Made too many missteps, but in all fairness, he found himself in an incredibly difficult position in the wake of a divisive Civil War. Such a situation would have been difficult for any man to deal with, but Johnson exacerbated the crisis with his stubbornness and willingness to make unlimited concessions to the defeated South.

Johnson had a rough go of it. The circumstances that he arrived at the Presidency were hard enough as is--after the assassination of the President and at the end of a bloody civil war that deeply wounded and divided a nation. As a Southerner from Tennessee, Johnson had the potential to become a conciliatory figure of sorts, given his regional origins and political affiliation as a Democrat who had opposed secession from the Union. This was why Lincoln had picked him as his VP for the second term. However, the radical Republicans in the Congress, along with the cabinet which he inherited from Lincoln made life very difficult for him. Turns out they had different ideas about how to administer the South after the Civil War. Johnson supported less punitive damages from the South for their cessation from the Union, while the Republicans wanted to "gut" the South. Johnson simply couldn't navigate these treacherous waters; many of his proposals regarding the reconstruction issue were vetoed by the Congress. Essentially, the Congress, which lost a lot of power under Lincoln, were re-asserting its prerogatives over the weak Johnson. He was impeached in 1868 under political charges that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act, passed in 1867 to protect the radical Republican Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, from being fired by Johnson. In short, Johnson claimed that the law was unconstitutional, that he had every right to fire whomever he wanted to at will. He broke the law by firing Stanton. Subsequently, a court was adjourned in the Senate to begin impeachment hearings. Johnson was acquitted by only 1 vote in the Senate, luckily for him. Generally speaking, Johnson is regarded as one of the worst Presidents. However, I don't fault him entirely. The political situation he found himself in would have been difficult for anyone. Johnson was in way over his head.

He muddled through. He succeeded to the office in a perilous time and faced heavy opposition.

Andrew Johnson accomplished everything he set out to do, and was an overall very successful president, despite being impeached with a trap set by a hostile, Radical Republican Congress. From an objective point of view, he was a success. The problem is almost everything he set out to do was a vile and disgusting. He squandered the little good actually gained by the Civil War. Johnson must have been in a very difficult position, indeed. He was a Democrat, and a Southern one at that, at a time when many Southern Democrats had just lost a long and bloody rebellion. Johnson wanted to let the Southern rebels off easy (the only good thing he did - so did Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman), but he went to far, restoring rights to such a point that the anti-bellem leadership was in a place to punish the former slaves. He also did everything he could to keep the freed slaves from gaining equal rights (very bad - unlike many Northern leaders). He did little to combat the Ku Klux Klan from waging what amounted to a gureilla war against the Union occupation army, northern civilians in the South (Carpetbaggers), and the freed slaves. The KKK's actions in the ten years or so between the end of the war and when they were first stopped by President Grant was arguable worse than what happened in Germany after WWII or is happening now in Iraq. Johnson did nothing. Johnson also used the veto more than any president before or since to oppose things such as what would become the 14th (black citizenship) and 15th (black voting rights) Amendments. I also have little respect for Johnson in that he turned his back on his state (one of only four states which acted nobly during the secession crisis - Tennessee, along with Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas, were the only states with the courage to first oppose illegal and unjustifable secession on the part of the Deep South and then oppose an illegal and unjustifable call for war on the part of the northern states.)