History is usually written by the winners, but Andrew Johnson is a rare case where almost everyone agrees he lost. Even today, if you ask a room full of historians who the absolute worst president in American history was, Johnson’s name is going to come up within the first ten seconds. It’s almost a guarantee.
But why? Most people know he was the first president to be impeached, but the details of his life and his actual "fame" are way messier than a simple trivia answer. He wasn’t just a guy who got in trouble with Congress; he was a tailor who couldn't read until his teens, a Southern loyalist who stayed with the Union when everyone else bailed, and a man who arguably ruined the best chance America ever had for true racial healing after the Civil War.
What was Andrew Johnson famous for during the Reconstruction era?
If you had to boil it down to one thing, what was Andrew Johnson famous for was his disastrous handle on Reconstruction.
Imagine the scene: The Civil War is over. Lincoln is dead. The country is a bleeding, broken mess, and suddenly this guy from Tennessee—who was only on the ticket to balance things out—is in the Oval Office. Johnson didn't want to punish the South. In fact, he was kind of obsessed with getting things back to "normal" as fast as possible.
The problem was that his version of normal didn't include rights for the 4 million formerly enslaved people.
He was famous for his "soft" Reconstruction. He basically told the Southern states, "Hey, just say you're sorry, swear an oath, and you’re back in the club." This led to the rise of Black Codes—vicious local laws that basically reinvented slavery under a different name. While the Radical Republicans in Congress wanted to build a new, fair South, Johnson was busy handing out pardons to Confederate leaders like they were candy.
Honestly, it was a train wreck.
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The Impeachment that nearly changed everything
You can't talk about Johnson without talking about the big "I" word. He was the first president to ever face an impeachment trial. It wasn't over a sex scandal or a shady land deal; it was a pure, raw power struggle over the Tenure of Office Act.
Basically, Congress passed a law saying the president couldn't fire his own cabinet members without permission. They did this specifically to protect Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, who was the only guy in the cabinet who actually liked the Radical Republicans' plan for the South.
Johnson, being famously stubborn, fired him anyway.
The House impeached him instantly. The trial in the Senate was high drama—the kind of stuff people would be live-tweeting today. In the end, he survived by literally one single vote. One guy, Edmund G. Ross, supposedly changed his mind at the last minute, saving Johnson’s job but essentially ending his own political career. Johnson stayed in power, but he was a "lame duck" for the rest of his term, mostly just sitting in the White House while Congress overrode almost every single one of his vetoes.
The unexpected "Seward's Folly" and Alaska
Here’s a weird twist: for a guy who is mostly famous for being a failure, he oversaw one of the biggest real estate wins in history.
In 1867, his Secretary of State, William Seward, bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. At the time, people thought it was a joke. They called it "Seward’s Folly" or "Andrew Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden." They thought he’d bought a giant, useless ice box.
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Fast forward a century, and we realize that the gold, oil, and strategic position of Alaska made that $7.2 million (about two cents an acre) the steal of the millennium. Johnson himself didn't do much of the heavy lifting here—Seward was the brains—but it happened on his watch, and it remains one of the few "positive" things people remember about his four years in office.
From a tailor shop to the White House
Johnson's "rags to riches" story is actually pretty insane. He never went to school. Not for a single day.
He was apprenticed to a tailor in North Carolina, ran away as a "wanted" fugitive, and eventually opened his own shop in Greeneville, Tennessee. His wife, Eliza McCardle, was the one who actually taught him how to do math and improve his writing while he sat there stitching coats.
He was a "populist" before the word was cool. He hated the "planter aristocracy"—the rich guys who owned the big plantations—and he styled himself as the champion of the "common man" (as long as that man was white). This is why he was so loyal to the Union; he didn't necessarily love the North, but he absolutely despised the Southern elites who started the war.
Why his legacy still sparks such anger
If you look at modern rankings, Johnson is almost always at the bottom.
Historians like Eric Foner have pointed out that Johnson’s racism wasn't just "of its time"—it was extreme even for the 1860s. He actively fought against the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. He tried to veto the Civil Rights Act of 1866. He basically gave the green light for the Ku Klux Klan to form and thrive by refusing to use federal power to protect Black citizens in the South.
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He was a man of deep contradictions:
- The only Southern senator to stay loyal to the Union.
- A man who hated "aristocrats" but protected Confederate generals.
- A president who was nearly removed from office but later got elected back to the Senate (the only former president to do so).
He died just a few months after getting back into the Senate in 1875. He was buried with a copy of the Constitution under his head and an American flag wrapped around his body. It’s a bit ironic, considering how much he and Congress fought over what that Constitution actually meant.
What to do with this history
If you're looking to understand why American politics is so polarized today, looking back at 1865 is a good place to start. Andrew Johnson represents the "what if" of history. What if Lincoln hadn't been killed? What if a more competent person had been in charge during Reconstruction?
To see this history in person, you can visit the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site in Greeneville, Tennessee. You can see his original tailor shop and the home where he lived. Reading the transcripts of his "Swing Around the Circle" speaking tour is also a wild ride—it shows a president losing his cool and yelling back at hecklers in the crowd, which feels surprisingly modern.
Understanding Johnson isn't about memorizing a name for a test; it’s about seeing how one person’s stubbornness and prejudice can derail an entire nation’s progress for generations. Check out some of the primary sources from the 1868 impeachment trial to see just how close the U.S. came to a total constitutional collapse.