Andrew Johnson: The Runaway Tailor Acquitted by a Single Senate Vote

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Andrew Johnson was born in North Carolina in 1808. His father, Jacob, died of a heart attack after rescuing drowning men when Andrew was three, and at ten his mother bound him as an apprentice to a tailor named James Selby. About five years later he and his brother ran away, with a $10 bounty posted for their return. He settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where his wife, Eliza McCardle, taught him writing and arithmetic in his tailor shop. He rose from alderman and mayor to the legislature, the U.S. House, the governorship and the Senate, championing a Homestead Bill for 160 acre grants, while owning at least ten enslaved people, including Dolly, Henry and Sam. In 1860 and 1861 he was the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat.

Lincoln named him military governor of Tennessee in 1862 and chose him as his 1864 running mate on the National Union ticket in place of Hannibal Hamlin. After his drunken inaugural speech in March 1865, he became president on April 14, 1865, when George Atzerodt, assigned to kill him at the Kirkwood House, lost his nerve. With Congress out until December, Johnson pardoned former Confederates while Southern legislatures passed Black Codes, then vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau extension and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Congress overrode him, and after he fired War Secretary Edwin Stanton despite the Tenure of Office Act, the House impeached him. The Senate acquitted him by one vote. In 1875 he returned to the Senate, the only former president to do so.

• He campaigned against secession in Tennessee with a loaded gun on his lectern before fleeing through the Cumberland Gap.
• Sam, whom he had enslaved, later became a Freedmen's Bureau commissioner and received land from Johnson in 1867.
• On his 1866 Swing Around the Circle tour he traded insults with hecklers and compared himself to Jesus.
• Stanton locked himself in his War Department office rather than leave.
• He was buried in Greeneville wrapped in a flag, his head resting on a copy of the Constitution.