"I was then, as I am now, for a white man's government, and for a free, intelligent, white constituency, instead of a Negro aristocracy," he said in a speech in Franklin in August 1863.
"Servitude or slavery grows out of the organic structure of man," he said in 1857. Andrew Jackson declared that states did not have the right of nullification and asked Congress for authority to collect the tariff by force if necessary.
He soon grew widely unpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.Even the White House's official website describes Johnson as "one of the most unfortunate of presidents.
Instead, his changing stance on whether slavery should be abolished was determined "by hardheaded, pragmatic judgment of the way it affected those beacons which guided his life — the Constitution, the Union, the common man, and the democratic process," wrote Paul Bergeron, a late history professor at the University of Tennessee who edited thousands of pages of Johnson's correspondence for the Andrew Johnson Papers Project.But who was Andrew Johnson, anyway? "Johnson seemed to want the U.S. to return to the way it was before the war, with Black people technically free from slavery but still relegated to the underclass in society. "Johnson modeled himself after another Tennessee politician: Andrew Jackson. Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he now clashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders.
And what did he believe?Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" — the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should be above the highest Black man, said Astor, the Maryville College professor. "They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race. "If you break the power of these large planters, you will allow ordinary white men to have land in the west, a chance to compete for better wages. If in this recoil slavery must go, I say, let it go! "By the middle of 1863, Johnson had come out in favor of emancipation as a way to end the war and keep the Union intact. He had very little tact. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolina before moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor, owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.With Congress not in session, Johnson began reconstructing the former Confederate states by himself.
"I want my reputation to go down clear," the former president said in 1869.