¹     Andrew Johnson was born on December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to a very, very poor family. There were many nights that Andrew and his brother, William, went to bed hungry because the family did not have enough money for food.
 
²     Even though Andrew never went to school, he learned how to read a little bit when he was working for a tailor at the age of fourteen. A tailor is someone who makes and alters clothes. When he was an adult, he married Eliza McCardle, who taught Andrew how to write. They had five children and Andrew worked as a tailor in his own shop called the A. Johnson Tailor Shop. Many of the neighborhood children would come to his shop to discuss issues concerning the people of the United States.
 
³     Johnson held many positions in government and was a senator for Tennessee when the Civil War broke out in 1861. One of the main reasons for the Civil War was that a lot of the Southern states did not like the way President Lincoln was handling the United States, so they wanted to break away from the country. The Northern states were staying with the United States. This led to a lot of fighting between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy). Many thousands of soldiers were killed on both sides.

Paragraphs 4 to 6:
For the complete story with questions: click here for printable