Andrew Johnson — 17th President of the United States
17th President of the United States, Democratic
Andrew Johnson
Term: Apr 15, 1865 – Mar 4, 1869
Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) became the seventeenth president on April 15, 1865, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; he had been elected vice president on the 1864 National Union ticket. His lenient Reconstruction policy, which largely restored Southern state governments without guarantees of rights for formerly enslaved people, brought him into direct conflict with the Radical Republican Congress. The House of Representatives impeached him in 1868 — the first presidential impeachment in U.S. history — and the Senate acquitted him by a single vote, allowing him to complete his term.
“The Union of the United States of America was intended by its authors to last as long as the States themselves shall last.”