49 Fun Facts About Andrew Johnson

Which party did Andrew Johnson, the Republican Lincoln's running mate, belong to?

Democratic: Johnson was the country's most prominent War Democrat, and Lincoln wanted him on the 1864 ballot to win voters beyond his own party.

In which city was Andrew Johnson born?

Raleigh, North Carolina, is where his father, a porter, died after going to the rescue of drowning men when Andrew was three, leaving the family in poverty.

To which trade was Johnson apprenticed as a boy?

Tailor: bound to a master's shop as a boy, he never spent a day in school, and it was there that he first learned to read as well as to sew.

What did the teenage Johnson's master do when he fled his apprenticeship?

Posted a reward: the notice went up in 1824, and Johnson spent about two years on the run before coming back and failing to make peace with his old master.

Johnson settled and opened his shop in which Tennessee town?

Greeneville is where he arrived with his mother and stepfather in September 1826; within three years the newcomer was an alderman, and by 1834 he was the town's mayor.

Johnson's wife Eliza taught him which skills?

Mathematics and writing were what Eliza tutored him in after they married; the newlywed who could barely read grew into one of Tennessee's most noted orators.

Which reform did Andrew Johnson propose as a congressman, decades before it became law?

Direct election of senators was one of the amendments he pressed in the House, along with electing presidents by popular vote; all were defeated, and state legislatures kept choosing senators until 1913.

Which relative usually served as Johnson's White House hostess?

His daughter Martha Patterson ran the house while Eliza, whom he had married when he was 18 and she 16, kept to her room with tuberculosis.

What did Andrew Johnson persuade Lincoln to do for Tennessee in the Emancipation Proclamation?

Leave the state out of it: Johnson, a slaveholder himself, feared that freedom by federal order would drive off Tennessee's slaveholding Unionists, so the 1863 proclamation skipped the state.

Tennessee's August 8 Emancipation Day marks what Johnson did in 1863?

He freed his slaves on August 8, 1863, by family tradition; one of the people he freed is credited with starting the yearly celebration in East Tennessee.

Which measure to grant 160 acres to settlers did Johnson champion for years in Congress?

Homestead Bill: he first introduced it in 1846 and got it through the House in 1852, but it became law only in 1862, once the Southern legislators who had blocked it were gone.

Which state did Congress admit to the Union in 1867 over Andrew Johnson's veto?

Nebraska is the only state ever admitted by overriding a veto; Johnson objected because Congress had made equal voting rights for Black men a condition of statehood.

As governor, Johnson won a tax increase from Tennessee's legislature to fund what?

Public school system: he criticized the state's common schools and asked for taxes to support them; the mix of state and county levies that passed was a rare win in an office with little power.

How did Andrew Johnson celebrate his 60th birthday at the White House in December 1868?

A children's party: he invited some 300 youngsters to the White House, a rare happy scene in the last weeks of a presidency that had barely survived impeachment that spring.

Johnson was the only senator from a seceding state to do what?

Keep his Senate seat: when Tennessee seceded in June 1861 he fled the state, believing he would be killed if he stayed, and went back to Washington, where the Northern press hailed him as a patriot.

What did Johnson sometimes place on the lectern while campaigning against secession?

A gun lay before him as he spoke: he was threatened and assaulted for campaigning against secession, even though his own eastern end of Tennessee largely shared his loyalty.

In 1862 Lincoln appointed Johnson to which post?

Military Governor of Tennessee made him a brigadier general with sweeping powers, and he used them: he closed pro-Confederate newspapers and jailed officials and clergymen he judged disloyal.

Lincoln and Johnson ran in 1864 not as Republicans but under which party banner?

National Union Party was the name the Republicans campaigned under in 1864 to win voters from outside the party; two years later Johnson tried to revive the label for his own supporters.

Whom did Johnson replace as Lincoln's running mate in 1864?

Hannibal Hamlin of Maine wanted to stay on, but Lincoln preferred a Southern Unionist from outside his own party, and the convention dropped its sitting vice president.

What did an ailing Johnson take just before his rambling 1865 inaugural speech as vice president?

Whiskey: ill and shaky, he drank it to steady himself and then rambled through his speech; the scene fed rumors of drunkenness that he never lived down.

Which boardinghouse keeper did Johnson allow to hang in 1865 for her part in the plot against Lincoln?

Mary Surratt went to the gallows with three men that July; days before his own death Johnson reportedly called her execution 'a crime of passion without justice or reason'.

Why was Johnson unharmed on the night Lincoln was shot?

His assigned assassin got drunk: George Atzerodt took the room above Johnson's at the Kirkwood House, then lost his nerve in the bar downstairs; he was hanged that July.

Who swore Johnson in as president on April 15, 1865?

Salmon P. Chase, the chief justice, gave him the oath a few hours after Lincoln died; three years later the same man presided over the new president's impeachment trial.

Who left a calling card for Johnson at the Kirkwood House on the day Lincoln was shot?

John Wilkes Booth left the card hours before he shot Lincoln, asking 'Are you at home?'; historians still argue over what he wanted with the vice president.

How did Johnson handle wealthy ex-Confederates' pardon requests?

Granted thousands: his 1865 amnesty shut out rebels with property over $20,000, but he signed their pardons almost routinely, putting much of the old planter class back in power.

Which laws did Southern states pass in 1865 and 1866 to bind freedmen to farms and arrest them for vagrancy?

Black Codes forced freedpeople into yearly labor contracts they could not quit and let the jobless be arrested as vagrants; Northern anger at them helped turn Congress against Johnson's lenient plan.

In a furious 1866 Washington's Birthday speech, Johnson denounced which Pennsylvania congressman by name?

Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the House Radicals, was singled out along with Senator Charles Sumner; two years later the ailing Stevens led the drive to impeach the president who had named him.

Which 1866 veto by Johnson was the first on a major bill ever overridden by Congress?

Civil Rights Act: it made the freedmen citizens, and his veto convinced moderate Republicans they could not work with him; within three weeks both houses had passed it again.

Which constitutional amendment, granting citizenship to former slaves, did Johnson oppose?

Fourteenth: he urged the Southern states to reject it, but his own Tennessee ratified it in 1866 and became the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union.

What was the nickname of Johnson's disastrous 1866 speaking tour?

Swing Around the Circle took him through the North in 1866 to rally voters against Congress; he traded insults with hecklers instead, and Republicans won two-thirds of both houses.

Which 1867 law restricted President Johnson's power to fire Cabinet members?

Tenure of Office Act: passed over his veto, it made him get the Senate's consent before removing officials it had confirmed; defying it became the main charge at his impeachment.

Johnson's attempt to dismiss which Secretary of War triggered his impeachment?

Edwin Stanton refused to go and barricaded himself in his office; three days later the House voted 126 to 47 to impeach the president.

Which offense did one impeachment article charge against Johnson?

Inflammatory speeches: the tenth of the eleven articles cited his 'intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues' against Congress on an 1866 speaking tour.

By how many votes did Johnson escape conviction at his impeachment trial?

One vote short: 35 senators voted guilty and 19 not guilty, and when two more articles produced the identical count ten days later, his opponents gave up.

Which Kansas senator defied his party to vote 'not guilty' at Johnson's trial, later earning a chapter in Profiles in Courage?

Edmund G. Ross was expected to convict until the roll was called; the vote cost him his seat, though President Cleveland later made him governor of New Mexico Territory.

Who would have become president had Johnson been removed from office?

Benjamin Wade, the Senate's president pro tempore, was next in line because there was no vice president; some senators so disliked the Radical Ohioan that they hesitated to convict.

Which general agreed to serve as interim War Secretary in 1867 when Johnson suspended the incumbent?

Ulysses S. Grant took the post while still commanding the Army, then handed it back when the Senate objected; the two men were enemies from then on.

Which territory did Secretary of State Seward buy for $7.2 million during Johnson's term?

Alaska cost about two cents an acre, and some critics mocked the frozen bargain as 'Seward's Folly'; he also tried and failed to buy the Danish Virgin Islands.

Which uninhabited Pacific atoll did the U.S. Navy claim in 1867, during Johnson's presidency?

Midway Atoll was formally taken by a Navy ship's captain in August 1867; its mid-Pacific position made it the scene of a turning-point battle in 1942.

In 1866 Johnson held a White House reception for the visiting Queen Emma; which kingdom was hers?

Hawaii was her kingdom; the widowed queen had gone to England for her health and to raise money for the Anglican mission at home, and she called on the president on her way back.

What became of Johnson's only Supreme Court nomination?

Seat abolished: an 1866 law shrank the Court as justices left it, so Henry Stanbery's name was never acted on and Johnson left office without appointing a single justice.

On Christmas Day 1868, Johnson issued a final amnesty covering whom?

Everyone, including Jefferson Davis: his last amnesty was unconditional, and within weeks prosecutors dropped the treason case against the former Confederate president.

Whom did Johnson pardon for involvement in Lincoln's assassination in his final months?

Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had set the fleeing assassin's broken leg, escaped the gallows by a single vote of the military court and spent nearly four years in an island fort off Florida.

What did Johnson refuse to do on March 4, 1869, the day Grant took office?

Attend the inauguration: Grant would not share a carriage with him, so Johnson stayed at the White House signing last-minute bills and left only as his term ran out.

Johnson is the only former president to later serve in which body?

The U.S. Senate took him back in 1875, six years after he left the White House; he called it his vindication, sat through one short session, and died that summer.

The plot that killed Lincoln also targeted Johnson and which Cabinet member, who was badly wounded that night?

William Seward, the secretary of state, survived the attack; Johnson kept him on, and Seward ran foreign policy for the whole of the new presidency.

What was placed under Johnson's head when he was buried, according to his wishes?

A copy of the U.S. Constitution went under his head and an American flag around his body: he had justified veto after veto as a strict reading of that document.

Where did Andrew Johnson take the presidential oath on the morning Lincoln died?

In his hotel: he was sworn in at the Kirkwood House a few hours after Lincoln's death, then held his first Cabinet meeting at the Treasury and asked every member to stay on.

Which former New York governor won the 1868 presidential nomination Johnson had hoped for, then lost to Grant?

Horatio Seymour was chairing the convention when it turned to him; Johnson had run second to George Pendleton on the first ballot and then faded.