Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson. From Poverty to Presidency. Walking from Decatur, Alabama to Columbia in the 1820s as a poor illiterate boy in his teens, Andrew Johnson came to Columbia to seek work as a tailor's apprentice. Not much is known about his time spent here. We know his home was on or near 207 West 6th Street and his tailor shop was located in this block. There is an entry in the Maury County Court minutes for 1826 where one Andrew Johnson submits his resignation as a constable to the court. Did the future president begin elected office in Columbia?, Johnson, who held Union sympathies, would become the military governor of Tennessee during the Civil War. This made him a most unpopular man in Maury County as well as much of the South., Andrew Johnson was the only President of the United States who never went to school a day in his life; he was the first vice-president to succeed to the nation's highest office through the assassination of the incumbent president, also the first to have impeachment proceedings brought against him; and the only former president to be elected to the United States Senate., In 1888 a New York reporter came through Columbia, filing a report that noted "a butcher shop of today was a tailor shop of yesterday where Andrew Johnson worked the goose and mopped his brow with his arm." He also noted that Columbia was "gloriously beautiful as a bride at the altar." Though the shop's location is lost to history, Johnson's impact on Columbia, Tennessee and the nation is felt even to this day. , Excerpts taken from Hither and Yon by Jill Garrett.