Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina in 1808 and grew up in poverty, apprenticed as a tailor before moving to Tennessee. He built a political career as a champion of poor white voters, serving as mayor, congressman, governor, senator, and military governor of Tennessee during the Civil War. Though a Democrat and slaveholder before the war, he remained loyal to the Union after Tennessee seceded. Abraham Lincoln chose him as his running mate in 1864 on the National Union ticket to symbolize wartime unity.

Johnson became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, inheriting the enormous task of Reconstruction. He offered rapid restoration to former Confederate states and issued broad pardons to many ex-Confederates. His plan allowed Southern governments to re-form with little protection for formerly enslaved people, and those governments enacted new laws governing labor and civil arrangements in the South.

Johnson and Congress held competing visions for Reconstruction. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but Congress overrode his veto and pursued its own Reconstruction program.

In 1868, Johnson became the first president impeached, following a dispute over the Tenure of Office Act. The Senate acquitted him by one vote. He left office in 1869. Johnson later returned briefly to the U.S. Senate in 1875, the only former president to do so, and died that same year.