Andrew Johnson for Billy Kennedy and The Ulster-Scot
By Fred Brown 
He was known as the "Old Commoner," a sobriquet he relished, indeed bragged about. He was, he often said, a man of the people. He also became the 17th U.S. President.
Born in the humblest of surroundings, some say in a barn or horse stall, he was fatherless at age three and then had to run away from his hard days as an apprenticed tailor to find himself, and the career that would eventually lead him all the way from the Tennessee frontier to the nation's White House.
Andrew Johnson, named for his grandfather from Mounthill outside Larne (who had emigrated to America about 1750), was practically illiterate until he married Eliza McCardle, whose father John was a Scots cobbler. Eliza, described as a handsome woman, taught her husband to read and to write, a prized value and ability Johnson held dear until the day he died.
Johnson, with Eliza's help, rose from the ranks of oblivion to the highest office in the land, living the American dream.
Johnson was born on a cold winter night in Peter Casso's Inn in Raleigh, N.C., five days after Christmas in 1808. Mary McDonough Johnson gave birth to her third child, a boy, and when someone asked his name, she promptly replied, "Andrew Jackson Johnson."
Later, Mary eliminated Jackson from her son's middle name, not wanting to burden him with being named for the nation's seventh president. He would have a hard enough time as it was, just staying alive.
Mary, known as "Polly," was a maid in Casso's Inn, a two-story log cabin on Carrabus Street. Andrew, born near the inn's stables, was special to Polly. She just knew he was destined for greatness. She felt the stirrings before her son's birth.
Polly was married to Jacob Johnson, a good, hard-working man. But he was a "mudsill," from a class of people who were too poor to earn an education, too poor to have a profession, too poor to own anything much more than the clothes on their backs. Jacob was a maintenance man, and later a porter for the large State Bank in Raleigh, then only a rough settlement of brambles, briars, bushes and great oak trees. It was called a place of "magnificent distances" in that time.
Jacob died when Andrew was about 3, leaving the family penniless. Polly had little choice but to place her youngest child in indentured servitude. His brother William had already been "bound" over in similar fashion.
At age 10, Andrew was working long, difficult hours for the cruel James Shelby, a tailor. He was fed little more than scraps of food. Some time later, William joined Andrew at Shelby's and the two brothers decided that life had to be better somewhere other than under the hard hand of James Shelby.
They escaped to Carthage, Va., only 75 miles away and began their own tailor shop. It failed almost immediately. Andrew, 16 and William, 20 began again in Laurens, S.C., where they lasted for a year. Returning to Raleigh, they discovered Shelby had posted a reward for the "runaways."
In 1826 at age 18, Andrew Johnson decided to head West. He crossed the rugged mountains into Greeneville, Tenn., ventured to nearby Knoxville where he caught a flatboat to Decatur, Ala. He landed a job in a Mooresville, Ala., tailor shop and acquired a valuable skill-how to cut out and make the fashionable frock coat.
A little more than a year later, Andrew discovered through friends that Polly was destitute. He returned to Raleigh and almost immediately Andrew gathered up his mother, his stepfather, Turner Dougherty, a drinking man with all hope pushed out of him, and the family's property. With all of them in a two-wheeled wagon pulled by a blind pony, Andrew once again crossed the high and craggy mountains into Tennessee.
While searching for fodder for the pony, he encountered a crowd of young women near Greeneville. Eliza McCardle, petite, pretty, a shoemaker's daughter, spied the handsome Andrew. "There goes the man I'm going to marry," she told her friends.
Johnson remained in Greeneville a short while before moving on to Rutledge, a small village with only 150 people. Here he found work, opened a tailor shop, but there was something missing in his lifeŅEliza McCardle, who had been born Oct. 4, 1810.
In the spring of 1827, Andrew returned to Greeneville and asked Eliza to marry him. On May 17, 1827, the 19-year-old Andrew Johnson married the 16-year-old Eliza McCardle. They were married by Mordecai Lincoln, first cousin to Thomas Lincoln, father of Abraham, a man Andrew Johnson would later serve with honor, loyalty and dignity.
Eliza knew her young husband was rough around the edges but possessed a keen mind, a strong will and unyielding Scots-Irish trait of self-determination. She helped him with reading and worked to smooth his manners.
The A. Johnson Tailor Shop on Main Street in Greeneville, where he made coats for $3.50, pants for $1.50, $3.50 for vests and $10 for a suit, flourished.
Soon, townspeople began to view the enterprising and smart tailor for something else-politics.
In 1829, Andrew Johnson was elected a Greeneville alderman, taking the first step of a political career that brought him from the stable door to the Tennessee governor's house and finally to the White House.
Johnson was hardened in the real world of life and politics, especially in Tennessee where politics was a contact sport.
Johnson was a defiantly self-reliant man, serious to a fault almost, persevering and intensely patriotic. He began his political calling in the manner of his birth-in obscurity.
But, before he was through, he had made it from Greeneville city hall as an alderman, mayor, to the state assembly, the U.S. House of Representative, back to Nashville as Military Governor of Tennessee during the Civil War, then to Washington as Vice President and then becoming the 17th President after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.
Johnson was also something of an anomaly in those times: he was a Democrat, believed in states rights, owned slaves, but was fiercely loyal to the Union and insisted that it not be broken apart. He thus, attracted bold and powerful enemies on both sides of the aisles in Congress, known as Radical Republicans, as well as across the nation.
Dr. Paul Bergeron, retired University of Tennessee historian and former editor of the Johnson Papers at the university, says Johnson never documented or said anything about the freeing of his own slaves.
"He did this orally, apparently. He did make some kind of public acknowledgement in August of '63, that he no longer favored slavery. There was some sort of exchange between Lincoln and Johnson commending him for freeing his slaves.
"And of course there was his famous speech in 1864, called the 'Moses Speech,' since he talks of leading the freed slaves to the promised land."
Johnson, says Bergeron, was typical of the white southerner of the period. "He was very racist. But at the same time, there was a complicated layer about Johnson. He was antagonistic toward slave owners, which was basically a class antagonism. He considered the southern aristocrat really bad, leading the nation into war.
"And even though he was a slave owner, Andrew Johnson never plowed an acre of land. He had slaves as domestics (servants). But it is slavery nonetheless. And remember, he is in Greeneville, not West Tennessee where the slave economy thrives."
By the time 1866 rolls around and Johnson is in the White House, he has become less sympathetic to the North's notion of punishing the South.
"He is for the 13th Amendment (to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude), but he thinks the war has really settled the issue. He thinks slavery is a bad institution and it is cut and dried: get rid of it," Bergeron says. "But at the same time, he thinks all this should be left up to the states. He is for states rights.
"The 13th Amendment was ratified in his first term, but then he turns right around and says the states should chart their own courses."
In the South, he was viewed as "a homemade Yankee, white trash, traitor." In the East, he was a "turncoat."
With the Civil War winding down, radicals in Congress, loud from the outset, found an even louder voice in radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania.
On the day after taking the oath as president (May 28, 1865), President Johnson, like the good tailor he was, began pushing for Reconstruction, to heal the wounds, to bind the nation together again, to repair the torn parts of the country.
Stevens and that ilk were having no part of Johnson or the Johnson brand of Reconstruction. They wanted revenge and oppression of the breakaway Confederate states. The Stevens-led radicals pushed through bill after bill that ate away at the South's recovery, even over Johnson's veto. It was a political position that bankrupted the already-devastated South, causing economic havoc well into the 20th Century and beyond.
Then on Feb. 24, 1868, with Stevens ranting and railing and roiling the votes, the House of Representatives voted approval of a resolution for impeachment. The next day, the U.S. Senate followed in a unanimous ballot, ushering in an evil wind across the landscape of U.S. politics.
Dark and powerful forces were set upon the man from Tennessee, who faced down his challengers with the same courage he had exhibited that had impressed President Lincoln. Andrew Johnson, the "Old Commoner," was fearless and even though wounded and cornered, he matched his attackers blow for blow.
But Stevens was doing battle with a man who, if nothing else, was as stubborn as a Tennessee mule, and twice as ornery.
The Johnson presidency was saved by one vote. When the former president and tailor returned home to Greeneville as a private citizen after his presidency had ended, the people of Tennessee eventually sent him back to the U.S. Senate, thankful for his loyalty and grateful for his experience. He was the first man to serve as vice president, president and return to the Senate as a U.S. Senator.
Johnson ran for the seat in November 1869 but was beaten. When he ran again in 1874, he was elected, and on the day he reappeared in the Senate briefly, March 1875, he was greeted by a standing ovation of his former peers.
Johnson died July 31, 1875, after suffering a stroke. He had been in Washington less than five months as a Tennessee Senator when he suffered a stroke at the home of his sister. He was only 67 years old.
At his request, he was wrapped in the American flag, and his personal copy of the U.S. Constitution was placed beneath his head in his casket.
Andrew Johnson, in the end, was a common man who led an uncommon life and left an incomparable legacy upon the American fabric.
 Eliza (McCardle) Johnson
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