6

Mr. President

It is a measure of how little given to self-reflection Andrew Johnson was that the story of what happened to him on the night Lincoln was shot, and the aftermath of that most pivotal event in American history, comes from others. Leonard J. Farwell brought news of the tragedy at Ford’s Theatre to Johnson at Kirkwood House, the boarding establishment where he was living. The sleeping vice president was awakened by the sound of the former governor of Wisconsin rapping at his door and speaking in urgent tones. Johnson opened the door, and Farwell relayed the news that Lincoln had been shot. Farwell recalled that he and Johnson fell into each other’s arms and cried.

It was clear very quickly that this was a moment of great danger for the entire government because Lincoln was not the only official who had been attacked. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his sons Frederick and Augustus, who tried to protect him, were seriously wounded by Lewis Powell (Paine), one of the conspirators. An organized effort to destroy the leadership of the United States was under way, and there was justifiable concern for Johnson’s life. The fears were well founded. There had, in fact, been plans to kill Johnson, but the would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, decided to get drunk instead of carrying out his mission. Johnson was placed under guard, and Farwell returned to Ford’s Theatre to learn Lincoln’s condition. The president had been taken across the street, to Peterson House, a boarding establishment. It was evident to all present that they were on a death watch. Farwell reported this grim news to Johnson, who thought it best to hurry over to join what was an excruciatingly painful scene.

Johnson arrived to find people packed into the tiny room where the very tall Lincoln lay awkwardly on a too-short bed. Mary Todd Lincoln, in the grips of a hysteria from which she never seemed to recover, was in the room next door. Charles Sumner, who held the president’s hand as his life ebbed way, suggested that Johnson not stay too long lest he encounter Mrs. Lincoln, who absolutely detested her husband’s vice president. Johnson acceded to the request and remained only a short time at the president’s bedside. He would continue to be solicitous of Mary Lincoln’s feelings, as he waited patiently as she grieved, allowing her to remain in the White House for weeks after her husband’s death.

Lincoln died the following morning, having never regained consciousness. Johnson was sworn in several hours afterward by the chief justice of the United States, Salmon P. Chase. The simple ceremony (so different from the one that had taken place just weeks before) was held in Johnson’s hotel room before a small group that included several of his friends, along with members of the cabinet and members of Congress. The country had been awash in violence unparalleled in its history. There were still pockets of resistance, Confederates who would not give up even after Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant. Overall, there had been a great anticipation of the peace that seemed to be on its way after Appomattox. John Wilkes Booth’s final act of brutality sucked the life out of that. The outpouring of grief across the North was instantaneous and enormous. Whatever satisfaction white southerners took at Lincoln’s death was tempered by the knowledge that his assassination by Booth, the Virginian, might be cause for northern retaliation, sinking the region even further into despair and defeat. They could not have taken any joy at the prospect of having Johnson at the helm at this moment and in this way. He, with this incessant and hard talk of punishing traitors, frightened them more than Lincoln.

It must have been particularly hurtful, galling even, for Lincoln’s men in the cabinet to have their time with him ended in this fashion, and to see Johnson replace him. As Johnson’s biographer Howard Means pointed out, the last time many of them had seen the vice president was when he was drunk at the inauguration embarrassing himself, Lincoln, and all who witnessed the display. Despite his many flaws, however, Johnson had not risen in the world by being a fool. He was an often shrewd man and could be quite sentimental. He knew at least some of the things he was supposed to do in a moment like this, even though America had never witnessed a moment like it. Johnson immediately asked all the members of Lincoln’s cabinet to remain in their positions. Although this was probably a sincere gesture, done out of regard for Lincoln’s memory and the country’s anguish over what had happened, it was also pragmatic. Rumors of all sorts were flying around. Booth and his fellow conspirators were still at large. While Johnson was certainly not seen as a friend to the Confederacy, he was a southerner, and he stood to gain by the death of the president. It would not be long before some, the president’s distraught wife in particular, began to suspect that Johnson did in fact have a hand in Lincoln’s death.

The suspicions were given traction by a strange and, as yet, unexplained event. On the day he assassinated Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth came to Johnson’s boardinghouse and left a missive in the box of Johnson’s private secretary, William A. Browning. “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth,” the note read.1 What was Booth up to? People immediately wondered why the president’s assassin was communicating—on the day of the assassination no less—with one so close to Vice President Johnson. Did he know Johnson, too? Fast-forward to 1963 and imagine the response if it had been learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had left such a note with Lyndon Johnson’s personal secretary—or anyone close to Johnson—when he was in Dallas on November 22.

There is no reason to doubt that Booth engaged Powell and Atzerodt to kill Seward and Johnson, while he killed Lincoln. Ah, the skeptic might respond, couldn’t the Atzerodt plot have been a mere ruse to make it look as though Johnson was a target when he never really was? After all, he was the only person designated for attack who was never even touched. Powell, by contrast, was serious about his mission, and Seward escaped death only because he happened to be wearing a neck brace that prevented the slashing of his jugular. Even with that narrow escape, Seward was severely wounded and maimed for the rest of his life. What better way to deflect attention from Johnson than to make it seem as if he was a target of the conspirators as well? How convenient that Atzerodt decided to go and get drunk instead of attacking him.

The suspicions about Johnson were baseless. The evidence indicates that Booth did actually recruit Atzerodt to kill him. There was nothing in Johnson’s profile, to that date, to make Booth believe that it was better to have him as president than Lincoln, and he had every reason to hate the Tennessean, despised throughout the South as a traitor to his region. If a Johnson faux-assassination attempt had been a mere diversionary tactic, Atzerodt would have to have been a knowing part of the scheme, or else he could have gone ahead and killed or seriously wounded the vice president. What Atzerodt did after being apprehended militates against this notion. During the course of the legal proceedings following his arrest, he, facing certain execution if found guilty, attempted to save himself by giving information about his fellow conspirators. He talked long and somewhat wildly about what had happened. It would seem virtually impossible that Atzerodt, as he told his story, would have left out the part about Vice President Johnson being involved in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln and how he was never supposed to commit one of the crimes he was charged with, that is, killing Johnson. Why go to his death without giving up the biggest fish of all—the man who was now president of the United States? But the suspicions about Johnson lived on.

It is not surprising that a number of Americans believed there had been a high-level conspiracy to kill Lincoln. There is often extreme reluctance on the part of some to accept that the great can be felled by the ordinary. How could one in whom so many had invested their love and admiration, and who rose to such unparalleled heights, have been killed by a person of no consequence? One looks for the grand design behind the murder of a Lincoln, a Kennedy, or a King, because only that would seem fitting given each man’s stature. Booth’s actions would be comprehensible if accomplished with the aid of an actual member of the government—essentially a coup d’état by Johnson to put himself in Lincoln’s place, a tale straight from the days of the Roman Empire. As things stood, it all seemed so meaningless. The South had lost the war, even if a few dead-enders were still soldiering on in far-off places like Texas. Booth’s act of pure personal vengeance served no larger strategic purpose that people could discern at the time.

But despite the enormously sad circumstances, there was work to be done, and Johnson went straight to it. On the day he was sworn in, he presided over his first cabinet meeting, the one in which he requested that all members of the cabinet remain in their positions. There was also the matter of Lincoln’s funeral. Johnson took steps to plan for that and appointed a temporary replacement for Secretary of State Seward, who was still incapacitated after Powell’s vicious attack upon him.

Lyndon Johnson’s ascent to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was traumatic for the nation, but Andrew Johnson’s succession of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 was an even more difficult transition. The Cold War, as important as it was, did not have the same immediacy for Americans as the Civil War. A large percentage of the male population, particularly in the South, had been soldiers. And the battles had been fought on American soil, largely in the South, bringing the hardship of the conflict home to all the inhabitants of the country. Johnson faced the formidable task of steadying the country’s nerves for the struggle that still lay ahead.

During those agonizing days and weeks immediately following the assassination, Johnson seemed more than up to the task. In all the ceremonies surrounding Lincoln’s death, there would be no repeat of the fiasco of the inauguration that had taken place just a month and a half before. Instead, two days after the tragic and confusing night when he was elevated to the presidency, Johnson went to the East Room of the White House where Lincoln’s coffin had been placed on a “magnificent catafalque.”2 There he gazed in silence upon the face of the man who had chosen him to be his successor in the event of his death. Then on April 19, in a powerful display of the solidarity and continuing strength of the American democracy, President Johnson headed an assemblage of all the members of the government who had gathered at the White House to attend the funeral. They escorted Lincoln’s body to the Capitol building, where the fallen president would lie in state for several days before the long trip by train back to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. In that most critical period, the new president carried himself with a dignity that raised respect for him in many quarters.

Johnson excelled at more than ceremony. His deft mediation and resolution of a dispute between General William T. Sherman, of the famous march through Georgia, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton gave evidence that he could employ the skills of a diplomat when he wanted. The personalities involved in this fracas, and the issues underlying it, foreshadowed nearly all the major problems to come in Johnson’s presidency. Sherman had entered into an agreement with General Joseph Johnston, the commander of the Confederate army in North Carolina, under which the state agreed to cease armed conflict with the assurances that the government in existence at the time (the Confederate government) could remain in power, that there would be a general amnesty for all rebels, and that the property rights of whites would be guaranteed—in other words, there was no hint that the status of enslaved people had changed at all, let alone any notion of land reform that would give freedmen access to property. These were extremely important and delicate political questions, and with this move Sherman the military man had intruded, without permission from Washington, into politics.

Stanton, in particular, was furious about the agreement. Johnson, too, was unhappy with Sherman’s presumptuous gesture. With the unanimous backing of the cabinet, he dispatched General Ulysses S. Grant to North Carolina to set things straight. Grant directed Sherman to rescind the parts of the agreement that lay in the realm of politics rather than military strategy. The chastened general was then greatly insulted when Stanton made the whole matter public by discussing it in the newspapers, subjecting Sherman to criticism from members of the press who questioned his motives for being so lenient with the Confederates. Although Sherman apparently never forgave Stanton, he and Johnson did reach a rapprochement after the president made conciliatory overtures to him. In truth, it was not very long before it became clear that Sherman’s impulse in favor of postwar leniency toward the South would become the new president’s own plan of action as well. Johnson’s strained relations with Stanton, of course, would later put him on the road to impeachment.

Johnson’s handling of the rift between Sherman and Stanton further cemented his image as one willing to be tough on the southern rebels, even as it created a newfound respect for his administrative abilities. He won further plaudits when he put a $100,000 bounty on the head of Jefferson Davis, who along with other prominent Confederates was on the run after the war’s end. After Davis’s capture, a question arose: should the former leader of the Confederacy and others who had betrayed the United States be tried in civilian or military courts? Johnson delayed his decision about Davis but quickly settled upon a military commission as the best venue for trying the individuals arrested as conspirators in Lincoln’s murder. After a six-week trial, four of the nine conspirators were sentenced to death, including, very controversially, Mary Surratt, the lone woman of the group. Johnson rejected the desperate entreaties of the condemned woman’s daughter for leniency for her mother, and Surratt was hanged with the other conspirators on July 7, 1865.

Johnson’s decision to let Surratt be put to death would come back to haunt him twice: once when he was president and saw a copy of John Wilkes Booth’s diary that suggested that Surratt had not been an active member of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln, and again in 1872 when he tried to make a political comeback after the end of his presidency. During that election it was alleged that Johnson had ignored a petition signed by five of the members of the military commission to commute Surratt’s sentence to life imprisonment. The evidence against her was very weak when compared to the men who were executed, and there was much sentiment against executing a woman. Johnson claimed he never saw the petition, while the judge advocate general, Joseph Holt, charged with bringing it to him, said that he had indeed delivered the petition to Johnson. Former cabinet members Seward and Stanton, as well as others, supported Holt. Both men said that the cabinet had discussed the petition with Johnson during one of their regular meetings, and the president and his advisers had held firm in their belief that Surratt should be executed despite the commissioners’ request for leniency.3 The controversy over the meeting aside, Johnson was a supremely stubborn man once he had made up his mind. There is no reason to think he would have saved Surratt even if he had seen the commissioners’ petition.

But that was all in the future. By the time the nation got around to celebrating victory over the Confederacy with a national parade in May 1865, Johnson’s personal popularity was at its zenith. Never again would so many Americans view him so favorably. Never again would he have so great an amount of political capital to expend. One suspects that many in the nation desperately wanted to believe that Johnson was the man they needed simply because he was the man who was there. After the devastating loss of Lincoln, the loss of nearly half a million men in battle, the physical destruction wrought by war, surely providence had provided, in Johnson, a man who would lead the nation with the same intelligence, wisdom, judgment, and moral authority as had the martyred president. Surely.

*   *   *

Presidents of the United States come into office facing a plethora of different policy issues of great or middling import, both domestic and foreign. It is often said that the “great” ones are those who serve their country as commander in chief. For only war, and the life and death decisions that flow from it, provides the trial by fire that forges and then reveals the leader’s capacity for greatness. By this conventional, though actually quite problematic, measure, Andrew Johnson missed his chance to become a great president. Although isolated battles continued for a time after he took office, Lincoln had been the true “war president,” and Johnson was left with war’s aftermath.

But what an aftermath it was! Whatever conventional wisdom might say about war’s unique ability to test presidential mettle, the unprecedented situation Johnson faced as he entered the presidency provided its own crucible for greatness. While, as we will see, other issues arose during Johnson’s presidency, his first and only major task was no less than the repair of a broken country. Others would be involved with that process—indeed, that would turn out to be the central point of contention that ruined his presidency—but in whatever form it took, any president during the post–Civil War years would have had a pivotal role to play in helping set the nation’s new course. Reconstruction provided the perfect opportunity for a man of clear vision and character to rise to the occasion, even though that might require rising above himself—or what he had shown himself to be until that point.

As it turned out, Johnson’s character created obstacles for the task that lay before him in the spring of 1865. He was, in the words of Paul H. Bergeron, the editor of The Papers of Andrew Johnson, “a maladroit strategist.”4 The historian Howard K. Beale, no great critic of the man, wrote of him, “His mind had one compartment for right and one for wrong, but no middle chamber where the two could commingle,”5 a tendency doubtless fueled by his personal insecurity. What was it like for Johnson during his moments alone in the White House to know that he now occupied a space held by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, and the Adamses—father and son—men with superior educations, great intellect and erudition? Even Washington and Jackson, no intellectuals they, during their early lives had been in careers that required some level of learning and study. Johnson knew he was the most poorly educated man who had ever risen to the presidency, and that his immediate predecessor, whose formal education was only marginally better, just also happened to be a genius, which he was decidedly not. So Johnson placed stubbornness, or, as he would say, sticking to his principles, in the spot where an effective intellect should have been and pressed on.

One cannot say that Johnson brought no political skills to the role of president. He had, after all, risen from nothing to the highest office in the land. The presidency, however, was a different thing altogether, a much larger arena. The issues were more complex—especially at this moment in the nation’s history—and the many players much more sophisticated than those he had encountered during his ascent. Rising is one thing; knowing what to do once in office is another. Johnson, probably, should never have held any office higher than governor of Tennessee, if that. Still, he began his presidency well enough. For a time, some who had worshipped Lincoln breathed a sigh of relief. Indeed, men such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Wade, two of the most notorious of the men who would be called “radical Republicans,” the most staunch defenders of the rights of the freedmen, had wondered if the martyred president might not have been just a bit too anxious for reconciliation with the Confederates.6 For a brief period, they thought Johnson saw things as they did and understood all that was at stake.

The South’s much vaunted “way of life” had carried the seeds of the catastrophic destruction of the Union. Fundamental changes had to come to the region, or the progress of the nation as a whole would be impeded. Having an effective plan of Reconstruction that really transformed the South was about the past, present, and future at once. This was also a matter of honor. There had to be some way to repay the debt owed to the thousands of black men who had taken up arms to fight for their freedom and to preserve the Union. Those men fought believing that there would be a place of dignity for their people in the newly reborn United States of America. They deserved the right to vote in the new nation born after the conflict. All of this seemed very sensible to the radical Republicans.

Because Johnson spoke so volubly of taking a hard line and punishing traitors, those who heard him can be forgiven for thinking he meant to exercise the full prerogatives of the victor. Northerners could not reasonably have expected to play Rome to the South’s Carthage, General Sherman’s depredations notwithstanding. The white residents of the North and South shared a history, and there was only so far that pure vengeance could go among them once the fighting stopped and there was a clear victor. But what was vengeance and what was a matter of just deserts? Everyone had an opinion on that matter, and various factions sought to influence Johnson’s thinking on the question. Blacks were among the first, and those who were able took an active role during this critical moment. They wrote to the new president seeking support for their rights. White southerners who had remained loyal to the Union begged for his help in fashioning a new South that would protect their interests along with those of the freedmen. Both groups keyed in on suffrage as one of the most important vehicles for ensuring the interests of the newly freed slaves.7

In the earliest days of his presidency Johnson gave hints that he was amenable to these suggestions; that he, too, wanted to transform the South. When Charles Sumner, Ben Wade, and others went to see him to talk about how this could be done, with voting rights for the freedmen at the centerpiece of the plan, Johnson would either play the sphinx, saying things that had double meanings, or blatantly profess to side with the proponents of suffrage. Sumner and Wade, hearing what they wanted to hear, thought they had a friend and ally in the new president. Perhaps Wade, who had known Johnson from their fight for the Homestead Bill in the 1850s, believed that his old comrade could muster the same empathy for the freedmen that he showed for poor whites who wanted land. Hans Trefousse suggested that Johnson’s heated denunciations of the southern traitors misled these men and other observers. That he said hard words about punishing individuals said nothing about his attitude toward plans for altering the southern social system. Johnson was never in favor of that. Not long into his presidency, everyone in the country—and, most fatefully, white southerners—began to get that message.

*   *   *

The first indication of Johnson’s true mind on the subject of what was to be done with the South came with his handling of Virginia’s reentry into the Union. As it happened, Virginia’s future status had been one of the subjects covered during the last meeting of Lincoln’s cabinet. Secretary of War Stanton had presented a plan to place both Virginia and North Carolina under military governorship for a time. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles felt that the two states should be handled differently because Virginia had recognized the government in West Virginia that had remained loyal to the Union. Welles’s idea took hold, and Stanton was sent back to the drawing board to come up with a plan to be discussed at the next cabinet meeting. That meeting never took place, of course, and Virginia’s status was left to the Johnson administration. Although black suffrage had not been broached at Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting, it was never far from considerations about the South’s future. The idea of making black voting in southern states a condition for return to the Union gained currency, and, as mentioned above, some of the foremost proponents of this idea—Sumner and Wade—believed that Johnson was on their side. In May 1865 they received a rude awakening.

While Congress was out of session Johnson issued a proclamation bringing Virginia back into the Union with no mention of black voting rights, much to Sumner’s and Wade’s surprise and dismay. Not everyone was shocked. Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania had disliked Johnson from the moment Lincoln picked him as a new running mate, suspecting that he was “at heart a damn scoundrel.” He recognized this proclamation as a portent of things to come.8 The radicals convened to draw up a plan of action, but Sumner and Wade held fast to their notion that Johnson supported black voting.

Stevens and others were right to be worried about Johnson’s plans for the future. What he had in mind all along for the South was a restoration rather than reconstruction—putting things back to the way they were before the war as quickly as possible, save for the institution of slavery, which had been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. Johnson’s plan as it unfolded involved broad amnesty provisions and the appointment of governors of the president’s choosing, who would work with voters to reestablish ties with the United States of America. He was determined to achieve his goal of the speedy reincorporation of the southern states all by himself, acting by presidential proclamation to bring in the rebel states before Congress came back into session in December 1865.

After Virginia came North Carolina, then six other southern states, including the one that had led the South out of the Union: South Carolina. Johnson asked nothing of these states save that they recognize the end of slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. This was perfectly in keeping with his understanding of what had happened when the southern states rebelled against the Union. They had never truly “left” the United States of America. The rebellion was merely that—a rebellion that had not worked a change in these states’ status within the Union. Very important for Johnson’s understanding about restoration, the issue of who could vote was a matter for the states to decide—just as it had been before the war.

Hans Trefousse cited Johnson’s belief that the federal government had no power to set voting qualifications as the principal reason for his refusal to address the question of black voting in the presidential proclamations restoring the southern states to the Union.9 That is what Johnson said. There is, however, good reason to doubt that this was really at the heart of Johnson’s objection. That he was able to appoint provisional governors was a testament to the federal government’s power over the states (rebel states, at least) in the completely unforeseen circumstances in which the country found itself. The very fact that the president was in the position to set terms and then declare that Virginia, North Carolina, and the other states had met federally mandated requirements for readmission to the Union was evidence of how far the prewar constitutional regime had been traduced.

The question was one of policy—did Johnson favor voting rights for black people or did he not? He did not, and so in his view the Constitution would not allow making black suffrage one of the federal mandates. He, in effect, made his personal beliefs coterminous with constitutional authority. Johnson’s states’ rights philosophy was totally instrumental; if he approved of a measure it was constitutional and if he did not approve of a measure it was unconstitutional. Consider his approach to appointing provisional governors in the southern states. He based his ability to do this—to impose an executive on a state—on language in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, which said that the “United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” Johnson cited that provision to visiting former governmental officials from North Carolina, who upon viewing his proclamation bringing their state back into the Union strenuously objected. Giving the president so much power, they said, violated the Constitution!

That same language in Article IV could have been used to explain why it was necessary to expand the franchise to qualified blacks. While the overwhelming majority of blacks were enslaved and had not been educated, there were some among their number who were literate, certainly more so than Andrew Johnson. In addition, there were blacks whose families had been free for several generations, who were literate and were property owners. They could no more vote than the people who had only recently been freed. The simple fact is that Johnson’s racial views heavily determined what rights he wanted to preserve for the states. Just as some southern members of America’s founding generation feared a federal government so large that it could interfere with the institution of slavery, Johnson feared a federal government so large that it could interfere with white supremacy. His policy preferences on this matter were clear: there would be no federally mandated political rights for black people.

White southerners, who in the aftermath of Lincoln’s death had waited in fear of what Johnson might do, were relieved and then ecstatic about his performance during the summer of 1865. Staunch Confederates hailed him as a hero and savior. Beyond the ending of slavery there would be no reformation of the southern racial landscape. Not only did Johnson refuse to press the issue of black suffrage; he picked men as provisional governors who he knew could be counted on to take a hard line on questions of black political and social rights—there would be none. One white southerner wrote to Johnson, “In our estimation [you have] been just, independent, statesmanlike and highly satisfactory to us, we hope and pray that God may permit you to remain at the head of our government.” The legislature of South Carolina greeted Johnson’s actions warmly, calling his measures “wise” and saying that he had found the right way of “securing the peace and prosperity of the whole Union.”10

In picking provisional governors, Johnson reverted to his old tactics in Tennessee of eschewing strict party loyalty in favor of seeking personal power through alliances with like-minded individuals. He moved with dispatch, appointing conservatives regardless of their formal political ties. On the surface it seems paradoxical that Johnson would actually come to “count on the backing of former secessionists”11 as he put forth his plans for the South. These were the men he was supposed to have hated with a passion. But Johnson’s method served a dual purpose. First, if he managed the situation correctly, he could create a new base of political power with himself at the head of an alliance of the most conservative elements in the North and South, regardless of party affiliation. The fortunes of the National Union Party had long ceased to concern him, and with no real ties to the Republican Party—he had never actually joined it—he was free to forge ahead into new territory. And this furthered Johnson’s second purpose: if he succeeded in creating a new party of conservatives from all over the country, he could ensure that the South would remain a “white man’s government,” a goal he pursued with great urgency throughout his tenure of office.

If white southerners rejoiced at Johnson’s maneuverings, many northerners and Republican congressmen were aghast at his actions and looked on helplessly as these events unfolded while they were away on recess. A delegation of Republicans returned to Washington to ask the president to call Congress into special session so that it, too, could begin to work on the issue of Reconstruction. At the very least, they asked, could he wait until the scheduled session before he implemented his plans? Johnson flatly refused. It finally dawned on everyone that the president fully intended to reconstruct (restore) the South all by himself in his own way. If they wanted to stop him, the Republicans would have to use their power to enact their own plan for remaking southern society. The battle was joined.