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

by David O. Stewart

  AN AVALANCHE OF TALK

  APRIL 22–MAY 6, 1868

  [W]e have been wading knee deep in words, words, words…. [T]here are fierce impeachers here, who, if [faced with] the alternative of conviction of the President, coupled with their silence, and an unlimited opportunity to talk coupled with his certain acquittal…would instantly decide to speak.

  REP. JAMES A. GARFIELD, APRIL 28, 1868

  THE EXCITEMENT WAS back. On Wednesday, April 22, crowds flocked to the Senate chamber to hear closing arguments. The president was still in the White House. Secretary Stanton was still camped out in the War Department. One of them would be moving very soon. Spring temperatures brought ladies and gentlemen to the Capitol in their finest outfits, eager to hear soaring rhetoric about the fate of the Republic. This day, however, fell short on that score.

  The session began with a ninety-minute dustup over how many speeches could be delivered on each side. Finally acceding to the House managers, the Senate grudgingly allowed an unlimited number of speakers. Manager John Logan of Illinois submitted his remarks in written form. In view of their great length, the Senate had cause to be grateful. Manager James Wilson of Iowa was even more gracious, offering no statement at all. Despite these self-denying gestures, the final speeches would consume almost two weeks. Four lawyers would speak for each side, in an alternating pattern: a House manager would begin, then two defense lawyers, followed by two managers. The last two defense lawyers would speak, and then a final House manager would conclude the ordeal. Americans in the 1860s were accustomed to long addresses, often treating oratory as a spectator sport. Nevertheless, the number and length of the closing arguments would wear down both the senators and the public.

  Manager George Boutwell of Massachusetts opened for the prosecution. Having worked doggedly for more than a year to remove Andrew Johnson from office, Boutwell had to take some satisfaction in the moment. His address consumed three hours, until the Senate called it quits for the day.

  The compact Boutwell, then fifty years old, did not electrify audiences. His solemn delivery could grow wearisome. Senators became distracted after the first thirty minutes. The galleries began to rustle. The ladies turned their opera glasses on one another, with even the occasional “telescopic flirtation.”

  The Ladies’ Gallery in the Senate during the trial.

  Whatever his rhetorical limitations, Boutwell presented a thoughtful analysis. The president, he argued, had no innocent intent in the War Office episode. Johnson knowingly violated the Tenure of Office Act without taking any step to test the statute in court. Reviewing the legislative history of the statute, Boutwell challenged the defense view that it did not apply to Stanton. He made deft use of learned allusions, deploying a passage from Hamlet to compare Johnson’s Cabinet to the simpering servility of Polonius. He also offered the most obscure classical analogy of the trial, equating the president’s performance in office with the disastrous administration of Sicily by Caius Verres in 80 B.C.

  Boutwell’s bland demeanor cloaked a white-hot rage against Andrew Johnson. The anger burned through on the second day of his peroration. He denounced Johnson for delivering to Southerners the power “they had sought by rebellion,” condemning the region to “disorder, rapine, and bloodshed.” Then he offered an astronomical interlude, describing a part of the night sky where no heavenly body could be seen. That “dreary, cold, dark region of space,” Boutwell continued, was the only proper destination for the president:

  If this earth was capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue,…it would heave and throw,…and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude as eternal as life….

  Most press accounts ignored this powerful image of a convulsing planet ejecting the horror that was Andrew Johnson, but defense lawyer William Evarts was paying close attention. He would make the managers regret Boutwell’s astronomical curse.

  The press neglected Boutwell’s moment of excess because the next speaker, defense lawyer Thomas Nelson of Tennessee, offered nothing but excess. A Whig from East Tennessee, Nelson had opposed Johnson politically for many years. The two reconciled in the dangerous days of 1861, when both opposed secession from the Union.

  The outline of Nelson’s speech made sense. By showing the president’s human side, the Tennessean aimed to tear down the monstrous image created by the Radicals’ perfervid rhetoric. Nelson’s manner, though, was ill suited to the task. After his opening, shouted question, “Who is Andrew Johnson?” Nelson rapidly lost his listeners’ attention. He was loud and confrontational, denying that the Senate could legitimately conduct the trial without Southern senators present. One observer thought Nelson “mistook the Senate for a set of Tennessee sinners, and appealed to its feeling instead of its judgment.” Another described his oration as “a great impassioned appeal to defend the President without strict regard to time and place, the rules of logic, or the nicer distinctions in grammar and philology.” When Nelson ended his seven-hour speech on Friday afternoon, April 24, most seats were empty. Of the managers, only Butler remained. Judge Curtis drowsed alone at the defense table.

  Nelson also inserted a distraction: the Caribbean guano island of Alta Vela. Boutwell had referred to the withdrawal of Jeremiah Black as one of Johnson’s defense lawyers. Black abandoned the president when Johnson refused to intervene in favor of his clients’ claim to bird waste on Alta Vela. In answer to Boutwell, Nelson revealed a letter to the president, dated six weeks earlier, in support of Black’s clients. Drafted by Ben Butler, the letter was signed by three other managers (Bingham, Stevens, and Logan), and several more Republicans. These impeachers thus petitioned the president on behalf of guano claimants as they attempted to remove him from office. In truth, the letter had nothing to do with impeachment, but those who signed it suffered deep embarrassment.

  The next defense lawyer, William Groesbeck of Cincinnati, elicited a far different response. Groesbeck had been to Washington City before. He had served a single term as a Democratic congressman and attended the “Peace Convention” that met in Washington in early 1861 to try to head off war. Still, he appeared before the Senate as a tall, lanky unknown. He had not spoken during the trial. The beaky lawyer not only finished his address in a single day but also bewitched his audience. One listener claimed that Groesbeck gave the finest speech ever heard in the Senate.

  In contrast to Nelson, Groesbeck was not combative. In contrast to Judge Curtis, he was not dry. Groesbeck impressed his listeners with a careful description of the historical precedents for presidential removal of subordinates. Instead of denouncing the impeachers, he expressed dismay that Johnson could be ousted based on “these miserable little questions.” He drew a sympathetic portrait of his client. Johnson, Groesbeck insisted, “trod the path on which were the footprints of Lincoln,” seeking only reconciliation.

  William S. Groesbeck of Cincinnati, counsel for President Johnson.

  Ah, he was too eager, too forgiving, too kind. The hand of conciliation was reached out to him and he took it. It may be that he should have put it away, but was it a crime to take it? Kindness, forgiveness, a crime?

  Groesbeck thus reinvented the congenitally angry president who had demanded that traitors be hanged, who had accused the Radicals of seeking his assassination, whose dedication to states’ rights prevented him from compromising with Congress, and who had abandoned Southern Unionists and freedmen to brutal violence. In Groesbeck’s version of the world, Andrew Johnson’s only crime was excessive kindness.

  After a Sunday of what must have seemed like golden silence, the week began with the much anticipated address by Thad Stevens for the prosecution. Throughout the spring, the press had been transfixed by the Pennsylvanian’s decline, meticulously charting his progress to the grave. His daily attendance at the trial was compelling stuff. “He seems to breathe with difficulty,” reported the Cincinnati Commercial. “His voice has that dreadful low, grating sound that w
e hear from deathbeds.” On the Senate floor, Stevens sipped brandy and port while eating raw eggs and terrapin. He limped unsteadily on his club foot or rode in a chair hoisted by powerful porters. His gaunt face and empty gaze seemed to summon judgment from the world beyond.

  For twenty-five minutes on Monday, April 27, Stevens gave it a try. He read from foolscap sheets, his voice steadily weakening until almost no one could hear him. Stevens accepted Ben Butler’s offer to read the final half of the address for him.

  Acknowledging that the Senate trial was no place for “railing accusation,” Stevens could not help himself. He demanded that Johnson “be tortured on the gibbet of everlasting obloquy.” He insisted that impeachment was the correct remedy for the president’s political offenses. Stevens tried to widen the Senate’s focus, to show that the case against Johnson could turn the nation toward a society based on equality. Brushing past the Tenure of Office Act, Stevens deplored Johnson’s creation of Southern state governments in 1865 and his opposition to Congress’s Reconstruction laws. If the president was unwilling to enforce the laws, Stevens said, he should “resign the office…and retire to his village obscurity.”

  Following the sepulchral Stevens, Manager Thomas Williams delivered a speech that emptied the chamber until the next day. When he was done, the galleries filled in anticipation of the address of defense lawyer William Evarts. The arrivals included Anthony Trollope, the novelist, who sat with the British ambassador. The ruddy, gray-bearded writer used an ear trumpet to follow the proceedings while accepting cards from ladies in the gallery who were eager to praise his books. During a recess, Trollope’s contempt for the impeachers led him into a spirited argument with a young Republican who found the novelist rude and violent.

  Before Evarts could speak, Ben Butler was on his feet. Guano was on his mind. He attacked defense lawyer Nelson for his “insinuated calumny” in revealing Butler’s letter supporting the Alta Vela claimants. The Massachusetts manager stressed that his involvement with the guano claims predated the impeachment and was unrelated to it. Nelson scornfully answered with an implied challenge to a duel. After their squall erupted again the next day, it receded to its proper insignificance, leaving behind one of the better jokes of the spring: Nelson and Butler supposedly fought their duel, the story went; after Nelson was shot through the brains and Butler through the heart, both of them walked back to the Capitol, uninjured.

  Unruffled by Butler’s outburst, Evarts began an immense oration. A slim figure of less than medium height, the lawyer spoke with few notes, one hand in his coat pocket while the other gestured with clutched eyeglasses. Putting in an hour on Tuesday, Evarts carried on for most of the Wednesday session, all of Thursday’s, and much of Friday’s. In all, his argument consumed more than ten hours. Even in 1868, ten hours was a long time to listen to one man. Evarts hoped to make his speech immortal, John Bingham jeered, by making it eternal. (Bingham would soon have to eat those words.)

  Despite his prolixity, Evarts held his audience in the palm of his hand. As one observer noted of the address, “although it seems interminable, it is not tiresome.” Evarts presented clear, earnest reasoning with an easy grace and a pleasing voice. The substance of his remarks varied little from those offered by Judge Curtis and Groesbeck. The difference was that Evarts understood the power of humor, and the power of ridicule.

  On his second day, Evarts scored heavily with his lighthearted review of Manager Boutwell’s wish for Johnson to face “astronomical punishment” in the coldest, darkest place of the heavens. The defense lawyer noted that Boutwell thought the Constitution allowed the removal of Johnson but “has put not limits on the distance.” In an extended fancy, Evarts imagined Boutwell bearing the president on his shoulders to the top of the Capitol dome and flinging the apostate “upon his flight, while the two houses of Congress and all the people of the United States shall shout, ‘sic itur ad astra [thus do we reach the stars].’” Joined by Boutwell himself, the listeners roared with laughter as the chief justice strained to gavel them to a more decorous state.

  The next day, the merriment returned when Evarts discussed Butler’s stump-speech article (the tenth one) and its accusation of “crimes against rhetoric.” “We are speech-makers,” the defense lawyer observed with a shrug befitting a man in the third day of a speech. Evarts argued that no spoken words could ever warrant impeachment. He then illustrated his point by comparing Johnson’s admittedly intemperate remarks with some of Butler’s own extravagant rhetorical adventures. The exercise brought the Senate to a state of sustained hilarity. In slightly over two pages of the lawyer’s remarks, the stenographer noted “[Laughter]” eleven times. Evarts’s marathon performance transformed the New York lawyer into the darling of the trial, heaped with praise and adulation.

  When Evarts concluded on the afternoon of Friday, May 1, the defense surely should have stopped. Everything that could be said in the president’s defense had been said, several times. But former Attorney General Stanberry had recovered enough from his illness to return to the fray, and he needed to add more words. So the Senate endured hours more of the same legal arguments. Forced by lingering weakness to have an aide read the final half of his remarks, Stanberry offered his personal attestation that the president sought only to comply with the Constitution, and had acted with “sublime patience.” Evarts, however, was a difficult act to follow. Stanberry made little contribution to the cause beyond his personal assurance that the president—“more sinned against than sinning”—would not act vindictively if acquitted.

  Only one speaker stood between the Senate and the finish line, House Manager John Bingham. After ceding to Butler the principal role in the evidentiary phase of the trial, Bingham had labored for weeks on his address. He had apologized to his daughters in Ohio for how brief his letters to them were, explaining that the trial was filling his days and nights. Once more, the crowds surged back to the Capitol, eager to be present at a crossroads of history. Some onlookers had to perch on the steps of the galleries.

  Bingham’s oration might be the most important moment of the trial. Since late February, when Republican moderates joined with Radicals to demand Johnson’s removal, impeachment had suffered a slow leak of enthusiasm. Ejecting Johnson from the Executive Mansion had seemed so obviously necessary during those first heady days. Some deflation of those initial spirits was inevitable, especially when the president adopted the simple ploy of committing no fresh outrages. Then, with time for reflection, the impeachment articles began to wear thin. In the flesh, Lorenzo Thomas was more clownish than scary. In contrast, Stanton’s defiant encampment at the War Office became more unsettling to anyone who might expect presidential appointees to act at the direction of the president. And what about Johnson’s putative successor, Ben Wade? Would the gruff Radical be enough of an improvement to justify convicting Johnson? Would he be an improvement at all?

  Bingham aimed to revive the prosecution case with a magnificent effort that would win for him the hero’s mantle. Sporting a new black coat, the usually disheveled House manager was attired “with unusual neatness.” He was lean and of average height, with side whiskers that met under his chin. In a stern voice, he framed the decision before the Senate: “Yesterday the supremacy of the Constitution and laws was challenged by the armed rebellion; to-day the supremacy of the Constitution and laws is challenged by executive usurpation.”

  John Bingham of Ohio, who gave the final argument for the prosecution.

  Bingham announced that he hoped not to be “a mere eater-up of syllables, a mere snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” but then he matched Evarts in length, delivering his oration for twelve hours over three days. Recognizing that Evarts had delivered the principal defense of the president, Bingham took on the New Yorker directly, challenging each of Evarts’s principal assertions. To the accusation that Congress sought omnipotence in the government, Bingham replied that Congress must answer to the voters every two years. The House manager lingered over the de
fense claim that the president need not enforce an unconstitutional law. Until the courts declare a law void, he insisted, the executive must respect it. Of the defense contention to the contrary, “There never was a balder piece of effrontery,” Bingham roared, “since man was upon the face of the earth.”

  Bingham’s style contrasted with Evarts’s beguiling mixture of wit and insight. The Ohioan was sharp and declamatory, attitudes that fit his prosecutorial message. He ranged far beyond the narrow legal questions presented by the Tenure of Office Act, making emotional appeals to the memory of Lincoln that left spectators weeping. Bingham attacked Johnson’s claim that Congress was not legitimate without Southern representatives; the president’s position, he said, was “arrogance and impudence.” Johnson’s opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment was, for Bingham, an attempt to revive the Civil War. In his closing crescendo on Wednesday, May 6, Bingham appealed for impeachment as the last, essential battle of that war:

  We stand this day pleading for the violated majesty of the law, by the graves of a half million martyred hero-patriots who made death beautiful by the sacrifice of themselves for their country, the Constitution, and the laws.

  Bingham’s conclusion loosed cheers from the galleries. Many rose from their seats and ladies waved their handkerchiefs as the Ohioan mopped his brow with a red bandana. When Chief Justice Chase called for order, the crowd laughed and hissed. Senator Grimes demanded that the police clear the galleries, prompting spectators to regale the lowan (whose opposition to impeachment was known) with a song predicting his imminent demise. Chase directed that all spectators be removed. With only senators and lawyers left in the chamber, the Senate agreed that its further deliberations on impeachment would occur in secret session, then adjourned.