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

by David O. Stewart

  As the trial wore on, many tried to ferret out which way the uncommitted senators were leaning. Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island was judged an uncertain vote until a newspaper story related his conversation on a train between New York and Washington. The senator told a companion that, unlike his father-in-law, Chief Justice Chase, he believed Johnson should be removed. Sprague thus ended, for a time, active speculation about his vote.

  Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, the Republican Speaker of the House, counted votes carefully. In a note to the editor of the New York Herald, he despaired that Fowler of Tennessee not only was sitting with the Democrats, but also was voting for the defense on evidentiary questions. Grimes of Iowa appeared to be lost, Colfax added, along with Fessenden of Maine. Senator Ross of Kansas was suspiciously intimate with the pro-Johnson Ewing family, while Colfax was anxious about the other Rhode Island senator, Henry Anthony. Colfax named four more Republicans who were mistrusted by others, but he refused to believe they would betray the party on this crucial vote.

  Colfax, like several newspapers, stressed that gamblers were betting heavily on Johnson’s acquittal. The role of gamblers in the impeachment troubled many. By linking private profit with this pivotal public event, the widespread wagering created the same motivations for bribe-paying (and bribe-taking) that arise with gambling on sporting events. Most obviously, betting could be used as a vehicle for payoffs. For example, to bribe a senator to vote for conviction, a person could bet on acquittal with an agent of that senator; if the president were then convicted with that senator’s vote, the briber could pay off on the bet and the senator’s agent could share the winnings with the senator. The same device could be used to acquire votes for acquittal. Indeed, one correspondent reported that abundant funds were available to buy an acquittal. A half-million dollars supposedly was offered for the influence of one man.

  A good deal of the impeachment betting, along with rumors of bribery, was tied to the “Whiskey Ring.” The whiskey ring of the 1860s—a shorthand reference to regional groups of distillers—demonstrated how tax policy can warp private and public conduct. Untaxed until 1862, whiskey then sold for about 24 cents a gallon. To finance the war effort, Congress levied whopping excises on alcoholic spirits, which finally reached $2 per gallon in 1865. Each tax increase took effect after a grace period, which created a powerful incentive to distill huge quantities of whiskey before the higher tax rate applied. As a result, the nation’s distillery capacity tripled and whiskey inventories skyrocketed.

  After 1865, many distillers bribed officials not to collect the huge taxes on their product. The corruption of revenue officers was so rampant that whiskey often sold for less than the amount of the tax, an impossibility without crooked tax collectors. As New York political boss Thurlow Weed wrote to Secretary of State Seward, the Whiskey Ring came to prefer the high tax because it “affords a larger margin for plunder.” Between January and March of 1868, the House Ways and Means Committee conducted hearings on whiskey tax frauds in New York. Bent collectors were prosecuted in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York, but the cases only scratched the surface of the corruption.

  During the impeachment season, the Whiskey Ring loomed as a powerful force for retaining Johnson in office. Any change at the Treasury Department could disrupt the pervasive cheating that was the lifeblood of the industry. After the trial, public attention would focus on how the whiskey interests might have influenced Senate votes.

  The doubtful senators faced nonstop advocacy wherever they turned. Republicans from around the country descended on Washington to urge their senators to convict the president. They emphasized the cause of the party. Losing the impeachment vote, their argument went, would reveal Republicans as weak and divided, thereby ensuring Democratic victories in the fall elections. “There are a thousand Thad Stevenses in Washington shaking their fingers in the faces of the Senate,” wrote the New York Times, “and daring any member to vote otherwise than Thad Stevens desires.” Republican governors of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were in town on April 17 to support the impeachers. Colonel Moore at the White House worried that home state officials were arriving “to manage Senators who are suspected of leaning to the side of the President.”

  Much of the advocacy, in those days before civil service reform, was distinctly mercenary. With every position in the federal government a political appointment, a change in presidents meant a bounty of job opportunities. Republicans nattered eagerly about jobs that would flow to the party faithful when Ben Wade of Ohio took over the Executive Mansion. Though Wade mostly refused to discuss appointments he might make as president, he was beset by office-seekers. His mail bulged with requests for positions. “The worst class of political cormorants,” wrote future President James Garfield, “are thronging the lobbies and filling the hotels in high hopes of plunder when Wade is sworn in.” Wade’s disposition, “not the most agreeable” under ordinary circumstances, soured under the onslaught.

  Though Wade’s term as president would last for less than a year if Johnson were convicted, the Tenure of Office Act gave extra value to any executive appointment by Wade. Under the statute, any president elected in the fall of 1868 would not be able to remove Wade’s nonCabinet appointees without the concurrence of the Senate. Consequently, a Wade appointee with strong Senate sponsors might look forward to lengthy public service. Newspapers routinely speculated about which Cabinet offices would go to which Republican worthies in a Wade Administration. Many thought that Ben Butler’s hard work on the trial would win him the Treasury Department. Speaker Colfax deplored this crass response to the impeachment. “The set of men who assume to speak for Wade,” he wrote at the end of April, “and who are making Cabinets and pressing patronage openly…don’t help with the doubtful men.”

  The pro-Johnson forces pointed with horror at the prospect of Ben Wade in the Executive Mansion, an eventuality that might be only days away. On April 25, the Chicago Tribune predicted that the Ohio senator would be sworn in on May 1. A Democratic newspaper warned that Wade’s elevation would raise the “constant danger of a bold committal to woman suffrage [and] some novelty in the financial system.” Wade also would gain the inside track on the Republican vice presidential nomination. For Republicans who preferred someone else on the ticket with General Grant, that was one more reason not to convict Andrew Johnson.

  William Pitt Fessenden of Maine topped the list of “doubtful men” in the Senate. The acerbic New Englander made no secret of his distaste for impeachment, and for Ben Wade. Playing cards during the trial, he remarked that he would soon be one of the most unpopular men in the nation. He confided to a cousin that the impeachment was “most unwise and can result only in disaster.” He added, “I prefer tar and feathers to lifelong regret.” Though Fessenden was a senator of stature, having served as chairman of the Joint Committee of Fifteen and as treasury secretary, his support for acquittal was apparent early enough that it did not prove especially influential. Moreover, his vote for Johnson was dismissed as resulting from his antipathy toward Wade.

  More significant was the potential defection of James Grimes of Iowa, also an alumnus of the Joint Committee of Fifteen. In the spring of 1868, Grimes not only left the Republican fold on impeachment, but also paved the way for others to follow.

  A New England expatriate, the burly lawyer rose to prominence on the Iowa frontier as an antislavery man. A year earlier, Grimes wrote to his wife that President Johnson was “guilty of many great follies and wickedness,” but his misdeeds were not enough to justify the “shock” of impeachment. Two more years of misrule by Johnson, Grimes added, were a short time in the life of a nation. The botched effort to place Lorenzo Thomas as war secretary did not change the Iowan’s views. In early April, while speaking with Gustavus Fox, the former Navy official, Grimes had raised two crucial points facing every Republican considering a vote for acquittal: how Johnson would behave if he were acquitted, and the need to have only one secretary of war. Fox had pa
ssed the message back to the White House.

  Impatient with the slow response to Fox’s message, Grimes waylaid Reverdy Johnson on the Senate floor. The Maryland Democrat, who was close to the president, was meeting nightly with a White House aide to report on the scuttlebutt passing among senators. Grimes pressed the Marylander to broker a meeting between him and the president. Republicans might vote for acquittal, Grimes said, but only if they believed that the president would engage in no rash acts that would “encourage rebels.” Skittish Republicans had to know they would not regret letting Johnson off the hook. The president, Grimes urged, could provide those assurances informally, at a social encounter. Reverdy Johnson agreed. He proposed that Grimes and the president drop by his rooms at the Arlington Hotel at 9 P.M. the following evening.

  Here was an opportunity for Johnson to try a new approach: conciliatory words and deeds. Looking down the barrel of impeachment, he could win support by offering the sort of commitments that can make governing possible. Had he been willing to take such conciliatory steps earlier, he might have avoided impeachment altogether.

  The next night, the president visited the Arlington Hotel and joined Grimes in Reverdy Johnson’s drawing room. After some social banter, the host raised the question that had brought them there. How would Johnson deport himself if acquitted? The president answered that the alarmists had no reason to fear him: He would comply with the Constitution in all matters. As much by his willingness to meet as by any particular statement, the president persuaded the Iowa senator that acquittal would not release floodgates of partisan retribution. Thus armed, Grimes assured doubtful senators that he knew Johnson’s intentions and there would be no postacquittal reign of terror. The president, he assured them, “has no thought of wrong or rash doings.”

  That still left Grimes’s second concern, the standoff at the War Department. The situation was ridiculous. No one in North America—not even the president, based on his recent newspaper interview—thought Lorenzo Thomas should be head of that department. Nevertheless, Thomas attended Cabinet meetings as part of the charade that he was the interim Secretary, while Stanton occupied the War Office but had no contact with the president. After weeks of stalemate, with the nation convulsed over impeachment, Johnson still had offered no viable alternative as war secretary. To win acquittal—to show that he could govern—the president had to resolve the situation. Johnson could be acquitted, wrote one correspondent, if only he “would quit his foolery with Lorenzo Thomas.”

  Prodded by Grimes’s message, Johnson consulted his inner circle, which certainly included the canny secretary of state, William Seward, who took care to preserve cordial relations with political friends and opponents alike. A compromise candidate for war secretary emerged: General John Schofield. The thirty-seven-year-old West Pointer was not a renowned combat leader, but he was politically adept. Of the five generals first appointed to command Southern military districts under the Reconstruction laws, Schofield was the only one Johnson had not fired for enforcing those laws too vigorously. The president did not care for the plump and balding general from upstate New York, calling him a “cold and selfish man.” Republicans also were tepid on Schofield, who opposed the Fourteenth Amendment. In short, neither side liked him, but both could live with him: exactly what the situation required.

  Although William Evarts held no government position, the president’s lawyer (and Seward confidant) played a central role in the Schofield nomination. On the afternoon of April 21, a recess day after the defense closed its evidence, Evarts invited the general to his rooms at Willard’s Hotel. The lawyer explained that the president was prepared to appoint him as secretary of war. A note from General Grant interrupted them. The general-in-chief had business with Schofield, who was staying at the Grants’ home while in Washington City. Schofield excused himself, but not before gaining Evarts’s agreement that he could talk to Grant about the offered appointment as war secretary.

  William Evarts, New York lawyer, who led the president’s defense inside and outside of the Senate.

  Schofield kept a level head. He needed to be sure that his elevation would not rile the general-in-chief. He would fail as war secretary if he were caught in a cross fire between the president and Grant. After dinner that evening, the two generals went for a walk. Schofield described the proposition from Evarts. Grant, who viewed Schofield as a friend, had no objection to the appointment. With that assurance, Schofield returned to Evarts’s hotel room at 8 P.M.

  Evarts explained that although there was no factual basis for impeachment, some Republicans would not vote for acquittal unless the War Department was restored to normal. Schofield had been selected, Evarts said, because Grant would accept him (which Schofield knew was true), which would satisfy Republicans. The appointment was not a personal matter for the president, the lawyer went on, because “he really had no friends.”

  When Schofield returned to the Grants’ home at 11 P.M., Grant insisted he would never believe a pledge by Johnson of future good conduct, then added that the president should be removed from office. Yet Grant still thought it proper for Schofield to accept the appointment. Next morning, Schofield told Evarts that he could go forward if the president abandoned the “annoying irregularities” in War Department matters that had developed during months of struggle with Stanton. When Evarts objected that Johnson could make no such commitment, Schofield replied that he would assume that his condition was acceptable if the president went through with the nomination.

  Evarts kept tight control over the announcement of Schofield’s nomination. The president sent Colonel Moore to deliver it to the Senate on Thursday, April 23, but Evarts waved the colonel away. The moment was not right. On the next day, the third day of closing arguments, Moore was back at the Senate with the nomination in hand. This time, Evarts nodded yes, and the paper was delivered. It created, Moore wrote in his diary, “considerable interest.” Judge Curtis gave Moore a cheering message to carry back to the president. “[D]uring the last twenty-four hours impeachment had gone rapidly astern.”

  The press reported the Schofield nomination as an olive branch extended to doubtful Republican senators, and noted that Grant did not object to it. That last point was the most important one. Grant could have scuttled the maneuver by advising Schofield not to take the appointment. Partisans like Stanton and Stevens doubtless would have preferred for Grant to do so, denying the president any advantage in the trial. The general-in-chief did not, however, consult political advisers on the question. He decided on his own. Every day, he knew, the standoff over the War Department snarled the military. Even though the appointment might save Johnson, Grant would not obstruct resolution of that standoff. The Schofield nomination represented a surprising act of mutual forbearance between Johnson and Grant, whose dislike for each other had not abated. If Johnson would swallow his pride enough to appoint a secretary of war whom the Senate could confirm, Grant would not stand in his way.

  A couple of days later, though, the general-in-chief changed his mind. On April 25, he dashed off a one-sentence note to Schofield suggesting that he decline the promotion to war secretary. Grant may have come to regret Schofield’s nomination as it began to seem like a lifeline for the president. In reply, Schofield pointed out that he had already agreed to accept the position.

  Despite the conciliatory gesture, Andrew Johnson still hungered for revenge against Grant. On the day after the Schofield nomination was announced, the president mused over ways to get at Grant “when this trouble is over.” He had an idea. Because Grant’s commission as General of the Army did not award him command of the army, and because Johnson had never appointed him to that command, Johnson thought he might still “get hold of him after a while.”

  As closing arguments filled the Senate Chamber, the head-counting gained in intensity. The president learned that Stanton was complaining that Fessenden, Grimes, and other Senate Republicans “had gone back on him.” The news must have given Johnson hope.


  Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who had sponsored fourteen Reconstruction statutes, was leaning toward acquittal. In late February, when Johnson tried to appoint Lorenzo Thomas as war secretary, Trumbull had been “earnest for impeachment.” During the trial, though, his doubts increased. Though he deplored Johnson’s opposition to Congress on Reconstruction, Trumbull was not inclined to convict the president on any of the eleven impeachment articles.

  In the tumult that followed the final impeachment votes, Fessenden, Grimes, and Trumbull received grudging credit for having expressed their doubts early. Few challenged the integrity of those three early defectors. Others of the doubtfuls did not receive a similar benefit of the doubt.

  For example, Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas, protégé of Indian trader Perry Fuller, inspired little respect. “A great and insidious influence is operating upon Ross,” wrote one observer, “who is a weak man and may be artfully operated on without his apprehension of the fact.” Joseph Fowler of Tennessee was still sitting with the Democrats, so his inclinations were a source of Republican anxiety. Uncertainty also surrounded Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia, who often voted without regard to party.

  Though the final outcome could not be predicted, by the last week of April the president had made progress toward securing the Republican defections he needed. The work of corralling votes would continue behind the scenes. Onstage, the stars of the show, the lawyers, were eager to deliver closing orations so brilliant, so incisive, so inspirational, that they would change history. If they fell short of that goal, it would not be for lack of effort.