Andrew Johnson

• Vice President to:       Abraham Lincoln
  
  
• Dates Served: Johnson served as Vice President from March - April of 1865, then as President till 1869.
  
• Political Party: Johnson was a Democrat, from Tennessee.
  
• Born: 1808.
  
• Died: 1875, at the age of 67.
  
• The presidential opponent during the 1864 campaign was:
  
  
  • General George McClellan - Democrat - Lincoln-appointed Civil War General from New Jersey
    
    
• Campaign issues in 1864:
  
  
  • The very un-Civil War Between the States had been dragging on for 3 years now and the main issue was obvious, peace. The Democrats ran as their candidate Lincoln's own General, McClellan, whom Lincoln had fired due to being too timid on the battlefield. They chose as their platform a criticism of the war as a failure and called for an immediate armistice. But McClellan refused to call the war a failure, saying he was unable to look his fellow soldiers in the eye and tell them that their efforts and sacrifices were a waste. He went against his own Party's platform and argued simply that he would preserve the Union at all costs. Lincoln ran on an obvious platform, "Don't swap horses in mid-stream". Lincoln won by a large margin. He would be dead within 5 months.
    
    
  
  
• Notable Facts about Andrew Johnson:
  
  
  • Andrew Johnson never attended a single day of school. When he was a teenager he taught himself to read.
    
    
  • Religious affiliation: Johnson was not particularly religious and wasn't a member of any specific church. He occassionally attended churches that practiced certain traits he considered conducive to Democratic principles, such as Baptist churches who practiced local church autonomy, and Catholic churches who let the pews be occupied by whoever showed up first, not selling special pews to wealthy patrons, a practice that particularly irked Johnson. His passion was political principles and revealed little of his religious beliefs.
    
    
  • Johnson married at age 18. His wife was 16.
    
    
  • Johnson was a tailor and made most of his own clothes.
    
    
  • He began his political career as Mayor of Greenville, Tennessee, serving from 1830 - 1833.
    
    
  • He served in the Tennessee House of Representatives from 1835 - 1837, and again from 1839 - 1841, then as a State Senator from 1841 - 1843.
    
    
  • He represented Tennessee in the US House of Representatives from 1843 - 1853, then then as Governor of Tennessee from 1853 - 1857, then as a US Senator from 1857 - 1862.
    
    
  • During his term in the Senate, he was the only Southern Senator to oppose the Secession and defend the Union. He lambasted both Secessionists and Abolitionists alike as enemies of the Union, he criticized his own party's president, Buchanan, for not taking more severe actions against the Southern Rebels, and when his own state seceded he became the only Southern Senator to denounce the Confederacy and remain in the Union-controlled Senate. He defended Lincoln and opposed any compromises as long as the Confederacy existed. He was considered a low-life traitor in Tennessee and was hung in effigy there, while at the same time being viewed as a brave hero by the North.
    
    
  • In 1862, President Lincoln appointed Johnson "Military Governor" of Tennessee, in which capacity he tried to rid the state of Confederate influence. He fired Confederate officials, closed down anti-North newspapers, arrested Church ministers who preached pro-Confederate sermons, and seized the railroads which he used to build an extension to the North to supply Northern troops fighting in the South. In exchange, Lincoln agreed to exclude Tennessee from the Emmancipation Proclamation, the only Rebel state not ordered to free its slaves. (Both he and Lincoln still felt that freeing all slaves was not a top priority).
    
    
  • During his term as Military Governor, Johnson stayed in Nashville several times during heavy Confederate attacks, and threatened to shoot anyone who surrendered.
    
    
  • Because of his support for Lincoln, and his willingness to remain in the Senate even while his own state had seceded, Lincoln picked him as his new Vice President in the 1864 elections, in an attempt to appease the South. This was the only time a sitting president deliberately chose a running mate from the opposing party. It didn't help though - his constituents still viewed him as lower than scum for agreeing to Lincoln's offer.
    
    
  • On inauguration day, Johnson was recovering from typhoid fever and decided to fortify himself with a few shots of whiskey prior to being sworn in. He then gave a rambling, incoherent speech that convinced many in the audience that he was drunk, which he probably was.
    
    
  • Johnson once described the capitol by saying, "Washington DC is 12 square miles bordered by reality".
    
    
  • The plot to assassinate Lincoln also included plans to kill Johnson, but the would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve at the last minute and never tried.
    
    
  • Later in 1875, after his term as President, he was elected to the Senate, again representing Tennessee (they had changed their minds regarding his earlier scum status). He thus became the only Senator to serve in the White House, then serve as a Senator again. He died in office only a few months after being elected to the Senate. He only gave one speech during his term. He died of a stroke and, at his request, his body was wrapped in the American flag, with his head resting on a copy of the Constitution. (He never professed faith in any religion, just the "civil religion" of politics)
    

Notable events during his Vice Presidency:

• Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the North on April 9th of 1865, without Jefferson Davis' permission, thereby ending "The War Between the States".
  
  
• Lincoln was assassinated five days later by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theater, and Johnson ascended to the presidency.
  
  Amazing fact for the day: When Lincoln was shot he was watching the play "Our American Cousin". When Lincoln was nominated for President at the Republican Party Convention in Chicago back on May 18, 1860 this same play was being performed that night in Chicago, at the McVerick Theatre.
  
  

Notable events during his completion of Lincoln's Presidential term:

• Reconstruction. Johnson favored a "soft" treatment of the South following the end of the war, a policy that had been supported by Lincoln prior to his death, but Congress favored a harsh treatment. Johnson argued that since the, as the Republicans preached, the Constitution didn't allow for member states to secede from the Union then the Southern states had technically never left. Therefore Johnson made every effort to restore the Union to its pre-war state with the least amount of hassle for his fellow-Southerns. He even argued for the creation of a new Constitution, which specifically renounced Slavery, secession, and war debts. Then, he hoped, the South would have a change of heart regarding the freed slaves and everything would turn out OK in the end.
  
  The Republican Party, however, were worried that the Southern Democrats would quickly re-establish their pre-war power base and the same old conflicts would resurface. In addition, they pressed for punitive action against the Southern states for the massacres that the war had caused. They knew that they needed to maintain the support of former slaves and passed several Civil Rights bills, most of which Johnson vetoed, on the basis that they would just aggravate the white Southerners. He used his veto pen 29 times, and Congress managed to over-ride his vetoes 15 times. Johnson was the most out-vetoed President ever, a dubious honor.
  
  
• The creation of the Ku Klux Klan, in 1866. The northern government officials who travelled south to oversee their harsh brand of Reconstruction were derisively called "Carpetbaggers" by white Southerners, and any Southerners who cooperated with them were "Scalawags". In 1866 the Ku Klux Klan was formed in Tennessee, Johnson's home state, dedicating themselves to often violent opposition to the new political and social order. Their name referred to their logo, a circle called the "Kuklux", and the new organization was joined by a wide variety of people. Their race-based rhetoric survives into the 21st century.
  
  
• The first traffic light is invented, in 1868. Two gas lamps were installed outside of Britain's Houses of Parliament, one lamp being green and the other red. They were used to keep the growing number of horse-drawn carriages in London from colliding. Unfortunately, the gas in one of the lamps exploded one day after several years of use, killing a passing police officer.
  
  
• The 13th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, in 1865, outlawing Slavery.
  
  
• The US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867.
  
  
• Nebraska was admitted into the Union in 1867.
  
  
• The 14th Amendment was ratified, in 1868, which guarantees every citizen due process of law, and forbids any state from withholding the vote from any adult males, or else have its federal representation reduced proportionately.
  
  
• Prior to Bill Clinton, Johnson was the only president to be impeached, in 1868, as a result of Congress' opposition to his "soft" treatment of the South after the Civil War, and his firing of the Secretary of War. Johnson survived his Impeachment trial by a one-vote margin in the Senate, 10 months before the end of this term in office.