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

by David O. Stewart

  Once more, Stevens declared the Republican Party full of cowards. Once more, he pronounced impeachment dead. Once more, Johnson had survived. No matter how many ill-advised quarrels the president picked, no matter how many apparent blunders he committed, Stevens could not find the formula for a successful impeachment. Not enough Republicans shared his view that impeachment was a political tool for removing a woeful president like Andrew Johnson. And now Stevens could not even get an impeachment resolution out of his own committee. His failure was so plain that Samuel Clemens published a labored spoof portraying Stevens and other Radicals as nurses forced finally to admit the death of “our brother, impeachment.”

  If he could not get rid of the man in the White House, Stevens resolved to cut off even more presidential powers. “[T]hough dying,” Clemenceau wrote, Stevens “proposes more bills in one day than any of his colleagues in a month.” He proposed to give General Grant unfettered control over Reconstruction in the South, a power that Grant did not want. Another bill aimed to limit the president’s recourse to the courts by requiring a two-thirds majority of the Supreme Court before a law could be declared unconstitutional. Stevens’s Reconstruction Committee was preparing legislation to readmit individual Southern states to the Union. Even without impeachment, there was plenty to do.

  With the failure of this latest impeachment effort, Johnson’s thoughts turned to revenge. After seven months of scheming, he still was saddled with Edwin Stanton at the War Department. And now he had a serious score to settle with Ulysses Grant. A reporter who visited the White House found the president looking “as if he would like to raise…perfect hell.” Indeed, the reporter continued, “he expects to crush his enemies.”

  That vindictive spirit blinded Johnson to the damage he was doing to his own cause. Why not appoint a secretary of war whom the Senate would confirm? Even if such a candidate were far from his first choice, he would certainly be preferable to Stanton. But Johnson had no appetite for compromise. Indeed, he had achieved the implausible feat of making Stanton, perhaps the most disliked official in Washington, an object of sympathy. To many Americans, the president no longer seemed like the nation’s leader, but rather like a man obsessed with settling personal scores.

  SHOWDOWN ON SEVENTEENTH STREET

  FEBRUARY 15–21, 1868

  The President called upon the lightning and the lightning came.

  CLEMENCEAU, FEBRUARY 28, 1868

  GENERAL SHERMAN PLAINLY was the answer to Johnson’s problems. Of the Union Army heroes, Sherman was second only to Grant. After two years as Grant’s senior corps commander in the West, the general called “Uncle Billy” by his admiring soldiers had driven an army across the South, captured Atlanta, and conducted his famously destructive and demoralizing march to the sea.

  But Sherman was not only a Northern hero. He also was strongly sympathetic to Southern whites. Before the war, while superintendent of what is now Louisiana State University, he grew fond of Southern ways and people. Though he was a remorseless battlefield foe whose name would be reviled by generations of Southerners, he was a generous victor. In North Carolina shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, Sherman accepted the surrender of the last major Confederate army in the field. His terms were so magnanimous that War Secretary Stanton denounced them to the press and Grant had to hurry to North Carolina to retract them.

  The red-bearded Sherman was no fan of congressional Radicals or racial equality. He did not want blacks in his fighting corps, preferring a white man’s war. “With my opinions of negroes and my experience, yes, prejudice,” he wrote, “I won’t trust niggers to fight.” After the war, he thought blacks should be free, “but not put on an equality with the whites.” Called a race-hater by one Northern newspaper, Sherman thought the Radicals were trying to foment a new civil war. He supported Johnson’s 1866 vetoes of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Act. One Cabinet member hailed Sherman as a conservative opponent of the Radicals.

  Lieutenant General William T. Sherman.

  Sherman’s powerful family connections would guarantee Senate confirmation of him for any appointment. His brother, John, was the junior senator from Ohio, a Republican not usually counted among the Radicals. His father-in-law, Thomas Ewing, had been a senator from Ohio, plus treasury secretary in the early 1840s and interior secretary in the early 1850s. Ewing also was Sherman’s surrogate father. When Sherman’s own father died, leaving a widow with eleven children, Ewing took in nine-year-old Tecumseh Sherman, gave him the first name William, and raised him with his own children. Ewing was a Washington power broker still. Johnson’s attorney general, Henry Stanberry, had been Ewing’s law partner, while Ewing also sponsored Interior Secretary Orville Browning.

  From Johnson’s standpoint, Sherman seemed too good to be true. Which, it turned out, he was.

  Many high-ranking soldiers profess a disdain for politics but are drawn to it by ambition, or by a sense of duty, or a mixture of the two. Not Sherman. His horror of the political world was unshakable. “Washington is as corrupt as Hell,” he wrote to his wife in May 1865. “I will avoid it as a pest house.” Moreover, Sherman would never allow himself to be used against Grant. Twice already, the volatile Sherman had deflected Johnson’s efforts to raise him above Grant.

  As January ground to its acrimonious close, the president contrived a new set of lures designed to overcome Sherman’s resistance. Johnson offered to create a military district for Sherman—the District of the Atlantic—that would include Washington City, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia. Though Sherman might dread Washington, the president knew that Mrs. Sherman longed to be in the nation’s capital, close to her father and brothers. Johnson also proposed to appoint Sherman “Brevet” (or temporary) General of the Army, placing him at the same rank as Grant and making him the third officer in American history (after Washington and Grant) to hold that rank. Then Johnson would name him interim war secretary. Stanton would be gone for good, Grant would be subordinated to an officer he liked and respected, and Johnson would be able to sleep at night.

  In a passionate letter, Sherman declined the offer, arguing that it would guarantee conflict among the president, Grant, and Sherman. He underscored his personal wish to be nowhere near Washington, pointing to the city’s impact on Grant:

  I have been with General Grant in the midst of death and slaughter…and yet I never saw him more troubled since he has been in Washington, and been compelled to read himself a “sneak and deceiver,” based on reports of the four of the Cabinet, and apparently with your knowledge. If this political atmosphere can disturb the equanimity of one so guarded and so prudent as he is, what will be the result with me, so careless, so outspoken as I am?

  Sherman closed with more sound advice for Johnson. Since Stanton had no actual power now, he wrote, Johnson could afford to leave him in office to perform empty ministerial duties. Sherman also warned Johnson not to use force against Stanton, a prospect that the president evidently had raised.

  Johnson suffered a serious fit of indecision over what to do with this balky general. The president was firm to the point of obstinacy once he made up his mind, but he could hesitate before major decisions. His loyal navy secretary thought this his greatest weakness. On February 6, Johnson ordered the creation of the Department of the Atlantic with Sherman in charge. The next day, he withdrew the order. One day later, he changed course again, directing preparation of an order creating the new district but not naming Sherman as head of it. Johnson finally issued the order on February 12, directing that Sherman command the new district. On the day after, he nominated Sherman as brevet general.

  Sherman was wild when he learned of the president’s actions. He thought first of resigning from the army. To Grant, he likened the president’s order to “Hamlet’s ghost, it curdles my blood and mars my judgment.” To his brother the senator, Sherman complained that Johnson “would make use of me to beget violence.” He asked his brother to oppose his promotion in the Senat
e. Once more, Sherman pleaded with Johnson to abandon his plan. When Johnson received Sherman’s protest on February 19, he finally gave it up.

  Yielding to Sherman’s wishes meant that the president would need another strategy for driving Stanton from the War Office on Seventeenth Street. Johnson was in a permanent state of barely suppressed rage. He had endured the disloyalty of Stanton and Grant for too many months. Twice he had watched Congress dismantle his Southern policy. He had survived thirteen months of impeachment investigation and two serious attempts to impeach him. His fury was past the bursting point. He had had enough.

  On Sunday, February 16, President Johnson went to church with his personal secretary, Colonel William Moore. Back at the White House, Moore read to the president from the drama Cato, written in 1713 by Joseph Addison, about the Roman aristocrat who resisted Julius Caesar’s grab for power. The play, with its confrontation between despotic evil (Caesar) and republican virtue (Cato), was a favorite of Americans in the colonial and revolutionary eras. George Washington fell in love with it at age thirteen. To buoy his troops’ flagging spirits during the brutal winter at Valley Forge in 1778, Washington had his officers stage Cato. The play features little action, characters that can only aspire to be two-dimensional, and relentlessly self-righteous cant. It has slid out of favor with modern audiences. For President Johnson, it was pure inspiration.

  “Cato was a man,” he instructed Colonel Moore, “who would not compromise with wrong but being right, died before he would yield.” Johnson pointed out that Caesar offered peace terms to Cato, “but proud old Cato folded his arms and sustained alone by his sense of duty to Rome, dictated…terms to Caesar.” Needless to say, Cato dies at the end of the play.

  Johnson, Colonel Moore concluded, “[w]ithout directly expressing the thought in words,…intimated a parallel between his position and that of Cato.” Moore thought the president saw himself similarly devoted to pursuing the right; Johnson also could seem indifferent to the consequences of his actions, evidently wishing for martyrdom. In a newspaper interview in early February, the president made the point himself. “He said the time had arrived,” the New York Evening Post reported, when he would be “compelled to ignore the Constitution itself or [ignore] an act of Congress [the Tenure of Office Act] clearly unconstitutional.” He would not hesitate to uphold the Constitution, Johnson promised, at the risk of impeachment. Navy Secretary Welles wondered if the president courted impeachment, a glorious political death to rival Cato’s.

  The next day, Johnson sent Colonel Moore to see John Potts, the chief clerk of the War Department. By statute, Potts was to run the department when there was no Secretary. Moore offered Potts the chance to become interim war secretary. Potts could then demand the papers of the department from Stanton; if Stanton resisted, Potts could sue Stanton for control of the department.

  “Mr. Potts,” Moore recorded, “shrank from this.” Understanding Stanton better than the president did, Potts pointed out that the war secretary would simply fire him as chief clerk. When Moore argued that Stanton would no longer be Secretary and thus would have no power to fire him, Potts was not convinced. He knew Stanton. Potts’s refusal disappointed the president. If he could only find the proper man to replace Stanton, Johnson mused, “he would settle the matter this morning.”

  Anticipating that both Potts and Sherman might be unwilling, the president had cultivated a third candidate, Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas. At a meeting with Thomas on February 18, Johnson raised the possibility of placing the adjutant general as interim war secretary. The soldier was willing. Then General Sherman’s letter arrived with its plea to be spared Washington duty, and Potts scurried out of the picture. Johnson turned back to Lorenzo Thomas. Moore, the president’s aide, questioned whether a Thomas appointment would “carry any weight.” The president admitted it would not, but his patience was at an end.

  [Johnson] said he was determined to remove Stanton. Self respect demanded it and if the people did not respect their Chief Magistrate enough to sustain him in such a measure, the President ought to resign.

  But for this unlucky intersection with Andrew Johnson in high dudgeon, Lorenzo Thomas would be remembered, if at all, as a diligent army officer for more than forty years. An 1823 graduate of West Point, he was adjutant general when the Civil War broke out. With power over the army’s personnel matters, the adjutant general had to be politically deft, particularly with senior officers. Thomas did well enough in the job until Stanton took over the department in 1862. The brusque new Secretary had little patience for the avuncular Thomas, a tippler who was fond of dress uniforms. One contemporary recalled Stanton pledging to “pick Lorenzo Thomas up with a pair of tongs and drop him from the nearest window.”

  Stanton never flushed Thomas out of the army, but he stashed the older man out of sight for five years, beginning with an assignment to recruit black soldiers in the Mississippi Valley that kept Thomas on the road for the last two years of the war. After the Confederate surrender, Thomas’s exile included inspections of military offices and national cemeteries. His able second-in-command acted as adjutant general during his extended absence.

  Army Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas.

  Thomas finally returned to Washington in late 1867 to write up his report on the cemeteries. With Stanton suspended from office, Thomas seized several opportunities to ask President Johnson for reinstatement as adjutant general. No doubt the president knew of the bad feeling between Thomas and Stanton. That hostility only commended the adjutant general to the president. Even more gratifying to Johnson, Grant also had little affection for the adjutant general, recently recommending his involuntary retirement. On February 13, the president directed that Thomas be reinstated as adjutant general, then a few days later sounded him out about the War Department appointment.

  On February 20, Johnson again talked with Colonel Moore about appointing Thomas. Even though his aide continued to urge delay, the president would wait no longer. Upon arriving in his office the next morning, Johnson instructed Moore to prepare papers removing Stanton and appointing Thomas. By noon, the tall, thin Thomas was in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Johnson handed two orders to Colonel Moore, who read them aloud. The first informed Stanton that he was removed from office and directed him to relinquish all official papers; the second appointed Thomas as interim war secretary. With conscious dignity, Johnson said he was committed to upholding the Constitution. He adjured Thomas to do the same.

  Before taking this fateful step, Johnson had consulted exactly two people, Colonel Moore and Adjutant General Thomas. The list of those he did not consult is long. Not his deft secretary of state, William Seward. Not his determined attorney general, Henry Stanberry. In fact, no Cabinet member knew of this maneuver ahead of time. Equally in the dark were Johnson’s allies in Congress. The president sometimes turned for advice to senior outsiders like Thomas Ewing or Jeremiah Black, a lawyer who had served in Buchanan’s Cabinet. None, however, heard a whisper of Lorenzo Thomas’s impending elevation.

  By keeping the Thomas appointment secret, Johnson achieved several dubious results. He ensured that the news would explode into the public mind. He also insulated himself from anyone who might argue against the step. Finally, he guaranteed that his supporters would not be prepared to defend the appointment. The situation drove Navy Secretary Welles, a steadfast supporter, to wish that Johnson would “more freely communicate with his Cabinet and Friends.”

  Thomas went to Stanton’s office at the War Department on the morning of February 21 and presented Johnson’s two letters firing Stanton and appointing Thomas. Stanton reviewed the president’s letters, then stalled, asking if he could have time to gather up his personal items. Here the adjutant general committed the blunder of courtesy. “Act your pleasure,” he said. From that moment, Stanton steadily seized the initiative.

  The dismissed war secretary requested a copy of Johnson’s order. While Thomas went off to have a copy made by hand, Stanton dispa
tched messengers to report this stunning development to his friends in Congress. Thomas returned with the copy. General Grant entered Stanton’s office and read over the president’s letter. The two men conferred. Stanton ordered Grant to arrest Thomas. Grant declined. The general-in-chief added, though, that Stanton should hold his office.

  Having caught his breath, Stanton could gauge his position. The Senate had voted only a month before that the president had no grounds for removing him. Stanton had done nothing in the last thirty days to alter that conclusion, so he should be able to rely on support from Congress. The president’s choice to replace him, Lorenzo Thomas, enjoyed neither political support nor public reputation. Stanton likely felt insulted to be replaced by such a nonentity. By choosing Thomas, Johnson revealed his desperation to be rid of Stanton. The Secretary made up his mind. He would cross this Rubicon. Stanton told Thomas that he might not obey the president’s order.

  Thomas’s response was to announce to the Secretary’s aides that he was the new interim war secretary. Stanton directed them to ignore Thomas. Then Stanton wrote out an order commanding Thomas to stop pretending to be the secretary of war.

  Flummoxed by Stanton’s defiance, the adjutant general announced that he would return on Monday, three days hence, to take possession of the office. He retired to report to the president. Johnson received the news stoically, no doubt regretting that he had sent Thomas into such an uneven contest. “Very well,” the president said, adding that Thomas should not wait until Monday, but should take possession of the War Office on the next day.