Andrew Johnson: From White Slave To President

Andrew Johnson undoubtable remains the poorest man ever to rise to the American presidency, even to this day. He continues to be the only president ever to have been forced to labor, the only one who experienced a degree of bondage. The fact that he became anything more than an illiterate wage laborer is a testament to his dogged determination, incredibly disciplined work ethic, and a whole lot of luck. His grandfather William Johnson, Jr., was poor enough to have been “Sold out at a Sheriff’s sale” for his labor in Raleigh, North Carolina. Due to this fact, William subsequently was unable to provide for his family financially, leaving the future president’s father, Jacob, landless and illiterate. Jacob found occasional employment working odd jobs, serving as a miller, a porter at a bank, and the city’s bell ringer. Jacob married Mary (Polly) McDonough, a seamstress, laundress, and weaver, and together they may have eventually made their way into the lower middling classes after a lifetime of hard work and long hours. But Jacob tragically died after saving three other men whose boat had capsized, leaving Mary destitute and widowed with two young sons. Andrew was only three.

Often referred to as “swarthy complexioned” to raise questions over his racial purity, Andrew never received a day of schooling throughout his life. Like the states of the Deep South, North Carolina had no system of public education, and his mother was far too poor to pay for his education. By the time Andrew turned fourteen, his impoverished mother no longer had the means to house, feed, and clothe her two sons. Bound out as apprentices to a local tailor named James Selby, Andrew and his brother William were repeatedly abused and treated cruelly—in addition to working twelve-hour days, six days a week. As Johnson’s biographer Hans Trefousse wrote, “North Carolina law placed apprentices in a position little better than slaves…while serving their term they were entirely at their master’s beck-and-call.” After a particularly humiliating punishment, the boys ran away, staying on the move throughout the Carolinas to evade capture. Their master, Selby, had taken out an advertisement in southern newspapers for their apprehension and return. The ad for the Johnson’s capture was uncannily similar to runaway slave ads. Given these types of experiences, it was unsurprising that during his lowest moments, Johnson himself became a vicious, acerbic, intemperate drunk. No matter how hard Johnson worked, and clearly, no matter what he accomplished, there would always be painful memories of a poor white boy who had been ripped from his home, forced to labor for a master, and beaten as if he were enslaved. Try as he might, he would never fully escape the indignities of his past—his own short-term version of white bondage. 

Johnson’s master, however, was not the only white Southerner to whip Johnson. As a young boy, Johnson lived near a wealthy slaveholder named John Devereaux, described by Trefousse as an aristocrat whose “contempt” for the poor white family “was scarcely hidden.” Apparently, Devereaux “habitually” whipped impoverished whites, and members of the Johnson family were not spared the rod. Once, as a young Andrew and his cousins ran along the path separating Devereaux’s land from that of his son, the slaveholder send his coachman “to whip the boys back to their shanty.” During another instance, John Devereaux himself gave Johnson a whipping, allegedly because Andrew attempted to steal some fruit from one of his daughter’s trees. Regardless of the reasons for the lashings, the truth remained. As an impressionable young child, Andrew Johnson had been punished multiple times like a slave—by a slaveholder and a master. There were seemingly few privileges associated with Andrew Johnson’s whiteness.

-excerpted from “Masterless Men” by Keri Leigh Merritt (2017)