A conservative Democrat, he supported Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential election of 1856. He represented the slave-owning defendant in the infamous 1857Dred Scott case. Personally opposed to slavery, he was reportedly a key figure in the effort to keep Maryland from seceeding from the Union during the American Civil War.
He served as a Maryland delegate to the 1861 peace convention and from 1861 to 1862 served in the Maryland House of Delegates. After the capture of New Orleans, he was commissioned by President Abraham Lincoln to revise the decisions of the military commandant, General B.F. Butler, in regard to foreign governments, and reversed all those decisions to the entire satisfaction of the administration. After the war, representing the riven 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 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 1868 he was appointed minister to Great Britain 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.
He passed away in 1876 in Annapolis and is buried in Greenmount Cemetery at Baltimore.
Further reading
Steiner, Bernard C., Life of Reverdy Johnson, New Library Press.Net. ISBN 0795024525
JOHNSON, Reverdy, statesman, born in Annapolis, Maryland, 21 May, 1796; died there, 10 February, 1876 He was educated at St. John's college, studied law with his father, John Johnson, chancellor of the state, and was admitted to the bar in 1815.
Johnson was invariably outspoken in his opinions of all public matters, his decided opposition to the proscriptive doctrines of the "Know-Nothing" party led him, together with many of the Whig leaders in Maryland, to unite with the Democrats in 1856 and in the subsequent support of Buchanan's administration.
Johnson joined the Douglas wing of the party, and was active in his efforts to secure its success, he was a member of the peace congress in Washington in 1861 and in 1862.
REVERDYJOHNSON (1796-1876), American political leader and jurist, was born at Annapolis, Maryland, on the 21st of May 1796.
His father, John Johnson (1770-1824), was a distinguished lawyer, who served in both houses of the Maryland General Assembly, as attorney-general of the state (1806-1811), as a judge of the court of appeals (1811-1821), and as a chancellor of his state (1821-1824).
In 1817 he removed to Baltimore, where he became the professional associate of Luther Martin, William Pinkney and Roger B. Taney; with Thomas Harris he reported the decisions of the court of appeals in Harris and Johnson's Reports (1820-1827); and in 1818 he was appointed chief commissioner of insolvent debtors.
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