On this day in 1875, former President Andrew Johnson, the man
who had become president upon the tragic assassination of
Abraham Lincoln in 1865, dies of a stroke while visiting his
daughter in Tennessee. Johnson's career took him from mayor of
Greeneville (1834) to the Tennessee legislature (1835) and then
to the U.S. House of Representatives (1843). He went home to
serve as Tennessee's governor from 1853 to 1857, but then
returned to Washington as a U.S. senator in late 1857. In 1864,
he accepted Abraham Lincoln's offer to run with him as vice
president for Lincoln's second term. Lincoln was shot on the
night of April 14, 1865, and died the next day, making Johnson
the 17th president of the United States. In addition to
inheriting the presidency in a dramatic way, Johnson's
presidency itself was marked by spectacle. In February 1868, the
House of Representatives charged him with 11 articles of
impeachment for vaguely described "high crimes and
misdemeanors." (For comparison, in 1998, President Bill Clinton
w