Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 – July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States from 1865 to 1869. He was the 16th vice president of the United States from March to April 1865. He became president after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He was the first president to be impeached, but he was not removed from office.

The impeachment happened because he had fired the Secretary of War from his presidential cabinet after Congress had made that illegal. The law was criticized, as it is usually up to the president to appoint and to fire his secretaries. However, Congress hated him because he did not want to help the former slaves. That makes Johnson widely regarded as one of the worst presidents in American history.

Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808 in a house with one room. His family was very poor, and unlike every other U.S. president, he never went to school. He was apprenticed as a tailor and held by someone named Selby, a tailor, as an indentured servant, which was similar to a slave. The contract stated that Johnson had to work for Selby until he was 21, but Johnson did not like the work and ran away with his brother. The tailor put out wanted posters, but Johnson never returned.^[2]

In the end, he started a business of his own in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he met and married Eliza McCardle. She was very ill because of tuberculosis, a sickness of the lung, but Johnson loved her very much. She helped him learn to read properly and study, which assisted him when he entered politics.

He became mayor of Greeneville in 1834, aged 25. In 1843, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1853, he became Governor of Tennessee, the most powerful position in the state. After serving two terms, he was instead elected for the U.S. Senate (the Tennessee General Assembly, not the people, then elected both positions) and returned to Washington, D.C. Johnson was very wealthy and owned several slaves himself. The country was at a breaking point, partly because of slavery.

When Tennessee and ten other slave states declared that they were no longer part of the United States, he was the only senator from them not to leave his seat. Instead, he went to the North and helped it in the war, which was called a "Union Democrat." Despite being a Democrat, he was elected as President Abraham Lincoln's vice president on a "National Union" ticket in 1864, which thought the war should be ended by the South being welcomed back into the Union.

Lincoln chose Johnson partly because he had been loyal but also because Lincoln thought that it was to have a Democrat on the election ticket to show that the Union was not a matter for only the Republican Party. Johnson freed his slaves in 1863, shortly before the law made slavery illegal. In 1865, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment just before the war ended; when enough states had ratified it after the war for it to go into effect, it banned slavery in all of the United States.

He became president in 1865 after Lincoln was assassination. The Republicans, who controlled Congress after the assassination, wanted stricter terms than Johnson supported for the Reconstruction of the South that had rebelled. Congress was also more friendlier to African Americans who had recently been slaves, and many Republicans wanted them to vote and be given land. Johnson, who was a Democrat, thought it would hurt white people in the South and was strongly opposed to those policies. As a result, he vetoed 29 bills passed by Congress and is the president who had the most vetoes overridden, which happened 15 times. That can happen if Congress passes the law a second time with a two-thirds majority, with at least twice as members supporting the law as opposing it. If that happens, the veto fails, and the law passes anyway, which is very unusual.

He was also the first President to be impeached in 1868, but he was later acquitted in the Senate. When a president is removed by Congress, the House of Representatives must vote to impeach him, and the Senate then to convict by a two-thirds majority. Although the Republicans had mor that many senators, the conviction failed by one vote.^[3] Several Republicans thought it was not their job to replace the president and that the charges against Johnson were made up. Also, moderates did not want Senator Banjamin Wade, a Radical Republican, in power; one of those who voted for impeachment, he would have become the next president.^[4] Another would pass 130 years before another president, Bill Clinton, was impeached in 1998.

The U.S. bought Alaska from the Russiam Empire for $7.2 million, at 2 cents per acre, while Johnson was president, but it was Secretary of State William Seward who arranged the buy. Though some people thought that it was a waste of money to buy so much cold land, it is now considered a very wise move, and the natural resources in Alaska today are worth many billions.

After his term ran out, Johnson left Washington, D.C. In 1875, he returned after he was again elected senator for Tennessee, but he died the same year. He remains the only president of the U.S. to have served as a senator after being president. One former president, John Quincy Adams, served in the House of Representatives after his presidency.

• Andrew Johnson's White House biography Archived 2009-01-17 at the Wayback Machine