Andrew Johnson
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49 free Andrew Johnson trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Andrew Johnson never spent a day in school. Apprenticed to a tailor at ten, he ran away, taught himself to read, and talked his way from Greeneville alderman to governor, senator and, in 1865, vice president to Abraham Lincoln. Six weeks later Lincoln was dead and the tailor was president, facing the hardest question in American history: what to do with the defeated South. His answer put him on a collision course with Congress. This quiz covers the Black Codes, the vetoes that were overridden, the disastrous "Swing Around the Circle" tour, the Tenure of Office Act, the firing of Edwin Stanton and the impeachment trial that fell one vote short. It also asks about the odd corners of his story: the drunken inaugural speech, the Alaska purchase, the would-be assassin who got drunk instead, and the comeback that made him the only ex-president ever elected to the Senate. Fifty questions, easy to hard, every answer sourced and every explanation adding one more detail.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which party did Andrew Johnson, the Republican Lincoln's running mate, belong to?
Democratic
Democratic: Johnson was the country's most prominent War Democrat, and Lincoln wanted him on the 1864 ballot to win voters beyond his own party.
Q 02In which city was Andrew Johnson born?
Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina, is where his father, a porter, died after going to the rescue of drowning men when Andrew was three, leaving the family in poverty.
Q 03To which trade was Johnson apprenticed as a boy?
Tailor
Tailor: bound to a master's shop as a boy, he never spent a day in school, and it was there that he first learned to read as well as to sew.
Q 04What did the teenage Johnson's master do when he fled his apprenticeship?
Posted a reward
Posted a reward: the notice went up in 1824, and Johnson spent about two years on the run before coming back and failing to make peace with his old master.
Q 05Johnson settled and opened his shop in which Tennessee town?
Greeneville
Greeneville is where he arrived with his mother and stepfather in September 1826; within three years the newcomer was an alderman, and by 1834 he was the town's mayor.
Q 06Johnson's wife Eliza taught him which skills?
Mathematics and writing
Mathematics and writing were what Eliza tutored him in after they married; the newlywed who could barely read grew into one of Tennessee's most noted orators.
Q 07Which reform did Andrew Johnson propose as a congressman, decades before it became law?
Direct election of senators
Direct election of senators was one of the amendments he pressed in the House, along with electing presidents by popular vote; all were defeated, and state legislatures kept choosing senators until 1913.
Q 08Which relative usually served as Johnson's White House hostess?
His daughter
His daughter Martha Patterson ran the house while Eliza, whom he had married when he was 18 and she 16, kept to her room with tuberculosis.
Q 09What did Andrew Johnson persuade Lincoln to do for Tennessee in the Emancipation Proclamation?
Leave the state out of it
Leave the state out of it: Johnson, a slaveholder himself, feared that freedom by federal order would drive off Tennessee's slaveholding Unionists, so the 1863 proclamation skipped the state.
Q 10Tennessee's August 8 Emancipation Day marks what Johnson did in 1863?
Freed his slaves
He freed his slaves on August 8, 1863, by family tradition; one of the people he freed is credited with starting the yearly celebration in East Tennessee.
Q 11Which measure to grant 160 acres to settlers did Johnson champion for years in Congress?
Homestead Bill
Homestead Bill: he first introduced it in 1846 and got it through the House in 1852, but it became law only in 1862, once the Southern legislators who had blocked it were gone.
Q 12Which state did Congress admit to the Union in 1867 over Andrew Johnson's veto?
Nebraska
Nebraska is the only state ever admitted by overriding a veto; Johnson objected because Congress had made equal voting rights for Black men a condition of statehood.
Q 13As governor, Johnson won a tax increase from Tennessee's legislature to fund what?
Public school system
Q 21Which boardinghouse keeper did Johnson allow to hang in 1865 for her part in the plot against Lincoln?
Mary Surratt
Mary Surratt went to the gallows with three men that July; days before his own death Johnson reportedly called her execution 'a crime of passion without justice or reason'.
Q 22Why was Johnson unharmed on the night Lincoln was shot?
His assigned assassin got drunk
His assigned assassin got drunk: George Atzerodt took the room above Johnson's at the Kirkwood House, then lost his nerve in the bar downstairs; he was hanged that July.
Q 23Who swore Johnson in as president on April 15, 1865?
Salmon P. Chase
Public school system: he criticized the state's common schools and asked for taxes to support them; the mix of state and county levies that passed was a rare win in an office with little power.
Q 14How did Andrew Johnson celebrate his 60th birthday at the White House in December 1868?
A children's party
A children's party: he invited some 300 youngsters to the White House, a rare happy scene in the last weeks of a presidency that had barely survived impeachment that spring.
Q 15Johnson was the only senator from a seceding state to do what?
Keep his Senate seat
Keep his Senate seat: when Tennessee seceded in June 1861 he fled the state, believing he would be killed if he stayed, and went back to Washington, where the Northern press hailed him as a patriot.
Q 16What did Johnson sometimes place on the lectern while campaigning against secession?
A gun
A gun lay before him as he spoke: he was threatened and assaulted for campaigning against secession, even though his own eastern end of Tennessee largely shared his loyalty.
Q 17In 1862 Lincoln appointed Johnson to which post?
Military Governor of Tennessee
Military Governor of Tennessee made him a brigadier general with sweeping powers, and he used them: he closed pro-Confederate newspapers and jailed officials and clergymen he judged disloyal.
Q 18Lincoln and Johnson ran in 1864 not as Republicans but under which party banner?
National Union Party
National Union Party was the name the Republicans campaigned under in 1864 to win voters from outside the party; two years later Johnson tried to revive the label for his own supporters.
Q 19Whom did Johnson replace as Lincoln's running mate in 1864?
Hannibal Hamlin
Hannibal Hamlin of Maine wanted to stay on, but Lincoln preferred a Southern Unionist from outside his own party, and the convention dropped its sitting vice president.
Q 20What did an ailing Johnson take just before his rambling 1865 inaugural speech as vice president?
Whiskey
Whiskey: ill and shaky, he drank it to steady himself and then rambled through his speech; the scene fed rumors of drunkenness that he never lived down.
Salmon P. Chase, the chief justice, gave him the oath a few hours after Lincoln died; three years later the same man presided over the new president's impeachment trial.
Q 24Who left a calling card for Johnson at the Kirkwood House on the day Lincoln was shot?
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth left the card hours before he shot Lincoln, asking 'Are you at home?'; historians still argue over what he wanted with the vice president.
Q 25How did Johnson handle wealthy ex-Confederates' pardon requests?
Granted thousands
Granted thousands: his 1865 amnesty shut out rebels with property over $20,000, but he signed their pardons almost routinely, putting much of the old planter class back in power.
Q 26Which laws did Southern states pass in 1865 and 1866 to bind freedmen to farms and arrest them for vagrancy?
Black Codes
Black Codes forced freedpeople into yearly labor contracts they could not quit and let the jobless be arrested as vagrants; Northern anger at them helped turn Congress against Johnson's lenient plan.
Q 27In a furious 1866 Washington's Birthday speech, Johnson denounced which Pennsylvania congressman by name?
Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the House Radicals, was singled out along with Senator Charles Sumner; two years later the ailing Stevens led the drive to impeach the president who had named him.
Q 28Which 1866 veto by Johnson was the first on a major bill ever overridden by Congress?
Civil Rights Act
Civil Rights Act: it made the freedmen citizens, and his veto convinced moderate Republicans they could not work with him; within three weeks both houses had passed it again.
Q 29Which constitutional amendment, granting citizenship to former slaves, did Johnson oppose?
Fourteenth
Fourteenth: he urged the Southern states to reject it, but his own Tennessee ratified it in 1866 and became the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union.
Q 30What was the nickname of Johnson's disastrous 1866 speaking tour?
Swing Around the Circle
Swing Around the Circle took him through the North in 1866 to rally voters against Congress; he traded insults with hecklers instead, and Republicans won two-thirds of both houses.