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Andrew Johnson became an apprentice in Selby's Tailor shop at age ten. He was legally bound to work there until his 21st birthday. One of Selby's employees taught him how to read and write in the most basic fashion. His education was supplemented by citizens who would come to Selby's shop to read to the tailors as they worked. He and his brother ran away from the apprenticeship five years later and were fugitives for a time.
In 1827 Johnson married Eliza McCardle. The ceremony was a non-religious one performed by a Justice of the Peace. (The JP was Mordecai Lincoln, first cousin to Abraham Lincoln's father Thomas).
Johnson became involved in Tennessee state politics and in 1843 he was elected to the US House of Representatives. One of the few public records of Johnson showing any religious interest was when, as a congressman, he introduced a resolution that congress be opened with a prayer, with the cost of the clergyman to be paid through voluntary contributions from the members of the House. The resolution was ignored.
His political star continued to rise and he served in the US Senate from 1857 to 1862. Johnson earned the notice and support of President Abraham Lincoln, who was pleased to have a pro-Union senator from the south. Lincoln appointed Johnson as the Military Governor of Tennessee in March of 1862. Although he had previously supported slavery, he also supported the Emancipation Proclamation, seeing it as necessary to preserve the union. He said "If the institution of slavery seeks to overthrow it [the Government], then the Government has a clear right to destroy it". He also reluctantly supported efforts to enlist former slaves into the Union Army, but said that African-Americans should perform menial tasks to release white Americans to do the fighting.
In 1864 Lincoln selected Johnson as his running mate on behalf of the National Union Party and Johnson became Vice-President in March of 1865. It is said that Johnson was drunk when he spoke at his inauguration. Johnson became President a month later following Lincoln's assassination.
As President he made few pronouncements of a religious nature and was not an official member of any church, though it is said that he sometimes attended St. Patrick's Catholic Church. He also sometimes accompanied his wife Eliza McCardle Johnson to Methodist services. Of the Catholic services, he said he did so because there was no reserved seating and he liked how Catholics gave equal access to the pews in their church regardless of money. He sometimes spoke out against anti-Catholic sentiments. When a political opponent accused him of being an infidel, he replied: "As for my religion, it is the doctrine of the Bible, as taught and practiced by Jesus Christ."
Johnson was never elected to the Presidency and therefore made no inaugural address in the traditional sense. In his first annual message to Congress on December 4, 1865, he said "Here religion, released from political connection with the civil government, refuses to subserve the craft of statesmen, and becomes in its independence the spiritual life of the people. Here toleration is extended to every opinion, in the quiet certainty that truth needs only a fair field to secure the victory."
Several months later, in a speech given to supporters on February 22, 1866, he told them, "I intend to stand by the Constitution, as the chief ark of our safety, as the palladium of our civil and religious liberty. Yes, let us cling to it as the mariner clings to the last plank when the night and the tempest close around him!"
Johnson's presidency was a turbulent one, in which he broke with Republicans over reconstruction and survived removal from office in an impeachment trial in the senate by one vote. A public speaking tour he embarked on in 1868 failed to rehabilitate his chances for re-election and only seemed to make things worse for him politically.
After he left office, he returned home to Greeneville in eastern Tennessee. He was re-elected to the senate in 1875, but was nearing the end of his life and was only able to attend one special session. Shortly before his death, he wrote to a friend in July of 1875 and said "I have performed my duty to my God, my country, and my family. I have nothing to fear in approaching death. To me it is the mere shadow of God's protecting wing. Here I will rest in quiet and peace beyond the reach of calumny's poisoned shaft, the influence of envy and jealous enemies, where treason and traitors or State backsliders and hypocrites in church can have no peace." He died on July 31, 1875 at the age of 66.