The Impeachers
Page 47
After the death of his father, a nine-year-old William Tecumseh Sherman (he’d been named after the Shawnee chief Tecumseh) was raised by Thomas Ewing, the first secretary of the interior, fourteenth treasury secretary, and U.S. senator from Ohio. Ewing helped secure Sherman admission to West Point, and Sherman married Ewing’s daughter Ellen. In 1853, he resigned from the army and for a short time became a banker in San Francisco; that didn’t go well. Appointed infantry colonel at first during the war, after Bull Run Sherman said that at least two thousand troops would be needed to win the war; he was called insane and temporarily relieved from duty. Reinstated, he headed the Georgia campaign in the notorious “march to the sea,” for by then his friendship with Grant was crucial to winning the war. But Sherman opposed the Radical Republican blueprint for reconstruction, which Grant did not. Restless, ruthless, brilliant, fond of Dickens and Shakespeare, whom he often quoted, Sherman later waged war against Native Americans. With amoral clarity, he’d unhappily predicted that any sustained assault would be “a sort of predatory war for years”—which is what happened; Sherman ordered the army to strike Native Americans brutally and without hesitation.
Lincolnesque, at least in looks, Henry Stanbery was the law partner of Thomas Ewing and, like Ewing, adamantly opposed giving black men or women the vote. When Johnson renominated Stanbery as attorney general after the impeachment trial, the Senate refused to confirm him.
The abrasive Edwin Stanton was one of the big guns of the wartime administration, said Walt Whitman; you could rely on him. “He was touchy, testy, yet also wonderfully patriotic, courageous, far-seeing,” the poet noted. After Grant’s inauguration as President, Stanton said, more than anything, he had wanted a seat on the Supreme Court, and at the end of 1869, when one became vacant, he was swiftly confirmed by Congress. His health already shattered, he died just a few days later, at age fifty-five.
As the recognized leader of the House Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens always inspired hatred, devotion, contempt, fear, and affectionate respect; still does. Born into poverty, partly lame because of a congenital clubfoot, Stevens was a fighter; he had fought in Pennsylvania for free public education—and for a war to end slavery once and for all, which he hoped Lincoln would wage with ferocity. Known for his sarcasm, his masterful intelligence, and his generosity, he might annihilate a colleague on the House floor, it was said, and then take him to lunch. He had no use for Andrew Johnson.
Fresh out of Harvard Law School, Moorfield Storey went to work as Charles Sumner’s private secretary, where the fairly conservative young man was soon radicalized. Back in Massachusetts in 1869, Storey passed the bar, and as a Liberal Republican, then a Democrat, supported the presidential bid of Grover Cleveland. Although he never held public office, he did briefly consider running for President on a third-party ticket; in later life, and always an activist, he became founding president of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) as well as a charter member and president of the American Anti-Imperialism League, which vigorously opposed American intervention in Cuba and the Philippines.
Called great and weak, philanthropic and selfish, venomous and sincere, Charles Sumner could be insulting, which is how Congressman Preston Brooks regarded Sumner’s 1856 public excoriation of his cousin Andrew Butler as beholden to his mistress, the “harlot slavery.” On the Senate floor, with colleagues standing by, Brooks proceeded to thrash Sumner within an inch of his life. Sumner left the Senate to recuperate for more than three years while Massachusetts kept the seat open. Returning to the Senate, Sumner continued to condemn slavery as barbaric, and after the war, like Stevens, he deplored what he saw as Johnson’s betrayal of Republican ideals. He then supported Grant for President but when not nominated his secretary of state, as Grant’s antagonist, he prevented passage of a treaty to annex Santo Domingo, which he considered to have been fraudulently negotiated. As a result, Sumner lost his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. All the while, though, Sumner continued the battle for civil and political rights for blacks, even after he joined the Liberal Republicans, mainly to prevent Grant’s 1872 re-election.
Keen, sharp, reserved, and logical, Lyman Trumbull struck contemporaries as looking like a schoolmaster. After serving as a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court, Trumbull defeated Lincoln in 1854 for the Senate seat, although the two men admired each other and shared the similar aim, preventing the extension of slavery into the territories. Though he helped draft the Thirteenth Amendment, he called the Radical Republicans rash and ruthless. During Grant’s administration, Trumbull became a Liberal Republican to protest government corruption. Urged to a run as the Liberal Republican candidate for President in 1872, Trumbull was passed over in favor of the once-powerful publisher Horace Greeley, even though Greeley was widely dismissed as an inept, half-cracked huckster. In 1876, Trumbull became a Democrat, but in 1894, allying himself with Populists, he and Clarence Darrow defended labor leader Eugene V. Debs for having participated in the Pullman railway strike.
Né Samuel Clemens of Missouri, Mark Twain had paddled the Mississippi until the Civil War; had fought very briefly on the side of the Confederacy during that war; had lived in Nevada and prospected in San Francisco; and worked as a lecturer, humorist, inventor, stand-up comic, and writer who hated cant: that same Mark Twain, author of such iconic books as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was also an incisive, coruscating, and basically compassionate political journalist living in Washington in the months before the impeachment trial.
Considered the most honest man in the Senate but also the unsubtle conscience of the Republicans, Benjamin Wade was burly and belligerent, profane and tenacious, and not without his prejudices. During the first days of the Civil War, Wade attempted to block the Union retreat at Bull Run by grabbing his rifle, overturning his carriage, and threatening to shoot runaway soldiers. Though an elector for Rutherford B. Hayes in the disputed election of 1876, Wade considered Hayes’ withdrawal of federal troops from the South a tragic and treacherous mistake.
Along with his two brothers, who had each been elected from different states, Elihu Washburne was a supporter of Lincoln—he’d written his campaign biography—and then managed Grant’s presidential campaign. A cautious but energetic broad-shouldered man with bushy eyebrows, Washburne was appointed secretary of state by Grant, but he immediately resigned. Then, as minister to France, he stayed there during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. In 1880, he permanently and bitterly fell out with Grant over the presidential contest.
Familiarly known as the Old Man of the Sea, or Neptune, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was a fusty, cranky man with a bushy beard who had been a Democrat, albeit an anti-slavery one, in the Connecticut House of Representatives. Rewarded by Lincoln with a cabinet post, during the Civil War Welles efficiently expanded and rebuilt the navy, and, increasingly embittered, believed he and the navy never received their due for their contribution to the Union victory. During both the Lincoln and Johnson administrations, Welles, a former journalist, faithfully kept a diary in which he transcribed the daily goings-on in the cabinet and government, generally with a waspish pen. For better and worse, the diary has become essential, if biased, source material.
An anti-slavery Democrat before the war, Walt Whitman traveled to Washington after the battle at Fredericksburg to find his brother. He stayed there but lost his job as a clerk when Interior Secretary James Harlan found in Whitman’s desk a working copy of Leaves of Grass, which he called obscene. Whitman was then hired in the attorney general’s office, and friends rallied round him with a campaign that famously turned him into the Good Gray Poet. Shaggy and massive, he was often seen swinging slowly down Washington’s broad avenues, an old felt hat perched on his head, his collar unbuttoned. During the Johnson years, the poet wrote essays later collected as Democratic Vistas, and which had been inspired in part by the corruption of polit
icians—and what Whitman celebrated as the strong, vital, lasting, and forever sublime spirit of America.
Notes
COMMONLY USED ABBREVIATIONS
People
The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited names:
AJ: Andrew Johnson
BB: Benjamin F. Butler
HCW: Henry Clay Warmoth
OOH: Oliver Otis Howard
USG: Ulysses S. Grant
WPF: William Pitt Fessenden
WTS: William Tecumseh Sherman
Archives, Libraries, Collections
For frequently cited libraries or manuscript depositories, the following abbreviations are used:
BRFA: Registers and Letters Received by the Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freemen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872
Bowdoin: George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Butler: Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York
Cornell: Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, Special Collections, Cornell University Library Division of Rare Books and Manuscripts
LC: Library of Congress, Manuscripts Collections, Washington, D.C.
Hayes: Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, Special Collections, Fremont, Ohio
Houghton: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Huntington: Huntington Library, San Marino, California
KSHS: Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas
NA: National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Notre Dame: Archives, Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
NYHS: New York Historical Society Museum and Library, Manuscripts Department, New York, New York
NYPL: The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York, New York
SHA: Southern Historical Collection at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
SCA: South Caroliniana Collection, University of Southern Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina
Smith: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
Western Reserve: Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
WHS: Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin
Yale: Archives and Manuscripts, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
In addition to the archives gratefully credited above, I also gleaned significant material among the following papers:
Francis W. Bird papers bMS Am 1851; Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, bMS Am 1083, Charles Eliot Norton Papers, bMS 1066; Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, bMS 1088; Wendell Phillips Papers, bMS Am 1953, Charles Sumner Papers, bMS Am 1, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Samuel L. M. Barlow Papers, MS BW 42, boxes 56–68, plus the Jerome Stillson Correspondence, HM 82487–82516, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
The Bigelow Family Papers, MSS 299 and John Bigelow Papers, MSS 301; Horace Greeley Papers, MSS 1231; Bryant-Godwin Papers, MSS 422, Henry J. Raymond Papers, MSS 2532; Gideon Welles Papers, MS 3275, in The Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited books, reports, or articles:
CWL: Collected Works of Lincoln, ed. Roy Basler. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 8 vols.
CG: Congressional Globe: Debates and Proceedings, 1833–1873. Washington, D.C.: Blair and Rives, 1834–1873.
“Impeachment Investigation”: National Archives Files, 40th Congress, Various Papers, Files 40B–A1, C–A2, Boxes 1–12.
Impeachment Testimony: Impeachment Investigation: Testimony taken before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives in the Investigation of Charges Against Andrew Johnson, 39th Cong., 2nd Session and 40th Congress, 1st Session. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867.
“Memphis Report”: Report of the Select Committee on the New Orleans Riots. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867.
Moore: “Notes of Colonel W. G. Moore, Private Secretary to Andrew Johnson.” ed. George L. St. Siousset. American Historical Review, Oct. 1913: 98–131.
OR: “War of the Rebellion” Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.
PAJ: Papers of Andrew Johnson, ed. Roy LeGraf, Ralph Haskins, and Paul Bergeron. 16 vols. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000.
PUSG: Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974–2009, 31 vols. (Supplementary volume 32, ed. John F. Marszalek.)
“Raising of Money”: “Raising of Money to Be Used in Impeachment,” Report to the Committees of the United States House of Representatives for the Fortieth Congress, 75, CG 40: 2, July 3, 1868. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868.
Trial: The Trial of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, before the Senate of the United States, on Impeachment by the House of Representatives for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. ed. Benjamin Perley Poore. 3 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1868.
PROLOGUE
“This is a country for white men”: quoted in McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, p. 184.
“If we have not been sufficiently”: CG 39: 1, Dec. 18, 1865, pp. 74–75.
“ ‘All men are created free and equal’ ”: CG 39: 2, Jan. 15, 1867, p. 478.
“Peace had come”: Josephson, The Politicos, p. 6.
It sounded like a death sentence: “Washington. Impeachment of Johnson at the Bar of the Senate,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 02-26-1868, p. 3.
“And out of the midst”: Mark Twain, “Mark Twain’s Letter,” Chicago Republican, March 1, 1868, p. 1.
“Andrew Johnson was the queerest man”: Cullom, Fifty Years of Public Service, p. 143.
“The multitude of strangers were waiting for impeachment”: “Mark Twain’s Letter,” Chicago Republican, March 1, 1868, p. 11.
Still, the impeachment of a President: see C. M. Ellis, “The Causes for Which a President Can Be Impeached,” Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1867), p. 89. For a more modern point of view, written in the shadow of the possible Nixon impeachment, and one that argues against the Johnson impeachment, see Berger, Impeachment.
“the negro is an animal”: Andrews, The South Since the War, p. 87.
“Can we depend on our President to exert his influence”: F. A. Angell to BB, July 7, 1865, Butler, Private and Official Correspondence, vol. 5, p. 641.
“replanting the seeds of rebellion”: quoted in Thaddeus Stevens, “Reconstruction,” Sept. 6, 1865, in Stevens, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 22.
“It is our duty”: quoted in Andrews, The South Since the War, p. 391.
Union General Philip Sheridan: Gen. Philip Sheridan to OOH, Aug. 3, 1865, Bowdoin.
In New Orleans: see Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour, p. 245.
“People had not got over regarding”: Reid, After the War, pp. 420–22.
The whole episode left such a bitter aftertaste: see C. Vann Woodward, “The Other Impeachment,” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 11, 1974, p. 25.
The year before Woodward’s pronouncement: see Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson.
“political and l
egal train wreck”: Stewart, Impeached, p. 315.
“This is one of the last great battles with slavery”: Trial III, pp. 247–48.
“unscathed cross upon”: quoted in Stryker, Andrew Johnson, p. 822.
“The American people must be taught”: AJ, “Reply to the Illinois Delegation,” April 18, 1865, quoted in Moore, Speeches of Andrew Johnson, p. 470.
CHAPTER ONE: MARS
aggressive often insolent: see Flower, Stanton, p. 48.
“prone to despond”: Dawes, “Recollections of Stanton under Lincoln,” p. 164.
“Where is Mary?”: Wolcott, Edwin M. Stanton, p. 100.
“I feel indifferent”: Stanton to Salmon Chase, Nov. 30, 1846, LC; see also Thomas and Hyman, Edwin Stanton, pp. 40–41.
“as white and cold and motionless”: Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed. Burlingame and Ettlinger, p. 37.