Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 12, 2013

John W. Johnston (1818–89) was an American lawyer and Democratic politician from Abingdon, Virginia. He served in the Virginia State Senate, and represented Virginia for 13 years in the U.S. Senate after the American Civil War. He had been ineligible to serve in Congress because of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade anyone from holding public office who had sworn allegiance to the United States and then sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, his restrictions were removed at the suggestion of the Freedmen's Bureau when he aided a dying former slave after the War. He was the first person who had sided with the Confederacy to serve in the U.S. Senate. Issues in his senatorial career included the Arlington Memorial debate, as he found the initial proposal to relocate the dead distasteful, yet wanted to defend the memory of Robert E. Lee. He was also an outspoken Funder during Virginia's heated debate as to how much of its pre-War debt the state ought to have been obliged to pay back. The controversy culminated in the formation of the Readjuster Party and the appointment of William Mahone as its leader, ending Johnston's Senate career. (Full article...)

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