If Johnson had signed, he could have demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with conservative and moderate Republicans. If he had signed, he could have undermined opposition, tamped down hostility, effected some rapprochement, enhanced his prestige, and won more popular support. He could have strengthened his presidential hand. Told again and again that by signing the bill, even under protest, he would prevent more extreme measures from landing on his desk: with just his signature, Johnson could knock the wind right out of Radical Republican sails and avoid his own impeachment.
Journalist Charles Nordhoff called on Johnson at the White House to tell the President that his friends at the Democratic Evening Post had defended his policy until circumstances—the atrocities in the South, to say nothing of Johnson’s tirades—made its defense utterly impossible. Everyone wanted reconstruction, Nordhoff continued, and since Johnson’s policy was dead beyond resurrection, “it was the duty of all who wished good to the country, to unite together in some practicable scheme.” Johnson would not listen. The white people of the South were poor, quiet, unoffending, and harmless, he replied, and didn’t deserve “to be trodden under foot ‘to protect niggers.’ ”
Nordhoff said that this kind of bias served only to frustrate “sensible Republicans” and encourage men like Thad Stevens. Johnson did not understand. He said he’d read about the rape of a twelve-year-old girl in New York, and no one made a fuss. “If it happened in the South, and the girl was black,” he added with contempt, “what an outcry there would have been.”
“For starters, the criminal had been promptly arrested and sorely punished,” Nordhoff replied.
“It’s all damned prejudice,” the President snarled back. Nordhoff decided that the prejudice belonged to Johnson, who wanted to protect the old guard in the South—those who, as Johnson emphasized, “must in the nature of things rule.”
Nordhoff left the White House dazed. The President is cunning but mulish, he muttered, “with only one idea, & that is bitter opposition to universal suffrage.” Johnson listened only to men who told him what he wanted to hear, men like reactionary Fernando Wood. “Whatever else you lose,” Wood had advised, “preserve your manhood.” Or, as Charlotte Cushman commented, “the southerners pat the President on the back, hobnob with him & keep him vetoing everything that is presented to him.”
“The President was raining vetoes, which rolled off Congress like water off a duck’s back,” noted John Bigelow. But when the President vetoed the Reconstruction Bill, Bigelow was equally astonished at the utter contempt with which any communication or message of the President was treated. “He is of no account,” Senator Nye of Nevada said with a shrug. “We pay no attention any more [sic] to what he says.”
Congress again overrode Johnson’s veto. “He is a nullity & will be treated as such,” Charles Sumner said.
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BUOYED BY THE Republican success in the fall of 1866, the Thirty-Ninth Congress had authorized the Fortieth Congress to be called to order immediately at noon on March 4, 1867, right after the Thirty-Ninth adjourned. “Radicalism desires a perpetual session to override the Executive,” Gideon Welles declared. “We are living in a revolutionary period.”
Crowds of men and women were again pulsing through the Capitol’s passageways and corridors to catch a glimpse of new representatives, like the brash General Ben Butler and the outspoken General John Logan of Illinois, both Radicals, or the two Democrats from New York, Fernando Wood and John Morrissey, the latter a broken-nosed prizefighter who owned a string of gambling houses. Schuyler Colfax was promptly elected House Speaker again, and Benjamin Wade was named president pro tempore of the Senate. Radical Republicans considered Wade’s election as Senate leader a triumph. But so did conservative Republicans and Democrats: since there was no sitting Vice President, as president pro tem of the Senate, Benjamin Wade was next in line for the White House. If Johnson were impeached, then the idea of a Radical like Wade in the Executive Mansion would terrify—or could be made to terrify—the country. Andrew Johnson would be saved.
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TREASURY SECRETARY HUGH McCulloch had suggested that Johnson appoint post haste the five military commanders mandated by the Reconstruction Act to demonstrate his goodwill. “The President got very angry and swore vehemently,” Interior Secretary Orville Browning confided to his diary, “and said they might impeach and be d-m-d he was tired of being threatened—that he would not be influenced by any such considerations, but would go forward in the conscientious discharge of his duty without reference to Congress, and meet all the consequences.”
Johnson did appoint the military commanders quickly, choosing the men that Grant presumably recommended: Philip Sheridan and Daniel Sickles as well as John Schofield, George Thomas, and Edward Ord were posted to the five newly created districts. “The slime of the serpent is over them all,” complained Gideon Welles, who, hating Edwin Stanton, believed he too had influenced the President, particularly in his selection of Sickles and Sheridan.
Adjourning for the recess in late spring, many members of the Fortieth Congress left the Capitol relieved that reconstruction in the South could and would at last proceed without the President. For at the end of March, they had passed a Second Reconstruction Act to fix what had been missing in the first: the actual supervision of elections. The new bill authorized the military to register eligible voters, black and white, and to schedule elections as well as convene conventions, since intransigent white Southerners had been reluctant to do so. Then, thanks to the rider that George Boutwell had included with the Military Appropriations Bill, the five military commanders would now report to and receive orders from General Grant as general-in-chief, not from the President. The rider also specified that General Grant could not be dismissed without the consent of the Senate.
And equally pleased that impeachment was sputtering into nonsense, congressional Republicans also believed they’d sufficiently hamstrung Johnson, whose job was simply to execute their laws. Charles Sumner, however, was uneasy. “Our President is a bad man,” Senator Sumner reminded colleagues. “Search history and I am sure that you will find no ruler who, during the same short space of time, had done so much mischief to his country.” Chiding those fellow congressmen who were eager to go home, Sumner begged them to reconvene in early July. “Witness Memphis. Witness New Orleans,” he cried. Do not wait for months and months and months to return to Washington, he pleaded, while Johnson had a free hand.
Sumner was right to worry. Johnson did try to circumvent the Reconstruction Acts, which he continued to brand “military despotism” legislation, and he instructed Attorney General Stanbery to issue an opinion about how best to get around it. Stanbery obliged. His conservative credentials impeccable, Henry Stanbery was the former law partner of Thomas Ewing and a friend of Interior Secretary Orville Browning but, as an Ohio jurist once said, intending a compliment, Henry Stanbery didn’t possess any “marked characteristics.”
Per Johnson’s instructions, Stanbery announced in early June that no military commander had the right to remove any civil office-holder. And since the military possessed neither the education nor the training for the delicate task of interpreting the law, the military was entitled to exercise only a very limited authority in the districts. The civil governments of the South must stand; their state governments alone could enforce the Civil Rights Act—not ignorant military commanders, as Stanbery alluded to the district generals, deliberately insulting them. Stanbery also claimed that former rebels should be able to vote even if they’d participated in or aided the rebellion.
“Mr. Stanbery cuts the heart out of the military bill,” a startled Horace Greeley protested. Senator Fessenden was amazed. “It is quite astonishing that he and his advisers could not see the necessity of letting well enough alone.”
Aggressive and diminutive, Major-General Philip Sher
idan took command of Louisiana and Texas after the war, and after removing the perpetrators of the New Orleans massacre and the governors of Louisiana and Texas, he registered thousands of black voters; President Johnson then relieved him of his command.
If impeachment seemed to pit an increasingly embittered President against an increasingly estranged Congress, each of them intractable, and defiantly proclaiming that they fought only for the good of the nation, Andrew Johnson’s clash with the military was as stark and significant. And it was just as responsible for the impeachment trial that would occur in the last year of his presidency. General Philip Sheridan, commander of the Fifth Military District (Louisiana, Texas), promptly ignored Stanbery’s opinion, which he labeled “a broad macadamized road for perjury and fraud to travel on.” Widely known as “Little Phil” because he measured five foot six, Sheridan was also called the “Field Marshal of the Radicals” although he’d never been a Radical Republican—until, that is, he found himself military commander of Louisiana and Texas. “Game was scarce down that way then, and some gentlemen amused themselves by shooting negroes,” Sheridan would grimly recall. “I stopped this sport and they loved me not.” Sheridan made sure that half the police force consisted of former Union soldiers, and when the Texas Governor James Throckmorton, a former Confederate officer, told Sheridan to take his army to the frontier to fight Comanche and leave him alone, Sheridan replied that “there are more causalities from outrages perpetrated upon Union men and freedmen in the interior of the state than occur from Indian depredations on the frontier.” He then yanked Throckmorton from office.
In fact, the New Orleans massacre had already sickened Sheridan, and in the spring of 1867, bolstered by the Reconstruction Acts—and with his signature flair for the dramatic—he kicked out of office the men he held criminally responsible for it, such as Mayor John Monroe. Sheridan also sacked Louisiana Governor James Madison Wells. As he explained to General Grant, “we have gotten rid of an unprincipled Governor and the set of disreputable tricksters which he had about him,” and The New Orleans Times reported that “All’s well that ends Wells.” Even Johnson’s friend General James Steedman advised the President not to reinstate such sleazy characters—although, Steedman added, Sheridan’s real intention had been to embarrass Johnson.
General Grant and War Secretary Edwin Stanton had both approved Sheridan’s actions, and if Johnson tried to remove Sheridan as a result of them, Grant said every loyal man and woman in the country would rise up in protest. “Philip has a strong hold on the hearts of the people,” a New Orleans conservative agreed, “and it would hardly be policy for Johnson to attempt it.” The radical Independent was blunter. “The people would throw a thousand Andy Johnsons into the sea sooner than permit one Phil Sheridan to walk the plank.”
Having determined that it would reconvene if there was a quorum and a necessity—that is, if Johnson proved disruptive—Congress did reconvene. Complaining about the sticky July heat, its members swiftly passed a Third Reconstruction Act to obstruct the President’s course by giving to the general of the army—namely, General Ulysses S. Grant—complete authority over the execution of congressional reconstruction; it also gave full authority to the district commanders, should they choose to fire civil officers; and it allocated over a million and a half dollars to defray expenses. In addition, the House voted its thanks to General Sheridan as well as to the other military commanders in the districts.
The President of course promptly vetoed the Third Reconstruction Act, and Congress just as promptly overturned his veto.
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IT REMAINED A summer of discontent, with talk about real reconstruction come at last—or about military despotism, and the so-called military occupation of the South. Plus, with the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln again in the news, the wounds of war were made fresh once more. “You hear nothing but the newsboys singing out the ‘trial of John H. Surratt,’ ” said a Washington resident in August. For fifty-two days, a carnival of witnesses had paraded through the courtroom to testify for or against the Southern-sympathizer; but to beat the charge, Surratt’s lawyers had merely to show he couldn’t have been in Washington on the day of the assassination. That is, John Surratt had been indicted for assassination—not conspiracy, as his mother had been—and he was being tried in a civilian court, not a military one, also as his mother had been.
Anticipating a drawn-out deliberation, the jurors lugged big suitcases into the jury room as well as a large supply of food, while John Surratt waited, fanning himself with a huge palm leaf. He didn’t have long to wait, for the jury admitted that it too, like much of the country, was divided. Surratt went free. But those convinced of his guilt regarded the trial as a political maneuver designed to generate sympathy with the secessionist South—and with Andrew Johnson. “Some of them probably could see no harm in killing a Union President,” General Grant’s aide Orville Babcock bitterly remarked. “All loyal people here are disgusted with the result—all the Rebs highly pleased.” It was said jurors had been intimidated, a few had received death threats, and the man who’d found Surratt in Rome told Walt Whitman he was afraid he’d be murdered.
Journalist Emily Briggs saw photographs of Lee shamelessly displayed about town, and one bookstore conspicuously placed a picture of him right next to one of General Grant. She wouldn’t have been more surprised, she said, if the shopkeeper put Booth alongside Lincoln. “The cool way in which the beaten side demanded constant conciliation from the victor was getting to be a joke,” Charlotte Cushman observed. “Then the southerner will come back into all their former glory with undimmed luster after four years of traitorism.”
Mark Twain in Washington observed much the same thing. “Church congregations are organized, not on religious but on political bases,” he remarked, “and the Creed begins, ‘I believe in Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr-President of the United States,’ or ‘I believe in Jefferson Davis, the founder of the Confederate States of America.’ ” In fact, Jefferson Davis, detained at Fort Monroe for two years, was now in civilian custody too, awaiting an indictment for treason by the federal grand jury in Virginia district court. Though Chief Justice Salmon Chase was to preside as district judge in a trial, if one was to occur, Chase was reluctant to spoil his chances at another presidential bid, which a not-guilty verdict in a Southern court would surely do. “The idea that we cannot get the Chief Justice of the United States to try the head of a rebellion of four years standing—and that we cannot get a jury at the Capitol to find a crime in a combination of treason and the foulest of murders, does not add much strength to the Republic,” General Grant’s aide-de-camp lamented. “I hope we shall see better men and better days.”
But many Northerners also wanted to move on. A group of them that included the publisher Horace Greeley, the railroad and shipping baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith together raised $100,000 for Davis’ bail. When he walked out onto a Richmond street at last, he and his wife, Varina, were greeted with screams of joy. He’d have to return when the court reconvened, but for now the Davises were headed to Canada, where, as it happened, John Surratt had initially taken refuge after Lincoln was shot.
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YET EVERYONE WANTED to rub elbows with General Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of Appomattox. If he walked into the House of Representatives, his perpetual cigar clenched in his teeth, the young pages rushed to his side to ask for an autograph. At his lovely four-story brick home at 205 I Street, NW, the general and his wife hosted grand parties that were the talk of the town, with men attired in their formal best, women in colored velvets, and Mrs. Grant in a décolleté short-sleeved gown of green silk. His popularity was wide and resounding. But no one was completely sure how he saw his future.
“I am not a candidate for any office,” he had stated as early as 1863. Likely he believed what he’d said: that he’d ne
ver run for office. Yet he was slowly entering the political arena, particularly since in his own quiet way he’d begun pushing against Southern governors and editors who refused to support the Reconstruction Acts or who actively encouraged disloyalty and the breaking of the law. The exact nature of Grant’s party affiliation, however, was unclear. He welcomed conservatives like Gideon Welles, moderates like Lyman Trumbull, and Southerners like former vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens to his receptions. Andrew Johnson and his two daughters might appear, but when Thaddeus Stevens showed up one night, Gideon Welles suspected Radicals of trying to “appropriate” the general.
For everyone wanted him, everyone wondered what he had to say. He certainly had made his disgust known after the Memphis mayhem, which stamped, he said, “lasting disgrace upon the civil authorities.” Then there was the President’s awful “Swing Around the Circle,” which Grant had loathed. But his presence by Johnson’s side had chilled many a Republican heart. Representative Elihu Washburne, Grant’s political mentor, was deluged with questions: What is the general doing? What is he thinking? “Many of our friends are afraid that Grant will fall into and give countenance to the Johnson-Copperhead Party,” a prominent Indiana Republican nervously confided to Washburne. “If the public get an idea that Grant is with the President it will do us great injury. How can it be counteracted?” Regardless, Grant did not commit himself, at least not yet. “He is the only eminent man in America,” a British visitor observed, “who knows how to hold his tongue: this makes the newspaper speculation still more vague, as he stands committed to nothing.”
The Impeachers Page 22
