by H. W. Brands
Another impediment to conviction involved the man who would succeed Johnson. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tempore of the Senate, had almost as many enemies in the upper house as Johnson did, and these had no desire to make Wade president (on account of there being no vice president). “If impeachment fails, be sure of one fact,” a Washington observer remarked. “Dislike for Mr. Wade has done it.”
The trial began in early March and lasted till the middle of May. Salmon Chase, who had succeeded Roger Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1864, presided. The House sent Thaddeus Stevens and several colleagues to manage the prosecution; Johnson retained William Evarts, a distinguished member of the New York bar and a harsh critic of Johnson’s reconstruction policies who nonetheless thought the president deserved capable counsel. The senators, sitting as the jury in the case, weighed matters constitutional (What precisely were “high crimes and misdemeanors”?), political (Was it smarter to remove Johnson by conviction now or by election six months hence?) and philosophical (Was this exercise of the impeachment power a vindication of democracy or its perversion?). In the end the prosecution persuaded a solid majority but not quite the necessary two-thirds. Seven Republicans crossed the line to vote with the Democrats, sparing Johnson by a single vote.
55
WHILE THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN JOHNSON AND THE REPUBLICANS convulsed Washington and the East, a more violent struggle of much longer duration was playing out in the West. The contest for mastery of what would become the United States, between the indigenous peoples of North America and the European settlers and their descendants, had begun with the first clashes between the Indians and the English in Virginia and New England in the early seventeenth century; it continued with King Philip’s War, the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, Tecumseh’s War, the Creek War, the Seminole Wars, the Black Hawk War and the hundreds of raids, massacres and reprisals too minor to merit proper names. The battleground shifted as the frontier of white settlement pushed westward; one group of defenders gave way to another as various Indian tribes were defeated, dislocated or destroyed. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century the eastern half of the continent was essentially pacified; only the territory west of the Mississippi experienced continued resistance. And for a time that resistance was modest. The discovery of gold in California drew hundreds of thousands of adventurers to the Pacific Coast, and though they wreaked havoc on the California tribes, they provoked little conflict with the peoples of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains or the Great Basin. Those peoples stole cattle from unprotected wagon trains and sometimes extorted protection money from the travelers, but they typically acquiesced in the migrants’ passage, recognizing them as a transient annoyance rather than an existential danger.
Things changed around 1860. The discovery of gold and silver in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Montana and other parts of the western interior brought permanent populations of intruders to regions previously unpeopled by whites. And the outbreak of the Civil War pulled soldiers from frontier forts where their presence had tended to keep the peace. The uncontrolled friction between settlers and Indians in southeastern Colorado in 1864 culminated in a bloody massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children by Colorado militia at Sand Creek. The Sand Creek massacre reverberated among the tribes of the region and touched off a general war for the Plains. The Cheyenne and Arapaho allied with the Sioux to assault white settlements and outposts across Colorado. A force of a thousand Indians swept down upon the village of Julesburg, slaughtering and scalping the residents and burning the buildings. The attackers tore out telegraph lines and severed the road to Denver, cutting off that town from supplies and reinforcements.
The Sioux took the lead in the fighting, and at the head of the Sioux was a chief of the Oglala band, Red Cloud. “The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,” Red Cloud afterward told a delegation of federal officers at Fort Laramie. “I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.”
Efforts by the government to open a more direct route to the gold fields of Montana prodded Red Cloud and his first lieutenant, Crazy Horse, to launch a new series of attacks. Crazy Horse ambushed parties along the Bozeman road, enticing the commander at Fort Phil Kearny to sally forth in pursuit. The commander, William Fetterman, a Civil War veteran, had boasted that with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. With eighty-one men he rode into Crazy Horse’s trap, and he and his men were annihilated.
The conflict escalated further with the approach of construction crews of the transcontinental railroad. The Indians of the region hadn’t seen trains before, but they quickly realized that these trains weren’t like wagon trains, here today and gone tomorrow. The railroad established a permanent white presence and consequently a more serious threat to the indigenes’ way of life. When the railroad trains disgorged buffalo hunters who slaughtered the herds on which the Indians depended for food, clothing, shelter and fuel, the conflict became irrepressible. Not long after Crazy Horse crushed Fetterman, a coalition of Sioux and Cheyenne conducted raids against the Union Pacific crews in Wyoming. In one a hundred Indians attacked a special train carrying government officials and potential investors; the travelers escaped injury but quickly retreated to safer ground.
Grant inherited the Indian war when he became general-in-chief, but not until the struggle with the South ended did he pay much attention to the conflict on the Plains. In the summer of 1865 he sent Sherman to command the army forces in the West from headquarters at St. Louis; he typically worked through Sherman but occasionally received communications from the front. “I want men,” Colonel Henry Carrington demanded from Fort Phil Kearny in the wake of the Fetterman debacle. “I must have reinforcements and the best of arms.” Carrington related the grim details of the defeat and declared that if Grant didn’t send men and weapons the country must expect more of what Fetterman and his men had suffered. “Any remissness will result in mutilation and butchery beyond precedent.”
Grant was willing to reinforce the western army, but he insisted on doing so as part of a deliberate strategy. Sherman had proposed dividing the West into separate districts for whites and Indians. The Sioux would be kept north of the Platte, west of the Missouri and east of the road to Montana. “All Sioux found outside of these limits without a written pass from some military commander defining clearly their object should be dealt with summarily,” Sherman wrote Grant. The Arapaho, Cheyenne and other tribes would have their own districts. “This would leave for our people exclusively the use of the wide belt, east and west, between the Platte and the Arkansas, in which lie the two great railroads and over which passes the bulk of travel to the mountain territories. As long as these Indians can hunt the buffalo and antelope within the described limits”—of the white zone—“we will have the depredations of last summer and, worse yet, the exaggerations of danger raised by our own people, often for a very base purpose.”
Grant forwarded Sherman’s plan to the War Department. He endorsed the recommendations, provided that they didn’t conflict with existing treaty obligations. “The protection of the Pacific railroad, so that not only the portion already completed shall be entirely safe, but that the portion yet to be constructed shall in no way be delayed, either by actual or apprehended danger, is indispensable,” he declared.
Grant and Sherman viewed the struggle for the Plains through their experience of the struggle for the Union. Railroads were critical; protecting the lines of communication and transport took precedence over nearly everything else. Commerce came a distant second. Grant perceived the agents licensed by the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior as being much like the rogue traders of the Civil War. They put personal profit before the nation’s interest
, to the point of selling the Indians the weapons they used against the federal soldiers. Grant judged this intolerable, and he bent every effort to bring the traders under control of the military. “The Indian Bureau should be transferred to the War Department,” he told Sherman. “And Indian agencies, from among civilians, abolished.… No license should be given to traders among them.” The army would then strictly regulate what goods might be sold to the Indians. “Keeping arms and munitions from them, trade in all other articles would weaken them more rapidly than campaigns.”
Grant made the same argument more sharply and more politically to Edwin Stanton, at that time still secretary of war. Grant knew that the current regime of Indian agents had friends in Washington who would resist the changes he espoused. But he told Stanton that the government needed to make up its mind. “If the present practice is to be continued, I do not see that any course is left open to us but to withdraw our troops to the settlements, and call upon Congress to provide means and troops to carry on formidable hostilities against the Indians until all the Indians or all the whites upon the Great Plains and between the settlements on the Missouri and the Pacific slope are exterminated.”
He took his case to the president and the cabinet. “War exists,” he told Johnson and the secretaries. “We cannot fight them with one branch of the government and equip and feed them with another, with any kind of justice to those who are called upon to expose their lives,” he said. He was asked whether supplies ought to be withheld from peaceable Indians. “The military must be the judge of who are peaceable Indians,” he replied.
The judgment of some military men could be harsh. The spring of 1867 brought a new round of raids by the Plains tribes upon white forts and settlements; Sherman concluded that the chances of coexistence were slim. “This conflict of authority will exist as long as the Indians exist, for their ways are different from our ways,” he wrote Grant. “Either they or we must be masters on the Plains.” Sherman contended that right and wrong had little to do with the matter. “I have no doubt that our people have committed grievous wrong to the Indians, and I wish I could punish them. But it is impracticable.” The offenders had their political sponsors against whom a mere soldier would only break his lance. The alternatives were plain and undeniable. “Both races cannot use this country in common.… One or the other must withdraw.”
Grant wasn’t prepared to agree. When the Johnson administration refused to rein in the traders and Congress declined to increase appropriations for western defense, Grant called for a retreat from the most exposed western positions, the forts in the valley of the Powder River. “It will be well to prepare at once for the abandonment of the posts Phil Kearny, Reno, and Fetterman, and to make all the capital with the Indians that can be made out of the change,” he wrote Sherman. He told Sherman to prepare the evacuation at once, lest matters on the ground force the army’s hand. “I fear that, by delay, the Indians may commence hostilities and make it impossible for us to give them up.” To Stanton, Grant again spoke more politically. He identified the forts he wished to evacuate and explained that the ground they occupied was more important to the Indians than to the whites. “These posts are kept up at great expense and without any benefit,” he said. Prudence called for their abandonment.
Even as he urged retreat, Grant added his voice to those calling for negotiations with the Indians. He tapped Sherman to head a peace commission. Sherman had to be talked into the job, having traveled to Fort Laramie the previous autumn to meet with leaders of the Sioux, only for Red Cloud to boycott the talks. The chief sent a message that there was nothing to negotiate until the whites left the Powder River. “I did not first commence the spilling of blood,” he said. “If the Great Father kept the white men out of my country, peace would last forever. But if they disturb me, there will be no peace.… I mean to keep this land.”
Grant told Sherman to try again. “Your peace commission may accomplish a great deal of good, beside that of collecting the Indians on reservations, by attracting the attention of Indians during the season practicable for making war, and also of our white people, who never seem to be satisfied without hostilities with them.” Talking was preferable to fighting. “It is much better to support a peace commission than a campaign against Indians.”
Sherman consented, only to be frustrated again. Once more Red Cloud stayed away. He sent another message: “We are on the mountains looking down on the soldiers and the forts. When we see the soldiers moving away and the forts abandoned, then I will come down and talk.”
Sherman left muttering at the stubbornness of the Sioux. But Red Cloud got what he wanted. In the summer of 1868, after Congress accepted Grant’s calls for retrenchment, the army pulled out of the Powder River forts. Red Cloud led his warriors down from the mountains and into the forts, which he burned to the ground. He proceeded to Fort Laramie and signed a treaty Sherman had prepared. “The Government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it,” the treaty said. “The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to maintain it.”
56
THOUGH THE IMPEACHMENT EFFORT FAILED TO REMOVE JOHNSON from office, it confirmed congressional control of reconstruction. The president bowed to the inevitable and began to enforce the laws he had lately condemned, and the Radicals pushed ahead with the writing of Republican-friendly constitutions for the Southern states. Their haste to do justice to the former slaves was inspired by their historical sense that injustice had festered far too long in America and their political sense that if Republican-controlled Southern states could be readmitted in time for the 1868 presidential election, the electoral votes of those states would guarantee a Republican victory.
The most controversial question at the Republican convention was how severely to criticize Andrew Johnson—a question that proved not very controversial at all. “We profoundly deplore the untimely and tragic death of Abraham Lincoln,” the platform declared, “and regret the accession of Andrew Johnson to the Presidency, who has acted treacherously to the people who elected him and the cause he was pledged to support; has usurped high legislative and judicial functions; has refused to execute the laws”—and so on, through a condemnation that culminated in a correct but misleading verdict: “and has been justly impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and properly pronounced guilty thereof by the vote of thirty-five senators.”
The easy part was nominating Grant. He hadn’t campaigned at all, and no one in particular had campaigned on his behalf. The delegates simply assumed that the hero of the war would make an irresistible candidate. “It would hardly seem that the Convention had met for the purpose of nominating a candidate for President, so little is that office mentioned in the canvass going on,” a reporter who reached Chicago with the delegates said on Monday, May 18. “Grant’s name occurs to no one save as a positively fixed result, and the only occasion when it will be prominently in the mouths of his friends is when he is nominated by acclamation, which will be done by Thursday certainly, if not sooner.” The reporter added disappointedly: “This detracts in a great measure from the excitement and interest usually attending the nomination.”
No other candidate challenged Grant; if one had, there might have been a riot, or perhaps a mutiny. A gathering of Union veterans took place in Chicago simultaneous with the Republican convention; the soldiers swapped battle tales and convinced themselves that none other than their old commander must now become the country’s commander in chief. They passed a unanimous resolution to this effect and marched to the Republican convention to help the delegates there reach the same conclusion. At times it was hard to distinguish between the two groups. The temporary chairman of the Republican convention was Union general Carl Schurz, who introduced the permanent chairman, General Joseph Hawley. General John Logan placed Grant’s name in nomination. Scores more of the delegates had been lesser Union officers. The convention hardly required the prompting from the veterans; it unanimously approved Grant�
�s nomination on the first ballot.
Grant received word at Washington. Though he hadn’t sought the nomination, he could read the newspapers and the political tea leaves as well as anyone and wasn’t surprised. “The proceedings of the convention were marked with wisdom, moderation and patriotism, and, I believe, express the feelings of the great mass of those who sustained the country through its recent trials,” he wrote by way of reply, complimenting the delegates and himself in a single sentence. He distanced himself from Johnson, saying, “If elected to the office of President of the United States it will be my endeavor to administer all the laws, in good faith.” He avoided specifics. “In times like the present it is impossible, or at least eminently improper, to lay down a policy to be adhered to, right or wrong, through an administration of four years. New political issues, not foreseen, are constantly arising; the views of the public on old ones are constantly changing, and a purely administrative officer should always be free to execute the will of the people.” He embraced tradition and essential values. “Peace, and universal prosperity, its sequence, with economy of administration, will lighten the burden of taxation, while it constantly reduces the national debt.” He closed with four words that summarized the mood of the country and made the general election almost pro forma: “Let us have peace.”