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

by David O. Stewart

  The Astor House group and its allies showed remarkable resilience, though Perry Fuller was not the only one to collide with the law. Postal agent James Legate of Kansas was appointed governor of the Washington Territory in 1872. Within a year, he was under investigation for his time as a Kansas state legislator, this time for taking a bribe to vote for Ross’s successor in the Senate. A decade later, reports claimed that Legate paid $25,000 to dissuade a Kansas governor from running for president for the Prohibition Party. Eight years after that, Legate was mired in another scandal, this one involving the use of Whiskey Ring money to buy the votes of Kansas legislators to support a lottery.

  Sheridan Shook, the New York tax official and right-hand man of Thurlow Weed, was indicted in September 1869 on charges of mishandling public funds. After winning dismissal of the charges, Shook became a prominent theater and brewery owner, remaining active in Republican politics until his death in 1899.

  Shortly after President Grant ousted Henry Smythe as collector of customs in New York, an investigation found longstanding frauds in that operation. Smythe argued that the fraudulent practices started before he took office, adding that the Johnson Administration had been too distracted by the impeachment to combat the frauds. Smythe again escaped formal charges. Only low-level employees were prosecuted.

  After the impeachment trial, Charles Woolley of Cincinnati worked closely with Democratic leaders, then ran into controversy following the bitter Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. According to charges trumpeted by the New York Tribune, Woolley was part of a Democratic program that paid $50,000 in bribes to Florida election officials. Coded telegrams between Woolley in Florida and senior New York Democrats were splashed across front pages with sinister-sounding translations. Woolley, who was then president of the National Trotting Association, was never charged with any crime.

  Sam Ward gave up lobbying by the middle of the 1870s and returned to the financial world of New York, where he handled—among others—the accounts of William Evarts. Unable to meet margin calls several years later, Ward fled to Europe to escape his creditors. In his remaining years, he befriended Oscar Wilde, published a book of poems, and settled in Italy, where he died.

  Only one of the dark men of the impeachment season lost his resilience; indeed, he suffered a form of capital punishment for his inveterate scheming. In November 1890, Willis Gaylord, Senator Pomeroy’s brother-in-law and business agent, landed in a Philadelphia jail, charged with swindling an investor in a Southern railroad. Confined for weeks to cell 143 of Moyamensing Prison, Gaylord hanged himself from the bars over the cell window.

  Ulysses Grant’s victory in the 1868 election was not as overwhelming as Republicans had hoped. Though his margin in the electoral college was wide (214 to 80), he won only 52.7 percent of the popular vote, a 300,000 vote cushion out of almost 6 million votes cast. At forty-six, the president-elect was the youngest man yet to win the office.

  Southern participation in the election was spotty. Three states (Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia) were not yet readmitted to the Union and were excluded from the canvass. Florida had no popular election, so its legislature cast that state’s electoral votes. Grant lost Georgia and Louisiana, where terrorist attacks by white Democrats kept freedmen from the polls. In St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, Grant received not a single vote even though the Republican candidate for governor had won 2,500 votes there a year earlier. As many as 300 blacks were murdered around New Orleans, and a like number in Caddo Parish, where Grant received one vote out of 2,000 recorded. The Grant voter in that parish was then killed, according to a witness, “for voting the Grant ticket.” One hundred sixty-two blacks were killed in riots in Bossier Parish. Of 1,500 eligible blacks in Americus, Georgia, only 137 voted.

  Grant’s campaign slogan was “Let us have peace,” but there was no peace between the outgoing and incoming presidents. Rather than attend Johnson’s White House reception on New Year’s Day, Grant found business to attend to in Philadelphia. Johnson appointed a new minister to Mexico knowing that Grant detested the man. Grant struck back by helping to scuttle an agreement with Great Britain over shipping losses inflicted by Confederate privateers that had been outfitted in British ports.

  With the approach of Inauguration Day, March 4, Johnson began to consider his final thrust against the hated Grant. On the cold, rainy morning of Grant’s inauguration, Johnson’s Cabinet assembled at the White House. They expected to travel together to the Capitol for the ceremony. Johnson sat at his desk, reviewing and signing legislation recently passed by Congress. Attorney General Evarts, anxious to move on to the Capitol, kept his overcoat on. Secretary of State Seward smoked a cigar. Johnson kept working. Grant arrived downstairs in his carriage, but Johnson did not stir. Grant’s carriage left. At a few minutes past noon, Johnson shook hands with each Cabinet member and joined his family in his own carriage. He was the last president, and the only one not named Adams, to boycott the inauguration of his successor.

  The ex-president took his lacerated feelings back home to Greeneville, Tennessee, but he had no thought of a quiet retirement. His ambition, now yoked to a powerful craving for vindication, drove him straight back into politics. When Senator Joseph Fowler announced he would not seek reelection, Johnson immediately began to angle for the post. The contest would not be easy. The ex-president had done something to anger every part of the Tennessee electorate. Democrats remembered that he stood with the Union while his state seceded, then ran on a ticket with Lincoln. Republicans resented his lax Reconstruction policies. Then there was the stigma of escaping removal from office by a single vote. Just as Johnson began his push for the Senate seat, his son Robert committed suicide. The ex-president did not relent.

  In October 1869, the Tennessee legislature met to choose the state’s next senator. Johnson stood first after the initial ballot. Edmund Cooper, now a member of the State Senate, led Johnson’s forces. After more ballots, the ex-president crept to within two votes of the majority needed for victory. Cooper told Johnson he had the two votes, but they would cost $1,000 apiece. Johnson supposedly refused to approve the payment. Johnson’s rivals then combined to support none other than Cooper’s brother, Henry, who won the seat. It was Johnson’s first electoral loss since 1837. He never forgave either of the Coopers.

  In view of Cooper’s central role in the bribery schemes during the impeachment trial, his resort to bribery in the Tennessee Senate contest seems unremarkable. The twist in the story is Johnson’s supposed repudiation of Cooper’s bribery. Was the Senate seat not worth the price? Had he grown weary of purchasing votes and making shady deals?

  Johnson’s return to Greeneville was not a happy one. Once resettled, he described himself as “so solitary as though I were in the wilds of Africa.” He wrote in December 1871, “I long to be set free from this place forever.” He ran for Congress in 1872, losing again. In 1875, he tried again for a Senate seat. This time, at the age of sixty-seven, he won.

  Johnson managed only one major speech in his return to the Senate. On March 20, 1875, he took the floor to accuse Grant of imposing military despotism in Arkansas and Louisiana. Johnson also accused Grant of seeking a third term in office, predicting that if there were a third term, “farewell to the liberties of the country.” Johnson quoted from his much-loved Addison’s Cato, imploring Grant to discharge his military legions from the South and restore the Constitution in that region. The new senator expressed both disdain for the new constitutional amendments and undiminished fealty to the cause of states’ rights. During a long congressional recess, Johnson suffered a stroke at his daughter’s farm in Elizabethton, Tennessee. A second stroke carried him away two days later, on July 30, 1875. Three of his surviving children were with him.

  Five thousand thronged the funeral in Greeneville, though his widow could not attend. Former Senator Fowler, whose vote helped save Johnson’s term in office, delivered a eulogy. Johnson’s body was wrapped in an American flag with thirty-seven stars. His head rested o
n his well-worn copy of the Constitution.

  The Grant presidency, though it lasted for eight years, was inglorious. The former general seemed smaller in civilian office, sometimes inattentive. In sharp contrast to Johnson, Grant delegated much responsibility. A secretary who worked for both men found that Grant could dispatch work in one day that would take Johnson many days.

  Grant’s administration was rocked by scandals that reached his war secretary and his chief of staff. Grant retained modest qualities that are admirable in a human being but did not serve him well as the nation’s leader. When urged that a St. Louis butcher was not qualified for an appointment, the president explained that when times had been hard for the Grant family, that man sold him meat on credit and loaned him money. “I intend to appoint this German butcher,” Grant finished, “if it bursts the Republican party.”

  Under Grant, the federal government made efforts to protect the freedmen. The Justice Department effectively suppressed the Ku Klux Klan, securing criminal convictions of some 600 Klansmen. Though few went to prison, the campaign succeeded. For a time, antiblack violence flickered out in the South. Congress adopted more civil rights legislation in the early 1870s. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed the right to vote to all Americans, though it was incompletely honored for the next nine decades.

  By the time Grant left office in early 1877, Southern violence against blacks had revived. The tangled politics of Reconstruction snarled the presidential election of 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden won a narrow victory in the popular vote, and had an 18-vote margin in the electoral college before votes arrived from the last three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each of those states, however, returned two competing vote totals with opposite outcomes, each certified by a different, apparently official body. Many political agents (including Cincinnati lawyer Charles Woolley) spread cash around the three state capitols to acquire the results they wanted. When the election dispute landed in Congress, and then before a special commission, Republicans lined up Southern Democratic support for their candidate, Rutherford Hayes, by promising to withdraw federal troops from the South. That was the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Solid South. For the next four generations, few blacks in the South voted, most whites voted Democratic, and the principal success strategy for blacks was to leave. Andrew Johnson’s vision for his region was realized.

  THE RORSCHACH BLOT

  Surely God is on our side, for we have done what we could to ruin ourselves, and yet we have failed to do it.

  EDWIN STANTON

  ANDREW JOHNSON’S IMPEACHMENT, like the entire Reconstruction era, is one of the Rorschach blots of American history. Scavenging through this political and legal train wreck, historians and writers have drawn very different lessons, vividly illustrating the transitory nature of historical judgments.

  Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, Andrew Johnson was celebrated as a healer of the sectional divisions of the war, while the impeachers were depicted as hate-filled gorgons who wished only to oppress noble Southern whites. Many writers insisted that Johnson saved the nation from congressional Radicals who lusted to destroy the presidency and Southern culture. Books by two future presidents, Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, presented both contentions. Wilson portrayed Reconstruction as “the veritable overthrow of civilization in the South,” which placed the “white South” under the heel of the “black South.” Kennedy endorsed the view that Edmund Ross’s vote was “the most heroic act in American history.” A chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, proclaimed that the importance of the case “can hardly be overstated” because Johnson’s acquittal preserved “our tripartite federal system of government.”

  Popular culture followed this line. No early film was more powerful than D. W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan for staving off the horrors of black rule in the South. The abolitionist villain of the film, who endorses election fraud to empower blacks, was blatantly modeled on Thaddeus Stevens. Twenty-five years later, Hollywood reprised the theme in Tennessee Johnson. Strong-jawed Van Heflin portrayed Johnson contending against nasty old Thad Stevens, played this time by Lionel Barrymore (the actor who epitomized aging evil as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life).

  By mid-century, the emergence of the civil rights movement began to change perspectives on Reconstruction. Johnson’s solicitude for white Southerners seemed less admirable. His abandonment of the freedmen seemed misbegotten. His stubborn belief in the states’ rights values of the pre–Civil War Constitution began to look like a bullheaded failure to notice how the war had revolutionized the nation. Johnson’s defense lawyer, Benjamin Curtis, captured many of these elements in a short description: “He is a man of few ideas, but they are right and true, and he could suffer death sooner than yield up or violate one of them. He is honest, right-minded, and narrow-minded; he has no tact, and even lacks discretion and forecast. But he is as firm as a rock.”

  The impeachment trial of 1868 seethes with contradictions that have fostered equally contradictory views. As one congressman wrote later, Johnson “was impeached for one series of misdemeanors, and tried for another series.” For many impeachers, Johnson had to be removed because he so effectively confounded congressional Reconstruction. Wielding his veto pen, his patronage powers, his ability to pardon ex-rebels, and his attorney general’s willingness to misconstrue legislation, the president fought tenaciously against Congress’s attempt, as he saw it, to Africanize the South. Johnson was uninterested in negotiation or compromise; his goal was obstruction. Even that was not enough to get him impeached. The first two impeachment attempts failed because they were overtly political, without any superficial gloss that Johnson had violated a criminal law. Despite a three-fourths Republican majority, the House of Representatives would not impeach the president unless it could accuse him of something that felt like a crime.

  Stupidly, Johnson remedied that shortcoming when he sent Lorenzo Thomas to replace Stanton as war secretary. By flagrantly violating the Tenure of Office Act, he handed Stevens and the Radicals exactly the weapon they longed for. The president had incontestably committed a crime, or at least a high misdemeanor. Within days, the House adopted its impeachment resolution.

  From that high-water mark, the impeachment effort bogged down in the legal arcana of the Tenure of Office Act and of impeachment itself. The schizophrenic nature of impeachment—a political process for removing a leader through judicial-like processes—vexed the effort, from the drafting of the impeachment articles, to the presentation of evidence, to the closing arguments. Ultimately, Stevens’s unswerving view that impeachment was a political process was vindicated in part: the best chance to remove Johnson was under Article XI, which largely charged him with being an unfortunate president, not under those articles accusing him solely of violating a statute.

  In the final days before the Senate vote, the political character of impeachment, which the House had rejected when it refused to adopt impeachment articles only months earlier, became undeniable. Johnson advocates and opponents lobbied fiercely. Political deals were struck, notably the personal assurances Johnson gave to Senator Grimes and the appointment of General Schofield as war secretary. Another battle—one fueled by greed, patronage promises, and cold cash—raged in murky corners where Butler and his spy network struggled against Edmund Cooper, the corrupt Kansans, and the Astor House group. One last political reality helped determine the outcome of the trial: the prospect of Ben Wade as president. “Andrew Johnson is innocent,” one newspaper wrote after the acquittal, “because Benjamin Wade is guilty of being his successor.”

  Some of the Republicans who supported impeachment, including Ulysses Grant, later expressed remorse over the episode. After all, the republic made it through the last nine months of Johnson’s presidency without any terrifying crises. The overheated rhetoric about the Great Criminal seemed hard to justify after
Johnson had shrunk back to human scale, or less. The passion for impeachment began to seem unreal, a fever of the moment that would have cured itself. Johnson’s defense—that conviction would damage the constitutional structure by weakening the presidency—seemed more powerful.

  The regrets of hindsight, though, blinked at the exigencies of that moment in 1868 when the legacy of the Civil War seemed to hang in the balance. “An overwhelming majority of the loyal Union men North and South,” recalled Carl Schurz, “saw in President Johnson a traitor bent upon turning over the National Government to the rebels again, and ardently wished to see him utterly stripped of power.” When Johnson refused to negotiate over legislation with the vetoproof Republican majorities in Congress, his influence shriveled. When he used his executive powers to frustrate congressional policy, Congress adopted the Tenure of Office Act and the requirement that only General Grant could issue orders to the military. By systematically eliminating or restricting executive powers, those laws posed a far greater threat to the constitutional structure than impeachment did. Indeed, by February 1868, impeachment was the remaining tool for expressing Congress’s titanic frustration with Johnson. At a time when many feared that blood would run in the streets, impeachment was an essential safety valve, providing—as Ben Franklin, eighty years before, had hoped it would—an alternative to political violence. The legalistic process of impeachment slowed events down, allowing cooler reflection and the consideration of consequences.