Perth Amboy evening news., 1920-05-11
Fiue Minutes A Day
With Our Presidents
The Only President Who Never Went
40 GAr.nn
By JAMES MORGAN.

to School
Never has there been a change IN
the White House % untimely and
unwelcome as when, In the flash OF
Booths pistol. the Presidency passed
from Abraham Lincoln TO Andrew
johnson. That sudden shift in pilots
was dreaded by all the people. South
land North, except for a radical faction
in Lincoln's own party, which con-
fdently hoped to see his noble watch
/ words of Malice Toward None and
Charity for AL replaced by the
slogan that the Vice-President had
been sounding, Treason Must Be
Made Odious."
Although a Southerner, Johnson
had always been at odds with tho
| slave-holding ~aristocracy, which
! frowned on the rise of a penniless
youth who had been bound out at
ten to a tailor and who had been
advertised at seventeen as q runaway
l"bound boy"
A fugitive from his native State of
North Carolina, he crossed over the
mountains to Greenville, in Eastern
! Tennessee. and there he nailed above
the door of a two-room house the
sign upon which the weather beats
to his day:
A. JOHNSON TAILOR
| No other private occupation did
he ever have. From the table on
which he sat cross-legged as he work.
ed at his trade, he stepped directly
into Congress, n he remains the
| only President who could describe
himself as a hand-craftsman. His con-
tinued most Of his life to make his
own clothes and when he was Gov
ernor of Tennessee he complimented
the Governor of Kentucky by maxi
ing a suit for him.
T,I.D-11f. +oiIar ehnn NO r1En his
only schoolroom. He never was in
any other, even for a day. But he
was not his own teacher. That post
was filled by Eliza McCardle. who
had CHANGED to see the North Carolina
boy walking into town and had gig
gled to her companions. as so many
giggling girls have done: There
goes my beaul" In less than a year,
though the bride was only yet nine-
teen. they were married and keeping
house In the two-room tailor shop.
Johnson already could read a little
and could painfully form the letters OF
the alphabet. But his wife became
his first teacher, reading to him while
he piled his needle or guiding his
hand while he practiced writing. Her
eager pupil was most apt in oratory,
and soon his shop became the forum
of a debating society, where other
ambitious workers Joined the tailor
in wordy combats.
Before he was of age, this village
DemostheneS was elected an Alder
man on q workingman's ticket, ana
two years more he was Mayor. Then
for eight years he was in the Leg
islature; for ten years a Representa-
tive in Congress, for two terms Gov
ernor of Tennessee, and finally he was
eletced to the Senate. His worthiest
monument as a legislator is the
Homestead law, which opened the
great National domain to the landless
poor, q measure hat he introduced
and that he perseveringly championed
against a lobby of land-grabbers.
No one ever questioned Andrew
Johnson's honesty and more than his
courage as he rudely forced his way
up the ladder. rung by rung, in hard
hitting, rough-and-tumble contests.
He neither gave nor asked quarter.
1t was q poor school in manners,
taste and temper. His triumphs oyer
those who boosted their descent made
him boastful of his own ascent, and
this self-made man never forgot his
maker.
The bold self-reliance of Johnson
became heroic in the eyes of the Ma
tion when he alone among the twenty
two Southern Senator's breasted the
wave of secession which ~engulfed his
section and which swept out of the
Union ever the State from which he
held his credentials. He not only
fought secession in the Senate, but he
challenged 1t on its own ground, in
Tennessee where he faced a cloud
of deadly threats. Pulling u his
pistol at n place. he pointed 1t at
his muttering audience and detiantly
shouted: If any man has any shooting
to do, let him begin now" Nc n
.~Venturing to second that motion to a
hip pocket, Johnson laid his weapon
on the table and opened a vocal bonn
bardment of the foe.
by Lincoln's appointment, he was
mad military governor of Tennessee,
where his stout, fiery SOU became a
very fortress for the Union in the
midst of the enemy's country: 1t was
from that outpost that he WIS call
ed to the Vice Presidency, and in a
month more he was President.
Exiled from his home and family
as he a been, his house seized by
the C~onfederacy as the property of
"an alien enemy" the long struggle
had been indeed a civil war to An
drew Johnson, and 1t left him in n
most uncivil mood toward the Con-
federate leaders. Yet through It all
he had remained as stubbornly a
Southerner and a Democrat as he was
a Union man. 1t was as a war Dem
ocrat and a Southern Unionist that
he was nominated OF the ticket with
Lincoln in 1864, when the partisan
designation OF Republican was laid
aside for the broader name of the
National Union party. What his course
would be now that he had taken the
wheel was the riddle of one of the
most anxious and pregnant hours in
I A N prtRnY1 hfGfnVx~