Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was born on December 29, 1808, in a log cabin in Raleigh, North CarolinaNorth CarolinaNorth Carolina is a state in the South Atlantic region of the United States; its capital is Raleigh and its largest city is Charlotte. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on November 21, 1789, becoming the 12th state, and its population in the 2020 census was 10,439,388.Open the full entry, the younger of two sons of Jacob and Mary (“Polly”) Johnson; his older brother was William.⁠[1][2][3]

His father, Jacob, worked as a hotel porter and bank janitor, and his mother as a weaver and spinner; both parents were nearly illiterate.⁠[3]

In 1811 his father was weakened after saving acquaintances from drowning, and he died in January 1812, when Andrew was three; his mother later married Turner Daugherty.⁠[1][3]

His mother apprenticed William and Andrew to a local tailor, James J. Selby, when Andrew was 14; the brothers ran away in 1824.⁠[1][4][3]

After two years on the run he returned to Raleigh in 1826, and that year, at 17, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he opened a tailoring business whose shop became a gathering place for political discussion.⁠[3][1]

On May 17, 1827, Johnson married Eliza McCardle (1810–1876). Then sixteen and the only child of the village shoemaker, she read to him, taught him to spell and write, and advised him on investing in town real estate and farmland.⁠[5][3]

Among U.S. presidents, only Abraham Lincoln had less formal education.⁠[6]

In 1829 Johnson was elected an alderman of Greeneville on a mechanics’ ticket, and he served as mayor of Greeneville in 1834 and again in 1837. He identified himself as a Jacksonian Democrat.⁠[4][6]

Johnson was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835, lost reelection in 1837, returned in 1839 and was elected to the state Senate in 1841.⁠[4]

From 1843 to 1853 Johnson served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives; he lost his seat after his district was redrawn following the 1850 census.⁠[3]

In the 1840s and 1850s, as a representative and then senator, he championed a homestead bill to give poor men a free farm.⁠[7]

From 1853 to 1857 Johnson served two terms as governor of Tennessee.⁠[3]

Johnson became a U.S. senator in 1857, and he was in his first term when the Civil War broke out.⁠[4][6]

Johnson held the proslavery and states’ rights views common in the Democratic Party but opposed secession; after Tennessee left the Union, he was the only Southern senator who did not give up his seat.⁠[8][3]

In the South he was hanged in effigy, his property was confiscated and his wife and daughters were driven from the state; in the North he was hailed as a patriot.⁠[3]

On March 3, 1862, Abraham Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of Tennessee with the rank of brigadier general; the White House biography describes his use of the state as a “laboratory for reconstruction.”⁠[4][3][7]

Johnson asked Lincoln to exclude Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, but later accepted emancipation as a war measure against the South. In August 1863 he freed his own slaves, and in 1864 he gave speeches calling slavery a “cancer upon the body politic” and urging Tennesseans to abolish it by amending the state constitution.⁠[8][3]

In 1864 the National Union Party convention in Baltimore nominated Johnson as Lincoln’s running mate, a choice meant to attract War Democrats. Lincoln and Johnson defeated George B. McClellan and George Pendleton in the election.⁠[4][8][6]

Johnson took the oath as vice president on March 4, 1865. Recovering from typhoid fever, he had drunk whiskey and gave a confused inaugural address, which sparked rumors that he was a drunkard; the American Battlefield Trust biography states that he was not.⁠[8]

Lincoln was shot on the night of April 14, 1865; the conspirator assigned to kill Johnson backed out at the last minute. After Lincoln’s death on April 15, 1865, Johnson was sworn in as president.⁠[8][1][4]

Johnson’s cabinet included Secretary of State William H. Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Attorney General James Speed and Secretary of the Interior John Palmer Usher, who was succeeded by James Harlan on May 15, 1865.⁠[9]

While Congress was out of session in 1865, Johnson reconstructed the former Confederate states. He pardoned all who took an oath of allegiance, but Confederate leaders and wealthy men had to apply for individual presidential pardons; in the first eight months of his term he issued thousands of pardons.⁠[7][6]

He let the former Confederate states elect new governments, which began passing “black codes” to control freed people. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, it refused to seat the newly elected Southern members and created the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction.⁠[8][7][9]

In 1866 Johnson vetoed a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Congress’s first attempt to override the Freedmen’s Bureau veto failed, but a second attempt succeeded.⁠[9]

The Senate and the House voted by two-thirds majorities on April 6 and April 9, 1866, to pass the Civil Rights Act over his veto, making it law; the White House biography describes Congress’s overriding of his vetoes of measures on former slaves as the first time it had overridden a president on an important bill. The act declared all persons born in the United States and not subject to a foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, to be citizens regardless of race, color or previous condition of slavery, with the same rights as white citizens to make contracts, sue, give evidence and hold property.⁠[10][7]

A few months later Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states. Johnson urged the Southern states not to ratify it, and all the former Confederate states except Tennessee refused.⁠[7][8]

To campaign for his allies in the 1866 congressional elections, Johnson made an 18-day speaking tour of the Midwest that he called “a swing around the circle”; the Radical Republicans won sweeping victories that fall, gaining enough strength to override his vetoes.⁠[9][7]

On March 2, 1867, Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the first Reconstruction Act, which divided 10 former Confederate states into five military districts; Tennessee, already readmitted, was excluded. To be readmitted, the states had to draft new constitutions providing universal male suffrage, obtain congressional approval of them and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.⁠[11]

That month Congress also passed the Tenure of Office Act, which barred the president from removing cabinet officials appointed during his term without the Senate’s consent.⁠[12]

On March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward accepted Russian Minister Edouard de Stoeckl’s offer to sell AlaskaAlaskaAlaska is the largest U.S. state by area and borders Canada to the east; its capital is Juneau and its largest city is Anchorage. Alaska was admitted to the Union on January 3, 1959, as the 49th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 733,391.Open the full entry for $7.2 million. The Senate approved the treaty on April 9, 1867, Johnson signed it on May 28, and Alaska was formally transferred to the United States on October 18, 1867.⁠[13]

Johnson removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton twice: first in August 1867, while Congress was in recess, and again in February 1868, after the Senate had refused its consent. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry states that he acted to test the act’s constitutionality.⁠[12][9]

On February 24, 1868, the House voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson, making him the first U.S. president to be impeached. The House adopted 11 articles of impeachment, eight of which concerned alleged violations of the Tenure of Office Act.⁠[12][1]

Seven House managers, led by Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the House Republican floor leader, prosecuted the case. One article accused him of bringing Congress into “disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach,” with evidence drawn largely from his 1866 tour speeches.⁠[12][9]

Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presided over the Senate trial. On May 16, 1868, the Senate voted 35 to 19 on Article 11, one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict; on May 26 the votes on Articles 2 and 3 were again 35 to 19, and the Senate then adjourned the trial. Seven Republicans voted with Johnson’s supporters.⁠[12][9]

Johnson received a modest number of votes at the 1868 Democratic National Convention but did not actively seek the nomination, which went to Horatio Seymour.⁠[9][8]

After his term ended in 1869, Johnson returned to Tennessee and moved with his family back into their Greeneville homestead, which they renovated; soldiers had used the house as a hospital and headquarters during the Civil War and left graffiti on its walls.⁠[8][1]

He lost a U.S. Senate race in 1869 and a U.S. House race in 1872.⁠[8]

In 1875 Tennessee returned Johnson to the U.S. Senate, making him the only former president to serve in the Senate. He said he would rather have that news than learn he had been elected president, adding, “Thank God for the vindication.”⁠[7][14]

During his brief Senate service he criticized the policies and corruption of Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was an American soldier and politician who commanded the Union armies in the final years of the Civil War (1864–1865) and served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877.Open the full entry’s administration.⁠[14]

Johnson suffered a stroke in July 1875 and died on July 31, 1875, in Carter County, Tennessee.⁠[8][14]

On August 3, 1875, he was buried with Masonic rites on a hilltop in Greeneville on land he had bought in 1852, his body wrapped in the American flag and accompanied by a copy of the Constitution.⁠[15][1]

Johnson and Eliza McCardle had five children: Martha (1828–1901), Charles (1830–1863), Mary (1832–1883), Robert (1834–1869) and Andrew (1852–1879).⁠[5]

Charles, a Civil War surgeon, died after a fall from a horse in 1863; Robert, his father’s private secretary, died shortly after the family returned from Washington in 1869. Martha’s husband, David Trotter Patterson, was a senator from Tennessee who voted “not guilty” at the impeachment trial.⁠[15]

The family erected an obelisk over the grave in 1878. Martha Johnson Patterson’s will asked that the hill become a resting place for veterans; the family owned the cemetery until 1906, when Andrew Johnson National Cemetery was established, and it was under War Department jurisdiction from 1906 to 1942, receiving its first veteran burial in 1909 before passing to the National Park Service in 1942. When it became inactive in 2019, more than 2,000 headstones marked the grounds.⁠[15][16]

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service, comprises a visitor center, the Andrew Johnson Homestead where he lived before and after his presidency, Andrew Johnson National Cemetery, and museum exhibits on his presidency, Reconstruction, impeachment and the lives of the people he enslaved.⁠[17]

In Myers v. United States (1926) the Supreme Court declared the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional, which Britannica judges in effect vindicated Johnson’s position.⁠[9]

Britannica’s essay judges that Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies toward the South embittered the Radical Republicans in Congress and led to his political downfall and impeachment. The White House biography calls him “an honest and honorable man” and “one of the most unfortunate of Presidents.” The Miller Center’s essay concludes that he did more to extend the national strife than to heal it.⁠[2][7][6]

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site: Official website: https://home.nps.gov/anjo/index.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[17]