Charles Johnson

Charles Johnson (February 19, 1830 – April 4, 1863) was the first-born son of 17th U.S. President Andrew Johnson and his wife Eliza McCardle Johnson. He died at age 33 near Nashville, during the American Civil War, while his father was serving as military governor of Tennessee. Charles Johnson was remembered his mother's favorite. She was said to have "never quite recovered" from her grief at his early death. Charles Johnson's death is sometimes mentioned as one of the causes for Eliza Johnson's self-isolation during the family's White House years. He was noted for both his conviviality but also his "dissipation," and he is believed to have suffered from the same alcoholism that contributed to his brother Robert Johnson's death in 1869. Biography Born 1830 in the family's Main Street house in Greeneville, Tennessee, Charles Johnson was the second-born of Andrew Johnson's five children with Eliza McCardle. Charles Johnson was working in Greeneville at age 20 as a printer at the time of the 1850 census. For about a year he was a partner in a newspaper called the Greeneville Spy, and circa 1857 he co-owned a drugstore and worked as a druggist. Charles and his brother Robert also managed their father's business affairs and real estate when Andrew Johnson was away from Tennessee. At the time of the 1860 census, when he was 30, he was living in the family home, but his occupation was now listed as physician. But that same year, he also visited Charleston, South Carolina, for the 1860 Democratic National Convention and had "gotten on a spree" that had troubled the family, meaning that he had been drunk for the duration to the point that his brother had a hard time even getting him out of the city. In January 1861, as the nation was collapsing into civil war, Andrew Johnson's son Robert reported that Charles had gone on another "spree." Both Johnson brothers were delegates from Greene County at the May–June 1861 pro-Union East Tennessee Convention. When Tennessee went for the Confederacy, both Southern Unionist Johnson sons were wanted men, their brother-in-law David T. Patterson was imprisoned, and their brother-in-law Daniel Stover, a leader of the East Tennessee bridge burners, would have been summarily executed by CSA troops had he been captured. According to the National Park Service, at some point early in the war Charles Johnson took the Confederate oath of allegiance, "apparently in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve family property."