Johnson became the seventeenth president on April 15, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln died from John Wilkes Booth's bullet. The accidental president inherited Reconstruction at its most consequential moment, and he used the office to sabotage it. Johnson opposed civil rights for the formerly enslaved, vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, and worked to restore former Confederate elites to political power. Congress impeached him in 1868 for violating the Tenure of Office Act; he survived removal by a single Senate vote. He died in 1875 having spent his post-presidency trying to return to the Senate, which he briefly accomplished in March of that year. His grave marker reads his faith in the people never wavered — an epitaph that even an 1891 newspaper called singularly enigmatic, because nobody could quite say which people he had been faithful to.

Johnson was buried atop Signal Hill on August 3, 1875, in a Masonic funeral. Three years later, on June 5, 1878, the city erected a 28-foot marble monument over his grave — tall enough that the hill was renamed Monument Hill almost immediately. His daughter Martha Johnson Patterson, who had served as his White House hostess and inherited the property, did not want the family bound to maintaining it forever. She willed the land for use as a public park in 1898 and lobbied hard from 1900 to transfer the site to the federal government. Congress designated it a National Cemetery in 1906, the War Department took control in 1908, and the National Park Service inherited it in 1942.

Beyond Johnson and his immediate family, the cemetery now holds soldiers from every American conflict from the Civil War through the War on Terror. That breadth is unusual — when the Park Service took over in 1942, it briefly closed the cemetery to new interments to preserve its historic character. Pressure from the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution reopened it, and for the next seventy-seven years veterans of every twentieth-century war were buried among the white marble rows. New interments stopped in 2019, leaving Andersonville in Georgia as the only Park Service-administered national cemetery still accepting burials. The eagle carved into the monument cost a small fortune at the time. The names on the stones cost more.

The grave marker's inscription — his faith in the people never wavered — was meant to honor Johnson's lifelong populist self-image as a tailor's apprentice who rose to the presidency without formal schooling. It also obscures whom that faith excluded. Johnson's people did not include the four million Americans freed by emancipation, whose civil rights he actively worked to deny. Standing on Monument Hill today, looking down at Greeneville and out toward the Bald Mountains on the Tennessee–North Carolina line, the view is undeniably beautiful. The harder work is holding both the view and the history at the same time: a self-made man who became a president, and a president who used the office to entrench white supremacy at a moment when the country might have moved differently.