On the same Friday that Johnson had sacked Secretary Stanton, executive members of the Democratic National Committee were gathering in Washington for their annual meeting. The coincidence was striking, if it was a coincidence and not just Johnson’s hamfisted attempt to rally Democrats to his side. If it was, it flopped. On Saturday, the mood was dreary at the elegant White House banquet for well-heeled members of the committee. Only a fraction of them actually showed up, and all of them were uncomfortably aware that Congress was preparing to charge the banquet’s host, the President, with high crimes and misdemeanors. August Belmont, head of the committee, suavely disavowed Johnson through his newspaper mouthpiece, The World: Democrats would not comment on a personal tiff between the President and Mr. Stanton. After all, Mr. Stanton should have been removed from the war office long ago; now it hardly mattered. Besides, Johnson was a Republican, not a Democrat, and he had done very little for Democrats. “He aims now, when too late to get Democratic aid,” Pierrepont scoffed. “He will be dropped by all.”
It seemed true. The Herald’s James Bennett repeated that the President was not a Democrat, he hadn’t been elected by Democrats, and in this recent brouhaha he neither consulted with nor confided in them. Best that the Democratic party did not identify itself with him in the firing of the secretary of war. Other Democrats expressed their feelings more bluntly. They refused “to tie themselves to a corpse.”
Johnson seemed oblivious. He was surprised that Democrats were miffed because he hadn’t confided in them. “He swore that his course ought to have been plain enough,” Jerome Stillson told Samuel Barlow. And Johnson believed himself shrewd. Assuming that the appointment would burnish his own reputation, he sent to the Senate the name of Major-General George H. Thomas (not Lorenzo Thomas) to be appointed lieutenant-general by brevet. But the war hero familiarly known as the “Rock of Chickamauga” politely asked the Senate not to confirm him, insisting he had done nothing in peacetime to deserve it. Closer to the truth was that he didn’t want to involve himself in the Washington mess, and he didn’t want himself linked to the President.
Johnson also thought it shrewd to appoint Thomas Ewing as interim war secretary. “Too late, Mr. President,” Horace Greeley sneered. “The question before the country now is the violation of law.” The Senate didn’t bother to consider Ewing’s nomination. “Johnson is like a blind man reaching out in every direction for something to take hold of,” a Missouri Democrat noted, “but he finds only vacancy.”
Nationwide, people waited impatiently for news and heard terrifying talk about an invasion of troops from Maryland—or about another civil war. Certainly Stanton’s dismissal had been a defiant salvo against Congress, well aimed, presumptuous, deadly. Many people recalled how alarmed they’d been right before secession and then their anxiety after Lincoln’s death. Mass meetings were held throughout the country, and congressmen were pelted with telegrams and letters. “Nearly the entire loyal sentiment of the North is now with Congress & they look to the removal of Johnson as the only way to peace & quiet,” said Edwards Pierrepont. “The truest portion of the Republican Party in Delaware depends on the conviction and removal of Andrew Johnson from his accidental position,” a former member of the legislature told Thaddeus Stevens. From the South, a white Alabama man implored Benjamin Butler that “as American citizens, we ask you to hurry up impeachment.”
In California, the black journalist Philip Alexander Bell announced that “Andrew Johnson deserves impeachment.” Representative William Kelley, Pennsylvania Radical, was passionate on the House floor. “The bloody and untilled fields of the ten unreconstructed States, the unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas cry for the punishment of Andrew Johnson.” Conservative Virginia Governor Francis Pierpont had already admitted the President “ought to be removed.” General John Logan ecstatically told Wendell Phillips, “I think we have ‘caught the rat.’ ”
“Sound the tocsin,” Mark Twain exclaimed. “I don’t know what a tocsin is, but I want it sounded all the same!”
But there were naysayers too. A self-proclaimed Union man from Baltimore wrote Senator William Pitt Fessenden that “as President Johnson only has a short time to serve, don’t set such a bad precedent as turning him out because of a mere difference of opinion.” And Fessenden, cautious to the bone, had doubts about impeachment. “Either I am very stupid, or my friends are acting like fools, and hurrying us to destruction,” he complained. Charles Eliot Norton deplored the “indecent eagerness” of the impeachment vote. “There was something truly shocking in the manner in which men charged forth, and tried to get themselves on the record as original impeachers,” Norton complained to the editor of The Nation, who agreed.
* * *
—
IN THE FUTURE, after the political tides had changed, many of these men would loudly denounce impeachment, which they recalled as hysteria, and many an impeacher would regret his enthusiasm. But in early 1868, the nation faced questions that the unsettled, fragile peace had not fully answered: what were the duties of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary toward the people it represented—more specifically, to those people not yet represented by the ballot, the four million formerly enslaved individuals whose representation hung in the balance? Who was responsible for them, or were they, because they were now free, responsible for themselves, as Johnson and others argued?
If, in 1868, impeachment seemed risky, if it was unprecedented and frightening, it also promised a better, fairer future: prospects seemed good for real and lasting change. The black editor of Augusta’s Loyal Georgian said it would be “not a blunder, but a crime” not to impeach Andrew Johnson. “If you do not crush Johnson,” Senator Fessenden was warned, “he is determined evidently to crush the Congress & annul the work of Reconstruction.” And a Georgian (white) declared that “the removal of Andrew Johnson would be a lifting from the Southern people a greater load than any under which they have ever suffered. We are like men struggling with a fiend—our steps are watched, our words noted, our lives threatened, our labor plundered, our best men slandered, our great improvements retarded, our friends kept away, our brethren driven off.”
And if, after the war, Republicans were split over other issues, like fiscal policy, Johnson had managed once again to unify them—to bring them together on this contentious issue of impeachment, of all things. Johnson’s rashness riled even the loyal Gideon Welles. “By a final hasty move, without preparation,” Welles complained, “he took a step that consolidated the Radicals of every stripe.”
Most Republicans had been disinclined to impeach, preferring instead to tie Johnson’s hands and wait until the next election. But Johnson had pushed them too far. “We have tolerated a Rebel in the White House long enough, & all expect you will permit it no longer,” a Washburne constituent wrote to him. Reconstruction was at stake. The law was at stake. Johnson had shaken “a scarlet cloak or a red rag” at the Radicals, Thomas Ewing admitted, that “neither wild bulls, nor cock turkeys” could ignore.
Ewing was correct. No Republican could ignore the chief executive’s direct assault on the legislative branch of government. When Illinois representative Shelby Cullom asked Lyman Trumbull what he should do, Trumbull surprised him by saying, vote for impeachment. Senator John Sherman too supported the impeachment resolution. In the House, Elihu Washburne, fanning the Grant flame, had opposed impeachment, believing it would hurt Grant’s chance for the nomination. Now he was for it. The more conservative Henry Dawes had deplored the idea of impeachment; no longer. James Wilson no longer muzzled impeachment, and conservative Michigan Representative Austin Blair announced that “I have been among those who have hesitated long before resorting to this measure.” No longer.
* * *
—
AS SCHEDULED, THE debate in the House began Monday morning, February 24. It was snowing heavily, and the chamber was dark. Several senators
walked over to the House to listen. Representative John Bingham, who had been opposed to impeachment from the start, rose from his seat. “I stand here,” he said, “filled with a conviction as strong as knowledge that the President of the United States has deliberately, defiantly, and criminally violated the Constitution, his oath of office, and the laws of the country.”
Then the lid blew off. Washburne burst into a radical denunciation of Johnson. Look at the Navy Department and its profligacy; look at Treasury and its frauds; look at the Interior Department with its absurd Indian contracts and land jobbing; look at the Post Office and State, stuffed with traitors. Representative after representative spoke, Republicans for impeachment, arguing, like Sydney Clarke of Kansas, that “Andrew Johnson, in my judgement [sic], is guilty as inciter and provoker of the nameless crimes which have been inflicted upon the freedmen of the South; the two thousand murders known to have been committed in the State of Texas alone; and of the thousands of similar atrocities which have afflicted the loyal citizens, white and colored, throughout the rebel States.”
Ben Butler said that by violating the Tenure of Office law, Johnson was obviously guilty of a “high misdemeanor.” And yet what about the shameless pardon brokerage? What about consorting with traitors and murderers in New Orleans? What about his removal of military personnel from their commands in the South? What about his attempt to draw the army of the United States into conspiracy so as to get possession of the military? What about usurpation, lawlessness, and tyranny? What about his contempt for Congress? These too were crimes.
The House Democrats answered, somewhat lamely, that Republicans wanted to discard the President in order to increase their power in Congress. This was their party line, and it rang true, particularly to future critics who tarred Radical Republicans as power-hungry ideologues. Radicals were ambitious for power, of course, and they wanted Republicans to remain in Congress—not only for the sake of power, though there was that, but to protect their victory over slavery, an insidious, damaging, embarrassing national crime, and to eradicate its effects as best they could.
When arguing more substantively, Johnson allies stressed the President’s recent justification for firing Stanton: the President was just testing the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act, which he said impinged on his constitutional prerogatives. Noting that the law applied only to cabinet members who’d been appointed by sitting Presidents, they said that since Stanton had been appointed by President Lincoln, the Tenure of Office Act, even if it was constitutional, which it wasn’t, didn’t apply to Stanton.
Was this a legal quibble? Possibly; it remained to be seen. Stanton meanwhile had taken steps to foil Johnson. He dropped the charge against Lorenzo Thomas for violating the Tenure of Office Act, thus preventing Thomas from appealing the case to the Supreme Court, which would consider the law’s constitutionality, as the President now insisted he’d intended to have happen all along. In reply, Republicans argued that an ordinary citizen—but not the President—might challenge a law by disobeying it. No one is above the law. And they reasoned that since Johnson had obeyed the Tenure of Office Act when he first suspended Stanton, he had accepted Congress’s right to approve or disapprove his actions—only later had he defied the Senate’s decision, with a retrospective justification about testing the act’s constitutionality. “The President has openly and clearly violated the law,” Representative Austin Blair bitterly explained. “He has thrown down the gauntlet to Congress, and says to us as plainly as words can speak it: ‘Try this issue now betwixt me and you; either you go to the wall or I do.’ ”
To those who argued that the President of the United States could legitimately test the constitutionality of the law, the legally minded James Wilson said that once he took the oath of office, the President merged “his individuality into that official creature which binds itself by an oath as an executive officer to do that which, as a mere individual, he may not believe to be just, right or constitutional. Such an acceptance removes him from the sphere of the right of private judgement [sic] to the plane of the public officer,” Wilson continued, “and binds him to observe the law, his judgment as an individual to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Johnson had to obey the law, and if he disagreed, he should resign. It was that simple.
Just before five o’clock that afternoon, under the gaslights, Thaddeus Stevens hobbled to the front of the Speaker’s podium, bracing himself against the marble desk. His voice was hoarse. The room fell silent. But the effort to say what he wanted to say was too much for him. He handed his speech to McPherson.
“The framers of our Constitution did not rely for safety upon the avenging dagger of a Brutus, but provided peaceful remedies which should prevent that necessity,” McPherson read. Their peaceful remedy was impeachment, whose whole and only punishment was removal from office.
The long debate was over, the roll finally called. The impeachment resolution passed, 126 to 47. All the Republicans in the chamber had voted to impeach Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth President of the United States.
It was then that Mark Twain wrote, with certain satisfaction, that “out of the midst of political gloom, impeachment, that dead corpse, rose up and walked forth again!”
* * *
—
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS RECEIVED bagsful of mail congratulating them on a deed long overdue, and in several cities, the Union Leagues fired fifty-gun salutes. “The man who was inaugurated in drunkenness, who has ever since been a living disgrace to his name, to his position, and to his country, now will go to ‘his own place’ in history, in the company of Benedict Arnold and Jeff Davis,” the editor of The Independent rejoiced. In Maine, the House of Representatives passed a resolution endorsing impeachment, and in New York the governor put New York City under martial law in case of trouble. Horace Greeley proclaimed that “impeachment is peace.” According to him, the wealthiest and most conservative voters favored impeachment. New York diarist George Templeton Strong disagreed; he believed Democratic millionaires would be happy to finance a ragtag militia to prevent it. Greeley clarified. “Some of our people may rant and swear, and gnash their teeth; but we shall have no war—no disturbance—no arresting the wheels of Government—not the shimmer of the bayonet, nor the click of the trigger—” he predicted. “There is something grand to us in this spectacle of a great nation changing an incompetent ruler by the gentle and easy process of law.”
* * *
—
A sketch by Theodore R. Davis on the front page of Harper’s Weekly (March 14, 1868) portrays Representative Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham at the bar of the Senate, come to announce the House decision to impeach Andrew Johnson.
Impeachment was indeed a spectacle of sorts: a nation impeaching a President, its President, for the first time and without fanfare, bayonet, or trumpet. The ailing Thaddeus Stevens and the angular John Bingham, one man an avowed Radical, one man far more conservative, walked together, arm in arm, down the main aisle of a hushed Senate chamber. And then the House of Representatives rolled up its sleeves.
* * *
—
THE HOUSE OF Representatives was to identify the specific articles for which the President was to be tried. Speaker Schuyler Colfax appointed George Boutwell, Thaddeus Stevens, General John Logan, George Julian, Hamilton Ward, and two of the more conservative House members, John Bingham and James Wilson, to write the specific charges against Andrew Johnson.
To secure Bingham’s and Wilson’s votes, the House had been forced to focus on Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, an indictable offense, and not, as Stevens would have preferred, the President’s abuse of power. Ill and weak though he may have been, Stevens worried that “the committee are likely to present no articles having any real vigor in them.” And he believed that was exactly what they proceeded to do. The first eight articles dealt mainly with Stanton’s dismissal, i
ncluding the allegation that Johnson had conspired with Lorenzo Thomas to prevent the secretary of war from occupying his office. The ninth article concerned the President’s alleged suggestion that General William H. Emory, military commander of the District, disobey the Military Appropriations Act and take orders from Johnson instead of Grant, even though Emory had declined to do that. Whether or not Johnson’s suggestion was an indictable offense, the ninth article also suggested a broader interpretation of the requirements for an impeachment conviction.
These articles, even the ninth, didn’t satisfy Thaddeus Stevens, who didn’t want impeachment defined in such crabbed terms. An impeachable offense need not be an indictable one, like pocketing the spoons. This was the Radical Republican position earlier articulated by George Boutwell, and now again by Wendell Phillips. Addressing an auditorium filled to the brim in Cincinnati, Phillips explained that “my wish to impeach him tonight is not technical, but because the man, by either his conscience or perverseness had set himself up systematically to save the South from the verdict of the war, and the necessity of the epoch in which we live. Every single act since the summer of 1865 points to that.” Phillips recounted Johnson’s transgressions: Johnson had restored the property of unrepentant Southern ex-rebels; he’d lined their pockets; he’d placed as governors men unable or unwilling to take the oath of office, men who encouraged “violations of unappeased hatred of the malignant white race to wreak itself unheeded on the Union whites, and on the black race.”
The Impeachers Page 28
