“I will tell you who is mad,” Johnson snapped. “ ‘Whom the Gods want to destroy they first make mad.’ Did your Congress order any of them to be tried?” It wasn’t quite clear what or whom he meant, except for Jefferson Davis.
The boisterous crowd would have none of it. The hecklers baited the President. “Three cheers for Congress,” they again cried.
Johnson went on, this time referring to the assassination attempt on William Seward. “If I were disposed to play the orator and deal in declamation, even tonight, I would imitate one of the ancient tragedies, and would take Mr. Seward, bring him before you, and point to the hacks and scars upon his person. I would exhibit the bloody garments, saturated with gore from his gaping wounds. Then I would ask you who is the traitor?” Again, it wasn’t clear whom or what he meant.
But the President did have fans, for someone screamed, “Thad Stevens!”
“Why don’t you hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” Johnson yelled back. Some people cheered.
But something had gone very wrong. Later, when Senator Doolittle reminded Johnson about the dignity of his office, Johnson snorted, “I don’t care about my dignity.”
“The President was fortunate if he escaped insult, wherever the train stopped,” Sylvanus Cadwallader reminisced. Cadwallader was traveling with the presidential party as the correspondent for The New York Herald, which defended Johnson although it wouldn’t much longer. “Grant and Farragut were continually called for, and Johnson’s name jeered and hooted at whenever mentioned,” Cadwallader recalled. “At one point a lively scene was witnessed, when Mr. Johnson undertook to speak: There was a determination to drown his voice, by cries of: ‘Grant-Grant.’ The President roared out: ‘Why this interruption? Gen. Grant is not against me—I am not against him. He is not a candidate, I am not a candidate, there are no candidates here,’ ” Cadwallader said. “At Lockport Mr. Seward undertook to speak, but was howled down by the cry: ‘We don’t want to hear you or Johnson. We shall only cheer for Grant and Farragut. You others are bad men.’ ”
The morning after the Cleveland speech, Johnson looked ill, Postmaster Randall seemed unwell, Señor Romero rattled on about mosquitoes, and Johnson’s son-in-law Senator David Patterson was miserable.
Calm and almost bullish during the war, General Ulysses S. Grant was considered its greatest hero; but when Johnson attempted to subvert Congressional reconstruction, Grant vigorously sought to protect the freedmen and loyal whites in the South.
St. Louis was no better. The presidential procession entered the Lindell Hotel and, after walking through the parlor, went out to the balcony over the main entrance, where thousands of spectators stood below, waiting for a glimpse of Johnson, but more especially of General Grant. That night, at a ceremonial banquet at the Southern Hotel, Johnson appeared on the portico, where he addressed an eager crowd. With his characteristic opening—I am not here to make a speech—he speedily returned to the subject of New Orleans, accusing “this radical Congress” of instigating the riot there by encouraging the city’s black population to arm.
Someone called Johnson a traitor.
“I have been traduced and abused,” he shot back, his voice tremulous with self-pity. “I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been called Judas Iscariot,” he shouted. And just because he exercised his veto power over the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill or Civil Rights, his enemies said he ought to be impeached. The sympathetic members of the crowd cried out, “Never.”
“Yes, yes!” he answered, and then speaking of himself in the third person, cried, “They are ready to impeach him.”
“Let them try it,” his supporters answered back.
But he was incoherent. “There was a Judas once,” Johnson babbled, “one of the twelve apostles. Oh, yes! And these apostles had a Christ, and he could not have had a Judas unless he had twelve apostles.
“If I have played the Judas, who has been my Christ that I have played Judas with?”
It was bewildering. Again, he yelled, “Why don’t you hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?
“I call upon you here tonight as freemen to favor the emancipation of the white man as well as the colored man,” Johnson fired up the crowd. One reporter noted in muted horror, “The President continued in this strain at great length.” “Who ever heard of such a Presidential Ass?” an officer of Olivet College asked. The headline in the Republican Chicago Tribune groaned, “The Ravings of a Besotted and Debauched Demagogue.”
In Indianapolis, rowdy spectators booed and clamored so noisily for Johnson to shut up that he couldn’t speak. He withdrew into the hotel. General Custer heard the popping of gunfire. General Grant appeared on the hotel balcony to calm the crowd, to no avail. A local man was killed, others were wounded, and it was said there had been an attempt to assassinate Johnson. Gideon Welles, slightly paranoid, thought that the whole thing had been planned—Radicals conspiring with rogues to disrespect the President.
Even if that were true, Johnson had no one but himself to blame. The publisher James Bennett had reminded him that the press in an instant could telegraph Johnson’s speeches to the entire nation, that reporters would scurry back to their hotels and transcribe their notes to cable stories as fast as possible. Every word of Johnson’s, every hasty wisecrack and intemperate outburst, would flash on the front page of papers throughout the country. And they did.
In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, another horrible disaster occurred when the wooden platform that covered an old, dry canal collapsed under the weight of almost two thousand spectators. Hundreds of men, women, and children plunged twenty feet into the bottom of the canal, where they lay atop one another in the midst of splintered planks and rubbish. At least six people were killed and about three hundred, including dozens of children, were severely hurt.
As Johnson headed back to Washington, the Baltimore city council decided that the President had perverted the object of his visit—in fact, the object of his entire tour—by embarking on an electioneering campaign completely inconsistent with Union principles. Moderate Republicans began to distance themselves. Henry Ward Beecher insisted he was no longer a “Johnson man,” although he had agreed with some of the President’s policies. Beecher believed the Southern states should be welcomed back into the Union, albeit one at a time, and he claimed this would have been possible—except that as far as he was concerned, the inflexible President was preventing it. Johnson was a man who stood in his own way, and it was not even clear which way, except backward, he wanted to go.
It was an astute observation. “Proud and sensitive, firm to obstinacy, resolute to fierceness, intelligent in his own sphere (which is narrow),” Beecher declared, “he often mistakes the intensity of his own convictions for strength of evidence.” As for Johnson’s recent speeches, on what planet would they be considered conciliatory?
“The ‘so-called’ President whom it is evident the Gods wish to destroy has been doing the cause of freedom good service every day,” Frederick Law Olmsted agreed. “Every card he has played has been against him.”
Henry Raymond of The New York Times finally abandoned the President. “What a muddle we are in politically!” he exclaimed. “Was there ever such a madman in so high a place as Johnson?” Senator John Sherman told his brother that the President had “sunk the Presidential office to the level of a grog-house.” Some moderates were even less kind: they said Johnson might be cunning and skillful, but he was basically a hazy-headed demagogue who should resign his office so it might be said that “nothing in his official life ever became him like his leaving of it.” James Russell Lowell remarked that if the President’s rallies weren’t so pathetic, they’d be funny. Johnson was turning himself into a buffoon. William Cullen Bryant said the President’s behavior was not only indiscreet but stupid. Essayist Edwin Whipple compared Johnson to Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, what with his ostentatious humility a
nd addiction to the personal pronoun. “If he left Washington the ninth part of a man,” John Greenleaf Whittier remarked, “what a pitiful decimal fraction he brings back.”
Thaddeus Stevens called the road show a traveling circus. Former Congressman Isaac Arnold, a strong Lincoln supporter, resigned from his position in the government Post Office Department. “How can you, Mr. President, occupy the Executive Mansion as the successor of Lincoln,” he directly berated Johnson, “how could you visit his grave with the bloody outrages of Memphis and New Orleans unpunished?” Carl Schurz was contemptuous. “If there is any man that ought to hang,” he said, “it is Andrew Johnson.”
Democrats too soured on the President. “Does Seward mean to kill him off by this tour,” one of them asked, “and are we to stand by (& see him kill us off too?)” Others speculated that Seward was playing a double game, letting the President destroy himself so people would flock to him. Publisher James Gordon Bennett had had enough. Johnson had been too lenient with the South; the rebels were implacable; and Johnson should sever ties with Seward, who was leading the President right into a Dismal Swamp. The best way to restore the Southern states to Congress, Bennett continued, was to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment. William Phillips, an editor at Bennett’s Herald, told Johnson that if he’d stop fighting against the Fourteenth Amendment, the Herald would go easy on him. Concentrate on foreign and fiscal affairs, Phillips advised, and tariff and monetary issues, or on the French occupation of Mexico.
Actually it was Seward who’d brought Matías Romero on the President’s tour to pacify critics of what had appeared to be Johnson’s lackadaisical Mexican policy. When Napoleon III’s puppet, Emperor Maximilian of Austria, displaced Mexican president Benito Juárez, Seward had resisted Grant and others who wanted to intervene militarily, and lately it seemed that his diplomacy was paying off; France was going to gradually withdraw its troops from Mexico. But Romero was a protégé of Juárez, the leader of the liberal Mexican government in exile, and he was hoping for more support from the administration. Not for long: the usually tireless Romero said he was too tired to continue on the trip. Aghast at Johnson’s speeches, he privately remarked that he had no intention “to mix myself in the domestic business of this people.”
By the middle of September, Admiral Farragut and General Grant were also distancing themselves from Johnson and “My Policy,” claiming they had joined the presidential entourage because they’d been instructed to do so. In fact, Grant had briefly left the tour, apparently so upset by Johnson’s behavior that he’d gone on a bender. According to Sylvanus Cadwallader, in Buffalo, after waiters passed through the cars, plying everyone with food and drink, the general got so drunk he had to lie down on a pile of empty sacks in the baggage car. Until he’d recovered enough from his “indisposition” that they could steer him into a carriage, Grant was shielded by Cadwallader and Grant’s friend John Rawlins, who kept away all callers. But Grant returned to the tour just before the President landed in Cincinnati. There, he loyally stood up for Johnson, though equivocally: “The President of the United States is my superior officer, and I am under his command,” he said. Of course Grant had supported the President’s lenient policy toward the South, and his own hasty report on conditions there, back in 1865, could have been written by Johnson himself. Grant had also argued for dropping all charges against Robert E. Lee unless he violated his parole, which Lee had not. But now he stood beside a President whose tirades offended him. In Buffalo he’d presumably told a friend, “I wouldn’t have started if I had expected any thing of the kind.” And he confided to his wife that he considered Johnson “a National disgrace.”
With crowds calling for him, not the President, or hailing General Grant as their next chief executive, the relationship between Grant and Johnson cooled. Seward again stepped into the breach, shrewdly affirming Grant’s support of the President’s policy. By doing so, Seward cost Grant the confidence of many Republicans. “If the public get an idea that Grant is with the President it will do us great injury,” one of them had complained to Grant’s friend Representative Elihu Washburne. Said another, “the Genl. may say that he will take no part in the political issues, but the people think he is taking part now by traveling with Johnson on his electioneering trip.” Letters of exasperation and gossip about Grant landed on Washburne’s desk: it was Seward who’d gotten Grant drunk in Buffalo to help get Johnson re-elected. Keep Grant quiet, Washburne was advised from one side; make Grant talk, Washburne was urged from another: “his reticence had led some of our friends to doubt him, and all the Democrats claim him as their own.”
Other backers reported in relief that Johnson’s behavior had cured some of Grant’s most influential friends, like John Rawlins and Adam Badeau, of their good opinion of Johnson. And the thickset general returned to Washington alone, not with the President. As Grant explained to Sheridan, Johnson seemed increasingly “violent with the opposition he meets with, until now but few people who were loyal to the Government during the Rebellion seem to have any influence with him.” And after New Orleans, Grant was making his position clear: the military must intervene when and if the civil authorities allowed the massacre of men and women, as it seemed too often to be doing.
Johnson, perceiving Grant as a rival, decided he must rid himself of the popular general without exactly removing him from his prestigious post as general of the Army of the United States, a title revived the previous summer for the hero. Johnson would send Grant to Mexico to accompany Lewis D. Campbell, the new minister to the Juárez government. In an ill-defined advisory role, Grant was to pressure the French to withdraw their troops, which would presumably suit Grant, a supporter of Juárez and his government. The real objective of the mission wasn’t the French or even Mexico; it was getting Grant out of Johnson’s hair and pairing him with Campbell, who had a known drinking problem. With Grant gone and his reputation again damaged by drink, Johnson could appoint the more conservative William Tecumseh Sherman as interim general-in-chief.
Johnson overlooked one important detail—that Grant and Sherman had been friends for more than twenty-five years. And Sherman was no more a fool than Grant. “There is some plan to get Grant out of the way, & to get me here,” Sherman told his wife, “but I will be a party to no such move.” No need. Grant unequivocally declined the mission. The essentially diplomatic assignment was beyond the scope of his office, he said, and besides, he possessed neither the training nor a taste for it.
Irritated, Johnson instructed Secretary of State Seward to order Grant to Mexico, but on the recommendation of the cabinet, Johnson backed off, suggesting instead that Seward “request” that Grant go. Grant again declined, saying it was expedient for him to stay in Washington. Growing angry himself, Grant said he was not subject to orders from the secretary of state: he was an officer in the military, and this was a civilian posting. “No power on earth can compel me to it.” Johnson apparently banged his fist on the table in a pique of anger, and Grant stormed out of the room.
The result was a grudging truce, and William Tecumseh Sherman accompanied the feckless Campbell to Mexico. “I cheerfully consented because it removes at once a crisis,” Sherman told his brother John. “Both Grant and I desire to keep plainly and strictly to our duty in the Army, and not to be construed as partisans.”
Grant apparently thought it had been Seward even more than Johnson who had devised the plot to sequester him in Mexico. “The influence of Mr. Seward over the President is complete,” Matías Romero concurred. “One does not need to be with them for long to learn that Seward knows how to gain the confidence of Mr. Johnson to a high degree.” Seward had tried to climb into the Lincoln White House by a back window, James Russell Lowell decided, and since the Republican party had ditched him in 1860, Seward felt no compunction about deserting it now.
“Poor Seward! What a miserable close to his career!” Charles Eliot Norton exclaimed. “What a loss to him, & to
the country, that he did not die with Lincoln!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Resistance
One of the chief architects of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was Andrew Johnson. The man had a penchant for martyrdom. It allowed him to cling to his belief that he was cruelly beset, deeply unappreciated, wholly persecuted, and denied the respect he rightfully deserved. If his great destiny—his crucifixion—was to be fulfilled by impeachment, so be it. For his temperament allowed no other choice. He thus welcomed a struggle to the death, with the hero, himself, going down to defeat in a blaze of unforgettable glory.
Speculation about impeachment had been in the air for months. The preceding spring—before New Orleans, before the swing around the circle—the spellbinding orator Anna Dickinson had mesmerized audiences with her call to impeach Andrew Johnson. “Permit this government to be reestablished on the old foundations of falsehood & oppression—permit the white traitor to legislate for themselves, for us, & for the freedmen of the South, & this war will have been fought in vain, this treasure spent in vain, this perilous blood spilled & black lives sacrificed in vain,” Dickinson cried. Johnson had launched “that miserable abortion known all over as ‘My Policy.’ The man should be slain politically,” she rousingly added, “so politically killed, that there would be no hope of his political future.” Wendell Phillips too had said Johnson and Seward, who were working to smash the Republican party, did not care a jot about black suffrage, or whether black men and women were “sunk into eternal perdition.”
Impeachment rhetoric was not limited to the Radicals. If a majority of Radical Republicans returned to Congress, Montgomery Blair cried, they’d run the President out of office and push Ben Wade, one of the worst of the Radical bunch, into the White House. They’d soak the streets with blood, Blair continued, “and a devastation, to which that of the South was nothing, would overwhelm the entire north.” The outgoing minister to France, John Bigelow, heard that Johnson would be impeached as soon as Congress met. General James Steedman told Interior Secretary Browning that the country was on the brink of revolution; the only way to stop it was to “prepare”—he meant militarily. Browning went to Secretary of State William Seward and frantically said that the President’s impeachment was on the horizon. Calm as ever, Seward was nonplussed.
The Impeachers Page 18
