Much of the still-accepted wisdom about the Johnson impeachment is wrong. Johnson is sometimes portrayed as the true successor to Abraham Lincoln, reaching out the hand of fellowship to vanquished Southerners. After all, this argument goes, his initial plan for Southern state governments in 1865 had been developed for Lincoln before the assassination. Lincoln’s closest adviser, Secretary of State Seward, performed the same role for Johnson and steadfastly insisted that the Tennessean acted as Lincoln would have. Embracing this theory, John Kennedy agreed that Johnson was “determined to carry out Abraham Lincoln’s policies of reconciliation with the defeated South.”
This theory, however, unrealistically assumes that Lincoln was incapable of changing his course to respond to events. Lincoln was far too good a politician to alienate Congress, as Johnson did. Lincoln was far too strong a leader to accept meekly the black codes and gruesome violence of the restored Southern states, as Johnson did. And Lincoln was far too compassionate a man to ignore the suffering and oppression of the freedmen and Southern Republicans, as Johnson did. That Seward embraced Johnson as Lincoln’s successor reveals more about the secretary of state than it does about Johnson’s stewardship of Lincoln’s legacy. Seward shared with Johnson a lack of concern either for Negro rights or white Southern terrorism. At the end of his long career, having survived a brutal assassination attempt and the deaths of his wife and daughter, Seward desired peace and union far more than he cared about justice. But Johnson, to whom he pledged his all, could bring neither peace nor union.
After the war, the entire nation—North and South—had to unlearn the habits of rage and hate. Lincoln understood that and had begun to bend every energy to that goal. Johnson, in contrast, fed the fires of rage and hate. It was simply his rigid, combative nature. Far from being Lincoln’s political heir, Johnson squandered Lincoln’s legacy. At a most delicate moment in our history, when greatness of spirit was needed, the man from Tennessee could not be more than the forceful, intelligent, and intransigent politician he had always been. The times demanded more. Johnson’s rise from abject poverty to the White House is an inspiring story, but his presidency was so calamitous that it can only be seen as a tragedy.
Many Republicans joined to resist Johnson’s benighted policies after the war, but their undeniable leader was Thaddeus Stevens. A complex, sometimes ruthless man, Stevens sought to expand freedom and equality with sound strategic instincts and a single-minded focus that intimidated his contemporaries and those who have come after. His legacy includes the Fourteenth Amendment, which transformed the nation long after his death. The Reconstruction legislation championed by Stevens worked imperfectly, to be sure, but it honorably aimed to provide physical security and basic rights to the freedmen so they could become full participants in American society. Had he been granted six more months of health, Stevens likely would have won a Senate conviction and driven Johnson from the White House. It is long past time to reclaim Thaddeus Stevens as a great American figure.
Conversely, the myth should be abandoned that there was much of heroism in the acquittal votes of Edmund Ross and John Henderson. The national pantheon should be closed to those who trade votes for cash and patronage favors. As for the denials of misconduct offered by Ross and Henderson after the trial, Henderson’s own observation as a prosecutor is irresistible: anyone capable of committing the crime is capable of denying it.
The notion has been widespread that the votes of the seven defectors “saved” either the presidency or the Constitution, or both. For John Kennedy, Ross’s vote “may well have preserved for ourselves and posterity constitutional government in the United States.” He quotes with approval the self-justifying claims of Senator Ross himself, who insisted twenty-five years after the trial that “the independence of the executive office as a coordinate branch of the government was on trial.” The presidency, according to Ross and Kennedy, was at risk of being “ever after subordinated to the legislative will.” This, too, is wrong.
Johnson’s acquittal did not revive a weak and passive presidency. Indeed, exactly the opposite happened. Johnson’s presidency was stronger than the office would be again until the 1890s. Lincoln exercised unprecedented powers during the Civil War. He called on the states to provide hundreds of thousands of soldiers and proclaimed a blockade of the South. His Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the seceded states. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus in states that did not secede and hired an army of bureaucrats to collect the taxes needed to support a great military. No longer at war, Andrew Johnson’s administration still collected the income tax and maintained an occupying army in ten Southern states. Johnson used every shred of executive power to battle Congress toe-to-toe for three years, pressing his own vision of reviving Southern state governments and Southern society with minimal federal intrusion. Indeed, he fought Congress so well that he brought on his own impeachment. For the next two decades, executive initiative would recede as Congress asserted itself as the dominant power in the national government.
The related claim has been made that Johnson’s acquittal avoided a devastating precedent that would have sapped the power of future presidents, leaving them dangling at the end of strings manipulated by a malign Congress. In this vein, one historian has denounced the impeachment as “the most insidious assault on constitutional government in the nation’s history,” which threatened to alter the constitutional scheme forever. Again, the dramatic assertion is wrong.
What if Johnson had been convicted and removed from office? Would Ben Wade, in ten months as president, have changed the course of American history? That seems unlikely in the extreme. Would Ulysses Grant still have been elected president? Most likely, yes, though some Republicans feared a popular backlash against their party if they succeeded in deposing President Johnson. Would future Congresses have hastened to impeach and remove future presidents with wild abandon? That is difficult to imagine.
In most presidencies, impeachment has been irrelevant. After all, it requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict a president. Most later presidents either enjoyed sufficient support in Congress, or managed not to enrage huge numbers of congressmen and senators, so impeachment never became part of the national conversation. More than all of his predecessors and successors as chief executive, Andrew Johnson was uniquely well suited to become a target for impeachment: the opposing party enjoyed a three-fourths majority in both houses of Congress, he disagreed with that majority on an explosive political issue (Reconstruction), and he aggressively pursued a policy of confrontation and obstruction over that issue, repeatedly vetoing congressional legislation. The wonder is not that he was impeached, but that Congress took so long to do it and then failed to convict him.
Moreover, Johnson’s acquittal did not mark the death of impeachment as a constitutional tool. The House impeached several federal judges between Johnson’s acquittal and 1935; some resigned and the Senate convicted two of them after trial. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal. The Johnson verdict did not prevent House Republicans from throwing the moralistic temper tantrum that led to the 1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton for actions totally unrelated to his official duties (though Clinton was acquitted by the Senate). Impeachment is an institutional safety valve, like the emergency lever in a train, to be used only in times of great exigency. Following the Johnson case, the safety valve continued to be available and continued to be used, rarely.
Based on the Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton cases, certain conditions seem to be necessary, if not sufficient, for presidential impeachment to be possible: Congress must be controlled by the opposing party, and the impeachers must be able to point to a legal violation by the president that can be portrayed as a crime. One further lesson from the Johnson and Clinton examples is that a president who has acted most unwisely can still avoid removal from office as long as he retains the support of his own party.
That presidential impeachment has been rare can hardl
y be attributed to Johnson’s acquittal. It arose once, briefly, before the Johnson case; it has been an infrequent concern since. The triumphant generalizations offered by many historians and commentators about the Johnson impeachment have been so ill founded because the case unfolded in unique circumstances. Never again would the nation face a prolonged political struggle over how to reunite with a breakaway region that had started a civil war; never again would the party opposing the president enjoy such lopsided majorities in Congress; never again would assassination elevate to the White House someone who truly belonged to the other political party. The remarkable achievement was that impeachment produced a peaceful resolution of the angry contest, not that it saved the presidency from being subjugated to Congress.
When it came to restoring the constitutional balance of the government, Johnson’s acquittal was far less important than Congress’s repeal of much of the Tenure of Office Act, which began shortly after Johnson left the White House. In response to President Grant’s demands, Congress promptly gave him control over firing Cabinet officers, and additional authority over the removal of lower officials. That controversial statute had, indeed, frozen some of the gears of government by stripping the president of the power to choose those who would implement his policies.
Almost sixty years later, the Supreme Court ruled on whether Senate approval could be required before specific executive officials could be fired—the constitutional issue that Johnson claimed he hoped to bring to the Supreme Court by replacing Edwin Stanton. In Myers v. United States, the Court held that the president could fire a postmaster without Senate approval. The Court’s opinion was written by the only former president to serve on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice William Howard Taft decried congressional encroachment on executive powers and denied that Congress could reserve for itself the power to approve the firing of Postmaster Myers. Dissenting opinions by liberal Louis D. Brandeis and archconservative James McReynolds shredded Taft’s historical arguments. As the dissenters saw it, Congress created executive offices under the Constitution, and established their salaries and duties. Why could Congress also not prescribe specific terms for those offices, or require Senate concurrence in the removal of the people holding them? The dissenters were not fazed by Taft’s insistence that it was unwise for the Senate to play a role in executive removals; wise or foolish, they insisted, the Constitution allowed it. Less than ten years later, the dissenters were partly vindicated after President Franklin Roosevelt dismissed the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. The Supreme Court ruled that since Congress had created a five-year term for the position, the president could not fire the chairman before the end of his term.
Fourteen decades after Johnson’s trial, several features of that constitutional confrontation still resonate. Stevens, Butler, and the other Republicans gave life to the impeachment clause as a response to a national crisis. They showed that it could be used to challenge a president directly. In our era of an increasingly imperial presidency, it is a powerful example: the direct representatives of the people possess the ultimate tool for curbing executive excess. It is an unwieldy tool, but an essential one. By coming so close to a conviction, the impeachers established that there are limits on presidential discretion, that the nation need not wait until the end of a four-year term to jettison a president. They also deserve credit for accepting their defeat peacefully, without any call to arms, respecting the constitutional process.
The positive results of the unsuccessful impeachment should not be overlooked. The accusers—and their supporters—had the cathartic experience of haling Johnson before the Senate, displaying his failings to the nation and the judgment of history. The experience chastened the most powerful person in the nation, who had committed many blunders, whether or not they warranted his removal from office. Unless he had been battered by that constitutional two-by-four, Johnson might well have left the clownish Lorenzo Thomas as interim secretary of war and could have embarked on other spiteful and ill-considered actions. Moreover, though hysterical rhetoric filled the air, the impeachment process itself was legalistic and peaceable, a constitutional outlet for violent political passions.
After three serious attempts to impeach a president, though, we are no closer than Thad Stevens and Benjamin Curtis were to knowing exactly what conduct justifies presidential removal. Indeed, in many ways the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” has proved to be its own Rorschach blot, sufficiently imprecise to permit intelligent arguments that it requires a true judicial “crime,” or alternatively that it imposes no such requirement. But in the twenty-first century, when presidential powers have grown so vast and intrusive, it is an essential principle that something does.
In addition, though Johnson’s acquittal was mortifying to Stevens and his fellow impeachers, it stigmatized Johnson forever as the man who escaped removal by the skin of his teeth. That the key acquittal votes were won by political bargaining and patronage payoffs, or by bribes, marks him even more.
Also, though the immediate cause of the impeachment effort was the firing of Stanton, underlying it was the firm conviction held by many Republicans that Johnson was undermining the nation’s commitment to protect the freedmen and aid their emergence from slavery. That commitment would linger for only a few more years, then lie dormant for many decades. Yet it bears remembering that there were congressmen and senators in 1868 who almost drove a president from office in part because he would do nothing to stop the mistreatment of the former slaves.
Americans, perhaps all people, expect historical crises to be met by heroes—Washingtons, Franklins, Lincolns, and Roosevelts. A nation learns a great deal more about itself and its system of government when a crisis has to be met by people of lesser talents. In the impeachment crisis of 1868, none of the country’s leaders was great, a few were good, all were angry, and far too many were despicable. Still, we survived.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I SHOULD FIRST ACKNOWLEDGE three writers who traveled these serpentine historical trails before I set off and who shed important light on the story I have tried to tell. Coming upon Michael Les Benedict’s The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson was a liberating moment. In this and other writings, Professor Benedict persuasively concludes that the Johnson impeachment effort was not the historical atrocity of popular myth. Equivalent liberation came from Mark W. Summers’s The Era of Good Stealings, in which a serious scholar (arguably the serious scholar of American public corruption in the nineteenth century) takes seriously the possibility that bribery influenced the Senate impeachment vote. Finally, I must recognize Hans Trefousse, author of a half-dozen distinguished books about this historical period. On any subject central to this story—Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, Ben Butler, Ben Wade, the impeachment trial itself—Professor Trefousse has published an important treatment. He has been courteous and generous in discussing this project with me. It is a gratifying coincidence that he and I are both graduates of George W. Curtis High School on Staten Island, where I took AP English from his late wife, Rachelle Trefousse. I learned much from both of them.
I have benefited from a great deal of help from archivists and reference librarians all around the country. These include most of the staff at the Library of Congress, of whom Thomas Mann is the most conspicuous and most consistently remarkable. Judy Atkins at the National Archives found records of the House impeachment managers that I have not seen cited by any other researchers. Teresa Coble of the Kansas State Historical Society, William A. Jones of the library at California State University, Chico, and Mark Patrick of the Detroit Public Library were generous and responsive in my efforts to track down the more obscure rascals of this story. Through Jodi Boyle, I received an early look at the Riggs Bank records at George Washington University. Great on-site support was available at the Huntington Library and Bancroft Library in California, the Wheaton College Library, the New York Public Library, and the New York Historical Society. Donald Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office gracious
ly made available the resources of his office. I am also grateful for assistance from the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Yale University Library. Bob McAvoy, whom I encountered through the genealogical wonders of the Internet, provided welcome leads on the elusive General Alonzo Adams.
Many friends provided insightful critiques of this book while it was in progress, beginning with James McGrath Morris, whose thoughts I sometimes resisted but usually came to embrace. Among those who have reminded me to tell the story clearly are Don Carr, Catherine Flanagan, Solveig Eggerz, Wayland Stallard, Katherine Lorr, Phil Harvey, Susan Clark, Joye Shepherd, Frank Joseph, Leslie Rollins, Robert Gibson, Linda Morefield, Paul Vamvas, Ken Ackerman, and Andrew Dayton. I am grateful to all of them. I also benefitted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s gracious counsel in trying to understand the course charted during the Johnson Administration by William Henry Seward.
This is my second book with Alice Mayhew, which is a stroke of unwarranted fortune for me. Her steady focus on what makes a good book, and her skill in putting those elements together, have been great gifts. The entire Simon & Schuster team—Roger Labrie, Karen Thompson, Dana Sloan, Katie Grinch, Gypsy da Silva, Fred Weimer—is unfailingly professional and talented. My agent, Philippa Brophy, has provided sound advice and guidance. My thanks to all.
My greatest debt, always, is to Nancy, my wife, who has learned to live with the guy pounding on the keyboard in the attic. She read the manuscript, with great discernment, more times than anyone should have to.
APPENDIX 1
THE IMPEACHMENT PROVISIONS IN THE CONSTITUTION
Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy Page 36
