Andrew Johnson was born in a log cabin in 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Despite being the state capitol, Raleigh was still a small town at the time. His parents were illiterate. His older sister died as a child. His father, Jacob Johnson, died soon after heroically saving three men who were in a capsized boat.

His mother, Mary (Polly) Johnson, was left to care for two boys by herself. She was a seamstress and laundress. Because Andrew had black hair and a darker complexion than his older brother William (who had freckles and light hair), there were rumors that Andrew’s biological father was a lawyer his mom did laundry for. Poor white women at the time did the same work as enslaved black women and were likewise at the mercy of the men in whose houses they worked, so the rumors are at least plausible.

Polly remarried, but Andrew’s stepfather was another poor man. Things were so bad financially that Polly had to sell her sons’ labor. William and Andrew both became tailor’s apprentices. Andrew was an apprentice to James Selby from the age of 10. He was legally bound to be his apprentice until the age of 21. He was basically an indentured servant.

Johnson never went to school a day in his life (making him the least educated man to have become president), but one of Selby’s employees taught Johnson the basics of reading. Citizens would come to the shop to read to the tailors. Johnson was captivated by a book of speeches titled The American Speaker and the reader gave him the book as a present. He kept it with him his entire life.

Andrew was a bit of a trouble-maker. He and other boys formed a gang called “Jesse Johnson’s boys”. When he was 15, a local woman threatened to sue him, his brother, and other boys for throwing objects at her house. The boys ran away from town. Selby, Johnson’s master, placed an advertisement in the newspaper offering a reward for the boys’ return and threatening prosecution against anyone harboring them.

Johnson never worked for Selby again. He and his brother escaped to South Carolina where he became a tailor in his own right, proving an 11-year apprenticeship was unnecessarily long. At 17, he began courting Mary Wood. He made her a quilt and proposed to her, but she declined. Her mother didn’t consider him prosperous enough. He left town soon after, returning to Raleigh. Selby had moved by this time, but no one in town would hire him because he was still legally bound to Selby. He tracked Selby down and offered to buy out his contract, but Selby wanted a lump sum which Johnson couldn’t afford. So he skipped town and headed to Tennessee.

Inns weren’t plentiful in those days, so Johnson had to rely on strangers letting him spend the night in their house along the way. The future president of UNC, David Swain, refused to let Johnson stay at his house, which was unusual in this era of necessary hospitality.

Johnson traveled around for a while before helping his mother and stepfather move to eastern Tennessee. They encountered mountain lions and bears along the journey through the Blue Ridge Mountains. They were so anxious, they settled in the first town they came to, which was Greeneville, Tennessee.

There, Andrew met Eliza McCardle and they married. He was 18 and she was 16. They were married by Mordecai Lincoln, President Lincoln’s cousin once removed. Not much is known of Eliza. She may have taught Andrew how to write. (Literacy came slowly for Johnson who wasn’t comfortable with writing until his late thirties, and even then, he preferred aides to write for him.) Andrew and Eliza didn’t live together much as husband and wife. She suffered from tuberculosis and stayed home while he often traveled. There were rumors of infidelity on his part, which he denied. They had five children together.

Johnson’s tailor business did so well, he was able to hire workers to help him. He enjoyed politics and joined a debating society, a popular form of entertainment at the time. He got elected to alderman, then mayor, then state legislature. His opponents didn’t know how to respond to his “bully boy” debating style full of invective and savage ridicule. He was said to be forceful without being eloquent.

He left his family behind and moved to Nashville to be in the state legislature. That’s where he bought his first slave, a 14-year-old girl named Dolly. He later bought her half-brother Sam as well. (Johnson owned at least ten slaves during his lifetime. He freed his slaves in 1863 and they remained with him as paid servants.) Dolly gave birth to three children over the years, who were described as mulattoes on the census. Since Dolly was listed as black, this implies her children had a white father. There were rumors Johnson had a “colored concubine”. Johnson was kind to Dolly’s children, holding them on his knee and giving them presents.

He got voted out of the state legislature after he opposed extending the railroad to eastern Tennessee. His constituents wanted the railroad, but he was against it because he thought it would put inns out of business. In reality, railroads improved business for inns.

He switched from being a Whig to a Democrat and got elected to the US House of Representatives. He occasionally broke from the Democrats regarding tariffs and he upset both sides by proposing that congress chaplains not be paid with public funds. (He wasn’t religious himself.)

When Mexico abolished slavery, white people living in Texas declared independence from Mexico, which ultimately led to the Mexican-American War. Although he hated Polk, Johnson supported Polk’s war against Mexico, which was largely fought to expand slavery into new territories.

While a representative, Johnson spoke in favor of the Homestead Act, which would give land to white people for very little money. Having once been poor himself, he knew the struggle of poor white people trying to make a living. However, he later opposed giving land to black people under similar circumstances, claiming a government giveaway would make them lazy.

His enemies redrew the boundary lines of his district to ensure he wouldn’t be reelected, so he next ran for governor. To the surprise of most, he won. This is because he made backroom deals with politicians to get their votes. The governorship of Tennessee was mostly a ceremonial post since the writers of the state constitution didn’t want a strong executive. However, the title alone brought him prestige.

Johnson then became a US senator. Many were aghast that a man from his low social background became a senator. The House was intended to be the place for common men, the thinking of the time went, while the Senate was supposed to be reserved for aristocratic people.

The Homestead Bill, passed while Johnson was in the House, still hadn’t passed the Senate. He wanted to get it passed, but his fellow Southerners were opposed. To get their support, Johnson spoke in overwhelming support of slavery and denounced the North, but Southerners were still suspicious of the Homestead Bill because Northerners supported it. Johnson made amendments to the bill which didn’t help it pass. Other supporters made amendments that finally got the bill passed. However, President Buchanan vetoed it.

When Lincoln was elected, Johnson’s support for the Homestead Bill alienated him from his fellow Southerners. He’d made enemies of Jefferson Davis and others. It was obvious he wouldn’t have a political future with the Confederacy. He was also sincerely in favor of the Union and thought South Carolina had committed treason when it seceded. Throughout the South, Johnson was hanged and burned in effigy and received many death threats.

He gave a powerful speech which convinced Tennessee to remain with the Union for the time being. However, after the attack on Fort Sumter began the Civil War, people in his home state considered him a traitor. He was nearly lynched at a stop in Lynchburg. Someone pulled his nose, which was a way for an upper-class white man to insult another. In a way, it was a compliment, since it indicated Johnson was now being viewed as a member of the upper class. Johnson warded off the attack by pulling out his pistol and threatening to shoot.

He continued making speeches throughout the state, even though mobs continued to threaten him. In the end, Tennessee seceded from the Union and he left the state behind. He was the only senator from a state which had seceded to remain in the Senate. For some reason, he left his wife and children behind enemy lines to be harassed by the Confederates. Perhaps he thought they’d be safer there.

On the way back to Washington, he was shot at as he traveled through the Cumberland Gap, but he continued making speeches in favor of the Union. Those in the eastern part of Tennessee mostly voted to stay with the Union and were harassed and sometimes killed by Confederates. Johnson urged Lincoln to send in troops. Johnson, who had once been opposed to a railroad in eastern Tennessee, now desperately wanted one as it would make getting troops there faster. He was frustrated by how slowly Lincoln’s generals acted.

After some military victories, central and western Tennessee once again became part of the Union, but Lincoln treated it as a territory. Due to its rebellion, it couldn’t just go back to being a regular state. Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson to be the military governor of his old state. Johnson demanded loyalty oaths and shut down Confederate newspapers. In eastern Tennessee, his family continued to be harassed by Confederates until Governor Harris, who was in charge of the area, finally let them go.

Johnson was in favor of slavery, but when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he realized slavery would have to end to preserve the Union. Johnson began to recruit black troops, although he wanted to limit them to doing manual labor.

To help bring about reconciliation with the South, Lincoln replaced his fiercely anti-slavery vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, with southerner Andrew Johnson. Johnson now spoke out against slavery. The main reason he was opposed to slavery was that it led to race mixing.

Johnson had no confidants. He didn’t want to talk things over with people or ask questions, as he considered that to be a sign of weakness. He avoided social events, appeared to have no sense of humor, and no one knows what he did for fun.

During a speech before a black audience, Johnson expressed his wish that a Moses would arise to lead them to freedom. Someone shouted Johnson could be their Moses and he said if no one better could be found, he would be their Moses. He promised every man, white and black, would have a fair chance in the race of life. Many people thought Johnson had lost his senses, but he didn’t really mean it. He wanted white men to rule.

On inauguration day, he got drunk before being sworn in as vice president and gave a long, rambling, embarrassing speech. Secretary Stanton appeared petrified. The attorney general sat with his eyes closed. The postmaster general “was red and white by turns”. Justice Samuel Nelson’s lower jaw dropped in sheer horror. Lincoln just looked terribly sad. When taking the oath of office, Johnson picked up the Bible and kissed it. Some said Johnson had disgraced the office of vice president and should resign, but Lincoln was convinced it was just a bad slip.

Weeks later, when a friend told Johnson that Lincoln had been shot, they fell into each other’s arms and cried. In addition to the assassination of Lincoln, Secretary of State Seward was nearly killed, and a third would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, was assigned to kill Johnson, but Atzerodt lost his nerve and got drunk instead.

On the day he assassinated Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth came to Johnson’s boarding house and left Johnson a note: “Don’t wish to disturb you. Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth”. This led to suspicions that Johnson may have been part of the conspiracy. (He wasn’t. Atzerodt was facing the death penalty for his part in the conspiracy and would have surely said he was never supposed to have killed Johnson in the first place if this was true.)

Four of the nine conspirators in Lincoln’s murder were sentenced to death, including a woman named Mary Surratt. Johnson ignored calls for leniency and she was hanged with the other conspirators. This came back to haunt him in 1872 when he tried to make a political comeback after his presidency. Executing a woman was controversial by itself, plus the evidence against Surratt was weak. The diary of John Wilkes Booth suggested she had never been an active member of the conspiracy.

Johnson asked Lincoln’s cabinet, many of whom had last seen him embarrassing himself at the inauguration, to remain. In deference to Mary Lincoln’s feelings, he allowed her to stay in the White House for weeks after her husband’s death.

In exchange for surrendering, General Sherman offered to keep the Confederates in charge of the government in North Carolina and also let them keep their slaves. Secretary of War Stanton was furious that a military man would intrude into politics like this. Johnson rescinded Sherman’s agreement. Johnson’s reputation for being tough on the southern rebels grew when he put a $100,000 bounty on the head of Jefferson Davis. As he incessantly spoke of punishing traitors, the South feared Johnson more than they feared Lincoln. The South was so devastated and demoralized after the war, they were ready to accept almost any of the North’s terms.

At first, Johnson expressed support for giving the vote to black men and many thought this should be a condition for reentry into the Union. However, in the summer of 1865 when Congress was out of session, Johnson issued proclamations bringing southern states back into the Union with no mention of black suffrage.

Johnson wasn’t interested in reconstruction so much as restoration. He wanted to pretend the Civil War hadn’t happened and get back to the way things used to be, except without slavery. Southerners were relieved. Congress asked Johnson to call a special session of Congress or at least wait until Congress was back in session before finalizing his plans, but he refused.

“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

He complied with the request from the governor of Mississippi to remove black troops as their very presence was an affront to white people. He was in favor of raising an all-white militia, despite the violence against blacks that would inevitably occur as a result.

He once told a delegation of black people that rich whites and slaves had conspired to oppress poor whites like himself. He felt poor whites were the real victims of slavery! Frederick Douglass told him blacks and poor whites were both oppressed by the planter class, but Johnson wasn’t having it. He believed with slavery gone, the playing field between rich whites and poor whites had now been leveled. During Reconstruction, his chief concern was to ensure “the people of the South, poor, quiet, unoffending, harmless,” would not be “trodden under foot to protect niggers.”

With black people now counting as a full person rather than three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, the South grew in power. But without votes for black people, there was no reason to take their interests into account. (In fact, black people in the South weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

Johnson’s supposed hatred of southern aristocracy was just talk compared to his overwhelming support for white supremacy. In 1862, Congress passed a loyalty oath which gave amnesty only to those who hadn’t voluntarily aided the rebellion. Johnson ignored this and pardoned the leadership of the rebellion. People were shocked he forgave the people he’d previously railed against so vehemently. Thousands of white and black soldiers died to remove these men from power and Johnson rushed to put them back in charge.

The Freedman’s Bureau Act passed in 1865. Johnson vetoed it, but was overridden. It called for breaking land into 40-acre plots for rental and eventual sale to freedmen. It was similar to the Homestead Act supported by Johnson, except it benefited black people instead of white people. Johnson moved quickly to block this. Without land of their own, black people would be forced to work for their former masters again.

Johnson’s actions would hamstring black efforts to gain independence for decades to come. Southern states instituted “black codes” which brought slavery back in all but name. Black people were required to have labor contracts, and if they left a job, they could be arrested by any white citizen. Hunting and fishing became crimes for black people to prevent them from being self sufficient.

Whites in both the North and the South were horrified at the violence visited upon the four million freed black people in southern states after the Civil War. Black people were killed for running away or disobeying their former masters. White men set fire to a black settlement near Pine Bluff, Arkansas and hung men, women, and children from trees. In one area in Texas, more than a thousand black people were murdered by whites. In South Carolina, a minister shot a black man who complained about another black man being asked to leave the church. One man was killed for not removing his hat.

Thousands of separate instances like this occurred all over the South while Johnson sat back and let it happen. He even resisted efforts to stop it. People warned him he was giving aid and comfort to the people he’d called traitors during the war, but he didn’t care.

His leniency towards the South came back to bite him, however. He thought they would appreciate the leniency enough to support him in other matters such as Confederate debt, but they treated his leniency as weakness and ignored him.

Johnson ignoring Congress’s plans for Reconstruction also came back to bite him. Congress refused to seat the newly elected southern representatives. Congress formed a committee on Reconstruction and insisted the president didn’t have the power to readmit states to the Union.

Most Republicans were moderates who wanted to work with Johnson, but his inability to compromise pushed them away. To Johnson, giving any rights to black people at all was not an option. “Everyone would and must admit that the white race is superior to the black.”

When Congress gave black people in the District of Columbia the right to vote, Johnson vetoed it, but they overrode his veto.

Johnson went on a speaking tour hoping to gain support for his positions, but his speeches often descended into crude exchanges with the many hecklers in the audience. It was a disastrous performance that left even his supporters aghast. At one point, he even compared himself to Jesus. At a speech given to celebrate Washington’s birthday, people thought he was drunk.

He vetoed the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. He fought the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizenship to former slaves. The Reconstruction Bill of 1867 said southern states could reenter the Union if they passed the Fourteenth Amendment and gave black men the vote. If not, they would be placed under military rule. Johnson vetoed the bill and was overridden, but he didn’t intend to abide by it.

Many in Congress wanted to impeach Johnson for failing to execute the law, but some believed he could only be impeached for explicitly breaking the law. In 1867, when Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act by removing Secretary of War Stanton from office, he gave them the reason they’d been waiting for. He became the first president to be impeached.

Johnson made backroom deals to remain in office, promising that he would stop obstructing Reconstruction and that he would appoint the moderate Republicans’ choice for his new secretary of war. It also helped that if he were impeached, the new president would be senator Benjamin F. Wade, a radical Republican in favor of giving not just black men but also women the vote. His belief in high tariffs and labor unions also made him unpopular among moderates. In the end, Johnson escaped conviction by one vote in the Senate.

Johnson became even more of a hero to the South and was so jubilant, he returned the love by issuing a universal proclamation of amnesty that included Jefferson Davis!

While Reconstruction was the main issue of Johnson’s presidency, other important events happened as well. In 1866, Napoleon III used French troops to install Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. The US considered this a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary of State Seward convinced the French to remove their troops and avoided war. Seward also purchased the territory of Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Johnson wanted to get reelected, but he didn’t get the nomination from either party. After leaving the presidency, Johnson was struck with tragedy when his son Robert committed suicide. (During his first year as president, his brother William died after accidentally shooting himself.)

Andrew Johnson ran for Senate in 1869 but lost. He ran for the House of Representatives in 1872 but lost again. He got cholera and almost died. He lost a lot of money during a bank failure in 1873. He finally got elected to the Senate again in 1875. As his last hurrah, he gave a speech denouncing President Grant for interfering in the state affairs of Louisiana. That summer, he died of a stroke while visiting his daughter’s farm. He was a Mason and the local Masonic temple played a role in his funeral proceedings.

Andrew Johnson is usually considered the worst president except for James Buchanan. Him allowing slavery to continue under a different name after a bloody and costly civil war fought to eradicate slavery is definitely one of the worst things a president has ever done, if not the worst. He fought against giving former slaves the vote and against making them citizens. He allowed thousands of murders to take place without doing anything to stop them. He set race relations in the United States back decades. The only good that came out of his presidency, convincing French troops to leave Mexico, was accomplished by his secretary of state. It’s hard to say whether Johnson was worse than Buchanan, but he’s certainly one of the worst presidents the United States has ever had.