On the ticket with Lincoln, the Republicans had placed, as a sop to such pro-slavery sentiment as still existed at the North, a southerner and state rights Democrat named Andrew Johnson.  By one of those singular chances of history, Johnson’s origin and early years had been very much like Lincoln’s.  He, too, was born of a “poor white” family; first seeing the light in North Carolina about six weeks before Abraham Lincoln opened his eyes in that rude log cabin in Kentucky.  His condition was, if anything, even more hopeless and degraded than Lincoln’s, and if any one had prophesied that these two ignorant and poverty-stricken children would one day rise, side by side, to the greatest position in the Republic, he would have been regarded, and justly, as a hopeless madman.  But not even to a madman did any such wild idea occur.  “Poor whites” were despised throughout the South, even by the slaves; if there was, in the whole United States, any law of caste, it was against these ignorant and shiftless people; and Andrew Johnson, at the age of fifteen, was little better than a young savage.  He had never gone to school, he had never seen a book.  But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him.  He induced a friend to teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously taught himself to read.  So there was something more than “poor white” in him, after all.

By the time he was eighteen, he had had enough of his shiftless surroundings, and struck out for himself, journeyed across the mountains to Greenville, Tennessee, met there a girl of sixteen named Eliza McCardle, and, with youth’s sublime improvidence, married her!  As it happened, he did well, for his wife had a fair education, and night after night taught him patiently, until he could read fairly well and write a little.  I like to think of that family group, so different from most, and to admire that girl-wife teaching her husband the rudiments of education.

Already, as a result of his lowly birth and the class prejudice he everywhere encountered, young Johnson had conceived that hatred of the ruling class at the South which was to influence his after life so deeply.  He had a certain rude eloquence which appealed to the lower classes of the people, and, in 1835, succeeded in gaining an election to the state legislature.  He nursed his political prospects carefully, and eight years later, was sent to Congress.  He was afterwards twice governor of Tennessee.

It has been said that secession was, in the beginning, a policy of the ruling class in the South and not of the people.  It is not surprising, then, that Johnson should have arrayed himself against it, and fought it with all his might.  This position made him so prominent, that on March 4, 1862, Lincoln appointed him military-governor of Tennessee—­a position which was exactly to Johnson’s taste and which he filled well.  In this position, he seemed the