The impeachment effort did not seem to alarm the president. At his next Cabinet meeting, the discussion of impeachment centered on legislation proposed by Stevens to suspend Johnson for the period between a House vote approving an impeachment resolution and the completion of a trial in the Senate. The notion of suspending the president during the impeachment process had been afoot for some time. Johnson was on record denying Congress’s power to do so, and his position was plainly correct. At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, two delegates proposed that an official who had been impeached by the House should be suspended from office until tried by the Senate. The Convention rejected the proposal by a wide margin. General Grant assured the president that the army would obey his orders if Congress tried to arrest him before the end of a Senate trial. The Cabinet, including Grant, advised Johnson not to comply with any attempt to suspend him. Though Stevens continued to endorse the suspension legislation, it was never adopted.
On the eve of the House vote, the president did his customary best to enrage his opponents. Johnson’s annual message to Congress defiantly challenged that body. His first sentence angrily described the “continued disorganization of the Union, to which the President has so often called the attention of Congress.” Though he had hoped for reconciliation after the war, he wrote, none had occurred, a failure for which he assumed no responsibility. In apocalyptic tones, he announced, “[C]andor compels me to declare at this time there is no Union.” So much for binding up the wounds.
Averting his eyes from the pandemic racial violence in the South, Johnson argued for immediate withdrawal of federal troops and the return of complete power to the Southern states. He attacked Negro suffrage as forcing Southerners to “degrade themselves by subjection to the negro race.” The American republic, he declared, was “the glory of white men.” To avoid having “the inferior obtain the ascendancy” over whites, Johnson rejected any effort to “Africanize” the South, which would inevitably leave it a barren wilderness.
Then the president got to the nub of the matter. How far would he go in opposing Congress? Johnson said he had “deliberated much” on the question. In such highly charged times, he observed, his opposition to Congress could “produce violent collision,” which would be “simply civil war.” Although civil war should be avoided, if possible, the president insisted that he might be “compelled to stand on his rights, and maintain them, regardless of consequences.” Not exactly oil on troubled waters.
This time, the president’s provocative and racist rhetoric failed to unite Republicans against him. Even his implicit threat of armed resistance to Congress could not muster a majority for the impeachment resolution. The telling consideration for most congressmen was the one trumpeted by Chairman Wilson: the impeachers did not claim that Johnson had committed a crime.
On December 5, crowds again jammed the House galleries, this time to hear the impeachment debate. The seats reserved for diplomats and for ladies were full. Equal numbers of blacks and whites filled the gentlemen’s galleries. For the difficult assignment of justifying the impeachment resolution, the impeachers turned to Representative George Boutwell of Massachusetts. Having started his political life in the temperance movement, Boutwell brought a Puritan austerity to his labors. Small, bearded, and mostly self-educated, he had been governor of Massachusetts as a Democrat, the first commissioner of internal revenue during the Civil War, and a member of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on reconstruction. He was recognized as a man of “cool temperament, thoroughly honest mind, and sober judgment.” He could be long-winded, though, having earned the sobriquet “Steady Wind Blowing Aft.”
Boutwell’s prim exterior cloaked a violent passion to depose Andrew Johnson. In a magazine article the year before, he pronounced that the president “conspires with the traitors in the loyal States and the Rebels of the disloyal states for the humiliation, the degradation, the political enslavement of the loyal people of the country.” A young French doctor living in New York, Georges Clemenceau, who would be France’s prime minister during World War I, was transfixed by this American political brawl. According to Clemenceau, Boutwell was “too much a fanatic” to win his case, but also was “too honest and sincere for his opinions to be ignored by his party.” Over the next six months, the Massachusetts congressman would be a mainstay of the impeachment effort.
Saddled with a majority report that repelled more support than it attracted, Boutwell made one of the best speeches of the impeachment season. In an oration of over two hours, delivered on consecutive days, he struck a sober, restrained tone. After paying tribute to Johnson’s “talents and courage in a bad cause,” Boutwell rejected the legal argument pressed by Chairman Wilson’s minority report. If Wilson was right that impeachment was available only for indictable crimes, Boutwell said, the resolution must fail. But he insisted that impeachment can remove from office those who fail the public trust, not solely criminals.
In addition to the usual recitation of English and American impeachment cases, Boutwell urged that the demands of government compelled his view. What if the president denied the legitimacy of Congress and ignored its enactments (positions that Johnson had flirted with for almost two years)? Congress must be able to remove him from office even if he violates no criminal statute. Any other view, he said, “is virtually the end of the Government.”
When Boutwell turned to the factual allegations against the president, he confessed that he labored under great difficulties. He did not dwell on any specific incident, but listed the major actions of Johnson’s tenure: constituting Southern state governments in 1865, suspending loyalty oaths in some situations, his Washington’s Birthday speech in 1866, his many vetoes of legislation, his return of confiscated land and railroads to former rebels. These were all “tributary offenses,” Boutwell continued, that supported his “great crime”: “the restoration of the rebels to power under and in the Government of the country.” In conclusion, he emphasized Johnson’s failures as a leader. Two years after the nation emerged from war, “distracted, torn, and bleeding,” millions of former rebels were “still bold, defiant, aggressive,” while the freedmen faced constant danger. Boutwell demanded Johnson’s removal not for any crime, but because he was unfit to be president.
Rep. George Boutwell of Massachusetts, Radical Republican and ardent impeachment advocate.
Knowing that the impeachment resolution was a goner, Chairman Wilson spoke for only half as long. In a disingenuous opening, he denied “the slightest importance” to the question whether an impeachable offense had to be a crime. Wilson then pressed a spirited challenge on precisely that question, pointing out that although a purely political impeachment might give Boutwell the result he wanted, “can he not see that it may return to plague him?” Did Boutwell wish to give such an impeachment power to his opponents? The Iowan asked how Congress could define a political offense that warrants impeachment. “Is it,” he inquired, “the doing of something that the dominant party in the country does not like?” Wilson called Johnson “the worst of Presidents,” but repeated that he should be punished through “the suffrages of the people.” Wilson closed with more questions, practical ones:
If we cannot arraign the President for a specific crime for what are we to proceed against him? For a bundle of generalities such as we have here….? If we cannot state upon paper a specific crime how are we to carry this case to the Senate for trial?
No one else spoke on the merits of the resolution. After considerable squabbling, the impeachers succeeded in having a roll call vote on the resolution. On December 7, the House voted. “Yes” votes came from only dedicated Radicals like Boutwell, Stevens, Ben Butler of Massachusetts, and Ashley of Ohio. During some of the orations, Stevens had reclined on a sofa at the rear of the chamber. Rushing to his seat to cast the final vote for the resolution, he tottered unsteadily. One news account claimed that two-thirds of those voting yes would have gone the other way if their votes had been needed to defeat the measur
e. With Wilson and John Bingham of Ohio leading moderate and conservative Republicans into the “nay” column, the impeachers failed to command even a majority of Republicans. Fifty-seven voted in favor (all Republicans), 106 opposed (including 68 Republicans), and 22 did not vote.
The resolution’s defeat flowed from its failure to identify an indictable crime. As remembered by Senator John Sherman of Ohio, the House was unwilling to use the “imposing process” of impeachment for “misconduct, immorality, intoxication or neglect of duties.” Other factors played a role, too, such as the timing of the vote. Johnson’s dismissal of Sheridan and Sickles, and his suspension of Stanton, were months in the past. Anger over those actions had cooled.
Presidential politics also split the Republicans. Many eagerly anticipated having Grant as the party’s standard-bearer in the 1868 election. “Grant clubs” around the country supported his presumed candidacy. Two days before Boutwell began his speech, a pro-Grant rally in New York drew a large, enthusiastic crowd. Less than a week after the vote, twenty of the twenty-three members of the Republican National Committee expressed a preference for Grant at the head of the Republican ticket. Some Radicals, though, mistrusted the general, not realizing that the silent Grant truly opposed the president. Radicals who doubted Grant saw impeachment as a way to place Ben Wade of Ohio in the Executive Mansion. Wade might divert the 1868 nomination toward a more reliable Radical, or even seize the nomination himself. That reasoning provoked a contrary feeling among conservative Republicans that it would be better to keep Andrew Johnson in the White House for fifteen more months.
Whatever the reasons for individual votes on the resolution, its crushing defeat had long-term consequences. The House, despite a three-fourths Republican majority, rejected purely political impeachment. The impeachers would have to come up with something that felt more like a criminal offense. Presidential impeachments inevitably contain a healthy dose of politics, but never again would a serious presidential impeachment proceed on the sole basis that the incumbent was not fit for the office. If that argument could not be sustained by the massive Republican majority in December 1867, which detested Andrew Johnson, it would never prevail. This result likely abandoned the initial meaning of the impeachment clauses in 1787, but Boutwell and the majority never effectively answered the practical questions that Wilson raised. How could purely political impeachments be limited? How could such a trial ever end? Wouldn’t it degenerate into a standardless test of political power—in effect, a vote of no confidence—rather than a judgment of fitness to be president?
A day after the impeachment vote, Mrs. Lydia Smith admitted a deputation of Radical leaders to Stevens’s house at 213 B Street. They came to sit with their leader, no matter how decrepit he might seem, and sift through the wreckage of the impeachment drive. Fired by Stevens, the group resolved not to abandon the cause. They would bring up impeachment again and again and again. As a Republican remembered their strategy, “the closest watch would be kept upon every action of the President, and if an apparently justifying cause could be found the project of his removal would be vigorously renewed.” They knew that this president was prone to misadventures, particularly when flush with success. Johnson had been riding high in 1866 when he delivered his disastrous Washington’s Birthday speech, then embarked on his equally disastrous Swing Around the Circle. Johnson might even, after careful deliberation, step squarely into the trap that Stevens had laid for him in the Tenure of Office Act. They would bide their time, even if time was no ally for Stevens.
With the defeat of the impeachment resolution, partisans of President Johnson could abandon one effort they had just initiated. Collector Henry Smythe of New York, threatened with impeachment himself earlier in the year, had circulated a subscription among the 1,200 patronage employees of his Custom House. The subscription stated that each employee would contribute the predetermined amount next to his name, which was proportionate to the worker’s income, “for the cause of the country, and opposed to the impeachment of President Johnson.” Despite some initial resistance, all employees made the compulsory contribution, beginning at $5 apiece and rising from there. No one ever accounted for where that money ended up.
IMPEACHMENT, ROUND THREE
DECEMBER 12, 1867–FEBRUARY 15, 1868
I regard [the president] as a foolish and stubborn man, doing even right things in a wrong way, and in a position where the evil that he does is immensely increased by his manner of doing it.
SENATOR JOHN SHERMAN, MARCH 1, 1868
THE COUNTRY DID not stand still while the House of Representatives wrestled with impeachment. The Freedmen’s Bureau marshaled a food relief effort in response to poor harvests in the South. While North and South failed to reconcile, East and West strained to join each other. Bold men were planning the next surge in construction of the railroad that would tie the nation together. As soon as the spring thaw permitted, the Chinese crews of the Central Pacific would resume laying track east from California. Mostly Irish crews of the Union Pacific would work west, through Wyoming. Mormon crews would pitch in when the two lines reached Utah. In New York, financial titans Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould fenced for control of the Erie Railway, a battle that would extend for months. The nation was growing. In March of 1867, Czar Alexander II of Russia had ordered negotiations to sell Alaska to the United States. The two nations quickly agreed on a price: $7 million. Soon Congress would have to appropriate the funds to pay for the deal.
The cultural rage of the winter season was the lecture tour of British novelist Charles Dickens. In Boston, the queue for tickets to his readings lasted from morning till night. Patient devotees warmed themselves in the street with strong drink and blazing stoves. Scalpers demanded as much as $15 per ticket (at least $210 in current values). New York newspapers proclaimed “Dickens Fever” and reported skyrocketing prices for tickets to his lectures.
By early January, Washington had its own literary lecturer in the form of humorist Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). When he postponed an appearance, Clemens ran a notice in a local paper explaining that his manager fell ill while listening to a rehearsal of the talk. “[U]pon my sacred honor,” Clemens wrote, “I did not think it would be so severe on him.” To speed his manager’s recovery, he pledged, “I will not read the lecture to him any more.”
For ten Southern states, the reconstruction mandated by Congress was under way. (Because Tennessee reentered the Union in 1866, it avoided this stage of Reconstruction.) Under army supervision, Southerners registered once more to vote, but this time the freedmen participated, while many ex-rebels abstained or were excluded for their disloyalty.
In Virginia, for example, 105,000 freedmen registered alongside 120,000 whites. With many whites boycotting the election, Virginia’s voters chose delegates for a convention to write a new state constitution, barely two years after a Confederate-dominated convention had adopted one under President Johnson’s sponsorship. Of the 102 delegates to Virginia’s new convention, twenty-four were blacks and a majority were Republicans. The political activity sharpened racial tensions. The army arrested a black delegate, Lewis Lindsay, for giving a speech “calculated to incite the colored against the white.” Newspapers fretted over the risk of a race war.
This new Reconstruction unleashed the political energies of blacks and the fury of whites. Emancipation had brought a social revolution, but Johnson’s state governments preserved white political dominance. Not anymore. Now the revolution reached into political life. State constitutional conventions for Alabama and Louisiana met in November, while five other states (Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida) elected delegates to their conventions. Georgia’s convention met in December. These conventions, disparaged by many Southern whites, turned political expectations upside down. Black delegates won elections and proudly took their seats. Because many black delegates had limited education, they often followed the lead of white Republicans, or of those blacks who traveled from the Nor
th to experience this unprecedented opportunity for political engagement.
Nevertheless, the reality of black men in public office provoked powerful feelings in both races. The state conventions wrote charters for state governments that would be elected by white and black voters. The new state constitutions incorporated guarantees of equal rights, Negro suffrage, and mandatory public education.
Under the new state constitutions, black men would serve as state officials, legislators, even congressmen. In a fitting turnabout, the Reconstruction governments of Southern states would provide the votes needed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Southern whites recoiled from this political revolution, appalled by the prospect of “Negro rule.” As the freed slaves entered Southern politics, white violence evolved into politically motivated intimidation.
In the White House, the president took no break from his brutal schedule. As one of his aides remembered, it was as though he wanted to do all the work of the executive branch himself. Johnson rose at dawn and reviewed papers until family breakfast at 8 A.M. Office matters consumed him from 9 until 4, though he occasionally ducked across the hall to look in on his wife, and always welcomed the grandchildren. After a break for dinner and a walk or carriage ride, he would preside over the social event of the evening. He finished his day with more paperwork and political visitors until 11 P.M., often swapping information with those newsmen he trusted. Johnson was enjoying good health, free from the painful kidney stones (he called them “gravel”) that sometimes beset him. Ten years earlier, he had lost some use of his right arm when it was broken during a train derailment. The injury did not limit his political activity, though prolonged handshaking must have been a trial.
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy Page 13
