Andrew
Johnson was the 17th president of the United States, a
congressman, a senator, and the Union military governor of
Tennessee.
He was born on December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina,
to Mary McDonough Johnson and Jacob Johnson, a bank porter.
His father died when young Johnson was only three years old,
and his widowed mother worked as a spinner and weaver to support
her sons. Johnson worked as a tailor’s apprentice from the age
of 14, and then in 1827 opened his own tailor shop in
Greeneville, Tennessee, where his family had moved.
Inspired by the spirit of Jacksonian democracy, Johnson
helped found the Democratic Party in his region, and was elected
town councilman in 1829 and mayor in 1831. He was a strict
constructionist of the U.S. Constitution and an advocate of
states’ rights who distrusted the power of government at all
levels. He won election to the Tennessee state legislature in
1835, 1839, and 1841, before being elected to Congress in 1843.
As a member of the U.S. House, Johnson opposed federal
government involvement in the economy through tariffs and
internal improvements. He lost his congressional seat in 1852
because of gerrymandering by the Whig-dominated state
legislature. In 1853, he narrowly elected governor of Tennessee,
and reelected two years later. In 1857, Tennessee state
legislature, elected him to U.S. Senate.
While in the Senate, Johnson became an advocate of the
Homestead Bill, which was opposed by most Southern Democrats and
their slave owning, plantation constituents. This issue strained
the already tense relations between Johnson and wealthy planters
in western Tennessee. He further antagonized them when he
initially endorsed Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1860. After the national
party split into regional factions, Johnson backed the Southern
Democratic nominee, John Breckinridge, but by then the rupture
between Johnson and most Southern Democrats was too deep to
heal. The break became final when he allied himself with
pro-Union Whigs to fight the secessionist Democrats in his state
for several months after Lincoln’s election.
When the Civil War began, Johnson was the only senator from a
Confederate state who did not leave Congress to return to the
South. During the war, he joined Republicans and pro-war
Democrats in the National Union party. By 1862, Union military
forces had captured enough of Tennessee for Lincoln to name him
as the state’s military governor. In order to attract the
political support of War Democrats in 1864, Lincoln selected
Johnson as his vice-presidential running mate on the National
Union ticket. Johnson delivered his vice-presidential inaugural
address while inebriated, which lent credence to rumors that he
was an alcoholic.
Within six weeks of taking office as vice president, Johnson
succeeded to the presidency in April 1865 after Lincoln’s
assassination. The new president faced the difficult situation
of developing a policy for the postwar reconstruction of the
Union. Committed to limited government and a strict
constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, Johnson’s
Reconstruction plan would have allowed the former Confederate
states to return quickly to the Union. This would have left the
civil rights of the former slaves completely under the authority
of the former slave-owners who controlled the state governments.
Incensed at these policies, Radical Republicans in Congress
wrested control of Reconstruction from the president and began
passing their own program over Johnson’s vetoes. The
implementation of military districts and supervision across the
South in 1867 piqued the president to aid Southern resistance
and to attempt to thwart the process by firing Secretary of
State Edwin Stanton, who was cooperating with Radical
Republicans on Reconstruction. Stanton’s removal violated the
recently passed Tenure of Office Act and prompted the
Republican-controlled House to
impeach the president in February
1868. The removal trial in the Senate in May 1868 resulted in
his acquittal by one vote.
Johnson remained in office as the lamest of lame-duck
presidents, and unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s
presidential nomination in 1868. At the end of his term in March
1869, he returned to Tennessee where he began rebuilding his
political base of support. Over the next few years, he
unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for various
offices. Finally, in 1875, an alliance of Republicans and a
faction of the Democratic Party in the Tennessee legislature
elected him to the U.S. Senate. He served only five months
before he died on July 31, 1875, near Elizabethton, Tennessee. |