Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy

by David O. Stewart

  The argument over reconstruction included a central legal disagreement. Radicals contended that the Southern states were conquered territories, or had committed suicide, and thus could be governed by the victorious United States in any way it saw fit. The Constitution gives Congress the power to ensure that each state has a “republican form of government,” the Radicals pointed out, and Congress had to do so for the “new” Southern states. Stevens, the most determined advocate of radical change, demanded that large Southern plantations be confiscated and distributed to the freedmen. The Constitution, he added, must be amended to match the new reality of the United States, vindicating the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence. He thought the nation was “like a giant that had outgrown its garments, and if its new constitutional garment would not fit, it must be enlarged.”

  Johnson, in contrast, embraced the principle that the states were sovereign entities joined in an indissoluble union. He held the metaphysical view that despite the acts of secession and four years of war, the Southern states never left the Union. “There is no such thing as reconstruction,” he said six weeks after taking office. “These States have not gone out of the Union, therefore reconstruction is not necessary.” He denied the national government’s power to intrude on state prerogatives, certainly not to vindicate such a foggy notion as a “republican form of government.” It made no sense to him that the Congress could tell the states what to do. As he explained to a British interviewer:

  The States had brought Congress into existence, and now Congress proposed to destroy the States. It proposed to abolish the original and elementary principle of its being. It was as if the creature turned round on the creator and attempted to destroy him.

  After the war, in Johnson’s view, the federal government had only to help Southerners form their governments. Once formed, those sovereign state governments had the untrammeled right to do what they thought best. He might nudge Southern leaders to adopt certain policies—he suggested they extend the vote to black men who could read or owned $250 of real estate—but he denied the power of the federal government to dictate those policies. Most of all, he wanted the Southern states quickly to reconstitute their governments, elect representatives to Congress, and resume their role in the nation.

  Johnson thus became the leading advocate of states’ rights, of preserving “the Constitution as it is,” without changes beyond the prohibition of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment. He had an almost mystical confidence in the Constitution drafted in 1787, never mind that it had not prevented a calamitous civil war. An aide remarked that Johnson stood apart from established religions but “[i]f he had a bible at all, as far as I could learn, it was the Constitution of the United States.”

  Shortly after Johnson became president, War Secretary Stanton presented a plan for the reconstruction of North Carolina that he had developed for Lincoln. Under the plan, the president would appoint a governor for the state. That governor would call a convention to write a new state constitution that, at a minimum, would bar slavery and rescind secession.

  Johnson issued the North Carolina plan on May 29, 1865, six weeks after taking office, largely as Stanton had prepared it. Johnson’s action included two controversial elements. First, it signaled that he would exclude Congress from the process of reconstructing the state’s government. Lincoln had proceeded the same way during the war, but he had been exercising emergency war powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This was now peacetime. Those powers had evaporated. Though Johnson could not invoke emergency war powers, as a practical matter he could act on his own because Congress was in recess, not scheduled to meet again until December, more than six months away. Johnson could have called Congress back into session but chose not to do so. He preferred to take advantage of the opportunity to shape the restored Southern states on his own. By cutting Congress out of his reconstruction effort, Johnson courted conflict with that body.

  In addition, Johnson rejected Stanton’s recommendation that the freed slaves of North Carolina be guaranteed the right to vote. For Johnson, the Southern states, not the federal government, should decide the rights of the freedmen and freedwomen. Secretary of State Seward explained this policy in simple terms: “According to the constitution those citizens acting politically in their respective states must reorganize their state governments. We cannot reorganize for them.” In a separate proclamation, the president began to recede from his demand for vengeance against the “traitors.” His proclamation granted amnesty for all but the wealthiest and most powerful former Confederates, including restoration of their voting rights. Only six weeks after the end of the war, the former rebels were to regain control of their own governments, without any role for the freed slaves.

  An early challenge to Johnson’s policy came from Thad Stevens of Pennsylvania, who would swiftly become the new president’s leading opponent. Then seventy-two years old and in his sixth term in Congress, the Radical leader was a bold, polarizing figure. Stevens shared with Johnson both humble birth and a largely fatherless childhood. Stevens’s father, a farmer and surveyor in northern Vermont, slid into drink, finally drifting away from the family. Stevens’s determined mother put her clever second son through Dartmouth College. Stevens made the most of that advantage when he moved to Pennsylvania, becoming a feared lawyer and an iron manufacturer of middling success.

  Perhaps the greatest influence on this future political powerhouse was one Stevens never escaped—a club foot that marked him in an era when many were intolerant of physical handicaps. A neighbor recalled that other boys would “laugh at him, boy-like, and mimic his limping walk,” which “rankled” young Thad. Though he ultimately stood six feet tall and developed a strong, athletic constitution, Stevens always confronted the popular superstition that his deformity was the work of the devil. Those painful early experiences helped form the future politician. Stevens’s lameness—not to mention that of his older brother, who had two club feet—contributed to a dark, sardonic outlook that could intimidate both friends and foes. It also led him to sympathize with underdogs, the poor, those with afflictions of any kind. A congressional colleague recalled that Stevens “seemed to feel that every wrong inflicted upon the human race was a blow struck at himself.”

  Nineteenth-century America had no greater underdogs than the slaves in the South, and Stevens became both a fervent opponent of slavery and one of the least prejudiced white men in public office. As a lawyer before the war, he represented escaped slaves and opposed the slave catchers who searched for supposed fugitives. Neighbors told stories of Stevens purchasing freedom for slaves. His Lancaster home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad for blacks fleeing bondage. For his last nineteen years, Stevens’s home was maintained by Lydia Smith, a “mulatto, who in her youth had great beauty of person.” Stevens always treated her with respect, addressing her as “Mrs. Smith” and including her in social exchanges as an equal. Whispers insisted that the two were lovers. He never answered the whispers.

  In the House of Representatives, Stevens’s stern will and slashing rhetoric commanded respect and won him the leadership of the Republican majority. Another Republican remembered that most legislators chose not to tangle with the Radical from Lancaster: “[M]any a new member was extinguished by his sarcastic thrusts.” An adversary recounted Stevens using a single sentence to “lay a daring antagonist sprawling on the ground…the luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily charged electric wire.” One enchanted observer granted Stevens “the very front of Jove himself. Nothing can terrify him, and nothing can turn him from his purpose.”

  Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Radical Republican leader.

  Stevens’s greatest weapon was a dry sense of humor, which struck “like lurid freaks of lightning,” launched “with a perfectly serious mien, or…a grim smile.” Walking a narrow path one day, he encountered a rival who refused to let him pass, growling, “I never stand aside for a skunk.” Giving w
ay, Stevens replied equably, “I always do.” Advised that President Johnson was “a self-made man,” Stevens answered that he was “glad to hear it, for it relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility.” For one thrust, Stevens used President Lincoln as his foil. When Lincoln asked if a proposed Cabinet appointee would steal, the congressman answered, “I don’t think he would steal a red-hot stove.” Hearing of the remark, the appointee demanded a retraction. Old Thad obliged. He reminded Lincoln of his statement that the appointee would not steal a red-hot stove, then added, “I now take that back.”

  Stevens could mock his own pretensions. After typhoid fever caused his hair to fall out, he wore a lush wig to conceal his baldness. One observer thought Stevens wore the hairpiece so haphazardly that it was “at the first glance recognized as such.” A female admirer evidently missed the telltale signs and requested a lock of the congressman’s hair. Ever gallant, Stevens yanked off the wig and offered her all of it.

  By mid-May of 1865, Stevens was troubled that Johnson had recognized the “restored” government of Virginia, which was created during the war but existed mostly as an idea, not a reality. The Pennsylvanian insisted that only Congress could reconstruct the Southern states. In response to the president’s proclamation on Virginia, Stevens delivered a letter that made no pretense to courtesy. Johnson’s action was “beyond my comprehension,” he wrote, “and may provoke a smile, but can hardly satisfy the judg[men]t of thinking people.” Stevens advised Johnson to call Congress into session to address the question. Otherwise, many would “think that the executive was approaching usurpation.” Icily, Johnson made no reply to the leading figure in the House of Representatives.

  Seven weeks later, Stevens sent another letter to the president. Following the model set in his North Carolina proclamation, Johnson was appointing governors for each Southern state, instructing them to call conventions to write new state constitutions. Then, Johnson intended, the Southern states could resume their places in the national government. Admitting to “a candor to which men in high places are seldom accustomed,” Stevens came straight to the point: “Among all the leading Union men of the North with whom I have had intercourse, I do not find one who approves of your policy…[which] will greatly injure the country.” Like Stevens’s earlier letter, this one asked Johnson to wait for congressional action. Once more, Johnson did not deign to reply.

  For the other Southern states, the president issued proclamations like the one for North Carolina. Nurtured by Johnson, the seceded states wrote new constitutions, formed new governments, and chose congressmen and senators to send to Washington. Behind the scenes, Johnson advised Southerners to follow a moderate course and not restore former Confederates to power, but these were mere suggestions. For Johnson, the states must choose their own way. According to the newly appointed governor of South Carolina, the president asked only “that I write him occasionally and let him know how I was getting on in reconstructing the state.” Johnson’s designee as governor of Virginia complained that on critical issues he could get neither instruction nor advice from the president.

  Instead of reconstructed Southern states led by men committed to the Union, Johnson spawned resurrected Confederate governments that bristled with former rebels in high office. The new Southern governments embarrassed the president who so recently demanded the punishment of traitors, yet Johnson made no public objection. The sovereign states, for him, could do as they wished.

  Two features of the new Southern state governments threatened immediate trouble for Johnson. The first was the nature of the men chosen to serve as congressmen and senators from the seceded states. Most, according to a congressional report in 1866, were “notorious and unpardoned rebels, men who could not take the prescribed oath of office, and who made no secret of their hostility to the government and the people of the United States.” They included ten former Confederate generals and five more army officers of lower rank, seven former members of the Confederate Congress, and three men who were members of conventions that voted to secede in 1861. That many of the new state officials had initially opposed secession in 1861 and reluctantly followed their states into rebellion—traits that may have made them moderates in the eyes of other Southerners—made no difference to Northerners who were outraged by the specter of “unrepentant secessionists” in the halls of Congress. Having started and fought a war that cost hundreds of thousands of Northern lives, these former Confederates proposed to take the reins of power in the national government they had attacked with vast armies. The presence of such men in Washington City, one congressional leader recalled, “inflamed” Northern congressmen, driving many “to act from anger.”

  Johnson knew that the Southern states were following a reckless and arrogant course, but he would defend to the death their right to do so. He wrote anxiously to the provisional governor of Georgia after learning that all of that state’s new congressmen had been so involved in the Confederate cause that none could take the oath of office required for Congress. One of Georgia’s new senators was Alexander H. Stephens, who had been vice president of the Confederacy and was then under indictment for treason. Stephens’s selection, Johnson wrote privately, was “exceedingly impolitic.” Yet the president made no public objection to the Southerners’ choices.

  Equally incendiary, the restored Confederate governments began to adopt “black codes” that “practically deprived the negro of every trace of liberty.” One Republican called them “a striking embodiment of the idea that although the former owner has lost his individual right of property in the former slave, ‘the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.’” Though specific terms varied from state to state, the pattern was for “[t]hat which was no offense in a white man [to be] a heinous crime, if committed by a negro.” Vagrancy laws allowed the arrest of idle blacks, who would be put to work by local governments or loaned out to private employers—in short, a straightforward restoration of slavery. Blacks were denied the right to serve on juries, to testify in court, to own property. These “Johnson governments” certainly would never allow the freedmen to vote. Johnson raised no objection to the black codes, either.

  The president’s silence on these Southern actions told Southern whites that he was on their side. In a Mississippi hotel, one confided that Johnson “don’t believe much in the niggers, neither, and when we’re admitted into Congress we’re all right.” Beginning in late May of 1865, when Johnson announced the terms for North Carolina’s new government, white Southerners came to expect the president would help them restore much of their former lives. According to one traveler, men in the South “quoted the North Carolina proclamation, and thanked God that there had suddenly been found some sort of breakwater against Northern fanaticism.” By the end of 1865, a Northerner traveling in the South found that whites assumed “that the President had gone over to the so-called Democratic party, and would use the whole power of his office to break down the so-called Black Republicans.” Northerners began to fret, in the words of Radical Ben Wade of Ohio, that Johnson was dissipating “the whole moral effect of our victories over the rebellion,” while “the golden opportunity for humiliating and destroying the influence of the Southern aristocracy has gone forever.”

  This fear grew as the president implemented his program for granting amnesty to Southerners who took up arms. Johnson’s amnesty program did not include several categories of rebels, notably those owning taxable property worth more than $20,000. Those rich Southerners would have to beg the president for their pardons. The grandees who had snubbed the former tailor’s apprentice for decades would have to seek mercy from President Andrew Johnson. They did so in droves. For months during the second half of 1865, the White House was clogged with wealthy Southerners, hat in hand, asking for their pardons.

  Initially the pardon program seemed to express Johnson’s resentment of the Southern aristocracy, forcing the rich to crawl to him for dispensation. His lifelong class hostility was captured in the jibe that “[i]f Andy J
ohnson were a snake, he would hide in the grass and bite the heels of rich men’s children.” But Northerners came to detest the pardon process, fearing that Johnson was being seduced by those who solicited his favor. Not only were the former rebels getting their pardons, but they also were tying the president ever more closely to the traditional Southern power structure. “They kept the Southern President surrounded by an atmosphere of Southern geniality,” complained one New England reporter, “Southern prejudices, Southern aspirations.” With a heavy daily diet of Southern visitors, Johnson “heard little else, was given time to think little else.” By 1866, Johnson had granted individual pardons to more than 7,000 Southerners.

  As the days of 1865 grew shorter, Johnson’s honeymoon period as president was drawing to a close. With no Congress to inhibit him, he had swiftly reconstituted Southern state governments, ignoring the views of Republicans like Stevens. But the Republicans were coming. Soon they would arrive in Washington City with the overwhelming majorities they won in the 1864 election: 42 to 10 in the Senate, and 149 to 42 in the House. To avoid a challenge from these powerful Republicans, Johnson would have to demonstrate that his policy had succeeded, that his efforts—often called “presidential reconstruction”—were restoring justice and prosperity. Though no policy could have achieved those goals so quickly, the violence and poverty that oppressed the South would galvanize the opposition to Johnson.

  LAND OF REVOLUTION

  NOVEMBER 1865

  Nothing renders society more restless than…a revolution but half accomplished.

  CARL SCHURZ, 1865

  THE SCARS OF civil war ran fresh and deep across the land. In the North, the sacrifice of men and treasure had been appalling. An estimated 360,000 Union troops died of all causes. The towns and roads seemed littered with amputees, soldiers who survived the brutal medical practices of the age, constant reminders of the war’s murderous price. But the North had won, and few battles had been waged on its soil. Through the northern and western states, 23 million people gathered themselves for a burst of economic expansion that would transform the continent. The industrial energy devoted to wartime production would be directed to building railroads to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific.