The First Ladies: Eliza Johnson
Eliza McCardle Johnson is yet another of the lesser known first ladies whose life story reveals many surprises. She must have been a patient woman, given that her husband first entered the national scene by turning up drunk at his inauguration as Abraham Lincoln's vice-president in 1865.
She was born Eliza McCardle on October 4, 1810 at Leesburg, Tennessee. Her father was John McCardle, who worked as both a cobbler and as an innkeeper in the town of Warrensburg. Her mother was Sarah Phillips, . She was the only child resulting from her parents’ marriage. There is no evidence that her mother’s second marriage produced any children either, leaving Eliza without siblings or half-siblings. She was a Methodist who attended the Rhea Academy, in Greeneville, Tennessee. Few details are known about Eliza Johnson’s education, but Eliza Johnson wrote and spoke well and consistently read books on a wide range of subjects. She read books and newspapers to her fiancé and husband Andrew Johnson.
Eliza McCardle Johnson was the first among a few of the first ladies born into poverty. She first met her future husband in 1826. At the time Eliza helped to supplement the family income by making cloth and leather sandals, as well as quilts. On May 17, 1827, she married Andrew Johnson, then a tailor, at Warrenton, Tennessee. Eliza McCardle first met Andrew Johnson when he came to the town of Greeneville, searching for work as a tailor, along with his mother and stepfather. Johnson was unable to immediately find work in Greeneville. He worked in nearby Rutledge, where he worked and maintained a courting correspondence with Eliza. He was able to find enough tailoring work to establish a business in a two-room house, using the front room for work and the back for living quarters. At 16 years old, Eliza Johnson was the youngest-married First Lady. The couple was married by minister Mordecai Lincoln, the first cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s father.
The Johnsons had five children, two daughters and three sons: Martha Johnson Patterson, Charles Johnson, Mary Johnson Stover, Robert Johnson and Andrew Johnson, Jr.
Eliza Johnson helped her husband improve the quality of his written and spoken communicative skills. Their daughter Martha Patterson wrote of her parents in 1881 that, “it is a mistake she taught my father the alphabet as this he had acquired before leaving Raleigh. But little has been written about my mother as she always opposed any publicity concerning her private life. She was the stepping stone to all the honors and fame my father attained.” Eliza Johnson herself said, “I taught him to form the letters, but he was an apt scholar, and acquired all the rest of it for himself.” Andrew Johnson frequently credited his wife in public for much of his education. After their marriage, she successfully persuaded him to register as a member of the Greeneville College Debating Society. The practical experience led to his becoming a spokesperson and leader of a workingman’s party he organized and his successful campaign and election as Alderman and Mayor of Greeneville.
Eliza Johnson also managed the family finances. By February, 1831 the couple were able to buy a larger home to accommodate their growing family. When Andrew Johnson moved from local to state political office, first as congressman for Greene and Washington Counties (1835-1837; 1839-1841) and then as senator (1841-1843), he resided in the state capital of Nashville during legislative sessions while Eliza remained in Greeneville with the children. She took an active role in deepening the education of both her sons and daughters beyond what they learned in school. She was assisted with her work at home by two African-American slaves identified as “Dolly” and her half-brother “Sam”. It is said however that Eliza Johnson was vehemently opposed to the ownership of human beings, this being contrary to her Methodist faith.
During the full ten years of her husband's time as a Congressman, there are no reports that Eliza Johnson ever journeyed with him to Washington, but their eldest child Martha was placed in a girl’s school there. During vacations and weekends, Martha Johnson frequently accepted the invitations of First Lady Sarah Polk to participate in White House social events as Congressman Johnson had been a consistent supporter of his fellow Tennessean Democrat, President James Polk.
In 1851, following his congressional career and return to Greeneville, the Johnsons purchased a large home in town. She contracted tuberculosis. and when Andrew Johnson was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1853, Eliza Johnson had to limit her physical movement and was unable to join him in Nashville. She was only 43 years old. At home, she also began to confront the alcoholism shown by her sons Charles (later a doctor, pharmacist and surgeon with the Union Army during the Civil War) and Robert (an attorney, who committed suicide eight weeks after his father’s presidency ended). She arranged and attended her daughter Martha’s wedding and often visited her other married daughter and new grandchildren in a nearby county.
When Andrew Johnson was elected to represent Tennessee in the United States Senate (1857-1862) he lived in Washington, D.C. again while that body was in session, while Eliza Johnson again chose to remain home in Greeneville. There she continued her financial management of their property and investments and the social welfare work she supported through her Methodist Church. She decided to come to Washington following the secession of the southern states, including Tennessee. She enjoyed some notoriety as the spouse of the only U.S. Senator from the South remaining loyal to the Union despite his state’s secession.
Despite being under Confederate Army authority, the people of eastern Tennessee, where the Johnsons lived, were largely loyal to the Union. Senator Johnson spoke vigorously against the Confederacy and sought Union protection of his region. Without warning, their Greeneville home was confiscated for use as sleeping quarters for Confederate Army troops. Eliza Johnson and her young son Frank and adult son Charles, had to seek shelter at the nearby Carter County home of her daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Daniel Stover, and three young children. The Stover home, however, was also located in the area controlled by the Confederate government. In April of 1862, Eliza Johnson, along with other prominent Union families in that jurisdiction were given short notice to vacate by Confederate General Kirby Smith. Eliza Johnson wrote to the general stating “in my present state of health, I know I can not undergo the fatigues of such a journey; my health is quite feeble, a greater portion of the time being unable to leave my bed.” Five months later, she wrote him again, this time declaring herself able to travel and requesting the necessary permits for movement within the Confederate-held regions and to cross into Union territory when necessary.
For several nights, she and her daughter Mary Stover prepared and smuggled food into nearby mountain caves where her son-in-law and his fellow Union military sought shelter and eluded detection by Confederates. In late September, she was detained for two days in Murfreesboro by Confederate General, Nathan B. Forrest. She and her family later found shelter in an abandoned restaurant. She and her family later proceeded by train to Nashville, during which the family was harassed and her sons threatened with death by fellow passengers who were Confederate sympathizers. She and her family were given safe refuge in Nashville, arriving there on October 13, 1862. She and her family left Nashville for Cincinnati in November of 1862. The party proceeded to Louisville, Kentucky, but Eliza Johnson’s breathing problems became worse and she decided to return to Nashville in May of 1863, rather than unite with her husband in Washington, where the weather would further deteriorate her condition.
When President Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as Military Governor of Tennessee (1862-1865), Johnson made several dramatic references in public speeches to the treatment of his wife by the Confederate Army. Andrew and Eliza Johnson had a brief reunion in Nashville when she arrived there with her family in May of 1863 before he was forced to go to Kentucky’s Union territory for his safety.
In April of 1863 their son Charles was killed after being thrown from a horse. He had been appointed a Union Army surgeon with the rank of Colonel at age 33 and his mother took his unexpected death very hard.
In early June 1864, Andrew Johnson was nominated as the National Union Party’s vice presidential candidate, on the ticket with President Lincoln who was seeking re-election. Eliza Johnson played no role in his campaign, because of her role in handling a family crisis. Robert Johnson’s alcoholism had so worsened that he was forced to resign as a Union Colonel. In August of 1864, Eliza Johnson brought him to the Lewis Sanitarium in Lexington, Massachusetts for recovery treatment, and simultaneous treatment for her tuberculosis and the first signs of it in her younger son Frank. Another tragedy soon hit the family when Mary Stover was widowed by the sudden death of her husband in December of 1864.
Eliza Johnson remained in Nashville, rather than attend the Washington, D.C. swearing-in ceremony of Andrew Johnson as Vice President in March 1865. A month later, Lincoln had been killed and Eliza Johnson arrived at the White House on August 6, 1865, with an entourage including her two sons, her two daughters, her remaining son-in-law and five grandchildren. Eliza Johnson restricted her role as first lady to that of hostess at formal dinners and the visits of heads of state. Her daughters Martha Patterson and Mary Stover assisted at public receptions. Her limited role was due to lingering personal sadness over the death of her son Charles. Her first public ceremony, in February of 1866, involved a unique presentation to serve as a reminder of her husband’s escape from the widespread conspiracy around Lincoln’s death. Produced by the Historical Society of Wisconsin, it was an extravagantly leather-bound volume of testimony from eyewitnesses and participants who helped secure Johnson’s safety, written out in calligraphy penmanship.
One contemporary report, disputed by subsequent historians, was contained in the publication "Ladies of the White House" (1881) which drew on an 1869 Chicago Republican newspaper account which stated: “Mrs. Johnson, a confirmed invalid, has never appeared in society in Washington. Her very existence is a myth to almost every one. She was last seen at a party given to her grandchildren. She was seated in one of the Republican Court chairs, a dainty affair of satin and ebony. She did not rise when the children or old guests were presented to her; she simply said, ‘My dears, I am an invalid,’ and her sad, pale face and sunken eyes fully proved the expression.” This account is contradicted by contemporary correspondence and may be motivated by radical Republicans' dislike of President Johnson. They may also be explained by the state of her tuberculosis which at times required her to remain seated at events while at other times she made lengthy rail excursions throughout the eastern United States. In 1867, for example, she traveled along the eastern seaboard, stopping in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and also going west and south from Washington to Pittsburgh and Louisville.
Her condition gradually worsened, and she became sedentary and lived a more confined life towards the Administration’s end. The bacillus causing tuberculosis was not discovered until after her death, but less than a year before the Administration ended, Eliza Johnson was still presiding as First Lady at formal White House dinners. She appeared outdoors to watch her grandchildren join the Easter Egg Roll festivities (which had informally begun during the Lincoln Administration), but stayed on the White House South Portico and thus remained inaccessible to the general public.
In 1867, the First Lady agreed to participate in a fundraising effort seeking to create a large orphanage for thousands of southern children left without parents as a result of the Civil War. Eliza Johnson donated some personal items to be publicly auctioned in the fundraising effort. The orphanage was to be located in Charleston, South Carolina with the intention of it becoming the largest in the South.
To what degree President Johnson shared with her the details of his conflicts on Reconstruction policy with the Republican leaders in Congress and the subsequent 1868 trial for his impeachment and removal from office is unclear. However, Eliza Johnson kept herself fully apprized of the proceedings, making a close daily reading of political stories related to her husband from a variety of newspapers which she then clipped with a scissor and preserved in scrapbooks. Throughout the ordeal, she claimed to always believe he would be acquitted and she was overcome with emotional relief when she received confirmation of this prediction.
Eliza Johnson felt relieved to get back to her home in Greeneville. Initially her spirits were lifted when her widowed daughter Mary remarried. Just one week later, on 27 April 1869, the body of her son Robert Johnson was found in the house, a victim of his own suicide. This second death of an adult son, impacted by his alcoholism left Eliza Johnson devastated. In 1875, while the former president and his wife were in the home of Mary Stover Brown, Andrew Johnson suffered a stroke and died. Eliza Johnson was too weak to attend his funeral service. She died five and a half months later on January 15, 1876 at Greeneville, Tennessee. She is buried at Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in Greeneville.
She was born Eliza McCardle on October 4, 1810 at Leesburg, Tennessee. Her father was John McCardle, who worked as both a cobbler and as an innkeeper in the town of Warrensburg. Her mother was Sarah Phillips, . She was the only child resulting from her parents’ marriage. There is no evidence that her mother’s second marriage produced any children either, leaving Eliza without siblings or half-siblings. She was a Methodist who attended the Rhea Academy, in Greeneville, Tennessee. Few details are known about Eliza Johnson’s education, but Eliza Johnson wrote and spoke well and consistently read books on a wide range of subjects. She read books and newspapers to her fiancé and husband Andrew Johnson.
Eliza McCardle Johnson was the first among a few of the first ladies born into poverty. She first met her future husband in 1826. At the time Eliza helped to supplement the family income by making cloth and leather sandals, as well as quilts. On May 17, 1827, she married Andrew Johnson, then a tailor, at Warrenton, Tennessee. Eliza McCardle first met Andrew Johnson when he came to the town of Greeneville, searching for work as a tailor, along with his mother and stepfather. Johnson was unable to immediately find work in Greeneville. He worked in nearby Rutledge, where he worked and maintained a courting correspondence with Eliza. He was able to find enough tailoring work to establish a business in a two-room house, using the front room for work and the back for living quarters. At 16 years old, Eliza Johnson was the youngest-married First Lady. The couple was married by minister Mordecai Lincoln, the first cousin of Abraham Lincoln’s father.
The Johnsons had five children, two daughters and three sons: Martha Johnson Patterson, Charles Johnson, Mary Johnson Stover, Robert Johnson and Andrew Johnson, Jr.
Eliza Johnson helped her husband improve the quality of his written and spoken communicative skills. Their daughter Martha Patterson wrote of her parents in 1881 that, “it is a mistake she taught my father the alphabet as this he had acquired before leaving Raleigh. But little has been written about my mother as she always opposed any publicity concerning her private life. She was the stepping stone to all the honors and fame my father attained.” Eliza Johnson herself said, “I taught him to form the letters, but he was an apt scholar, and acquired all the rest of it for himself.” Andrew Johnson frequently credited his wife in public for much of his education. After their marriage, she successfully persuaded him to register as a member of the Greeneville College Debating Society. The practical experience led to his becoming a spokesperson and leader of a workingman’s party he organized and his successful campaign and election as Alderman and Mayor of Greeneville.
Eliza Johnson also managed the family finances. By February, 1831 the couple were able to buy a larger home to accommodate their growing family. When Andrew Johnson moved from local to state political office, first as congressman for Greene and Washington Counties (1835-1837; 1839-1841) and then as senator (1841-1843), he resided in the state capital of Nashville during legislative sessions while Eliza remained in Greeneville with the children. She took an active role in deepening the education of both her sons and daughters beyond what they learned in school. She was assisted with her work at home by two African-American slaves identified as “Dolly” and her half-brother “Sam”. It is said however that Eliza Johnson was vehemently opposed to the ownership of human beings, this being contrary to her Methodist faith.
During the full ten years of her husband's time as a Congressman, there are no reports that Eliza Johnson ever journeyed with him to Washington, but their eldest child Martha was placed in a girl’s school there. During vacations and weekends, Martha Johnson frequently accepted the invitations of First Lady Sarah Polk to participate in White House social events as Congressman Johnson had been a consistent supporter of his fellow Tennessean Democrat, President James Polk.
In 1851, following his congressional career and return to Greeneville, the Johnsons purchased a large home in town. She contracted tuberculosis. and when Andrew Johnson was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1853, Eliza Johnson had to limit her physical movement and was unable to join him in Nashville. She was only 43 years old. At home, she also began to confront the alcoholism shown by her sons Charles (later a doctor, pharmacist and surgeon with the Union Army during the Civil War) and Robert (an attorney, who committed suicide eight weeks after his father’s presidency ended). She arranged and attended her daughter Martha’s wedding and often visited her other married daughter and new grandchildren in a nearby county.
When Andrew Johnson was elected to represent Tennessee in the United States Senate (1857-1862) he lived in Washington, D.C. again while that body was in session, while Eliza Johnson again chose to remain home in Greeneville. There she continued her financial management of their property and investments and the social welfare work she supported through her Methodist Church. She decided to come to Washington following the secession of the southern states, including Tennessee. She enjoyed some notoriety as the spouse of the only U.S. Senator from the South remaining loyal to the Union despite his state’s secession.
Despite being under Confederate Army authority, the people of eastern Tennessee, where the Johnsons lived, were largely loyal to the Union. Senator Johnson spoke vigorously against the Confederacy and sought Union protection of his region. Without warning, their Greeneville home was confiscated for use as sleeping quarters for Confederate Army troops. Eliza Johnson and her young son Frank and adult son Charles, had to seek shelter at the nearby Carter County home of her daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Daniel Stover, and three young children. The Stover home, however, was also located in the area controlled by the Confederate government. In April of 1862, Eliza Johnson, along with other prominent Union families in that jurisdiction were given short notice to vacate by Confederate General Kirby Smith. Eliza Johnson wrote to the general stating “in my present state of health, I know I can not undergo the fatigues of such a journey; my health is quite feeble, a greater portion of the time being unable to leave my bed.” Five months later, she wrote him again, this time declaring herself able to travel and requesting the necessary permits for movement within the Confederate-held regions and to cross into Union territory when necessary.
For several nights, she and her daughter Mary Stover prepared and smuggled food into nearby mountain caves where her son-in-law and his fellow Union military sought shelter and eluded detection by Confederates. In late September, she was detained for two days in Murfreesboro by Confederate General, Nathan B. Forrest. She and her family later found shelter in an abandoned restaurant. She and her family later proceeded by train to Nashville, during which the family was harassed and her sons threatened with death by fellow passengers who were Confederate sympathizers. She and her family were given safe refuge in Nashville, arriving there on October 13, 1862. She and her family left Nashville for Cincinnati in November of 1862. The party proceeded to Louisville, Kentucky, but Eliza Johnson’s breathing problems became worse and she decided to return to Nashville in May of 1863, rather than unite with her husband in Washington, where the weather would further deteriorate her condition.
When President Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as Military Governor of Tennessee (1862-1865), Johnson made several dramatic references in public speeches to the treatment of his wife by the Confederate Army. Andrew and Eliza Johnson had a brief reunion in Nashville when she arrived there with her family in May of 1863 before he was forced to go to Kentucky’s Union territory for his safety.
In April of 1863 their son Charles was killed after being thrown from a horse. He had been appointed a Union Army surgeon with the rank of Colonel at age 33 and his mother took his unexpected death very hard.
In early June 1864, Andrew Johnson was nominated as the National Union Party’s vice presidential candidate, on the ticket with President Lincoln who was seeking re-election. Eliza Johnson played no role in his campaign, because of her role in handling a family crisis. Robert Johnson’s alcoholism had so worsened that he was forced to resign as a Union Colonel. In August of 1864, Eliza Johnson brought him to the Lewis Sanitarium in Lexington, Massachusetts for recovery treatment, and simultaneous treatment for her tuberculosis and the first signs of it in her younger son Frank. Another tragedy soon hit the family when Mary Stover was widowed by the sudden death of her husband in December of 1864.
Eliza Johnson remained in Nashville, rather than attend the Washington, D.C. swearing-in ceremony of Andrew Johnson as Vice President in March 1865. A month later, Lincoln had been killed and Eliza Johnson arrived at the White House on August 6, 1865, with an entourage including her two sons, her two daughters, her remaining son-in-law and five grandchildren. Eliza Johnson restricted her role as first lady to that of hostess at formal dinners and the visits of heads of state. Her daughters Martha Patterson and Mary Stover assisted at public receptions. Her limited role was due to lingering personal sadness over the death of her son Charles. Her first public ceremony, in February of 1866, involved a unique presentation to serve as a reminder of her husband’s escape from the widespread conspiracy around Lincoln’s death. Produced by the Historical Society of Wisconsin, it was an extravagantly leather-bound volume of testimony from eyewitnesses and participants who helped secure Johnson’s safety, written out in calligraphy penmanship.
One contemporary report, disputed by subsequent historians, was contained in the publication "Ladies of the White House" (1881) which drew on an 1869 Chicago Republican newspaper account which stated: “Mrs. Johnson, a confirmed invalid, has never appeared in society in Washington. Her very existence is a myth to almost every one. She was last seen at a party given to her grandchildren. She was seated in one of the Republican Court chairs, a dainty affair of satin and ebony. She did not rise when the children or old guests were presented to her; she simply said, ‘My dears, I am an invalid,’ and her sad, pale face and sunken eyes fully proved the expression.” This account is contradicted by contemporary correspondence and may be motivated by radical Republicans' dislike of President Johnson. They may also be explained by the state of her tuberculosis which at times required her to remain seated at events while at other times she made lengthy rail excursions throughout the eastern United States. In 1867, for example, she traveled along the eastern seaboard, stopping in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and also going west and south from Washington to Pittsburgh and Louisville.
Her condition gradually worsened, and she became sedentary and lived a more confined life towards the Administration’s end. The bacillus causing tuberculosis was not discovered until after her death, but less than a year before the Administration ended, Eliza Johnson was still presiding as First Lady at formal White House dinners. She appeared outdoors to watch her grandchildren join the Easter Egg Roll festivities (which had informally begun during the Lincoln Administration), but stayed on the White House South Portico and thus remained inaccessible to the general public.
In 1867, the First Lady agreed to participate in a fundraising effort seeking to create a large orphanage for thousands of southern children left without parents as a result of the Civil War. Eliza Johnson donated some personal items to be publicly auctioned in the fundraising effort. The orphanage was to be located in Charleston, South Carolina with the intention of it becoming the largest in the South.
To what degree President Johnson shared with her the details of his conflicts on Reconstruction policy with the Republican leaders in Congress and the subsequent 1868 trial for his impeachment and removal from office is unclear. However, Eliza Johnson kept herself fully apprized of the proceedings, making a close daily reading of political stories related to her husband from a variety of newspapers which she then clipped with a scissor and preserved in scrapbooks. Throughout the ordeal, she claimed to always believe he would be acquitted and she was overcome with emotional relief when she received confirmation of this prediction.
Eliza Johnson felt relieved to get back to her home in Greeneville. Initially her spirits were lifted when her widowed daughter Mary remarried. Just one week later, on 27 April 1869, the body of her son Robert Johnson was found in the house, a victim of his own suicide. This second death of an adult son, impacted by his alcoholism left Eliza Johnson devastated. In 1875, while the former president and his wife were in the home of Mary Stover Brown, Andrew Johnson suffered a stroke and died. Eliza Johnson was too weak to attend his funeral service. She died five and a half months later on January 15, 1876 at Greeneville, Tennessee. She is buried at Andrew Johnson National Cemetery in Greeneville.