LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Andrew Johnson: North Carolina
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To a Southern Unionist the plan seemed excellent, but it revealed Johnson's ignorance of the sentiments of most Northerners. Johnson's program left the decision of how to cope with emancipation completely in the hands of white Southerners. Northerners justifiably feared that freedmen's basic rights of citizenship would not be recognized, and considered it unsafe to restore the Union until that discrimination was ended. Therefore the Republican majorities in Congress refused to agree that the Southern states were ready to assume their rights and did not seat the Southern congressional representatives. This strained Johnson's relations with his party and convinced him that the entire federal system, with its strict limits on national power, was in danger. When Congress passed laws to protect the rights of the ex-slaves in 1866, he vetoed them as unconstitutional and broke with the Republican Party completely rather than endorse a new amendment to the Constitution granting blacks the rights of citizenship.
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Johnson’s parents, Jacob and Mary McDonough Johnson, were very poor people. Johnson’s father worked as a porter and sexton in Raleigh, North Carolina. Andrew, the younger of their two sons, was born in a small log house in Raleigh on December 29, 1808.
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Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty. He was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy, but ran away. He opened a tailor shop in Greeneville, Tennessee, married Eliza McCardle, and participated in debates at the local academy.
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The Democratic party, proclaiming itself the party of white men, north and south, aligned with Johnson. However the Republicans in Congress overrode his veto (the Senate by the vote of 33:15, the House by 182:41) and the Civil Rights bill became law.
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