The successful issue of these unprecedented and complicated difficulties depended in great degree upon the character and temper of the Executive. Many wise men regarded it as a fortunate circumstance that Mr. Lincoln's successor was from the South, though a much larger number in the North found in this fact a source of disquietude. Mr. Johnson had the manifest disadvantage of not possessing any close or intimate knowledge of the people of the Loyal States. It was feared moreover, that his relations with the ruling spirits of the South in the exciting period preceding the war specially unfitted him for harmonious co-operation with them in the pending exigencies. The character and career of Mr. Johnson were anomalous and in many respects contradictory. By birth he belonged to that large class in the South known as "poor whites,"--a class scarcely less despised by the slave-holding aristocracy than were the human chattels themselves. Born in North Carolina, and bred to the trade of a tailor, he reached his fifteenth year before he was taught even to read. In his eighteenth year he migrated to Tennessee, and established himself in that rich upland region on the eastern border of the State, where by altitude the same agricultural conditions are developed that characterize the land which lies several degrees further North. Specially adapted to the cereals, the grasses, and the fruits of Southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, East Tennessee could not employ slave-labor with the profit which it brought in the rich cotton-fields of the neighboring lowlands, and the result was that the population contained a large majority of whites. Owing much to a wise marriage, pursuing his trade with skill and industry, Johnson gained steadily in knowledge and in influence. Ambitious, quick to learn, honest, necessarily frugal, he speedily became a recognized leader of the class to which he belonged. Before he had attained his majority he was chosen to an important municipal office, and at twenty-two he was elected mayor of his town. Thenceforward his promotion was rapid. At twenty-seven he was sent to the Legislature of his State; and in 1840, when he was in his thirty-second year, he was nominated for the office of Presidential elector and canvassed that State in the interest of Mr. Van Buren. Three years later he was chosen representative in Congress where he served ten years. He was then nominated for governor, and in the elections of 1853 and 1855 defeated successively two of the most popular Whigs in Tennessee, Gustavus A. Henry and Meredith P. Gentry. In 1857 he was promoted to the Senate of the United States, where he was serving at the outbreak of the civil war.