Which said utterances, declarations, threats and harangues, highly censurable in any, are peculiarly indecent and unbecoming in the Chief Magistrate of the United States, by means whereof the said Andrew Johnson has brought the high office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule and disgrace, to the great scandal of all good citizens, whereby said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, did commit, and was then and there guilty of a high misdemeanor in office.
ARTICLE 11. That the said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his office and his oath of office, and in disregard of the Constitution and laws of the United States, did, heretofore, to wit: On the 18th day of August, 1866, at the city of Washington, and in the District of Columbia, by public speech, declare and affirm in substance, that the Thirty-ninth Congress of the United States was not a Congress of the United States authorized by the Constitution to exercise legislative power under the same, but on the contrary, was a Congress of only part of the States, thereby denying and intending to deny, that the legislation of said Congress was valid or obligatory upon him, the said Andrew Johnson, except in so far as he saw fit to approve the same, and also thereby denying the power of the said Thirty-ninth Congress to propose amendments to the Constitution of the United States. And in pursuance of said declaration, the said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, afterwards, to wit: On the 21st day of February 1868, at the city of Washington, D.C., did, unlawfully and in disregard of the requirements of the Constitution that he should take care that the laws be faithfully executed, attempt to prevent the execution of an act entitled “An act regulating the tenure of certain civil office,” passed March 2, 1867, by unlawfully devising and contriving and attempting to devise and contrive means by which he should prevent Edwin M. Stanton from forthwith resuming the functions of the office of Secretary for the Department of War, notwithstanding the refusal of the Senate to concur in the suspension theretofore made by the said Andrew Johnson of said Edwin M. Stanton from said office of Secretary for the Department of War; and also by further unlawfully devising and contriving, and attempting to devise and contrive means then and there to prevent the execution of an act entitled “An act making appropriations for the support of the army for the fiscal year ending June 30,1868, and for other purposes,” approved March 20, 1867. And also to prevent the execution of an act entitled “An act to provide for the more efficient government of the Rebel States,” passed March 2, 1867. Whereby the said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, did then, to wit, on the 21st day of February, 1868, at the city of Washington, commit and was guilty of a high misdemeanor in office.
Appendix C
Dramatis Personae, Denouement
A Selection:
Although James Ashley lost his seat in Congress, President Grant appointed him territorial governor in Montana; but Grant soon dismissed him, and Ashley’s already tattered reputation continued to deteriorate even though, three years before his death, the Afro-American League of Tennessee roundly praised him as a “consummate statesman, patriot, philanthropist and benefactor.”
Serving in Congress until 1872, John Bingham had written the due process and equal citizenship clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, and he insisted that the former Confederate states ratify it before being readmitted to Congress; but he was not a Radical Republican: Thaddeus Stevens said Bingham had no backbone. Under President Grant, he became the U.S. minister to Japan.
Montgomery Blair, regarding himself as unofficial adviser to President Johnson, had angled for a position in his cabinet to no avail. Retaining the ear of traditional Democrats, especially because his loudmouthed brother Frank was their vice-presidential nominee in 1868, Blair returned to the Democratic party, and in 1876 loudly insisted that fellow Democrat Samuel J. Tilden had been legally elected although the Electoral Commission ruled in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes.
George S. Boutwell long championed black voting rights and worked hard on the Fifteenth Amendment—just as hard as he’d fought to have Andrew Johnson impeached. President Grant installed Boutwell as treasury secretary, and Boutwell remained in politics, serving in the Hayes administration and then returning to Congress as a senator. In later life, as founding member and first president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, he passionately opposed American intervention in the Philippines.
Emily Edson Briggs was the first president of the newly founded Woman’s National Press Association and one of the first women admitted to the congressional press gallery—“a favor that is given at best grudgingly, and never unless the need is imperative,” as she said. After she and her husband had settled in the District of Columbia in 1861, she wrote her spiky column in the Washington Chronicle and the Philadelphia Press for more than twenty years.
Benjamin F. Butler, the Massachusetts man with the squashed look and brilliant mind, remains a controversial figure, perpetually linked with corruption, though nothing was ever proved. A savvy politician capable of mending fences, Butler regarded Grant as a fool, but soon after Grant’s election supported him. Butler also strongly backed the 1875 Civil Rights Bill, helped pass legislation to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, advocated women’s suffrage, and despite his association with congressional scandals, was elected governor of Massachusetts on the Democratic ticket in 1882. The overseers at Harvard University refused to grant Beast Butler the honorary degree typically bestowed on the governor, and when Butler attended the commencement, the president of the alumni association resigned rather than shake his hand.
Salmon Portland Chase was a lifelong politician with a very high opinion of his own abilities, for by the time he took on the robes of chief justice, Chase had already been Ohio senator, governor, presidential contender, and Lincoln’s treasury secretary. But he ruined his reputation, then and later, by currying favor with the Democrats in 1868, hoping desperately—some say pathetically—to be their choice for the upcoming presidential contest.
Georges Clemenceau had fled Napoleon III, arriving in New York City in 1865, where this versatile, radically minded French doctor anonymously covered the American political scene for Paris Temps and became one of the regulars at Pfaff’s Beer Cellar, the Bohemian hangout frequented by Walt Whitman. Clemenceau returned to France in 1869 with his American wife. There, as a journalist, he defended Dreyfus; as a politician, he would twice become premier of France, and after the First World War, known as The Tiger, he insisted on full German disarmament when he negotiated the peace.
The African American activist, businessman, entrepreneur, and restauranteur George Downing was also keeper of the restaurant in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he efficiently used it to lobby for civil and political rights—and on behalf of jobs for black men. A graduate of Hamilton College, Downing with a group of twelve others had resisted the Fugitive Slave Law and though a determined Republican, he frequently criticized the party for using black men and women as mere “bagged black ducks.” When Liberal Republicanism overtook the party, Downing joined the Democrats; his business prowess and restaurant empire had secured him financial as well as political independence.
Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass escaped in 1831, and for a time allied himself with William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement, becoming such a powerful speaker, said William Wells Brown, that many white people stayed away from his lectures lest they be converted to abolitionism against their will. His memoir of his captivity, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, rocketed Douglass to international acclaim; today it’s a classic of American literature. Also an author, speaker, and untiring advocate for equal human rights, Douglass continued to call Johnson treacherous, unscrupulous, ambitious—and plausible.
A supremely confident member of Johnson’s defense team, as his attorney general after the President’s acquittal, William Maxwell Evarts was said to be the only man who could c
urb Johnson’s worst tendencies. After Johnson’s presidency, Grant sidelined Evarts because of his association with Johnson. Yet Evarts was instrumental as a member of the legal team who secured the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes. Secretary of state under Hayes, Evarts later served as a one-term senator from New York. Henry Adams adored Evarts as a man-of-the-world who took pride in doing the things he did not like to do, although it seems that Evarts did precisely as he wished, with panache.
The sometimes prickly William Pitt Fessenden had gone back to the Senate just before Lincoln’s assassination (Fessenden had served as Lincoln’s treasury secretary after Salmon Chase); Lincoln considered Fessenden a Radical, which he decidedly was not. Since Lincoln had dropped Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, also of Maine, Fessenden had wanted to make sure he kept his seat in the upper House. Tall and slim, his face long and increasingly lined, Fessenden was reserved, he was spare, he was disciplined, he was something of a prude, and he disliked conflict although he despised Charles Sumner. Placing his eyeglasses on his head before he spoke, he was deft in parliamentary debate, practical, logical, precise, incorruptible, and reasonably, if not insufferably, convinced of his own rectitude—although one dubious acquaintance would call him a “crooked stick.”
Walt Whitman greatly admired the “grandly noncommittal” Ulysses S. Grant, who continued after the war to realize the principles embodied in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and then Fifteenth Amendments. And despite the many scandals associated with his presidency, Grant presided over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, giving blacks the right to vote, and helped to crush the Ku Klux Klan.
Andrew Johnson stayed sensitive—thin-skinned, actually—and continued to seek advice from those he thought he could trust: practically no one. Said a former general in the Confederate army, Johnson was possessed with an obstinate, suspicious temper: “Like a badger, one had to dig him out of his hole.” Firm and courageous as a Southern senator, representing Tennessee, and the Southerner who had valiantly stood by the Union when his colleagues seceded, Johnson was chosen by Lincoln as his running mate in 1864. The rest is history.
Eliza McCardle Johnson is one of the enigmatic presidential wives, having disappeared from public view after arriving at the White House in late summer 1865. There, she tended her five grandchildren, who were the children of her two daughters (one widowed), who also lived in the Executive Mansion. But she left the supervision of state dinners and other public duties to her eldest child, Martha Patterson, presumably Johnson’s favorite. Despite fragile health and her son Robert’s suicide in 1869, Eliza McCardle Johnson outlived her husband by nearly six months.
Wendell Phillips was unabashedly the Wendell Phillips his admirers and detractors expected: relentless, farsighted, and slightly arrogant. Although Navy Secretary Gideon Welles couldn’t stand Phillips, Welles had to admit his “extraordinary gift” for public speaking. Charismatic, Phillips always drew a crowd, whether his topic was slavery, impeachment, or later labor reform. By the time Rutherford Hayes entered the White House, Phillips was convinced that the weak-kneed, white Republicans had yet again sold out the ideals for which the war had been fought. Somehow, though, the optimistic Phillips, a man insensible to praise or censure, never lost his belief in himself—or the country he so loved.
Born in Wisconsin, Vinnie Ream, who began her career as a sculptor in Washington, D.C., and operated there as an informal lobbyist in the studio where she worked—which happened to be located in the Capitol Building—married the wealthy Lieutenant Richard Leveridge Hoxie of the Army Corps of Engineers in 1878. He urged her to abandon sculpture, and after the birth of a son in 1883, she began to suffer from a series of illnesses. An 1870 portrait of Ream by G.P.A. Healy hangs in the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Formerly a Kansas journalist, during the war Edmund G. Ross served as captain in a Kansas regiment under the command of Thomas Ewing, Jr., and then returned to Topeka, where he edited the Topeka Kansas Tribune until the suicide of Senator James Lane created the vacancy that Ross was elected to fill. General Daniel Sickles would recall that fellow Radical Republicans asked him to sway Ross the night before the Senate voted in the impeachment trial. Presumably, Vinnie Ream distracted Sickles, preventing him from talking with Ross, until four in the morning. Ream and Ross denied the story. Later, Ross, as a Democrat, importuned President Cleveland to appoint him territorial governor of New Mexico. Charged with nepotism, he served four years and then tried to rehabilitate his reputation with a published defense of his vote in the impeachment trial.
Serving in the Lincoln and Johnson administrations, William H. Seward baffled many former admirers with his loyalty to Andrew Johnson. A crafty politician, he held his cards close to his chest; even his personal letters were composed so as not to give much away. Intelligent, cultured, witty, and an able raconteur, Seward kept his eye on the main chance, which was William Seward. Slight and slim, he was described by Henry Adams, who admired him, as having a “head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; offhand manner; free talk; and perpetual cigar.” Georges Clemenceau, less admiring, was certain he played a considerable part in the acquittal of Andrew Johnson—others called Seward a coward and a sneak; Mark Twain parodied the slippery secretary as saying, “I have always done my duty by my country when it seemed best. I was always the first to desert it when it lost its prestige….I have been always ready & willing to embrace Christianity, infidelity, or paganism, according to which held the most trumps.” A territorial expansionist, Secretary Seward oversaw the U.S. purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million during the waning days of the Johnson administration and intended also to acquire Hawaii.
A West Point graduate, wiry, short, with hair that seemed painted onto his head and a handlebar mustache, General Philip Sheridan had a well-deserved reputation for titanic daring, and he was beloved by his troops. “If a wounded man stumbled,” recalled one of Grant’s aides, “he called out to him: ‘There’s no harm done’; and the trooper went on with a bullet in his brain till he dropped dead on the field.” As military governor in Texas and Louisiana after the war, Sheridan strenuously supported the enrollment of black voters—and met with such opposition he famously said, “If I owned both Hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.” In 1884 he became commander in chief of the army, serving until his death, and though active in the creation of Yellowstone National Park, he was also known for ruthless campaigns against the Oklahoma Cheyenne and the Southern Plains Indians.
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