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Portrait of Andrew Johnson

US Presidents · 19th century

Andrew Johnson

1808–1875 · American

Democratic (elected Vice-President on the National Union ticket)

In office: 1865–1869

Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who stayed loyal to the Union, became the 17th president when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865. His lenient Reconstruction policy towards the defeated South brought him into bitter conflict with the Radical Republicans in Congress, and in 1868 he became the first president to be impeached, avoiding conviction in the Senate by a single vote.

How to spot them

  • ▸Succeeded Lincoln in 1865; the first president to be impeached (1868)
  • ▸Acquitted by one vote after dismissing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act
  • ▸The purchase of Alaska from Russia ('Seward's Folly')
  • ▸A former tailor from Greeneville, Tennessee, who never attended school

In office

Impeachment over the Tenure of Office Act (1868)

Impeached by the House for removing Edwin Stanton; the Senate fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed to convict

The Alaska Purchase ('Seward's Folly') (1867)

Alaska bought from Russia for $7.2 million, negotiated by Secretary of State William Seward

Veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (1866)

Congress overrode the veto, making it law

The 'Swing Around the Circle' speaking tour (1866)

A disastrous campaign tour against the Radical Republicans before the midterm elections

Quick-fire facts

  • •The 17th President of the United States; Lincoln's second Vice-President
  • •Born in Raleigh, North Carolina; apprenticed as a tailor and never went to school
  • •The only senator from a seceding Southern state to keep his seat in the US Senate
  • •Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee in 1862
  • •Acquitted in May 1868 by 35 votes to 19, one short of the two-thirds needed; Senator Edmund Ross cast a key vote to acquit
  • •In 1875 he became the only former president elected to the US Senate, dying a few months later

Drill it — 5 cards

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Sources