Johnson, Andrew

Johnson, Andrew (1808–1875), seventeenth president of the United States.Born in extreme poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, Johnson in 1826 moved to Greenville Tennessee, where he operated a tailor shop. Lacking formal education, he was taught to read and write by his wife, Eliza McCardle, whom he married in 1827, when she was sixteen. Johnson held a series of public offices, culminating in his election as governor in 1853 and U.S. senator in 1857. Throughout his career he stressed his plebian origins and claimed a special identification with ordinary people. Although he vigorously defended the South and slavery in Congress, he supported the Union in 1861 and was the only southern senator to refuse to resign when his state seceded. After Union troops occupied central Tennessee in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln named Johnson military governor. In 1864, he was elected Lincoln's vice president on the National Union (Republican) party ticket.

Becoming president on 15 April 1865, following Lincoln's assassination, Johnson announced a program for reconstructing the postwar South. He built upon Lincoln's wartime policy of appointing provisional governors in the seceding states, offering amnesty to Confederates who professed future loyalty to the Union, and requiring constitutional conventions to reinstitute southern state governments. Johnson's plan required the new state governments to renounce slavery and secession, but by limiting the vote to adult white men, he assured the dominance of lawmakers unsympathetic to the rights of the freepeople. The reestablished governments passed legislation that denied black southerners' political rights and circumscribed their civil rights by enacting “black codes” to replace the prewar slave codes.

The Republican‐dominated Congress refused to recognize the southern state governments restored under Johnson's authority and in June 1866 responded to their racially discriminatory legislation by proposing the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship and guaranteed fundamental rights and equal protection to all. When all the Johnson‐created governments but that of Tennessee rejected this amendment, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and supplementary legislation. These laws placed the recalcitrant states under military rule until they established new governments recognizing equal civil and political rights for all adult men regardless of race.

Supported by the Democratic party and a few renegade Republicans, Johnson bitterly assailed Congress' civil‐rights and Reconstruction legislation, denying the constitutionality of these measures and using his influence and authority as president to obstruct their enforcement. His course threatened a dangerous confrontation over whether to count southern votes in the 1868 election. An initial House of Representatives effort to impeach Johnson, motivated in part by a desire to forestall the potential crisis, failed in December 1867. However, a second attempt succeeded in February 1868 after Johnson removed Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869) in apparent violation of the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which permitted removal of government officials only upon Senate confirmation of their successors.

The impeachment trial before the Senate revealed significant weaknesses in the House's case. Despite the overwhelming Republican majority in the Senate, the House managers of the impeachment narrowly failed in two key Senate votes (16 and 28 May 1868) to secure the two‐thirds majority needed to convict. However, Johnson stopped obstructing the congressional Reconstruction program and served out the balance of his term without incident.

Despite opposition from former secessionists, in March 1875 a coalition of Tennessee Republicans and dissident Democrats again elected Johnson to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death that July.
See also Confederate States of America; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate.

Bibliography

Michael Les Benedict , The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson, 1973.
Hans L. Trefousse , Andrew Johnson: A Biography, 1989.

Michael Les Benedict