The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Dunning was well on his way to becoming the influential scholar whose “Dunning school” of historians asserted that reconstruction had been a tragic failure: the so-called “carpetbaggers”—a derogatory term for Northerners come to teach, invest, or to farm—had invaded the South merely to plunder and then profit from its white misery. Freedmen and -women had been nothing more than inferior beings easily manipulated; and the Ku Klux Klan was a patriotic guild that repaired the dignity of white folk. Andrew Johnson had been maligned and mistreated.

  Marble and Dunning generally shared the same bias, except that Marble didn’t care much for Andrew Johnson. Regardless, Dunning hoped Marble would deliver the goods about Johnson’s acquittal. Marble obliged—up to a point. Drafting a garbled letter that he didn’t ultimately send—but that he saved—he admitted that Democratic leaders did in fact foil what he called “the seizure” of the federal government. Marble named the financier August Belmont, head of the Democratic National Committee; Dean Richmond, a railroad powerbroker and Democratic loyalist; the prosperous lawyer Samuel Tilden; and New York’s wartime governor Horatio Seymour. (Horatio Seymour and Samuel Tilden would be the Democratic nominees for President in 1868 and 1876.) Marble also said Republicans seemed not to know that the collector of the New York Custom House, Henry Smythe, was a cousin by marriage of Democratic boss Samuel Barlow, and that Barlow had arranged his appointment, which meant Smythe had access to a great deal of money. Marble was hinting, then, that Barlow had used that access to buy votes for acquittal.

  These men had been so well organized, discerning, and discreet that they were never exposed, even by 1906. But stopping the President’s conviction hadn’t been easy, Marble said; “The vote on impeachment tells how difficult was that prevention.”

  “There was no contemporary record of all this,” Marble finished. And then he added one further detail: Andrew Johnson was hell-bent on revenge, should he have found the opportunity.

  * * *

  —

  “MR. JOHNSON, LIKE Medea, stands absolutely alone,” Georges Clemenceau noted. “He is his own sole remaining friend. Unhappily, he does not suffice.”

  Johnson deeply wanted the Democrats to endorse him for President. “Why should they not take me up?” he plaintively asked. “They profess to accept my measures; they say I have stood by the Constitution and made a noble struggle. It is true I am asked why don’t I join the Democratic party. Why don’t they join me?”

  The reason was that he’d been disloyal.

  Not only had he trafficked with Republicans to become Lincoln’s Vice President, when he entered the White House he kept the odious Stanton and the shifty Seward in the cabinet. “Tis not in the power of mortal man to save him unless he will give up Seward & Stanton which he is determined apparently not to do,” Montgomery Blair had noted with disdain. And that harebrained Philadelphia convention of his, that feeble stab at a third party, offended old-time Democrats, who saw themselves being undermined. Washington McLean, the powerful publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer, wanted nothing more to do with Andrew Johnson; neither did Barlow or Democratic National Committee chair August Belmont.

  Johnson was bewildered. As he saw it, he’d scored a victory over the impeachers, he and his policies had prevailed, and yet he might lose the contest he most wanted to win: election to the White House on his own merits—he’d been the Accidental President, a mere custodian, thanks to the bullet of an assassin. But he was not dead yet. He issued another general proclamation of amnesty, his third, slated for publication on the Fourth of July and timed to coincide with the Democratic party’s national convention, which would open on July 7. Unconditionally pardoning every person who, directly or indirectly, participated in “the late insurrection,” Johnson declared that unless they were under indictment, they were no longer guilty, and their property, unless already divested and “except as to slaves,” would be restored.

  At the Democratic national convention, Thomas A.R. Nelson loyally nominated Johnson, and with some Southern support, Johnson did manage to place second on the first two ballots. Democrats graciously thanked the President for his service, and on the twenty-second ballot nominated the dark horse from upstate New York, Governor Horatio Seymour, the man who in 1863 had supported the murderous draft rioters, the man who in 1864 had supported McClellan against Lincoln, and the man who had supported a peace agreement with the South. A smooth-faced and soulless person, at least according to diarist George Templeton Strong, Seymour had said he didn’t care a fig for the presidency, and startled by the nomination, he reportedly wept on hearing of it—whether out of joy or fear, no one knew.

  Insiders claimed Seymour had been the choice of the New York Democrats all along, and they were the ones who controlled the convention. But Charles Dana of the New York Sun regretfully noted that Chase was the man who would have saved the party, renewed it, strengthened it. Seymour’s nomination was party politics as usual. “Does anybody want a revised and corrected edition of Andrew Johnson in the presidential chair for the next four years?” Frederick Douglass scoffed.

  Seymour’s running mate, General Francis (Frank) P. Blair, Jr., was actually more like Johnson than Seymour: a boozy zealot whose gift for intemperate white supremacist speech rivaled the President’s. Frank Blair said a Democratic administration would declare all Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional because Republicans had replaced the white man “with a host of ignorant negroes, who are supported in idleness with the public money, and combined together to strip the white race of their birthright.” Unstoppable and ugly, Blair also claimed that Republicans of the North had placed the white South under the heel of a “semi-barbarous race of blacks who are polygamist and destined to subject white women to their unbridled lust.” Republicans nimbly replied, “Seymour was opposed to the late war; Blair is in favor of the next one.” And as Georges Clemenceau observed, Horatio Seymour and Frank Blair represented “those who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.”

  With their election slogan “The Union, the Constitution, and the Laws,” even Sam Ward, who proudly called himself Copperhead-light, was miserable. “A terrible platform,” he groaned. Andrew Johnson calmly digested news of Seymour’s nomination but, enraged, threatened not to endorse the ticket, although in the end he did.

  By fall, Democrats realized they were in trouble. “Substitute Chase for Seymour and Thomas Ewing for Blair, we win,” said one of them. Seward supposed that Johnson could now be nominated and promptly traveled to New York to sound out the Democratic committee; it was too late. The Democrats stuck to Seymour.

  Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency by a sizeable electoral margin—214 electoral votes from 26 states for Grant versus 80 electoral votes from 8 states for Seymour. But Grant received only 52 percent of the popular vote. White men had overwhelmingly voted for Seymour. It was the 500,000 votes of black men in the South that carried the election for Grant—the votes of black men, that is, who had not been prevented, at gunpoint, from voting.

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  —

  THAT INTIMIDATION AND murder accompanied black men to the polls was beyond dispute. A black man named Larry White in Jacksonville said he saw so many men stabbed, knocked down, and beaten up on voting day that he tore up his ballot. If he wanted to live, he later said, he’d better not cast it.

  That the Ku Klux Klan directed much of the violence was also beyond dispute. In 1868, their numbers reached 40,000 in Tennessee alone, where, traveling by night in their masks, they whipped, hanged, or opened fire on Republicans and, in particular, any black man or woman for whom the Klan, said the governor, “seems to have a peculiar and mortal hatred.” Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, leading the terrorist posse, bragged that more than 550,000 men all over the South had joined what he called a “protective, military, political organization.”

  In Macon, Georgia, for instance, a committee of white men protested th
e Reconstruction Acts, which they considered cruel and unjust. “In making this earnest protest against being placed, by force, under negro domination, we disavow all feeling of resentment toward that unfortunate race,” the men declared. “As they are made the dupes of unscrupulous partisans and designing adventurers, we pity them; as they are ignorant, dependent, and helpless, it is our purpose to protect them in the enjoyment of all the rights of person and property to which their freedom entitles them.” But the committee then concluded that the white men of Georgia should organize in order to protect themselves and their families against this “direful rule of negro supremacy.”

  That committee may well have been the Klan. The Klan burned one-third of the town of Lewisburgh, Arkansas, after gunning down a black man named George Washington and leaving him for dead. The justice of the peace, L. B. Umpsflet, said that unless he received federal protection, he was leaving Arkansas, and maybe the country. Congressman James M. Hinds was killed with a double-barreled shotgun, and in South Carolina Klansmen assassinated a black state representative. Mounted men shot the black state senator Benjamin F. Randolph as he waited on a railroad platform. Teachers, black and white, were seized, schoolhouses torched, printing presses smashed, assemblies raided, men lynched. The stories were bone-chilling. “The ‘Klu Kluxe Klan’ is in full blast here and have inaugurated their nefarious proceedings by visiting, on two occasions, families of Negroes in this place,” Charles Cotton reported from Camden, Alabama. “On one occasion they went to a place where the Freedmen were, halting a meeting and one of the party deliberately shot a negro through the head.”

  There was nothing Secretary Edwin Stanton could do. Although friends and supporters had urged him to stay in the War Department, he said he’d resign if Johnson was acquitted, and just two hours after the final verdict, he made good on his promise and packed up his private papers, having already prepared a letter announcing his resignation. The White House received it in the middle of the afternoon, and in a matter of weeks, the House and Senate passed a resolution thanking Edwin Stanton for the purity and fidelity with which he had discharged his duties as secretary, both during the war and afterward. General John Schofield took over the office.

  President Andrew Johnson forged ahead. He appointed generals he believed he could control to head the military districts in the South. And in his fourth annual message to Congress, in December, he again denounced the legislative branch of government. The recent civil war had been fought to protect the Constitution, he said, and he’d fought to protect the Constitution, but Congress, by meddling with the peaceful progress of restoration, had placed the country in a state of terrible turmoil. He called for the annulment of all reconstruction legislation, which he deemed pernicious and failed. He scorned black suffrage in the South, which he called an “attempt to place the white population under the domination of persons of color.”

  Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, Johnson issued a Fourth Amnesty Proclamation, this time to pardon unconditionally and without reservation anyone, whether Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, who’d participated either directly or indirectly in the recent rebellion, and to provide immunity from the charge of treason.

  Mark Twain, unable to let the moment pass, wrote his own version of Andrew Johnson’s last speech: “And when my term began to draw to a close, & I saw that but little time remained wherein to defeat justice, to further exasperate the people, & to complete my unique & unprecedented record, I fell to & gathered up the odds & ends, & made it perfect—swept it clean; for I pardoned Jeff Davis; I pardoned every creature that had ever lifted his hand against the hated flag of the Union I have swept the floors clean; my work is done.”

  Thaddeus Stevens neither laughed nor despaired. In one of his last speeches, fully aware of what Johnson had done—and what his congressional colleagues had left undone—he affirmed his faith in the government he’d loved, saying if it “never depart from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, especially from the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and its necessary concomitant—universal suffrage—she never can take a step backward, but will sail forward on a sea of glory.” To him, impeachment had not completely succeeded; but neither had it completely failed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Epilogue

  “The whirligig of time has brought about its revenges.”

  —CHARLOTTE FORTEN

  On the day of Grant’s inauguration, the mood on the street was hopeful, the impeachment trial largely forgotten. The clouds had been thick in the morning, the March air damp and chilly, and though the sun began to shine at noon, the gaslights in the White House were blazing. Andrew Johnson, his trunks packed, would soon vacate the mansion. Members of the diplomatic corps had gathered to say goodbye, and then the doors of the Executive Mansion opened to well-wishers come to shake Andrew Johnson’s still-presidential hand.

  Not even for the sake of appearances would there be a rapprochement between Johnson and Grant. Neither of these two proud men could forget or forgive. Grant hadn’t attended Johnson’s New Year’s reception, and he hadn’t allowed his children to join a White House birthday party to celebrate Johnson’s sixtieth year, although Ben Butler had come to pay his respects. And when the committee planning Grant’s inauguration invited Johnson to ride in a column parallel to the general’s, it was clear that the President-elect did not wish to ride in the same carriage with Johnson, as was the custom.

  Johnson wondered what he should do. Gideon Welles, who took the insult personally, told him not to inconvenience himself. After all, when President-elect Andrew Jackson had failed to call on John Quincy Adams, Adams chose not to attend Jackson’s inauguration, and as for himself, Welles waspishly added, he had no intention of celebrating a double-dealing general. “Knowing these things,” Johnson declared two days later, “shall we debase ourselves by going near him?”

  At Johnson’s farewell reception, the night before the inauguration, such a crush of visitors had arrived at the White House that at least a third of them had to be turned away. The police were forced to shut the doors, and outside the building, there was a racket of bucking horses and cursing drivers. Inside, it was so suffocatingly hot that it was hard to breathe, and there was pandemonium in the cloakrooms, women losing their wraps or their escorts. But President Johnson, at the entrance of the East Room in his striped trousers, smiled and welcomed visitors with a polite greeting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. His daughter Martha Patterson again stood at his side, dressed much as she had dressed when the crowds first met her there three years earlier: a black velvet dress trimmed with bands of satin over which she had thrown a white lace shawl.

  The next morning, Inauguration Day, General John Schofield, as secretary of war, arrived at the cabinet room early. Johnson was already at his desk, reading and signing bills. He had asked Congress to forward them to the White House, having decided not to go to the Capitol on the last morning of the session, as was customary, to sign them there. William Evarts entered the room and, assuming that the cabinet and the President would soon be leaving for the inauguration, didn’t bother to remove his overcoat. Browning and McCulloch, already there, were itching to go. Head bowed, Johnson went on signing. Browning said nothing, and neither did Schofield. Seward appeared, puffing on his cigar. “Ought we not to start immediately?” he asked. The President merely said the cabinet should finish its work.

  A gunner had been posted in front of the White House and waited to fire the shot signaling that the President had left the building. Yet there was no sign of Johnson. Grant, who’d evidently changed his mind about riding with him, ordered his polished carriage to stop at the Executive Mansion. Johnson still didn’t appear. Someone said he was too busy, and Grant’s carriage rolled away.

  When Chief Justice Chase administered the oath of office to Ulysses S. Grant on the East Portico, President Andrew Johnson was nowhere to be seen.

  Johnson
had retained his self-respect, or so he believed. But like the impeachment verdict, this victory was a Pyrrhic one, if it was a victory at all. “No one will lament the passing of this administration,” Georges Clemenceau observed. The public seemed to agree. “No President has had grander opportunities than Andrew Johnson; no one has failed so lamentably,” a Democratic paper noted. “He defied the people he said he loved and succeeded in destroying only himself.”

  Johnson released a farewell address that typically broadcast his grievances about being misunderstood, abused, and unfairly criticized. “I have nothing to regret,” he concluded.

  * * *

  —

  A LITTLE AFTER noon, Johnson finally emerged from the White House, and before he closed the door of his carriage, he inhaled deeply. Leaning over to Secretary Welles, he said, “I fancy I can already smell the fresh mountain air of Tennessee.”

  * * *

  —

  BUT ANDREW JOHNSON would not go gentle into that good night. “Depend on it,” journalist William Robinson said, “we shall see Andy on the stump again.” And they did. In March of 1875, after a near-fatal bout of cholera and though he’d been defeated in two congressional races, Andrew Johnson triumphantly returned to the U.S. Senate, much the same man: headstrong and quarrelsome, fulminating against reconstruction, black people, and President Grant.

  “Thank God for the vindication,” Johnson crowed. He looked surprisingly well. His hair had grayed slightly, and his pasty face was more slack, but his bearing was erect. Andrew Johnson, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, settled himself on the Democratic side of the aisle, where he’d been before the war.