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

by David O. Stewart

  Johnson continued to support white conservatives in the South. He appointed new military commanders who would take little action to curb violence against blacks. Pleas for military intervention against white violence came from Republican governors in Georgia and Mississippi and the military commander in Tennessee. Johnson did not respond. Using terror tactics to drive the freedmen from the polls, Democrats in Georgia and Mississippi posted gains in the fall elections.

  Estimates of the election-year carnage in the South were staggering, though often imprecise. The House Committee on Elections found that in Louisiana more than 1,000 blacks and white Unionists were killed and an equal number wounded, more than 600 killed in Kentucky, and dozens more in South Carolina. From August to October, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported, Georgia saw 31 killings of blacks and white Unionists, 43 nonfatal shootings, 5 stabbings, and 63 beatings. A Republican congressman from Arkansas was assassinated for political reasons. Fifty armed men attacked a plantation owned by a Unionist in Texas, killing seven freedmen. The Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for murdering leading Republicans in Alabama, in Georgia, in Texas, and in South Carolina.

  Southern Republicans wrote anguished letters to Northern colleagues, pleading for assistance. From Vicksburg, Mississippi, came the report that “organized bands of desperadoes, cut throats and murderers [are] at large in this state,” driving Republican voters from the polls. Bribery, threats, and force were used for the same purpose in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Many freedmen were blocked from voting. Others were compelled to vote for Democrats.

  Much of the worst violence continued to be in Texas. A former governor reported in May 1868 that 250 “union men” had been murdered in the state in the preceding six months. For a price, gangs would kill blacks, Republicans, or federal soldiers. Efforts at self-defense by the poorly armed freedmen often brought catastrophe. Civil war broke out in Brazos County, with whites and blacks forming militias. Twenty-five freedmen died in a battle that drove most blacks and Union families from the area.

  Over the summer of 1868, the new legislatures of Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee requested more federal troops to reduce civil violence. The response from Washington was halting and reluctant. War Secretary Schofield issued instructions that military force be applied only upon the president’s order. The attorney general lectured army commanders that the duty of maintaining order “belongs to the civil authorities of the States,” not federal officials. If the man in the White House cared about the mayhem across the South, there was little evidence of it.

  In early July, the president grew edgy while Democrats gathered in New York City to pick their candidate for president. Edmund Cooper and other Johnson agents headed to the convention. One of Johnson’s defense lawyers at the trial, Thomas Nelson of Tennessee, placed his name in nomination. The president paced the Executive Mansion awaiting word, his ambition gnawing at him, considering resignation if he was not nominated. After the first ballot, Johnson stood second among the Democratic hopefuls. He was so close to vindication.

  Amid the smoldering ruins of his presidency, Johnson could see no reason why the Democrats would not choose him. His administration had been marked by unprecedented conflict with Congress, by unprecedented rates of vetoes and veto overrides, and by an impeachment effort that barely failed. Nevertheless, the president fumed that he had bested General Grant, the Republican candidate, in every confrontation over the last several months, including the impeachment trial. Having been “successful in every single issue heretofore,” Johnson railed that giving the Democratic nomination to anyone else would be “an abandonment of our cause.” Why shouldn’t the Democrats nominate him, he demanded of Colonel Moore: “They profess to accept my measures: they say I have stood by the Constitution and made a noble struggle.”

  The prospect of vindication proved to be a mirage. On the twenty-second ballot, the Democrats selected Governor Seymour of New York.

  Shortly afterward, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified despite Johnson’s opposition. On July 20, 1868, Secretary of State Seward certified that twenty-eight states—three-fourths of the thirty-seven states—had approved the amendment. He issued a further certification eight days later after receiving notice of ratification by Alabama and Georgia. Seward’s decision to issue the second certification reflects just how messy the ratification process was.

  When Congress sent the amendment to state legislatures in 1866, some argued that ratification could be based on approval by three-fourths of the twenty-seven states then represented in Congress (that is, not counting the ten Southern states excluded from Congress). That position never prevailed. Two Northern states (Ohio and New Jersey) ratified the amendment but then attempted to rescind their ratifications after Democrats won control of their state legislatures. Seward concluded that those rescissions were invalid, and so signed the first certification that the amendment had been ratified. Seward issued his second certification because the intervening ratifications by Alabama and Georgia meant that twenty-eight states had ratified without attempting to rescind (that is, excluding Ohio and New Jersey). When Oregon’s legislature purported to rescind its ratification three months later, Seward took no further action. Although Seward did not recognize the attempted rescissions, three Southern states (the Carolinas and Louisiana) were permitted to change their course in the other direction. While ruled by the state governments sponsored by Johnson, all three states rejected the amendment. The new state governments formed under the Reconstruction laws of 1867, however, approved it.

  Of the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, the guarantees of due process of law and equal protection would prove most enduring. The reach of the due process clause changed over time, ultimately becoming the source of many personal rights now taken for granted by Americans. The equal protection clause lay mostly dormant until the middle of the twentieth century, when civil rights lawyers persuaded the courts to breathe life into it, making it central to American political and social life.

  By the fall of 1868, the end was in sight for the Johnson Administration. The president’s annual message to Congress in December included his familiar denunciation of congressional Reconstruction, which he described as failed and pernicious. Though Johnson’s pledge of better conduct had produced few changes in his behavior, he did become less and less important as his term ran out. By New Year’s Day, 1869, with Ulysses Grant poised to occupy the White House in two months, Ben Butler could pass a few pleasant moments with Andrew Johnson because, finally, Johnson no longer mattered very much.

  Thaddeus Stevens never gave up. On July 7, 1868, six weeks after the last votes acquitting Johnson, he presented five new articles of impeachment. Knowing that his days were dwindling, the Pennsylvanian made no effort to cloak the political nature of his accusations. Johnson, Stevens charged, had betrayed Republican principles and replaced Republican officeholders in an effort to build a personal political party. The president had unilaterally created state governments in the South in 1865, usurping the powers of Congress to make the laws. He induced Colorado officials to perjure themselves to defeat statehood, pardoned Union Army deserters so they could vote for Democrats, and returned confiscated property to ex-rebels. In a long speech that he submitted for publication but did not read in person, Stevens ignored the recent impeachment trial, choosing instead to warn his countrymen “not to place our trust in princes.” He ended with an exhortation from graveside:

  My sands are nearly run, and I can see only with the eye of faith…. If you and your compeers can fling away ambition and realize that every human being, however lowly-born or degraded by fortune, is your equal, that every inalienable right which belongs to you belongs to him, truth and righteousness will spread over the land….

  Representative Thomas Williams, also a former House manager, submitted fourteen more impeachment articles on the same date. The House took no action on any of the new impeachment proposals.

  By early August, the newspapers resumed the deat
h watch on Stevens, running daily bulletins on his health. For ten days, he could not leave his room. In bedside chats, Old Thad regretted that when the war came he became “so radical that I had no control over anybody.” His only satisfaction, he said, came from his time in Pennsylvania’s state government, especially the creation of free public schools in the 1830s. When a caller commented on his appearance, Stevens’s wit flashed briefly. He was not concerned about his appearance, he replied, but his disappearance.

  As Stevens grew weaker in this lingering public death, he admitted fewer and fewer visitors. On his final evening, he was attended by an aide, a nephew, his sister Loretta, and Mrs. Smith. Two black clergymen prayed with him and left. Late that night, two Sisters of Charity from a nearby Catholic hospital visited. With the consent of Stevens’s nephew, they baptized the dying man. In Stevens’s final moments, his nephew held his hand while Mrs. Smith knelt at the foot of his bed.

  On the next day, citizens of Lancaster who lived in Washington carried his casket to the nearby Capitol, where his body lay in state overnight, surrounded by dignitaries and a detachment of Negro soldiers. Mourners came to pay their respects until midnight. The next morning, a crowd watched the funeral party’s progress, the hearse drawn by four white horses, to a special train. When Stevens was buried in Schreiner’s Cemetery in Lancaster, more than 15,000 people overflowed the surrounding streets. Before his death, Stevens had sold two plots in a white-only cemetery, then acquired a space at Schreiner’s because it accepted people of all races. His headstone reads:

  I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, Not from any natural preference for solitude, But, finding other Cemeteries limited as to Race by Charter Rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death The Principles which I advocated through a long life; EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR

  That fall, Lancaster Republicans nominated a dead man, Thaddeus Stevens, as their candidate for Congress. He won easily.

  For the other House managers, the failure of impeachment proved no obstacle to advancement. No one who saw Ben Butler joking at the White House on New Year’s Day could be surprised by his future success. Butler settled a bitter wartime feud with General Grant and became a political adviser to the new president. He lost his House seat in 1874 but won another term two years later. In 1879, Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts with Democratic Party support. After an unsuccessful run for president on the Greenback Party ticket in 1884, Butler retired from politics.

  John Bingham of Ohio stayed in the House until 1872, when President Grant appointed him ambassador to Japan, a post that Bingham held through three presidential terms, retiring in 1885. He lived long enough to see a distant cousin, William McKinley, elected president in 1896. George Boutwell of Massachusetts served in the Grant Administration as secretary of the treasury, then was chosen senator from his home state. In his final years, Boutwell led the Anti-Imperialist League in opposing the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of overseas colonies. John Logan, serving in the House and then the Senate until his death, was the Republican candidate for vice president in 1884. As head of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ group, Logan led the movement to create Memorial Day to honor the nation’s war dead.

  Fewer honors awaited the president’s defense team. Johnson tried to appoint Benjamin Curtis as his attorney general, but Curtis turned down the position. The president then picked Henry Stanberry. Showing more than a little spite, the Senate rejected him. One more time, William Evarts benefited from Stanberry’s bad luck. Johnson nominated Evarts and the Senate confirmed him. Despite his loyal service to Johnson, Evarts later was welcomed back into the Republican Party. In 1876, his legal work was critical during the months-long dispute over the presidential election. Evarts’s client, Rutherford Hayes, rewarded Evarts by making him secretary of state. Evarts later was a senator from New York. Stanberry returned to private law practice, becoming a leading courtroom defender of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Edwin Stanton left the War Office in miserable health, his asthma tormenting him. He tried to resume his law practice in Washington City. President Grant nominated him for the Supreme Court, and the Senate confirmed Stanton in December 1869. Four days later, on Christmas Eve, Stanton died after taking the oath of office in bed. Ben Wade’s Senate term expired in early 1869. He stayed in Washington as a lobbyist. Grant appointed him to the board of the Union Pacific Railroad and sent him as a special envoy in unsuccessful negotiations to acquire the Caribbean land of Santo Domingo.

  One of the enduring myths of the Johnson impeachment involves the fates of the seven Republican defectors who supposedly chose principle over party, sacrifice over self-advancement. Each of them, according to the myth, ended his life a broken man, crushed by vindictive Radical Republicans. “Not a single one of them escaped the terrible torture,” wrote John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage, “of vicious criticism engendered by their vote to acquit.” It is a myth.

  All seven defectors supported Grant’s candidacy in the fall of 1868. Grimes of Iowa, despite his stroke in May, returned to the Senate the following year. He pronounced that his influence in the new Congress was greater than it had been before the impeachment. Poor health forced his resignation at the end of 1869. Only a few months earlier, Fessenden of Maine died during a summer recess, still in office. Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia reported in July 1868 that the “stir” over his impeachment vote “died away very suddenly.” Soon, he found, “I am invited to and attend all the Republican caucuses.” He retired from the Senate in 1869, as he had intended. None was a victim of postimpeachment retribution. Indeed, their careers were not wildly different from those of the thirty-five senators who voted to convict Andrew Johnson: only seventeen of those senators won reelection as Republicans, while one crossed the aisle and won with support from Liberal Republicans and Democrats.

  Missouri’s John Henderson did not seek reelection to the Senate when his term expired in 1869, but he stayed true to the Republicans, and they to him. In 1872, he was the Republican candidate for governor of Missouri, and for senator the next year, though his impeachment vote still could draw negative comment. Failing in both campaigns, Henderson secured appointment as United States attorney in Missouri, where he prosecuted alleged members of the Whiskey Ring. In the most formal recognition of Henderson’s good standing among Republicans, he was the presiding officer at the party’s national convention in 1884. He moved to Washington a few years later and built a thirty-room mansion on Meridian Hill, a platform from which his wife startled the city with her advanced social views. In the early twentieth century, Mary Foote Henderson mounted vegetarian and nonalcoholic dinner parties, as well as weekly dancing classes in the style of Isadora Duncan. On a memorable evening in 1906, Mrs. Henderson and her temperance ladies pillaged her husband’s wine cellar, smashing into the gutters of Sixteenth Street more than a thousand bottles of wine, brandy, and whiskey.

  Three of the defecting senators did move away from the Republican Party, though at different speeds. Of the three, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois lingered the longest. Following Grant’s election, he continued to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee and still received Republican Party honors. Like many other Republicans, Trumbull soured on the Grant Administration. In 1872, he campaigned for reelection on the Liberal Republican ticket, but lost. He later ran for governor of Illinois as a Democrat, losing that race, too.

  Fowler of Tennessee chafed at criticism of his acquittal vote. In the days following the trial, he moved his seat permanently to the Democratic side of the Senate to escape “Radical whisperings.” He lost his committee assignments the following year. Fowler did not seek reelection, anticipating that Tennessee Republicans would not support him. In 1872, he campaigned against Grant, then largely retired from public life.

  Between his impeachment vote and his deals with Johnson, Edmund Ross’s prospects were poor when the Grant Administration arrived in March 1869. Only weeks later, Grant threw the Kansas senator out
of the White House after a heated argument over patronage. Ross claimed he told the new president to “go to hell.” Ross sought a full term in the Senate from the Kansas legislature in 1871. Fittingly, the legislators chose a rival who paid them $60,000 in bribes, even more than Perry Fuller paid for Ross’s seat in 1867. The bribery was so blatant this time that his successor was forced to resign in 1873. Ross started two Kansas newspapers that failed, then in 1880 ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for governor. Two years later, Ross moved to New Mexico, where he ran a printing business. When the Democrats won the White House in 1884, President Grover Cleveland named Ross the territorial governor of New Mexico. In his final years, Ross was the major source of the legend of the seven martyrs, defending his impeachment vote in correspondence, magazines, and a book.

  Thus, of the seven defectors, five either retired from the Senate voluntarily, died in office, or left because of health. Henderson remained a Republican in good standing for the rest of his life. Trumbull chose to leave the party years later, while Ross remade himself as a Democrat. Hardly the trail of suffering and despair that has been depicted.

  Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas ended his Senate career in disgrace. In January 1873, he paid a $7,000 bribe to a Kansas state legislator to support his bid for a new term. The legislator marched into the state Capitol building, denounced Pomeroy’s bribery, and delivered the cash to the legislative clerk so it could be used to educate the children of Kansas. A state investigation found Pomeroy guilty of bribery; but the United States Senate found insufficient evidence to reach that conclusion. Pomeroy retired to Washington, then Massachusetts. He ran for president in 1884 for the American Prohibition Party.