Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson was acquitted in the United States Senate by a single vote. That vote, cast in May 1868, saved his presidency from becoming the first to end in removal from office. Yet the trial itself exposed everything that had gone wrong: a man who had risen from a two-room shack in Raleigh, North Carolina, to the highest office in the land, now stood before the nation accused of deliberately defying the law.
How did a self-taught tailor from the Tennessee frontier become vice president? Why did he spend nearly every ounce of political capital he possessed fighting to deny rights to the people Abraham Lincoln had just freed? And what does it mean that historians have consistently ranked him among the worst presidents in American history, yet the people of Tennessee sent him back to the Senate after it was all over?
Johnson's story is a study in a man whose every instinct was shaped by the class he came from and the world he chose not to leave behind, even after that world had been defeated on the battlefield.
Jacob Johnson died of an apparent heart attack while ringing the town bell in Raleigh, North Carolina, shortly after rescuing three drowning men, when his son Andrew was three years old. His widow, Mary, known as Polly, worked as a washerwoman and became the sole support of the family. Both Jacob and Polly had been illiterate, and Andrew never attended school.
At age ten, Andrew was apprenticed to a tailor named James Selby, legally bound to serve until his twenty-first birthday. His formal education happened incidentally: one of Selby's employees taught him rudimentary literacy, and citizens would come to the shop to read aloud to the tailors as they worked. His biographer Annette Gordon-Reed suggests that Johnson, later a gifted public speaker, learned the art of oratory as he threaded needles and cut cloth.
After roughly five years, Johnson and his brother William ran away from Selby's shop. Selby placed a notice offering ten dollars for their return, naming both brothers but noting he would pay the same amount for Andrew Johnson alone. The brothers traveled to Carthage, North Carolina, and then Johnson moved to Laurens, South Carolina, where he found work quickly and met his first love, Mary Wood, for whom he made a quilt as a gift. She rejected his marriage proposal.
He returned to Raleigh hoping to buy out his apprenticeship, could not reach terms with Selby, and decided to move west. Johnson left North Carolina mostly on foot, passed through Knoxville and briefly through Mooresville, Alabama, and through Columbia, Tennessee, before his mother and stepfather drew him back and the family emigrated together through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Greeneville, Tennessee. He fell in love with the town at first sight. When he later became prosperous, he purchased the land where he had first camped and planted a tree there in commemoration.
In 1827, at the age of eighteen, Johnson married sixteen-year-old Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a local shoemaker, in a ceremony performed by Mordecai Lincoln, a first cousin of Thomas Lincoln, whose son would become president. The pair were married for almost fifty years and had five children. Eliza, though she suffered from tuberculosis throughout much of her life, taught Johnson mathematics and tutored him to improve his writing.
His tailoring business prospered and gave him funds to invest in real estate. He later boasted of his craft: "my work never ripped or gave way." Books about famous orators pulled him toward political life, and he held private debates with customers who disagreed with him. He also debated at Greeneville College, honing the skills that would become his chief political asset.
Johnson helped organize a Mechanics' ticket in the 1829 Greeneville municipal election, and was elected town alderman. On the 4th of January 1834, his fellow aldermen elected him mayor of Greeneville. The following year he won a state legislative seat by demolishing the opposition in debate, according to his biographer Hans L. Trefousse, with a near-two-to-one margin. After one defeat in 1837, Johnson would not lose another race for thirty years.
He ran for Congress and won in 1843, defeating Jonesborough lawyer John A. Aiken by 5,495 votes to 4,892. In Washington he advocated for the poor, opposed protective tariffs, and shunned social functions in favor of study in the Library of Congress. His relations with fellow Tennessee Democrat and President James K. Polk were famously difficult: Polk wrote in his final New Year's diary entry that Johnson was "very vindictive and perverse in his temper and conduct" and that he had been "politically, if not personally hostile" throughout his entire term.
Johnson introduced his Homestead Bill in Congress for the first time in his second term, proposing to grant 160 acres to people willing to settle and gain title to land. The issue was especially personal to him because of his own humble beginnings. It would take decades to pass.
In 1843, Johnson purchased his first slave, a fourteen-year-old named Dolly. He later purchased Dolly's half-brother Sam, and in 1857, he purchased a thirteen-year-old named Henry, who would later accompany the Johnson family to the White House. Ultimately, Johnson owned at least ten slaves.
Sam Johnson was a notably independent figure. He negotiated the nature of his work with the Johnson family, received some monetary compensation for his labor, and negotiated a tract of land from Andrew Johnson, who gave it to him for free in 1867. Sam would later become a commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau and was known as a proud man.
Johnson freed his slaves on the 8th of August 1863. They remained with him as paid servants. A year later, as military governor of Tennessee, he proclaimed the freedom of Tennessee's slaves. Newly emancipated people in Tennessee gave him a watch inscribed "for his Untiring Energy in the Cause of Freedom."
Yet Johnson's empathy had hard limits drawn along racial lines. He believed the phrase "all men are created equal" from the Declaration of Independence did not apply to African Americans, citing the Constitution of Illinois, which contained that phrase but barred African Americans from voting. By the time of his Senate career, Johnson owned fourteen slaves and held that the Constitution protected slavery as private property, prohibiting both federal and state governments from abolishing it.
His position was not a secret or a contradiction in the eyes of his supporters. Johnson saw himself as the champion of the poor white laborer, the "plebeian" against the planter class. The extension of rights to African Americans threatened, in his view, the coalition he was trying to build, and he never wavered from that calculation even as it destroyed his presidency.
In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and Johnson gave a major Senate speech in December decrying Northerners who would endanger the Union by seeking to outlaw slavery. When Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 set off secession talk, Johnson addressed the Senate with a pledge of loyalty: "I will not give up this government... No; I intend to stand by it... and I invite every man who is a patriot to... rally around the altar of our common country."
He was the only senator from a Confederate state who did not promptly resign his seat when his state seceded. Tennessee held a referendum on secession; when the first vote failed, the legislature put the question to a popular vote. Despite threats on his life and actual physical assaults, Johnson campaigned against secession, sometimes speaking with a gun on the lectern before him. The second vote passed and Tennessee joined the Confederacy in June 1861. Believing he would be killed if he stayed, Johnson fled through the Cumberland Gap, where his party was actually shot at. He left Eliza and his family behind in Greeneville.
Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee in March 1862, with the rank of brigadier general. The Confederates responded by confiscating his land and slaves and turning his home into a military hospital. Johnson demanded loyalty oaths from public officials, shut down newspapers owned by Confederate sympathizers, and oversaw the defense of Nashville against cavalry raids led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, he exempted Tennessee at Johnson's request. Johnson had come to believe that slavery had to end, writing, "If the institution of slavery... seeks to overthrow it the Government, then the Government has a clear right to destroy it." He reluctantly supported enlisting formerly enslaved men into the Union army, and oversaw the recruitment of 20,000 Black men into the United States Colored Troops, though he believed African Americans should perform menial tasks to release white Americans to do the fighting.
Lincoln's running mate in 1860 had been Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. For the 1864 campaign, Lincoln considered several War Democrats, sending General Daniel Sickles to Nashville in May 1864 on what was described as a fact-finding mission, though biographer Trefousse believes the trip was connected to Johnson's subsequent nomination. Gordon-Reed notes that having Johnson, a Southern War Democrat, on the ticket "sent the right message about the folly of secession and the continuing capacity for union within the country."
At the National Union Party convention in Baltimore in June 1864, Johnson led on the first ballot with 200 votes to 150 for Hamlin and 108 for Daniel S. Dickinson. On the second ballot, Kentucky switched its vote to Johnson, triggering a stampede. He was named on the second ballot with 491 votes to Hamlin's 17. Lincoln's response was characteristically plain: "Andy Johnson, I think, is a good man."
On the evening of the 3rd of March 1865, the night before his inauguration as vice president, Johnson attended a party in his honor and drank heavily. Hung over the following morning, he asked outgoing Vice President Hamlin for whiskey. Hamlin produced a bottle, and Johnson took two stiff drinks, saying "I need all the strength for the occasion I can have." In the Senate Chamber, he delivered a rambling, nearly incoherent address before Hamlin hastily swore him in. Lincoln, who watched sadly throughout, then went outside to deliver his acclaimed Second Inaugural Address.
Johnson spent the weeks that followed hiding from public ridicule at the Maryland home of a friend, Francis Preston Blair. He returned to Washington only when word came that General Ulysses S. Grant had captured the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Lincoln, asked about Johnson's behavior at the inauguration, replied, "I have known Andy Johnson for many years; he made a bad slip the other day, but you need not be scared; Andy ain't a drunkard."
On the afternoon of the 14th of April 1865, Lincoln and Johnson met for the first time since the inauguration. That night, Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth. The shooting was part of a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward the same night. Seward barely survived. Johnson's would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, got drunk instead of carrying out his assignment. Lincoln died at 7:22 the following morning, and Johnson was sworn in by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase between 10 and 11 am.
Johnson's approach to Reconstruction rested on three convictions: the seceded states had never truly left the Union and should be quickly restored; African-American suffrage was a distraction and historically a state matter; and he needed to build a coalition for his own election in 1868. He issued proclamations in May 1865 providing amnesty for former rebels who held property valued at less than $20,000, appointed provisional governors, and authorized elections, none of which included provisions on Black suffrage or freedmen's rights.
Southern states passed Black Codes that bound African-American laborers to annual contracts they could not quit and allowed law enforcement to arrest them for vagrancy. Congress refused to seat Southern legislators, among them Georgia Senator-designate Alexander Stephens, the former Confederate vice president. Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, leader of the Moderate Republicans, met with Johnson several times and was convinced the President would sign a bill extending the Freedmen's Bureau and the first Civil Rights Bill. Johnson rarely contradicted visitors, leaving them to think he agreed. In reality he opposed both bills as infringements on state sovereignty.
He vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau bill on the 18th of February 1866. On the 22nd of February, Washington's Birthday, he gave an impromptu speech in which he referred to himself over 200 times and named Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, accusing them of plotting his assassination. A Democratic ally estimated the speech cost the party 200,000 votes in the 1866 congressional elections.
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 on the 27th of March, objecting that it conferred citizenship on the freedmen at a time when 11 of 36 states were unrepresented in Congress. Within three weeks, Congress overrode it, the first time a major bill had been overridden in American history. Historian Eric Foner called this veto "the most disastrous miscalculation of his political career." Johnson also opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizenship to former slaves and guaranteed new federal civil rights. His home state of Tennessee ratified it despite his opposition, and Congress immediately seated its delegation, publicly embarrassing the President.
Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act over Johnson's veto on the 2nd of March 1867, requiring Senate approval before the President could fire Cabinet members. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was working from within the Cabinet to undermine Johnson's Southern policy alongside General Grant, refused to resign despite his public disagreements with the President. Johnson suspended Stanton in August 1867 with Congress in recess, installing Grant as temporary replacement. When Congress reconvened in January 1868, the Senate disapproved of the suspension and reinstated Stanton. Grant stepped aside over Johnson's objection, producing a complete break between the two men.
Johnson then dismissed Stanton and appointed Lorenzo Thomas. Stanton refused to leave his office. On the 24th of February 1868, the House impeached Johnson by a vote of 128 to 47, charging him with intentionally violating the Tenure of Office Act. The House subsequently adopted eleven articles of impeachment.
The Senate trial began on the 5th of March 1868 and lasted almost three months. House managers included Congressmen George S. Boutwell, Benjamin Butler, and Thaddeus Stevens. Johnson's counsel included William M. Evarts, Benjamin R. Curtis, and former Attorney General Stanbery, with Chief Justice Chase presiding. The defense argued that the Tenure of Office Act applied only to appointees of the current administration; since Lincoln had appointed Stanton, Johnson had not violated it. Johnson pledged to Iowa Senator James W. Grimes that he would not interfere with Congress's Reconstruction efforts, and promised to install the respected John Schofield as War Secretary. These assurances helped persuade enough Moderate senators. The final vote for conviction fell one short of the required two-thirds, and Johnson was acquitted.
He did not win the 1868 Democratic presidential nomination and left office in 1869. In 1875, Tennessee elected him to the United States Senate, making him the only former president ever to serve in that body. He died five months into his term, on the 31st of July 1875, the same man who had first arrived in Greeneville with nothing, and who had purchased the land where he camped to plant a tree.
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Common questions
Why was Andrew Johnson impeached?
Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives on the 24th of February 1868 by a vote of 128 to 47, primarily for violating the Tenure of Office Act by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without Senate approval. The House adopted eleven articles of impeachment, most alleging violation of that act and that Johnson had questioned the legitimacy of Congress. He was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.
What was Andrew Johnson's stance on Reconstruction after the Civil War?
Johnson favored rapid restoration of the seceded states to the Union without protections for formerly enslaved people and without federal requirements for Black suffrage, which he viewed as a state matter. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen's Bureau extension, opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, and issued amnesty proclamations that allowed many former Confederates to return to power. Congress repeatedly overrode his vetoes and enacted its own Radical Reconstruction program.
How did Andrew Johnson become president?
Andrew Johnson became the 17th president of the United States following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on the 14th of April 1865. Johnson had been elected vice president on the National Union Party ticket in 1864 and was sworn in as president by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase on the morning of the 15th of April 1865, the day Lincoln died.
What was Andrew Johnson's background before entering politics?
Andrew Johnson was born on the 29th of December 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into poverty, and never attended school. At age ten he was apprenticed to a tailor named James Selby. After running away from the apprenticeship, he settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he established a successful tailoring business. He taught himself through reading and debate, married Eliza McCardle in 1827, and entered politics through the Greeneville municipal election of 1829, eventually serving as alderman, mayor, state legislator, governor, and U.S. senator before the presidency.
Was Andrew Johnson the only former president to serve in the U.S. Senate?
Yes, Andrew Johnson is the only former president to serve in the United States Senate. Tennessee elected him to the Senate in 1875, several years after his presidency ended. He died on the 31st of July 1875, five months into his Senate term.
What was the Homestead Bill and what role did Andrew Johnson play in it?
The Homestead Bill proposed granting 160 acres to people willing to settle land and gain title to it. Johnson introduced it for the first time during his second term in the House of Representatives and championed it for years, driven in part by his own impoverished origins. He continued pushing for it in the Senate, where it was defeated 30-22 in 1859. The bill finally passed in 1862, after Johnson left the Senate to become Military Governor of Tennessee, and has been credited with opening the Western United States to settlement.
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