Andrew Johnson (1808 - 1875) was an American politician who served as the seventeenth president of the United States from 1865 to 1869, succeeding to the office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. [1] A self-educated tailor from Tennessee and the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union in 1861, he opposed the congressional programme of Reconstruction and resisted federal protection for newly freed African Americans. In 1868 he became the first American president to be impeached, and was acquitted in the Senate by one vote. [2]
Early life
Johnson was born on 29 December 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina, into severe poverty; his father died when he was three. [1] He never attended school and was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy, running away before his indenture ended. He settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, opened a tailor shop and learned to read and write with the help of his wife, Eliza McCardle.
He entered local politics as an advocate for working men and small farmers, serving as alderman and mayor of Greeneville, then in the Tennessee legislature, the United States House of Representatives, as governor of Tennessee from 1853 and in the United States Senate from 1857. [3] He was a slaveholder and a Jacksonian Democrat, hostile to the planter aristocracy but not to slavery itself.
Civil War
When Tennessee seceded in 1861, Johnson alone among senators from seceding states refused to leave his seat, denouncing secession as treason. The stand made him a hero in the North and an outcast in much of his home state. [1] In 1862 Lincoln appointed him military governor of occupied Tennessee, a post he held through guerrilla warfare and administrative chaos.
In 1864 Lincoln, running on the National Union ticket to broaden his appeal to war Democrats and loyal Southerners, dropped Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and chose Johnson as his running mate. He had been vice president for six weeks when Lincoln was shot on 14 April 1865; Johnson was sworn in the following morning.
Presidency and Reconstruction
Johnson moved quickly to restore the Southern states, issuing proclamations of amnesty and letting them organise new governments while Congress was out of session. Those governments passed Black Codes restricting the freedom, labour and movement of former slaves, and returned many former Confederate leaders to office. [3]
When Congress reconvened it refused to seat the Southern delegations and legislated its own terms. Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866; Congress overrode the civil rights veto, the first such override of a major bill. He campaigned against the Fourteenth Amendment and urged the Southern states to reject it. [2] Republicans won large majorities in the 1866 midterm elections and passed the Reconstruction Acts over his vetoes, placing the South under military supervision.
Impeachment
Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867 to restrict the president's power to remove officials confirmed by the Senate. When Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in defiance of the act, the House of Representatives impeached him on 24 February 1868, adopting eleven articles. [4]
The Senate trial ended in May 1868 one vote short of the two-thirds required for conviction, and Johnson completed his term. He failed to win the Democratic nomination that year, and Ulysses S. Grant succeeded him.
Later life and legacy
Johnson returned to Tennessee and in 1875 was elected to the United States Senate, the only former president to serve there. He took his seat in March and died of a stroke on 31 July 1875 in Carter County, Tennessee. [1]
Historians rank Johnson among the least successful American presidents, chiefly because his resistance to Reconstruction helped entrench white supremacist rule in the South and undermined the position of the four million people freed by the Civil War. [3]
