Richard Mentor Johnson

Biography

Richard Mentor Johnson was born in 1780 at Beargrass, on the Kentucky frontier near present-day Louisville, and grew up at Great Crossing in the Bluegrass region, where his father had prospered as a surveyor and landowner. He attended Transylvania University and read law, was admitted to the bar in 1802, and opened a practice at Great Crossing alongside business ventures with his brothers.

After two years in the Kentucky House of Representatives he was elected to Congress, serving in the U.S. House from 1807 to 1819, where he joined the War Hawks who pressed for war with Britain. During the War of 1812 he raised and led a regiment of mounted Kentucky volunteers and was badly wounded at the Battle of the Thames in 1813; he was widely credited with killing the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, a claim he used throughout his career. He sat in the U.S. Senate from 1819 to 1829 and then returned to the House until 1837.

Johnson openly treated Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman of mixed race, as his common-law wife and acknowledged their two daughters, which damaged him politically. As Martin Van Buren's running mate in 1836 he fell one vote short of an Electoral College majority when Virginia's electors refused to support him, and in 1837 the Senate chose him as vice president, the only time this has happened. He had little influence in office, and in 1840 the Democrats declined to renominate him; he ran anyway and lost.

Johnson returned to the Kentucky House from 1841 to 1843 and made several unsuccessful bids for higher office. Elected to the state house again in 1850, he died in Frankfort that November, two weeks into his term.