FEBRUARY 17
2011•Andrew Johnson Presidential $1
2012•Infantry Soldier Silver Dollars Presented
The Andrew Johnson Presidential Dollar Enters Circulation
On February 17, 2011, the United States Mint released the Andrew Johnson Presidential $1 Coin into circulation and marked the occasion with a public ceremony and coin exchange in Greeneville, Tennessee. The 17th coin in the Presidential $1 Coin Program honored one of the most complicated figures ever depicted in the series: the Tennessee tailor who rose through nearly every level of American government, became president after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, clashed bitterly with Congress over Reconstruction, and survived an impeachment trial by a single Senate vote.
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The Presidential $1 Coin Program was designed to put American history into people's hands.
Few coins tested that idea more directly than the Andrew Johnson dollar.
Johnson was not a universally celebrated president.
His administration unfolded during the traumatic first years after the Civil War.
His approach to Reconstruction brought him into fierce conflict with Congress.
He became the first president of the United States to be impeached.
Yet the Presidential $1 Coin Act required the Mint to present the presidents in chronological order.
History was not being filtered into heroes and villains.
The sequence moved from one administration to the next.
On February 17, 2011, it reached Andrew Johnson.
The 17th Presidential Dollar
The Andrew Johnson dollar was the 17th coin released in the Presidential $1 Coin Program.
The series had begun four years earlier, on February 15, 2007, with George Washington.
Four presidents were generally honored each year.
By 2011, the chronological sequence had moved through the founding generation, the early republic, the Jacksonian era and the presidents immediately preceding the Civil War.
Johnson followed Abraham Lincoln.
That sequence reflected the way he became president.
From Lincoln's Vice President to President
Andrew Johnson became vice president on March 4, 1865.
His vice presidency lasted only weeks.
President Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14 and died the following morning.
Johnson took the presidential oath on April 15, 1865.
He inherited a nation emerging from civil war, facing the destruction of slavery and confronting the enormous question of how the former Confederate states would return to the Union.
Those circumstances would define his presidency.
The Mint chose Greeneville, Tennessee for the February 17 launch ceremony.
The location was central to Johnson's life.
He settled there as a young man.
He established a tailor shop there.
He entered local politics there.
And he returned there after his presidency.
The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site preserves important places associated with his life, including his tailor shop and homes.
The United States Mint announced that the public launch ceremony would take place at the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site.
The event included a coin exchange allowing members of the public to obtain rolls of the newly released dollars.
Children attending the ceremony were eligible to receive a new Andrew Johnson Presidential $1 Coin.
The ceremony connected a national coin program with a specific local landscape tied to the president it honored.
The obverse features a portrait of Andrew Johnson.
Its inscriptions identify him as:
ANDREW JOHNSON
IN GOD WE TRUST
17th PRESIDENT
1865–1869
The portrait was designed and sculpted by United States Mint Sculptor-Engraver Don Everhart.
Everhart was one of the most important artists of the Presidential dollar series and also created its common Statue of Liberty reverse.
The reverse carries the same basic design used throughout the Presidential $1 Coin Program.
The Statue of Liberty fills the field.
The denomination $1 appears beside her.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA curves around the rim.
Don Everhart designed and sculpted the reverse.
The shared design visually connected presidents from very different eras to a common symbol of the nation.
Edge Lettering Remained Part of the Series
The 2011 Andrew Johnson dollar also carried inscriptions on its edge.
These included the year, mintmark and E PLURIBUS UNUM.
By 2011, however, IN GOD WE TRUST no longer appeared on the edge.
Congress had required the motto to be moved to the obverse beginning in 2009.
The change followed controversy over the original edge-lettering format and the famous missing-edge-lettering errors of 2007.
Like other Presidential dollars, the Andrew Johnson coin has a golden appearance.
It does not contain gold.
The coin uses the manganese-brass clad composition introduced for the Sacagawea dollar.
The golden color was intended to help consumers distinguish dollar coins from quarters and other circulating denominations.
Its diameter and weight matched the modern small-dollar standard.
Andrew Johnson dollars were struck for circulation at Philadelphia and Denver.
The Philadelphia coins carry a P on the edge.
Denver coins carry a D.
Proof versions were produced at San Francisco for collectors and carry an S.
The mintmark's location on the edge makes Presidential dollars unusual among modern American coins.
Johnson's path to the White House was remarkable.
He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808 into poverty.
He never attended school in the conventional sense.
As a boy, he was apprenticed to a tailor.
After moving to Tennessee, he opened his own tailor shop in Greeneville.
His wife, Eliza McCardle Johnson, helped him improve his reading and writing.
From that beginning, he entered politics.
Johnson's political career included an extraordinary range of offices.
He served as an alderman.
He became mayor of Greeneville.
He served in the Tennessee legislature.
He became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
He served as governor of Tennessee.
He became a United States senator.
During the Civil War, Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee.
Then came the vice presidency and presidency.
A Southern Senator Who Stayed with the Union
Johnson was a Democrat from a slaveholding Southern state.
But when Tennessee seceded during the Civil War, he remained loyal to the Union.
He was the only sitting U.S. senator from a seceded state who did not resign his Senate seat.
That loyalty made him politically useful to Lincoln.
In 1864, Lincoln ran for reelection under the National Union banner with Johnson as his running mate.
The ticket was intended to symbolize wartime Unionism beyond traditional party lines.
Johnson entered the presidency at one of the most difficult moments imaginable.
The Civil War was ending.
Lincoln had been murdered.
Four million formerly enslaved people faced an uncertain future.
Southern governments had to be reconstructed.
Congress and the president disagreed fundamentally about how that process should work.
Johnson favored relatively rapid restoration of former Confederate states.
He issued pardons and allowed Southern states considerable latitude in reorganizing their governments.
Those governments enacted restrictive laws known as Black Codes that limited the freedom and rights of African Americans.
Republicans in Congress increasingly concluded that presidential Reconstruction was inadequate.
The conflict became the defining struggle of Johnson's administration.
Congress passed major civil-rights and Reconstruction legislation over Johnson's opposition.
Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Congress overrode him.
The override was historically significant: Congress had overridden presidential vetoes before, but doing so on major legislation demonstrated the depth of the break between Johnson and the Republican-controlled legislature.
The Fourteenth Amendment became another central point of conflict.
The confrontation eventually focused on Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, restricting the president's ability to remove certain officeholders without Senate approval.
Johnson believed the law was unconstitutional.
He attempted to remove Stanton.
The House of Representatives treated the action as grounds for impeachment.
The First Impeached President
On February 24, 1868, the House voted to impeach Andrew Johnson.
He became the first president in United States history to be impeached.
The House eventually approved eleven articles of impeachment.
The Senate then conducted a trial.
The presidency itself was at stake.
The Senate required a two-thirds majority to convict and remove Johnson.
On the principal article considered, the vote was 35 guilty to 19 not guilty.
Thirty-six guilty votes were needed.
Johnson survived by one vote.
Additional votes produced the same result, and the trial ended without conviction.
He completed his term in March 1869.
Johnson's political story did not end when he left the White House.
He later won election to the United States Senate from Tennessee.
That made him the only former president to return to serve in the Senate.
He took his seat in 1875 but died only months later.
The achievement added another unusual distinction to an already extraordinary political career.
The Presidential dollar program was not a ranking of presidents.
It did not honor only administrations later judged successful.
The law established a chronological sequence.
That meant the Mint eventually had to depict presidents associated with war, scandal, failed policies, impeachment and deep historical controversy.
Andrew Johnson is perhaps the clearest example.
His inclusion does not resolve the historical judgment of his presidency.
It records that he held the office.
This is where the Presidential dollar concept works best.
A person encounters a name on a coin.
Why was Andrew Johnson president for only 1865–1869?
Why did his term begin in 1865 rather than after a normal election?
Why was he impeached?
Why did he survive removal by one vote?
A small dollar can lead directly into the central constitutional and civil-rights conflicts of Reconstruction.
The Program Was Still Producing for Circulation
When the Johnson dollar appeared in February 2011, Presidential dollars were still being struck in large quantities for circulation.
That would soon change.
Dollar coins were accumulating in Federal Reserve inventories because public demand remained weak.
Americans continued to prefer the one-dollar bill.
The government was producing more dollar coins than commerce needed.
Later in 2011, the Treasury Department announced that it would suspend production of Presidential dollars for general circulation.
The remaining presidential designs would still be produced to satisfy the law, but in smaller quantities intended primarily for collectors.
That makes the Andrew Johnson dollar part of the program's final year as a broad circulation initiative.
It belongs to the original vision of encountering presidents in everyday change.
Johnson opened the year's presidential sequence.
He was followed by:
Ulysses S. Grant
Rutherford B. Hayes
James Garfield
Together, the four 2011 coins carried the series from the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's assassination into the post-Reconstruction era.
It was one of the most historically consequential groups in the entire program.
The transition from Johnson to Grant was especially meaningful.
Grant had been the Union's commanding general at the end of the Civil War.
His relationship with Johnson deteriorated during Reconstruction.
Grant then succeeded Johnson as president in 1869.
In 2011, the Mint reproduced that political succession in metal: Johnson first, Grant next.
Ordinary Andrew Johnson dollars are readily obtainable.
Collectors can seek Philadelphia and Denver circulation strikes, San Francisco proofs and higher-grade certified examples.
Some specialists also study edge-lettering orientation and errors.
Because the edge inscriptions were applied separately, Presidential dollars offer collecting possibilities not found on conventional reeded-edge coins.
Check the Edge
A complete examination of a Presidential dollar requires looking beyond the obverse and reverse.
The edge carries information that would normally appear on a coin's face.
For the 2011 Johnson dollar, that includes the date and mintmark.
A collector who ignores the edge is literally ignoring part of the design.
That unusual feature remains one of the defining characteristics of the Presidential series.
Launching the coin in Greeneville connected the polished presidential portrait to Johnson's much humbler beginnings.
The National Park Service preserves his tailor shop.
The small building makes his rise tangible.
A man who began his working life sewing clothes in a Tennessee town eventually occupied the White House during one of the country's greatest constitutional crises.
The coin ceremony returned the presidency to the place where that career began.
February 17, 2011 was not merely another release date in a long coin program.
It placed one of Reconstruction's central figures into a national historical series.
The coin opened a door to questions about Lincoln's assassination, presidential succession, emancipation, civil rights, Reconstruction, congressional power and impeachment.
It also arrived near the end of the federal government's latest attempt to make the dollar coin a routine part of American commerce.
The Andrew Johnson dollar demonstrates that historical coinage does not have to celebrate uncomplicated stories.
Sometimes the value of a historical coin is that it prompts difficult questions.
Johnson's presidency remains heavily criticized, particularly for his Reconstruction policies and opposition to congressional civil-rights measures.
Yet understanding that history is precisely why the coin matters.
On February 17, 2011, the Andrew Johnson Presidential $1 Coin entered circulation in Greeneville, Tennessee, placing the 17th president—and the turbulent Reconstruction and impeachment history surrounding his administration—into the hands of a new generation of Americans.
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