Testifying at the impeachment hearings, Baker’s evidence against Andrew Johnson was equally tainted. He claimed to have heard about a letter that Johnson was said to have written to Jefferson Davis early in 1864, when Johnson was the acting governor of Tennessee, in which Johnson had sought a position in the Confederacy.
Baker was asked, Where was the letter now?
He said it had been stolen from Johnson’s writing table and never sent.
As the investigation skittered off into irrelevant inquiries about Johnson’s business dealings, Secretary Stanton put an end to the attempt to prove corruption by testifying that he—not the president—had overseen the disposal of railroad tracks and rolling stock. When practical, it had all been sold as conquered property belonging to the United States. What could not be sold within the rebel states was transferred back to its original owners. In no way had Johnson profited from the transactions.
After sessions like that one, Thaddeus Stevens was heard to demand in frustration, “Well, have you got anything, anyhow?”
• • •
As Congress justified its attempt to impeach the president, two unexpected complications arose to distract Charles Sumner. He was urged to expand the borders of the United States, but at the same time his new marriage was unraveling.
His public dilemma was thrust on Sumner the evening of March 29, 1867, when he responded to Henry Seward’s urgent invitation to come to his house. By the time Sumner was ushered in, Seward had already left for the State Department but had delegated his son Frederick to explain the emergency.
Before the war, Tsar Alexander II had hoped to bolster his faltering economy with a sale of Russia’s Alaska territory to the United States. Now that the Union had won, Russia’s minister to Washington, Eduard de Stoeckl, had entered into secret negotiations with Seward.
On the next day, the secretary of state intended to buy for $7.2 million all of Russia’s holdings in North America, land that measured 591,000 square miles, or twice the size of Texas. The price worked out to about two cents an acre.
Stoeckl was on hand to assure Sumner that his government was prepared to act. He found a sympathetic listener, although Sumner had assumed that when the country’s boundaries were moved north, it would be by absorbing Canada.
As chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, however, Sumner’s sense of propriety was offended at having the deal sprung on him at the same moment that Seward was having ceremonial copies of the treaty prepared for the next day.
Leaving that night, Sumner made no promises, but he scheduled a special session of his committee for April 1. President Johnson had called Congress back for the same day.
As word leaked out, newspaper opinion was mixed. Instead of “Alaska”—an Aleut word for “mainland”—editors were branding the territory “Walrussia” and “Seward’s Folly.” The New York World called Alaska a “sucked-dry orange” with one resource—the fur of seals, which had already been hunted to near extinction. Harper’s Weekly joked that Alaska’s cattle sat cross-legged on the frozen tundra and produced ice cream instead of milk.
Sumner’s committee members were unimpressed with the acquisition, but over the next few days Seward lobbied them intensely. His loyalty to the president rankled Republicans, however, and William Fessenden remained opposed, with one facetious condition: He would change his mind if “the Secretary of State be compelled to live there, and the Russian government be required to keep him there.”
When it fell to Sumner to take a stand, he announced, “I regret very much to go for this treaty.”
On domestic issues, his colleagues often found Sumner rash and intemperate, but they did not question his authority in foreign affairs. He carried the majority of his committee with him, and on April 4, 1867, the Senate voted to annex Alaska, thirty-seven to two.
• • •
The respect Sumner was accorded in the Senate was not being reflected at home. From the day they left Washington in their honeymoon carriage, Alice Hooper Sumner had not turned out to be the gentle nurse and admiring acolyte Sumner believed he was marrying. Her close friends already knew the force of her temper, which she unleashed at the smallest provocation.
At first, Sumner had overlooked the warning signs and took pleasure in showing off his glamorous wife. But soon he was confiding to dinner companions that he should be home working on legislation and not dragged out every night to balls and banquets.
Salmon Chase’s daughter, Kate, recalled that her father had twitted Sumner before his marriage about the perils of prominent men with much younger wives. Kate considered Alice Sumner a “flutterfly” and was pained for Sumner—not a charming man, she granted, but warmhearted and a brilliant talker—that people should be gossiping about him.
One midnight at a dance, guests heard Sumner say mildly to his wife, “My dear, is it not time to go home?” And they heard her snap, “You may go when you like. I shall stay.”
By the time of the debate over Alaska, Washington society was whispering that Sumner rarely accompanied his wife at all. These nights, she was often on the arm of an attaché from the Prussian delegation, Baron Friedrich von Holstein.
Because the good-looking young man showed no urgent interest in women, Alice Sumner seemed to expect that no one would question his constant presence at her side. One shrewd Washington matron thought that Alice was seeing Holstein only “as a catspaw to annoy her husband.”
These days, conversation between the Sumners ran along the lines of the exchange when Sumner found Alice getting into a carriage with Holstein and another young couple.
He asked, “Where are you going, Alice?”
“I am going to enjoy myself.”
“But where are you going?”
“That does not concern you.”
Sumner retreated into his house alone and wept.
When Holstein gave Alice a costly amber necklace to replace her artificial stones, Sumner insisted on paying for it, even though he was badly strapped by the grand house they were building at the corner of H Street and Vermont Avenue.
The situation had become unbearable. Sumner agreed to spare her reputation by sending Alice on a cruise and letting it be understood that their separation was only temporary.
Their truce ended in April 1867, when Holstein was ordered home by his government, and Alice was convinced that her husband was behind the recall. As Sumner protested in vain, she cursed him and with a final “God damn you!” locked the door to her bedroom and prepared to live apart with her daughter, Bell.
Alice was not prepared, however, for the condemnation she received from women like Kate Chase. Alice struck back by overseeing a campaign by her friends to reclaim her honor. She let it be known that she had left her husband because—in the words of one rumormonger—“he could not perform the functions of a husband.”
Alice Sumner had handed her husband’s enemies a weapon as lethal in its way as Preston Brooks’s guttapercha cane. Around Washington, Charles Sumner became “The Great Impotent.”
• • •
All but forgotten during the stormy sessions in Congress, Jefferson Davis was wasting away in Virginia at Fortress Monroe, at the junction of the James River and Chesapeake Bay. Varina Davis overcame her contempt for Andrew Johnson and went in person to plead her husband’s case. The president assured her that the unrelenting hostility of Thaddeus Stevens and his Radicals were to blame for Davis’s suffering.
Since no evidence could be found connecting Davis to Lincoln’s assassination, he was eligible for habeas corpus proceedings. To charge him with treason, however, required that he be tried in federal district court before the local Virginia judge and Salmon Chase as the U.S. Chief Justice. But Chase refused to lend his authority to any court in the Confederacy, and his critics suggested that his chief concern was not damaging his presidential chances for the following year.
As the months ground on, Davis’s circumstance troubled a number of influential Northerners who j
oined in the protests—Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad millionaire; Gerrit Smith, a wealthy New York abolitionist; and Horace Greeley, now editor of the Republican New York Tribune. Smith offered to put up bail for Davis and lectured Johnson that holding the Confederate president without a trial dishonored his administration and the nation.
As attorneys for Davis wrangled over his case, they blamed Seward, as a victim of the assassination attempt, for his “most venomous influence” in keeping Davis confined.
At last, bail was approved, and on Saturday, May 11, 1867, Jefferson Davis walked out of Fortress Monroe with Varina at his side to board a steamer for Richmond. Women passengers recognized him and flocked around with embraces and kisses.
Once landed at Richmond, the Davises rode along a carriage route lined with well-wishers from the dock to the Spotswood Hotel. Men raised their hats; women waved handkerchiefs; no one made a sound.
In court on Monday, the district judge set bail at one hundred thousand dollars. Vanderbilt, Greeley, and Smith each put up twenty-five thousand dollars; ten other men guaranteed the rest. The government’s lawyer told the court that no prosecution was planned, and the judge instructed the marshal to discharge the prisoner.
That same night, Davis and his wife left for New York on their way to an impoverished exile. Among the letters Davis received was a note from Robert E. Lee, now the president of Washington College in Lexington, Kentucky.
Lee assured his former president that Davis’s release “has lifted a load from my heart, which I have not the words to tell” and wished for Davis “that peace which the world cannot take away.”
• • •
At the White House, it was not a peace Andrew Johnson could enjoy. He had already decided to remove Edwin Stanton from the War Department when he discovered a new cause for firing him: Johnson had never been shown the petition for clemency for Mary Surratt, although it had been signed by five of the nine officers at her trial. Her son had been captured after two years in hiding, and it was during his trial that the petition had come to light.
Johnson was convinced that Stanton had tricked him to get his signature on Mrs. Surratt’s death warrant. He immediately dictated a note to Stanton that his resignation would be accepted.
Stanton ignored the note. With Congress just adjourned, Johnson suspended Stanton and appointed Grant as interim secretary of war. To underscore his point, the president also removed Philip Sheridan and turned his command over to General Winfield Scott Hancock, a credible wartime leader but without Sheridan’s following throughout the North.
Grant believed that the Tenure of Office Act made the president’s action illegal, and he cautioned Johnson that loyal people of the country—North and South—might object if he dismissed from government “the very man of all others” in whom they had confidence. But, Grant concluded, he was a soldier first and would obey orders.
At home, Grant confided his ambivalence to his wife. The president had worked himself up to a white heat of indignation, Grant reported, and he had agreed to the interim appointment “as I think it most important that someone should be there who cannot be used.”
Grant added that he did not share the Radicals’ high opinion of Stanton. “He was very offensive,” Grant said, “voting ‘nay’ to every suggestion made by the president.”
If anything, Johnson had been too lenient with him: “Stanton would have gone and on the double-quick if I had been president.”
• • •
Over lunch, Grant brooded about recent developments, and in the afternoon, he rode with his wife to alert Stanton to his dismissal. They caught up with the secretary of war in his carriage on Seventh Street. Grant got out, stood on the step of the carriage, and told Stanton what Johnson had done.
“I thought, Mr. Stanton, it was but just to inform you so that you might not be unprepared and might arrange your actions, your papers, et cetera.”
“Ah,” Stanton replied, “I expected it. He could do nothing else and keep his self-respect.”
• • •
Stanton indicated that he would accept Grant as his interim replacement but agreed that the Tenure of Office Act prevented Johnson from removing him outright. Exhausted, low in spirits, and short of funds, Stanton went home to Ohio for his first vacation in five years.
The same wrangling that had depleted him, however, had recharged Andrew Johnson. The president told the faithful Gideon Welles, “If Congress can bring themselves to impeach me, because in my judgment a turbulent and unfit man should be removed, let them do it.”
And in his third annual message to Congress on December 7, 1867, Johnson flaunted his contempt for the Radicals’ quest for universal voting rights. He railed against the prospect of “negro domination” and charged that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people.”
Giving black men the vote would have cataclysmic results: “All order will be subverted, all industry cease, and the fertile fields of the South will grow up into a wilderness.”
• • •
The president had reason for his bravado. Congress had moved its Fortieth Session forward to prevent Johnson from taking advantage of its customary long adjournment, but when Congress returned to Washington in early July, the spirit for impeachment had flagged. Finding he could not revive it, Thaddeus Stevens was disheartened enough to agree that the motion should be tabled.
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Iowa congressman James Wilson, argued for ending the effort entirely. He complained that the anti-Johnson forces were trying to convict the president for actions that he might take someday. For example, he might station soldiers in Southern states “to overawe the loyal people of those states, especially the colored vote.”
Wilson asked, “Are we to impeach the President for what he may do in the future?”
Undeterred, the Radicals called for a vote on impeachment. On December 7, 1867, they lost almost two to one—57 yeas to 108 nays. For Stevens, Sumner, and their Radicals, the defeat was the more galling since membership in the House was now two-thirds Republican.
Salmon Chase
CHAPTER 10
SALMON PORTLAND CHASE (1868)
THE DAY AFTER THEIR EMBARRASSING defeat, Radical Republicans met at Thaddeus Stevens’s house on B Street to plot their next step. They agreed to keep up their campaign for impeachment by seizing on any political setback for Andrew Johnson or any slip he might make.
General Grant guaranteed that they would not have to wait long. From the first, he had been uncomfortable as interim secretary of war, given his approval of the congressional Reconstruction Acts. In mid-January 1868 he abruptly left the cabinet, turning the keys to the War Department back to Edwin Stanton and returning to his office at army headquarters.
By now, Grant’s disillusion with civilian politics was complete. He wrote to William Sherman, “All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations, and act only from motives of pure patriotism, and for the general good of the public has been destroyed. An inside view proves too truly very much the reverse.”
Johnson felt betrayed. In front of the cabinet, he claimed that Grant had pledged to stay on until the Court could rule on the Tenure of Office Act. Grant denied making that promise. When a Washington newspaper sided with Johnson and suggested that Grant had deceived the president, Grant controlled his temper, called at the White House, and explained how their rift could be repaired.
Johnson ignored his advice, and the attacks on Grant by Democratic newspapers intensified. The angry correspondence ended with Grant writing, “And now, Mr. President, where my honor as a soldier and integrity as a man have been so violently assailed, pardon me for saying that I can regard this whole matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to involve me in the resistance of law, for which you have hesitated to assume the responsibility in orders, and thus to destroy my character before the country.”
When their letters were read in the
Senate, Thaddeus Stevens offered Grant his backhanded praise: “He is a bolder man than I thought him.”
The initiative now passed to Edwin Stanton. The president and Henry Seward were convinced that he had to resign. But with the conflict between the legislative and executive branches of government thrown into sharp relief, Congress was insisting that Stanton stay.
Fifty congressmen led by Speaker Schuyler Colfax called on Stanton in person, bringing with them an appeal signed by another sixty House members. The president’s defiance guaranteed that the delegation was not limited to the Radicals. William Fessenden, despite his regular clashes with Charles Sumner, was among the voices urging Stanton to stand fast against the “renegade White House.”
Seeing his chance, Thaddeus Stevens transferred the impeachment issue from the reluctant Judiciary Committee to his own Committee on Reconstruction. He was counting on the acrimony between Johnson and Grant to expose the president as a liar, although Stevens admitted that Grant might have misrepresented what he had told Johnson about accepting the cabinet post. But, Stevens concluded, “Grant isn’t on trial; it’s Johnson.”
Even on his own committee, however, Stevens faced opposition. Six members rejected a new motion to impeach. Only two sided with their chairman.
Once again, Andrew Johnson ignored his friends’ face-saving advice, refusing to ride out his term with Stanton at the War Department. Even knowing the risks, Johnson went ahead with his plan to name a replacement.
His first choice was John Potts, the War Department’s chief clerk, but Potts refused to be thrust into the fray. Johnson then turned to Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, a sixty-three-year-old West Point graduate who delighted in his dress uniform, even though he tended to drink more enthusiastically than he fought.
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