Poverty and apprenticeship
Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, into a household with little money and almost no security. His father died when Johnson was young, and the family economy pushed him into apprenticeship rather than school. Bound to a tailor, he learned a skilled trade but not the manners or credentials expected of gentlemen in public life. He later taught himself to read more fully, with important help from Eliza McCardle, whom he married after moving to Greeneville, Tennessee. Johnson's biography became central to his politics. He saw himself as a self-made man and developed a fierce resentment of planter aristocrats, bankers, and anyone who treated poor white laborers as inferior. Yet that class anger did not become racial equality. From the beginning, his democratic imagination was narrow: intense on behalf of white working men, hostile to elites, and deeply limited in its sympathy for Black Americans.
