by Jerry Curtis

Created on: May 28, 2009   Last Updated: January 10, 2011

Andrew Johnson's main legacy was struggle and controversy. He was a southern Democrat. He supported slavery, but did not support the Confederacy. He was only Southern senator who kept his seat after the southern states seceded, and Abraham Lincoln appointed him military governor of the rebel state of Tennessee. In his bid for a second term, Lincoln decided to run as a not as a Republican, but in the interests of national unity on a new Union Party ticket. Lincoln chose Johnson as his running mate. He was the first president to be impeached.

Andrew Johnson was in over his head as our second highest elected figure. He lacked tact, political skill, and had absolutely nothing in common with the snooty, well-educated Republicans who surrounded Lincoln. The imperious Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War could not abide Johnson, and their mutual animosity would one day lead to Johnson's impeachment.

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808 of a poor family, Johnson was apprenticed as a tailor at the age of 10. He moved to Tennessee in 1826 and one year later he married Eliza McCardle, who gave her illiterate husband the only education he had had up to that time by teaching him to read and write.

Johnson enjoyed success in his Tennessee public life. He held a seat in the Tennessee state legislature and senator, eventually serving ten years as a U.S. congressman. Later as governor of Tennessee from 1853 to 1857, his legislature voted him into the U.S. Senate. In 1865, having just moved into his hotel suite reserved for the Vice President, Johnson probably resigned himself to the obscurity of American vice presidents, his vice presidency being more so in that he was not in the same political party of the President.

Everything changed when after only weeks into his second term Lincoln was assassinated by southern sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth. With the Civil War over and the South in ruins, Johnson inherited the unresolved mess of reconstruction. It was Lincoln's wish that the south be gently ushered back to full participation in the national government. Johnson, however, took a rather more direct measure. On May 29,1865, while Congress was out of session, Johnson issued a proclamation of amnesty, welcoming the seceded southern states back to the union, no strings attached.

Johnson's amnesty proclamation outraged Radical Republicans in Lincoln's cabinet, the Senate and the House. The Republicans had other plans for their continued domination of Congress and their

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