Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy

by David O. Stewart

  Having easily withstood the impeachment assault, and buoyed by Democratic Party advances in the 1867 elections, Johnson turned to the offensive, starting with the military. He swiftly removed two more commanders in the South—General John Pope (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida), and General Edward Ord (Mississippi and Arkansas). Southerners had complained that both men enforced Congress’s Reconstruction program rather too well. Over a six-month period, Johnson had supplanted the commanders for four of the five military districts in the South. He also transferred another general serving in Alabama, for the same reason. General Pope vividly described what was at stake in the president’s management of Reconstruction:

  It is a misnomer to call this question in the South a political question. It is War pure and simple. The question is not whether Georgia and Alabama will accept or reject reconstruction. It is [whether] the Union men and the freedmen, [will] be the slaves of the old…rebel aristocracy or not? Or rather shall the [Union men] be permitted to live in these states at all or the Negroes [permitted to live] as free men?

  Southern whites instantly grasped the meaning of Johnson’s dismissal of the commanders. “The rebels are rejoicing,” complained the head of the Republican Party of Georgia, “and are now bragging that Reconstruction is a failure.”

  General Grant, a far more difficult target for Johnson to strike, continued to be an irritation, and worse. The new commander in New Orleans, General Winfield Scott Hancock, reversed many of the orders of his ousted predecessor, Philip Sheridan, exactly as Johnson had intended. But then Grant reversed Hancock. Unwilling to challenge the general-in-chief directly but equally unwilling to sit silent, Johnson called upon Congress to approve an official vote of thanks to Hancock. Congress, recognizing that the gesture would be a swipe at Grant, did not comply. In both Houses, according to Clemenceau, the president’s message met laughter, “and neither body descended to the point of discussing it seriously.”

  Johnson’s thorniest problem was his suspended War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, who stubbornly refused to resign. With the Senate back in session, the Tenure of Office Act required that Johnson ask that body to concur in Stanton’s permanent dismissal. The president could have thumbed his nose at the statute, asserting that the Constitution gave him authority to fire Stanton. Johnson, however, judged it unwise to flout the law, which had been written by Thad Stevens himself. Alternatively, Johnson could appoint a replacement for Stanton. If he followed that course, the Senate would never vote on whether Stanton’s dismissal was proper, but would simply decide whether to confirm a new war secretary. The president rejected this simple and reasonable strategy, doubting that the Senate would confirm anyone he would want to appoint. Had Johnson been willing to appoint a compromise choice for war secretary, the coming crisis could have been avoided altogether.

  On December 12, Johnson sent the Senate a report justifying Stanton’s dismissal. In doing so, the president accepted the procedures of the Tenure of Office Act, a course that would undercut his credibility if he ever wished to challenge that statute. He explained that he requested Stanton’s resignation in August because the two men lacked “mutual confidence and general accord.” Stanton’s refusal to resign was “a defiance, and something more,” which “must end our official relations.” The president ridiculed Stanton’s claim that the Tenure of Office Act protected him; Stanton himself had judged the statute unconstitutional! Johnson also detailed specific grievances. His Reconstruction policies followed the plans drawn up by Stanton for President Lincoln, yet Stanton now spurned those policies in favor of congressional Reconstruction. Johnson complained that Stanton did not relay to him a message about the New Orleans situation in late July 1866, which degenerated into the massacre. He concluded with the incontestable assertion that he could not work with this war secretary.

  On January 10, a Senate committee recommended that Stanton be restored to office. A fresh confrontation between Congress and the president was under way.

  Johnson thought he had a contingency plan for this turn of events. Months before, he had extracted a commitment from Grant, as interim war secretary, that he would not physically relinquish his War Department office if the Senate did not uphold Stanton’s dismissal. This commitment gave Johnson some additional options. If Grant held onto the office in defiance of the Senate’s action, Johnson might file a court challenge to the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act. Or, if Grant returned physical control of the office to Johnson—which seemed to boil down to giving the president the key to the office door—the president could try to keep Stanton out of the office by rushing over another interim Secretary. But if Stanton regained control of the War Office, Johnson’s choices would be fewer and worse. Thus, the president was depending on Grant, a man he scorned as a political bumbler. Both relying on the general, and thinking him a bumbler, were mistakes. Grant would prove Johnson’s match through an extended bout of maneuvering, backstabbing, and public recriminations.

  Grant later insisted that his course was clear once he realized that violations of the Tenure of Office Act could be punished by a $10,000 fine and time in jail. According to Grant, he did not make that discovery until the night that the Senate committee recommended that Stanton be reinstated. (Some suspect that Stanton himself enlightened the general on this legal point.) After discussing the law’s penalties with his staff and with General Sherman, Grant concluded he could not remain in the office if the Senate reinstated Stanton. He would not be lured into committing a crime, certainly not when he was expecting to run for president in a few months.

  On the next morning, January 11, Grant and Johnson talked at the White House for over an hour. The dynamics of the conversation were complex. By now the two men had considerable experience with each other, little of it good. Neither liked or respected the other. Grant, the subordinate who rarely acted that way, was a man of instinct and action. He saw before him a long-winded, tricky politician. Johnson, the beleaguered president whose natural Southern constituency was still excluded from the government, saw a sullen, tongue-tied soldier with intellectual gifts below the norm. Both knew that Grant had been undermining Johnson for at least eighteen months while Johnson worked to undermine the Reconstruction statutes.

  Later, Grant claimed to have told the president that if the Senate reinstated Stanton, he would give up the office. Johnson insisted that Grant said no such thing. With only those two men in the room, there is no way to know what happened. Perhaps Grant made his statement quietly while Johnson attempted to steamroller him, so the president simply missed it. By one account, Johnson offered to pay any fine Grant might face for violating the Tenure of Office Act. The full dimensions of their misunderstanding would emerge soon enough.

  Consulting again with General Sherman, Grant concluded that the president should appoint Ohio Governor Jacob Cox as war secretary. Cox, a moderate Republican with a solid war record, stood a good chance of Senate confirmation. Sherman made the recommendation to Johnson, but the president did nothing about it. Grant and Johnson saw each other at a White House levee on the night of January 13, but neither mentioned the problem with Stanton. And so it festered.

  While Grant and Johnson were misunderstanding each other on January 11, the Senate debated Stanton’s fate in secret session. The senators voted 35 to 6 to restore him to his office, on a straight party vote. Why would Senate Republicans restore to office a secretary of war whom the president could neither trust nor work with? How could that situation serve the nation? The principal factor had to be blazing Republican anger. One observer thought the Radicals gained courage and energy during Congress’s holiday recess. Certainly, Johnson had enraged his opponents anew when he removed Generals Pope and Ord from Southern commands. Many Republican senators supported Stanton solely because Johnson wanted him out.

  On the morning after the Senate’s action, Grant took a few mundane steps that launched the nation toward its first presidential impeachment. He went to his office at the lead-colored brick bu
ilding that held the War Department, a half-block west of the Executive Mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. After locking and bolting the door from the outside, he gave the key to his adjutant. Then he left for his other office at Army Headquarters. There, Grant sent a letter to Johnson acknowledging that the Senate had restored Stanton and thereby removed him as interim secretary of war. For the rest of the day, the general-in-chief bounced around Washington City like a pinball.

  Within an hour of Grant’s departure from the War Office, Stanton hurried into the building. He dictated a memo announcing his return. In his trademark peremptory fashion, he summoned the general-in-chief. For Grant, who had not expected Stanton to strike so quickly, the war secretary’s return must have seemed like the recurrence of a chronic ache. Stanton spent the afternoon in his office, receiving congratulations from happy Republicans.

  But the president also wanted a piece of Grant. He demanded the general’s presence at the Cabinet meeting at noon. When asked for a report on the War Department, Grant replied that he was no longer head of that agency. The indignant president, maintaining his self-control, subjected Grant to a withering cross-examination over his “duplicity” in giving up the office to Stanton. Navy Secretary Welles thought that Grant, “never very commanding, was almost abject” until he “slunk away.” After the general-in-chief left, all in the Cabinet, save Secretary of State Seward, agreed that Johnson should have the heads of both Stanton and the general.

  The tension between Johnson and Grant was ripening into a feud that would last the rest of their lives. Johnson thought Grant’s action “was that of a traitor.” When other Cabinet members sided with Johnson, Grant never again spoke to them or to their families. The next two weeks featured move and countermove between the general and the president, basted with wounded pride and resentment. Sherman tried to reconcile the two bitter men, but neither wanted rapprochement. Finally, Sherman yearned only to leave Washington.

  Grant was almost as angry with Stanton as he was with Johnson. At one point, the general-in-chief set off to advise Stanton to resign, only to encounter the war secretary’s “loud and violent” hectoring. Stanton, master of the positive uses of bad behavior, was sufficiently unpleasant that Grant gave up on his mission, leaving Stanton’s office without delivering his intended message.

  The general-in-chief came up with another path out of the morass. Why not, he proposed to the president, just ignore the war secretary? Johnson could order the army to disregard directions from Stanton. Johnson agreed but then never issued the order. That failure was no oversight, but a calculated measure to discomfit Grant. As the president explained to a confidant, Grant had been glad to be rid of Stanton when the war secretary was suspended. Johnson preferred to leave the two to “fight it out.”

  Instead, the president again pressed Sherman to become secretary of war, a prospect that still dismayed the high-strung general. Johnson could not accept that even though he and Sherman shared political views, the general would never be adverse to Sam Grant. As Sherman had put it, they stood by each other always.

  As soon as Stanton was back in the War Department, the press reported the president’s unhappiness. Johnson himself showed a reporter the minutes of a Cabinet discussion of Grant’s supposed double-dealing. The president gave exclusive interviews to a favored reporter from the New York World, complaining about his general-in-chief. Predictably, Grant grew furious, “as angry as any Hotspur in the land.” The general knew how to counterattack. On January 24, he wrote to Johnson requesting in writing the order that the army should disregard directions from Stanton. When Johnson did not respond, Grant raised the stakes with a second letter. Grant wrote that Johnson had said months before that he wanted to keep Stanton out of office, whether or not that was permitted by the Tenure of Office Act. As for the Cabinet meeting on January 14, Grant denied “the correctness of the President’s statement of our conversations.” In short, after accusing Johnson of soliciting his help in violating the Tenure of Office Act, Grant called him a liar.

  Several advisers urged the president to walk away from the confrontation. Public opinion was against Stanton, counseled one, but “by an imprudent act you may turn it in his favor.” Another encouraged Johnson to end the impasse by appointing a new war secretary. Good advice fell on deaf ears.

  Johnson challenged his top general with a letter asserting facts that were “diametrically the reverse of your narration.” He reported that every Cabinet member, “without exception,” agreed with Johnson’s version of the Cabinet meeting on January 14. Grant was not cowed. Unimpressed by the massed moral power of the president and his Cabinet, Grant replied that the “whole matter, from beginning to end, [was] an attempt to involve me in the resistance of the law, for which you hesitated to assume the responsibility in orders, and thus to destroy my character before the country.”

  At this point, Congress demanded copies of the incendiary correspondence, which promptly appeared in newspapers across the land. The episode was fascinating and horrifying: the president and his military chief exchanging angry accusations of mendacity. Even some who disliked Johnson doubted Grant’s version of events. Such doubts, it turned out, mattered little. The public was going to believe its hero general, not its president-by-accident. Early on, the New York Tribune distilled the calculus:

  In a question of veracity between a soldier whose honor is as unvarnished as the sun, and a President who has betrayed every friend, and broken every promise, the country did not hesitate.

  Grant’s successful campaign against Johnson in the winter of 1868 resembled some of his military operations. Somewhat surprised to be drawn into battle when the Senate reinstated Stanton, Grant made a swift, visceral evaluation. Whatever he might have said to the president before, he could not violate the Tenure of Office Act. Intentionally breaking a law, even a dubious one, would place him on the low ground. Worse, it would turn him into Andrew Johnson’s toady. While the president dug in his heels, seething and glowering, Grant explored ways to resolve the dispute, including appointing Governor Cox as war secretary, or bypassing Stanton at the War Department. When Johnson showed no interest in resolving the impasse, Grant attacked, throwing his massive popularity against the president’s checkered reputation. It had not been elegant, but it got Grant out of a tight political corner with his reputation mostly intact.

  Thaddeus Stevens watched the contest closely. When the House clerk read aloud Grant’s letter to Johnson of February 3—with several interruptions for spontaneous applause—the ailing congressman from Pennsylvania smelled blood. Grant, he exulted, “is a bolder man than I thought him.” With this evidence, Stevens continued, “Now we will let him into the Church.” Best of all, Grant gave Stevens a fresh theory for impeaching the president: that he had solicited Grant’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act. Within days, Stevens was pressing that theory in another impeachment resolution.

  By February 10, Stevens was ready. He persuaded the House to transfer all impeachment records to the Committee on Reconstruction, which he chaired. Now the Pennsylvanian could control the process.

  The president did not sit quietly and wait for Stevens’s next step. On the night before Stevens was to bring his resolution to the House, Johnson granted another interview to a friendly reporter. The president’s performance had a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality. He presented himself as calm and aloof from the storm. When impeachment came up, the president “laughed as if he didn’t believe the charges would ever come.” Johnson shared his unusual notions of political economy, blaming the nation’s economic troubles on emancipation, which converted slaves from “a good [that] increased the productive resources of the nation” into freedmen who burdened the country.

  But the heart of the interview was an assault on General Grant. The general supported the president during his early months in office, Johnson stressed, and had opposed Negro suffrage. Grant’s suggestion that the president order the army to ignore War Secretary Stanton was now, for Johnson, “only one
of a great many instances in which [Grant] has grossly deceived me.” After brandishing correspondence from Sherman to buttress his position, Johnson dismissed Grant as just another politician, the “Radical candidate for the Presidency.”

  But Johnson could not let go. On February 10, he fired off yet another rejoinder to the general, sputtering about Grant’s “insubordinate attitude.” A day later, Johnson released letters from Cabinet members supporting his version of events. Yet the president took no action against the general-in-chief, effectively admitting his mortifying political weakness. As summed up by old Thomas Ewing, General Sherman’s father-in-law and longtime political power, Grant’s actions “made it incumbent upon the president if he had any actual power to court martial him, but…he has not.”

  For Stevens, both sides of the Grant-Johnson correspondence established that the president tried to induce Grant to violate the Tenure of Office Act. As Stevens put it, “If the President’s statement is true, then he has been guilty of a high official misdemeanor. If the General’s statement is true, then the President has been guilty of a high official misdemeanor.” There was enough, he insisted, to impeach a dozen men. As for “the question of veracity, as they call it,” Stevens invited the two men to “go out in my back yard and settle it alone.”

  Stevens presented a new impeachment resolution to his committee on February 13, along with a report charging Johnson with soliciting the violation of the Tenure of Office statute. Though Stevens was “very earnest,” his committee balked. “Old Thad is still firm,” one reporter wrote, “but the others flinch.” Moderate John Bingham of Ohio held the balance of power. He moved that the resolution be tabled. His motion won, 6 to 3.