematics, Studies in Historical and Political Science, Reprint of Economic Tracts, American Journal of Philology, Contributions to Assyriology and Semitic Philology, Modern Language Notes, American Chemical Journal, American Journal of Insanity, Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, Reports of the Maryland Geological Survey, and Reports of the Maryland Weather Service. The institution is maintained chiefly with the proceeds of the endowment fund. It also receives aid from the state, and charges tuition fees. Its government is entrusted to a board of trustees, while the direction of affairs of a strictly academic nature is delegated to an academic council and to department boards. In 1907–1908 the regular faculty numbered 175, and there was an enrolment of 683 students, of whom 518 were in post-graduate courses.
On the history of the university see Daniel C. Gilman, The Launching of a University (New York, 1906), and the annual reports of the president.
JOHNSON, ANDREW (1808–1875), seventeenth president of
the United States, was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, on the
29th of December 1808. His parents were poor, and his father
died when Andrew was four years old. At the age of ten he was
apprenticed to a tailor, his spare hours being spent in acquiring
the rudiments of an education. He learned to read from a book
which contained selected orations of great British and American
statesmen. The young tailor went to Laurens Court House,
South Carolina, in 1824, to work at his trade, but returned to
Raleigh in 1826 and soon afterward removed to Greeneville in
the eastern part of Tennessee. He married during the same year
Eliza McCardle (1810–1876), much his superior by birth and
education, who taught him the common school branches of
learning and was of great assistance in his later career. In East
Tennessee most of the people were small farmers, while West
Tennessee was a land of great slave plantations. Johnson began
in politics to oppose the aristocratic element and became the
spokesman and champion of the poorer and labouring classes.
In 1828 he was elected an alderman of Greeneville and in 1830–1834
was mayor. In 1834, in the Tennessee constitutional convention
he endeavoured to limit the influence of the slaveholders
by basing representation in the state legislature on the white
population alone. In 1835–1837 and 1839–1841 Johnson was
a Democratic member of the state House of Representatives, and
in 1841–1843 of the state Senate; in both houses he uniformly
upheld the cause of the “common people,” and, in addition,
opposed legislation for “internal improvements.” He soon
was recognized as the political champion of East Tennessee.
Though his favourite leaders became Whigs, Johnson remained
a Democrat, and in 1840 canvassed the state for Van Buren for
president.
In 1843 he was elected to the national House of Representatives and there remained for ten years until his district was gerrymandered by the Whigs and he lost his seat. But he at once offered himself as a candidate for governor and was elected and re-elected, and was then sent to the United States Senate, serving from 1857 to 1862. As governor (1853–1857) he proved to be able and non-partisan. He championed popular education and recommended the homestead policy to the national government, and from his sympathy with the working classes and his oft-avowed pride in his former calling he became known as the “mechanic governor.” In Congress he proved to be a tireless advocate of the claims of the poorer whites and an opponent of the aristocracy. He favoured the annexation of Texas, supported the Polk administration on the issues of the Mexican War and the Oregon boundary controversy, and though voting for the admission of free California demanded national protection for slavery. He also advocated the homestead law and low tariffs, opposed the policy of “internal improvements,” and was a zealous worker for budget economies. Though opposed to a monopoly of political power in the South by the great slaveholders, he deprecated anti-slavery agitation (even favouring denial of the right of petition on that subject) as threatening abolition or the dissolution of the Union, and went with his sectional leaders so far as to demand freedom of choice for the Territories, and protection for slavery where it existed—this even so late as 1860. He supported in 1860 the ultra-Democratic ticket of Breckinridge and Lane, but he did not identify the election of Lincoln with the ruin of the South, though he thought the North should give renewed guarantees to slavery. But he followed Jackson rather than Calhoun, and above everything else set his love of the Union, though believing the South to be grievously wronged. He was the only Southern member of Congress who opposed secession and refused to “go with his state” when it withdrew from the Union in 1861. In the judgment of a leading opponent (O. P. Morton) “perhaps no man in Congress exerted the same influence on the public sentiment of the North at the beginning of the war” as Johnson. During the war he suffered much for his loyalty to the Union. In March 1862 Lincoln made him military governor of the part of Tennessee captured from the Confederates, and after two years of autocratic rule (with much danger to himself) he succeeded in organizing a Union government for the state. In 1864, to secure the votes of the war Democrats and to please the border states that had remained in the Union, Johnson was nominated for vice-president on the ticket with Lincoln.
A month after the inauguration the murder of Lincoln left him president, with the great problem to solve of reconstruction of the Union. All his past career and utterances seemed to indicate that he would favour the harshest measures toward ex-Confederates, hence his acceptability to the most radical republicans. But, whether because he drew a distinction between the treason of individuals and of states, or was influenced by Seward, or simply, once in responsible position, separated Republican party politics from the question of constitutional interpretation, at least he speedily showed that he would be influenced by no acrimony, and adopted the lenient reconstruction policy of Lincoln. In this he had for some time the cordial support of his cabinet. During the summer of 1865 he set up provisional civil governments in all the seceded states except Texas, and within a few months all those states were reorganized and applying for readmission to the Union. The radical congress (Republican by a large majority) sharply opposed this plan of restoration, as they had opposed Lincoln’s plan: first, because the members of Congress from the Southern States (when readmitted) would almost certainly vote with the Democrats; secondly, because relatively few of the Confederates were punished; and thirdly, because the newly organized Southern States did not give political rights to the negroes. The question of the status of the negro proved the crux of the issue. Johnson was opposed to general or immediate negro suffrage. A bitter contest began in Feb. 1866, between the president and the Congress, which refused to admit representatives
- ↑ Ira Remsen was born in New York City on the 10th of February 1846, graduated at the college of the City of New York in 1865, studied at the New York college of physicians and surgeons and at the university of Göttingen, was professor of chemistry at Williams College in 1872–1876, and in 1876 became professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He published many textbooks of chemistry, organic and inorganic, which were republished in England and were translated abroad. In 1879 he founded the American Chemical Journal.
