Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson, born December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and died July 31, 1875, served as the seventeenth President of the United States from 1865 to 1869, succeeding to office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Southern Democrat who had remained loyal to the Union, he clashed repeatedly with the Republican-controlled Congress over the terms of Reconstruction, vetoing civil rights legislation intended to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. In 1868 the House of Representatives impeached him, principally over his attempt to remove his Secretary of War in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, making him the first American president to be impeached; the Senate acquitted him by a single vote.