Vice President-Elect Andrew Johnson was Hammered when He Gave His Inauguration Speech
It happened inside the Senate Chamber on old Presidential Inauguration Day, March 4 (changed to January 20 in 1933), 1865, just a little while before the recently re-elected Abraham Lincoln was set to take his own oath of office on the back steps of the US capitol. Obviously, this was Lincoln’s second time going through the whole swearing-in song and dance, but it was Johnson’s first, at least at the executive level.
He’d previously served in the House as a representative from Tennessee, and later as one of its senators with two terms as governor in between. One of the South’s few Union loyalists, he lost his position when the state seceded in 1861, but later, as a reward for his loyalty, was appointed - by Lincoln personally - to serve as its military governor after the US retook it in 1862. He worked to rebuild its physical infrastructure as well as its local government over the next two years before being selected, primarily because of his popularity among Democrats and Southern Unionists, to replace Hannibal Hamlin (a Mainer) on the Lincoln 1864 re-election ticket.
Anyway, all that is to say that he was no stranger to the pressures of public life, public speaking, or the pomp and circumstance of inauguration days.
This particular one was different, though, and not just because the stakes were much higher. At some point during the final days of his military governorship, he came down with a nasty ‘cold’ - which some historians have speculated to be typhoid fever - that was so bad he didn’t have the strength to do any of his own work for weeks.