Greeneville: The Tailor Who Became President

Andrew Johnson arrived in Greeneville in eighteen twenty-six with almost nothing. He was seventeen years old, had grown up in poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had never spent a single day inside a schoolroom. What he had was a trade: tailoring. He set up a small shop here, and within a year he had married Eliza McCardle, who helped teach him arithmetic and improved his reading.

In a back room of that tailor shop, Johnson educated himself by hiring men to read aloud to him while he stitched, history, oratory, the Constitution of the United States. He memorized long passages of the founding documents. That self-schooling turned into political ambition. He was elected alderman, then mayor of Greeneville, then to the Tennessee state legislature, then to the United States House of Representatives. He served as Governor of Tennessee and as a United States Senator before the Civil War found him.

Johnson was the only Southern senator to refuse to follow his state out of the Union when Tennessee seceded in eighteen sixty-one. That act of defiance made him a symbol for Abraham Lincoln, who placed him on the National Union ticket as Vice President in eighteen sixty-four. Six weeks after their inauguration, Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre, and Andrew Johnson became the seventeenth President of the United States.

His presidency was defined by the collision between his conservative approach to Reconstruction and a Radical Republican Congress determined to reshape the South. In eighteen sixty-eight the House of Representatives voted to impeach him for violating the Tenure of Office Act, the first presidential impeachment in American history. He survived the Senate trial by a single vote.

Greeneville held on to him. After his presidency he returned here, and in eighteen seventy-four the Tennessee legislature sent him back to the United States Senate, the only former president ever to serve in that chamber. He died the following year. His tailor shop, his two homes, and his grave are all preserved here as part of the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site.