The Wars Of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History Of America's Most Progressive Era - Plot & Excerpts
War’s End, Activism’s Beginning At the age of fourteen, Dolly was put up for sale at auction. In later years, her son William told of Dolly boldly marching up to a man she hoped was kind and asking him to buy her, saying she “liked his looks.” The prospective buyer was thirty-four-year-old Andrew Johnson, then a Tennessee state senator. Born into poverty in North Carolina, Johnson was apprenticed to a tailor, but while still young he ran away to Tennessee, where he opened what became a very successful tailor shop in the front room of his home. At the age of eighteen, he married sixteen-year-old Eliza McCardle, the daughter of a shoemaker. Eliza taught her young husband to read and write, skills he mastered so inelegantly that he later required the aid of co-authors and editors in composing his state papers. Johnson’s growing prosperity as a tradesman earned him no respect at the hands of his landowning neighbors, and so in 1842 he bought Dolly and became a slaveholder. Shortly thereafter, he purchased her half brother Sam as well.1 Over the next several decades, Johnson rose in the political world, first as a congressman, then as Tennessee’s governor.
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