Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth President of the United States
(1865-69), was the first Vice President to take over the
presidency because of an assassination. He was also the first
President to be impeached by the Congress. In the Senate trial
he held onto the presidency by a margin of only a single vote.
He is the only President besides Bill Clinton to have been
impeached. On the positive side, Alaska was purchased during his
administration. Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North
Carolina on December 29, 1808. Like Lincoln, he came from a poor
family. His father died when he was three, and his mother, Mary
Johnson, worked as a seamstress to support him and his three
brothers. He taught himself to read and learned a trade as a
tailor's apprentice. In 1826 he moved to Tennessee where he
married Eliza McCardle, who taught him arithmetic and writing.
They had five children. One son served and was killed in the
Civil War. This self-educated tailor rose in Tennessee politics
to organize a workingman's party th