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

by David O. Stewart

  Teenage sculptress Vinnie Ream, with her bust of Lincoln.

  Ross tested the strength of his position during John Bingham’s interminable closing argument. On May 4, he sent Perry Fuller on a mission to Interior Secretary Orville Browning. The Reconstruction conventions in Southern states were sending their new constitutions to the president’s office, as was required. Though Johnson was supposed to convey them to Congress, he was slow to do so. Fuller told Browning he was speaking on behalf of Ross and that

  if the President would send [to Congress] the constitutions of South Carolina and Arkansas, which were now before him, without delay, it would exert a salutary influence upon the trial now pending, and that he [Ross] and others would then vote against impeachment.

  Browning, in turn, urged the president to send the state constitutions to Congress. Here was an opportunity to redeem the president’s commitment to Iowa Senator Grimes that he would not embarrass Republicans who supported him. Johnson sent the constitutions to Congress. The incident also tested the president’s willingness to bargain for acquittal votes. The answer was plain. Johnson would bargain.

  Ross’s approach to Johnson grew out of a political problem the senator faced with his Kansas colleague, Samuel Pomeroy. Although Pomeroy’s agents (Legate and Gaylord) were still trolling for bribes to acquit the president, Pomeroy himself had plunged into the effort to win a conviction, possibly in return for control over Kansas patronage appointments in the (presumably) incoming Wade Administration. A deal between Wade and Pomeroy would leave Edmund Ross out in the cold, politically neutered in his home state. If Pomeroy had locked up the Wade connection, the smart move for Ross would be to keep Andrew Johnson in office and get very, very close to him.

  In the days leading up to the impeachment vote, Ross played a double game. With each side trying to pin him down, Ross dallied with both.

  On May 12, Senator Pomeroy saw Ross closeted in a Senate office with defector Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. When Pomeroy entered, the other two were discussing the impeachment. They fell silent. After Trumbull left, Pomeroy confronted Ross with a tally sheet that recorded how each senator would vote on each impeachment article. Pomeroy had listed Ross as a “guilty” vote on several articles. He now asked Ross if the listings were correct. “He [Ross] said they were right,” Pomeroy recalled later, “with the exception of the eighth [impeachment article].” Ross said he was undecided on that one. Ross confirmed that Pomeroy’s sheet properly recorded him voting to convict on four of the impeachment articles.

  Meeting a newspaper correspondent and another senator a day later (May 13), Ross said he would vote to convict Johnson on four impeachment articles—the first three and Article XI. Ross’s position seemed slightly softer on the next evening, May 14, when he told a fellow Kansan that the impeachment vote should be postponed, but “the next best thing was conviction.”

  Later in the evening of May 14, Ross joined a conclave of doubtful senators in the rooms of Van Winkle of West Virginia, at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Once more dropping in where he was not wanted, Senator Pomeroy knocked on Van Winkle’s door. In the awkward conversation that followed, Henderson of Missouri predicted that the impeachers would fail by four votes. Pomeroy replied that his tally showed the president would be convicted on Article XI. At that point, the doubtfuls began to urge postponement of the vote. If the vote were put off, Henderson insisted, the president would overhaul his Cabinet. Henderson himself might be under consideration for a Cabinet slot. Ross broke in with a warning. Without being specific, he told Pomeroy that “he desired to notify me that he was doubtful on some of the articles.”

  Yet another factor confused those trying to predict Ross’s vote. His brother, William W. Ross, was in Washington City. Formerly his brother’s business partner, the younger Ross now lived in Florida as one of the “carpetbaggers” of lore, who are generally denounced for trying to profit from Southern hardships. Supposedly offered $20,000 to reveal his brother’s vote, William insisted that Edmund would support conviction.

  Back in Kansas, reports that Ross might defect created a furor. On May 14, the editor of the Leavenworth Times, D. R. Anthony (brother of suffragist Susan B. Anthony) fired off a telegram on behalf of “1,000 others.” “Kansas has heard the evidence,” Anthony wrote to Ross, “and demands conviction.” On the day of the vote, Ross’s reply denied that his constituents could dictate his vote. “I have taken an oath to do impartial justice,” he answered. Unimpressed, Anthony fired back: “Your motives are Indian contracts and greenbacks. Kansas repudiates you as she does all her perjurers and skunks.”

  Through the afternoon and evening of Friday, May 15, less than eighteen hours before the vote, Ross continued to string both sides along. At the end of the day, he called at Pomeroy’s home on H Street to acquire a copy of Anthony’s telegram. Joining the Pomeroy family at dinner, Ross said he favored conviction, and that Article XI was the strongest of the charges. Ross added that the vote should be postponed, arguing that they could control Johnson by holding impeachment over his head. He left the Pomeroys at 6:30 in the evening.

  Ross also was seen at Dubant’s restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, where he sat with fellow doubtfuls Henderson and Van Winkle. Encountering an acquaintance from Kansas, Ross said again that the vote should be postponed. Back at his rooms at the Ream house, Ross received a late night visit from fellow Kansan Thomas Ewing, Jr. Ross showed him the telegram from Anthony, the editor, and the reply Ross had drafted. Ewing urged Ross to send the reply right away. Ross agreed. At midnight, the two men set off on foot for the Western Union office a mile away.

  This moonlight expedition with the younger Ewing, who was closely tied to the president and had been Ross’s commanding officer during the war, certainly could have included a visit to some other destination. At that moment, Washington City was bursting with men eager to bribe Republican senators to acquit the president. Edmund Cooper was there, as were Sheridan Shook of New York, Postmaster General Randall, and Charles Woolley of Cincinnati. All of them had ready access to piles of greenbacks. Out in the early morning hours, Ross had a notable opportunity for clandestine negotiations over his vote, and to close a deal for it. Whatever happened on that stroll, by morning Ross would be with Johnson.

  Because of his foray with Ewing, Ross missed an uninvited visit from General Dan Sickles, who had gone for months without a military assignment since Johnson removed him from a command in the South. Ross and Sickles were friendly. During the trial, Sickles had hunted Ross down when he heard that Johnson’s allies were “tampering” with the Kansan. Ross then assured Sickles that he would vote for conviction. Late in the evening of May 15, Sickles heard an alarming report about Ross. This time, the Kansan supposedly had been swayed by the temptress Vinnie Ream to vote for Johnson. Some impeachers were convinced that the sculptor held Ross in a form of sexual thrall. Earlier, a Radical congressman had accused her of influencing the Kansan to vote for acquittal. When young Vinnie denied the charge, the Radical demanded that she employ her wiles to induce Ross to vote for conviction.

  Sickles, who lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg, gathered his crutches and called a cab. After some blundering through unlighted streets, the driver found the Ream house. The sculptor admitted the one-legged general to the parlor but told him that Ross was not in. Years later, Sickles claimed that he waited there until 4 A.M., but Ross—walking the streets with the younger Ewing—never materialized. Sickles’s florid recollection depicted the young woman playing the piano and singing for him, then bursting into tears over Senator Ross’s quandary. Miss Ream differed over several details in Sickles’s narrative, and denied she had ever discussed the impeachment case with Ross, but she confirmed that Sickles visited that night. In any event, Sickles and Ross never met in those early morning hours. Failing in his mission, the general crutched dejectedly back to his waiting cab.

  On the morning of the vote, Ross breakfasted at Perry Fuller’s nearby house. A Democratic s
enator joined him and Fuller. By the time Ross arrived at the Senate, his course was set. Ten minutes before the roll call began on Article XI, Senator Pomeroy approached Ross. This time, with Thad Stevens stopping to listen, Ross said he should be counted doubtful on every impeachment article.

  The Astor House group kept up its pressure through all four days before the Senate vote.

  On the same day that James Craig met with Senator Henderson—Wednesday, May 13—the railroad man sent an urgent message to Sheridan Shook, who was then in New York: “Come on by first train—very important.” Craig reinforced that dispatch with a follow-up, also to Shook: “You must come here and untangle a snarl between friends at once.” Woolley, the Whiskey Ring lawyer, sent a similar message to New York: “There are serious differences among your friends. Shook…should come immediately.” A third voice, a former Democratic congressman working with the Johnson forces, echoed the demand for Shook. Leaving nothing to chance, Woolley sent another message, the fifth of the day, to another New York contact: “Please go to Shook’s house and ask him to come here immediately.” Shook came to Washington on the day before the vote, joining Woolley at Willard’s Hotel, parlor no. 6. Visitors to the suite included Perry Fuller, Sam Ward, and railroad man Craig.

  Woolley was in touch with Fuller, confidant to Senator Ross, on May 12. He then reported to one Cincinnati client, “We have them by the throat,” and advised another, “The fight is bitter beyond description.”

  A New York client supported Sam Ward’s efforts with the Astor House group. Referring on May 12 to that alliance, the client insisted that “[t]ogether you can do anything you need.” On May 15, the day before the vote, he wrote to Ward that an unnamed person “has been waiting all day for a telegram which so far has not come and he infers that he is not needed. The arrangement was perfect that he should be sent for if required.”

  Despite the intense activity, the Astor House group took a cheery view of the president’s prospects. Tax official Erastus Webster, Seward’s vote-counter, advised Weed on May 13 that acquittal was “a fixed fact.” In a message on the next day, Woolley wrote of his opponents, “We have them [the impeachers] demoralized and bitter.” A presidential aide struck a similar tone in a May 14 message to Collector Smythe: “Other side desperate.” Sam Ward sent two confident messages on May 15, promising “result as predicted.” Colonel Moore at the White House shared the optimism. He instructed Collector Smythe not to release the letter from 1867 in which Senator Pomeroy promised to oppose impeachment if his man (James Legate) were named postmaster of Leavenworth, Kansas. They did not need it.

  On the night of May 15, a few hours before the big vote, the Astor House group staged an early celebration. In his dinner invitation to defense lawyer Evarts, Sam Ward wrote that Woolley, the Whiskey Ring lawyer, would be there and “has been steadfast and useful.” The celebrants met at Ward’s favorite eatery, Welcker’s, where Ward had instructed the chef in the preparation of a wide range of delicacies, including ham, Chicken Sauté Sam Ward, and terrapin. Ward’s table was ringed with happy Johnson loyalists, from lawyers Evarts and William Groesbeck to Edmund Cooper, the hub of the bribery schemes. Woolley and Sheridan Shook were there, along with railroad man James Craig and two others. While Senator Ross of Kansas dined awkwardly at the Pomeroys’, the president’s defenders luxuriated in the lavish wines and delectables for which Sam Ward was justly famous.

  The impeachers knew they were in trouble. Controlling neither patronage jobs nor government contracts nor tax collection, they had fewer tools for influencing senators. They could pledge advantages in the future Wade Administration, but the Ohio senator himself often undercut that approach. Most of the rumored commitments by Wade involved appointments for staunch Republicans who should have supported impeachment anyway. Beyond the case of Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, there is little evidence that Wade used promises of patronage to secure votes for conviction. Republicans had to find other tools for building the two-thirds majority they needed.

  General Grant gave a press interview. The soldier offered a wishful prediction that the president would resign rather than face the Senate’s vote, adding that he had bet Stanton a box of cigars on that outcome. Removing Johnson, Grant said, was the only hope for restoring peace to the South. Paradoxically, the future president promised that once Johnson was replaced with a man who would enforce the law in the South, many federal troops could be withdrawn from the region; if the troops left, who would enforce the law?

  The impeachers toyed with a dubious gambit for expanding the Senate itself. Seven Southern states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas) had completed the steps prescribed in Congress’s Reconstruction legislation of 1867. Allowing the freedmen to vote, those states had elected statewide conventions that drafted new constitutions. Now senators and representatives from those states were poised to join Congress. The new senators, fourteen of them, were Republicans, elected with black votes and intimately familiar with the violence besetting Unionists and freedmen in the South. They were certain to support impeachment. Better yet, many of the new Southern senators were already in Washington City, eager to be sworn in.

  Some Radicals argued for delaying the impeachment vote until the new senators could be seated. Then the Southerners could provide the margin of victory. It would be an excruciating irony. After more than two years of demanding that Congress take no action without the full participation of Southern senators and congressmen, the president would be removed from office by the votes of senators from the South.

  Stevens went so far as to threaten the ploy. His Reconstruction Committee reported legislation to restore those seven states to full representation. The House approved the bills by May 14, two days before the scheduled impeachment vote. The Southern senators “are standing waiting at the door,” thundered the Philadelphia Press. “Bring on, if you need them, patriot senators from Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and the Carolinas.” But not even Stevens was willing to pack the impeachment jury this way. In debate on the day of the Philadelphia Press editorial, he said that the legislation would not take effect before the impeachment votes were cast.

  On the night before the vote, a group of Republican senators converged on Senator Pomeroy’s house shortly after Ross had left it. Ben Wade, the president-in-waiting, joined them. He had visited Grant earlier in the day, showing the general-in-chief the list of Cabinet members he intended to appoint. Wade did not want to name anyone his probable successor would not like. For hours, the Republican senators reviewed each likely vote in the Senate and agreed again that the balloting should start with Stevens’s eleventh article. Pomeroy assured them that Ross would vote for conviction.

  For black Americans, still at the margins of national life, the vote loomed especially large. In the North, blacks could vote in only five New England states. Most blacks were in the South, only recently released from bondage and suddenly given the vote at the point of federal bayonets. They knew Johnson did not support their rights, that his removal could only be good for them. On its last day in Washington, the conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church declared that May 15, the day before the vote, should be a day of fasting and prayer that the Senate be guided by the Holy Spirit.

  Beginning at 9 A.M. on the fifteenth, the Negro churches in Washington City offered prayers for the president’s conviction. In one sermon, the minister called on the Lord to stiffen the backbone of the doubtful senators so they would remove from office “the demented Moses of Tennessee.”

  Prayers were in order for the health of key senators. Radicals cheered the news that Michigan Senator Howard, whose illness delayed the May 12 vote, was recovering. Two other Republicans were struggling with gastric fever. Some suspected poisoning. A warning went out for senators to avoid water pitchers at the Capitol. More shocking, James Grimes of Iowa, the first Republican defector to declare for Johnson, suffered a stroke on May 14. Weak and partially paralyzed, Grimes reassured his anxious visito
rs. He would not miss the vote, no matter what the state of his health.

  FREE AGAIN

  MAY 16–26, 1868

  Glory enough. We all get on a big drunk to-night. Open a bottle and drink to the health and long life of “Andy.”

  S. TAYLOR SUIT, MAY 16, 1868

  MR. SENATOR ANTHONY, how say you?” The question from Chief Justice Chase filled the Senate Chamber at 12:30 P.M. on Saturday, May 16. “Is Andrew Johnson, president of the United States, guilty or not guilty of high misdemeanors as charged in this article [Article XI]?”

  The bearded Rhode Islander stood at his desk. The silence in the Senate Chamber was perfect. “Guilty,” he said. The gallery let out its breath. One vote for conviction. Thirty-five to go.

  The morning had been a mixed one, clouds and sun taking turns in the warm Washington sky. Senate Republicans caucused at the Capitol at 10 A.M., but Edmund Ross was not there. Someone went to double-check how Ross would vote. The message came back. Ross was solid for conviction. The Republicans resolved to go forward with the balloting.

  Outside, carriages and horsecars rumbled up to the Senate entrance. Lush green lawns and colorful flower beds highlighted the spring dresses of the women spectators, which featured billowing polonaise overskirts. Inside, the marble halls echoed with footfalls and low voices. The atmosphere felt threatening to a young Radical as the “ghosts of managers and impeachers stalked gloomily through corridors.” The young man succumbed to “a state of unusual, not to say painful excitement.” Ignoring reporters, impeachment advocates stared through a doorway at senators who talked eagerly in an anteroom. Inside the chamber, other senators stood and sat in groups, waiting for the voting to begin. Leaning on his crutches, General Dan Sickles cornered Ross on the Senate floor, having missed him at the Ream house the night before. Sickles urged conviction. Ross turned to his desk.