The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Although the President had been a child laborer himself, he was insensitive to the issue. He’d instructed General Howard to revoke Circular 13 and return all confiscated lands to their original owners, who needed only to show proof of ownership and a pardon. General Howard tried to hedge, but the appointee in charge of recovering confiscated property, William Henry Trescot, a former slave-owner and planter in South Carolina, accused him of exciting and aggravating the antagonism between the races by dispossessing the white population. General Howard obeyed Johnson’s directive, knowing that Bureau commissioners who didn’t agree would be sacked. Thomas Conway was removed. “Could a just government drive out these loyal men who have been firm and loyal in her cause in all her darkest days?” General Rufus Saxton complained to General Howard. A former abolitionist who’d been the leader of the first federally authorized black troops during the war, Saxton, as assistant commissioner of the Bureau in South Carolina, had helped the freed slaves open their own bank, start their own schools, and cultivate the confiscated land given them. They lost the land; he lost his post.

  As William Trescot later admitted, land ownership was political power. That’s exactly what Thaddeus Stevens had incisively argued—and why he wanted to redistribute the land. Four million former slaves had been freed, Stevens had said, “without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets….If we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them around with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better left them in bondage.

  “If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power,” Stevens’ voice rang with urgency, “we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Reconciliation

  On New Year’s Day 1866, for the first time since Abraham Lincoln’s death, President Andrew Johnson opened the doors of the White House to the public.

  It had been a leaden morning of sleet, and a slimy drizzle so streaked the windowpanes that the threadbare carpets in the public rooms were wrapped in linen to protect them from the muck. The White House, which had not yet been refurbished, was shabby and gray. But the soiled sofas and scuffed chairs had been removed, and gilded vases loaded with lilies and camellias had been placed on lacquered tables. The chandeliers twinkled. Members of the cabinet—Secretary Stanton had come early—and the Supreme Court were already removing their coats. Stanton was smiling, and the regal Chief Justice Salmon Chase, whose likeness could be seen engraved on every dollar bill, entered the rooms, his beautiful daughter Kate, looking somewhat pale, on his arm. Foreign ministers in elaborate dress, epaulets on their shoulders and medals pinned to their chests, had been driven in the mud to the White House, accompanied by their wives or their sisters, and congressmen, more conservatively attired, were accompanied by theirs.

  It was already a large gathering when, at half past eleven, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and his entire staff strode into the mansion. Then at noon about four thousand citizens began trekking through the East Room. A police detail of at least forty men, wearing starched new uniforms and white gloves, waited nearby. No one was taking chances. The Marine Band in red regalia struck up overtures from Tannhäuser and William Tell as the crowd passed, two by two, toward the Blue Room as if heading to Noah’s ark, where the President gripped outstretched palms for a quick, hard shake. He wore his ivory-colored gloves.

  Smartly dressed in a black frock coat and a satin vest with a stand-up collar, Johnson offered words of polite greeting despite being exhausted and bored. His daughters, Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Stover, stood by his side, the first time they’d been seen in public. Martha Patterson, the wife of Tennessee Senator David T. Patterson, had braided her dark hair, which she’d pulled back from her face, and put on a dress of heavy black silk trimmed with black lace. A careful woman, she was managing expectations and soon was widely praised for remarking that “we are plain people from the mountains of Tennessee, called here for a short time by a national calamity. I trust too much will not be expected of us.” Johnson’s other daughter, the statuesque Mary Stover, took the same tack. She’d chosen dark colors, high-necked and funereal, since she was still mourning her deceased husband, a colonel in the Union army, who had died of cold and starvation during the war. Johnson’s invalid wife remained upstairs—no one was surprised to learn she was indisposed—although Johnson’s son Robert, working now as secretary to his father, was said to be busy in his office. Or, less kindly, gossips said he was ill, meaning he was drunk and had passed out somewhere.

  Several Southerners, pressing for pardons, approached the President. He told them to call tomorrow, and when lobbyists tried to corner him, he coldly turned his back.

  The eldest child of Andrew Johnson, Martha Johnson Patterson successfully assumed the role as presidential White House hostess; she also received praise for tending the dairy cows that grazed on the White House lawn.

  After the general reception concluded, the black men and women of Washington were permitted to enter the Executive Mansion. Very few did.

  Overall, the reception was a success despite the lingering melancholy of those who felt the presence of the gangly Lincoln, who had not so long ago walked through these rooms. “He would have enjoyed the day,” Gideon Welles sadly noted, “which was so much in contrast with all those he had experienced during his presidency.”

  The weekly Washington receptions—the “season”—had officially begun. Socialites were serving ice cream on silver trays and brandy punch for the gentlemen in a city that was no longer an armed camp. Almost every evening there was a ball or a dinner or a weekly event, like the Wednesday evenings at the home of Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, affably nicknamed “Smiler” for his perpetual grin. On Saturdays, the towering Chief Justice Salmon Chase received callers, and the presidential daughters held their receptions on Tuesdays. Often the Marine Band played at Secretary Stanton’s, and the man of iron seemed momentarily to relax. The Marquis de Montholon, the French minister to the United States, threw a party that lasted until sunrise, at which time he served breakfast. “Washington seemed to have gone wild,” noted one of the hostesses. Journalists mingled with jurors, the diplomatic corps with seedy lobbyists, and members of the cabinet talked, if briefly, with the clerks who worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau and slept in attic rooms.

  The gas lamps in the brothels glowed until late, the gambling halls were full. Yet sentries still guarded the homes of cabinet members, and on the streets everything seemed for sale. Confederate General Richard Taylor said shady brokers dashed in and out of the White House “for the transactions of all business,” he drily noted. Government hospitals were closing, and in the hospitals that remained, the poet Walt Whitman saw “cases of the worst and most incurable wounds, and obstinate illness, and of poor fellows who have no homes to go to.” They weren’t attending the brilliant receptions.

  “The spectacle of sudden loss and sudden elevation to wealth and prominence was equally demoralizing,” Johnson’s bodyguard observed. When Josephine Griffing, a volunteer agent at the Freedmen’s Bureau, complained that men and women lived in poverty all over the District, she was fired. “You will see how our cause has been made to suffer from the proslavery spirit, which has power in the Freedmen’s Bureau,” she confided to a friend, “and this is not strange when we see that the men who fill too many of these offices were six years ago wedded to the Institution of Slavery.”

  * * *

  —

  THE RESTAURANTEUR GEORGE Thomas Downing, a longtime abolitionist and advocate of civil rights, would tenderly clasp Charles Sumner’s dying hand, but that was in the future. In the past, Downing had been owner of a hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, and now he managed the members’ dining room in the House of Representatives, where he picked up political tips and chatter. He was heading a delegation from the national convention of the Colored Men�
�s Equal Rights League come to speak to President Johnson.

  With Downing were several other notable black activists: Frederick Douglass, one of the most famous and certainly one of the most eloquent men in America, and Douglass’ son Major Lewis Douglass of the fabled black regiment, the Massachusetts 54th, during the war; wealthy Chicago tailor John Jones; William E. Matthews of Maryland; John F. Cook of the District; A. J. Raynor of South Carolina; Joseph E. Oats of Florida; A. W. Ross of Mississippi; and lawyer and veteran William Whipper of Pennsylvania. They’d come to speak to the President about the vote.

  “We respectfully submit that rendering anything less than this will be rendering to us less than our just due,” George Downing politely informed Johnson.

  Johnson’s answer was predictable: the federal government should not impose black voting rights on “the people” of any state. Downing must have smiled to himself, for he quickly replied that in South Carolina, say, most of “the people” were black. Johnson ignored him.

  Frederick Douglass approached. Born a slave in Maryland to parents he never knew, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey had escaped from bondage to remake himself as Frederick Douglass, and in 1845, after the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he leaped onto the public stage. The bestselling chronicle of his life in bondage and his escape from it, told with unsurpassed verbal dexterity, was an international sensation that ironically exposed Douglass to the threat of recapture as a slave. But as a brilliant speaker on behalf of abolition and then the editor of his own newspaper, The North Star (later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper), Douglass had persuasively prodded many politicians to action, including Abraham Lincoln, whom he met at the White House in 1863.

  Douglass would depict Lincoln as “tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent,” at least when viewed from the vantage point of a genuine abolitionist—but, Douglass sharply added, when judged next to fellow officeholders, Lincoln was “swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Johnson was an entirely different man. “Full of pomp and swaggering vanity,” Douglass later characterized Johnson, and he well remembered the first time they saw each other. It was in 1864, inauguration day, when Lincoln tapped Johnson on the shoulder and pointed Douglass out. In an instant Douglass spotted the look of aversion that flashed over Johnson’s face. Noticing that Douglass had seen it, Johnson hastily recovered himself and tried to appear friendly, “but it was too late,” Douglass noted with disdain. “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be,” Douglass confided to a companion, “he certainly is no friend to our race.”

  Douglass explained that the delegation was calling on the President as a matter of respect—but, as men who’d served in the military or were subject to the draft, he and his fellow delegates were also presenting their claim for the privilege of the vote, which was owed them.

  Johnson didn’t listen well, and when nervous, as he evidently was, he repeated himself or rambled. He intended to be the black man’s Moses, he said. The two races, black and white, were natural enemies, he continued, and if “turned loose upon the other”—that is, if “thrown together at the ballot-box with this enmity and hate existing between them”—there’d be a race war. Working himself up, Johnson crossly added that he’d risked life and property in the war, and he certainly didn’t like, as he put it, “to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of liberty, who never periled life, liberty or property.” Johnson referred to Douglass’ reputation as a speaker but seemed not to know Douglass had been enslaved—that he certainly had periled life and liberty—and he probably hadn’t read Douglass’ Narrative. But Johnson despised what seemed to him to be sophisticated rhetoric in others—especially blacks.

  He proudly claimed, as he often did, that he had never sold any of his slaves, as if this information might impress the delegation as much as it apparently impressed him.

  Downing and Douglass and the others in the delegation silently listened to the President go on. They must have been stunned, but Douglass was unruffled. “We did not come here expecting to argue this question with your Excellency,” he said, “but simply to state what were our views and wishes in the premises.”

  Visibly flustered, Johnson suggested black people leave the South. Douglass calmly observed that even if black men and women should want to leave it, which they didn’t, they’d be immediately arrested since they weren’t allowed to move around. But the interview had for all intents and purposes ended, and detecting the President’s irritation, the delegation thanked the chief executive and exited the room.

  Johnson by then was furious. “Those d—d sons of b-s thought they had me in a trap,” he reportedly raged. “I know that d-d Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, & he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”

  When the delegation walked out of the White House, a messenger from the House of Representatives invited them to meet with a few congressmen in the House anteroom, and then they published a public reply to Johnson, taking care to note that his idea about deporting four million former slaves—“for no other cause than having been freed”—was not an act of justice or of peace. “Peace is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another,” Douglass said, “but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes.”

  Embarrassed, Johnson sympathizers tried to make Johnson sound reasonable: the President had merely said he couldn’t grant voting rights to the former slave “after the demoralizing influence of one hundred years of bondage.” Regardless, the President’s arrogance and his prejudice struck many people as reprehensible. Learning of the President’s response to the black delegation, Adam Gurowski, the garrulous Polish count who seemed to appear everywhere in Washington, exclaimed that he was actually “ashamed of belonging to the white race!”

  * * *

  —

  SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL was an intelligent and prudent man considered by colleagues as one of the most exceptional lawyers in the country, even if some of them found him cold, humorless, and pinched. The acerbic Gideon Welles called Trumbull “freaky and opinionated, though able and generally sensible.” A former Democrat and judge, Trumbull early in his career had been sent to the U.S. Senate by the Illinois legislature, but he did protest against slavery’s extension into the territories, and he joined the Republicans, although he was no real friend to black men or women. “We, the Republicans, are the white man’s party,” he had emphatically said before the war. He didn’t support the right of black men to vote, but he did believe in civil rights for all. The great natural truth, Trumbull declared, is “that all men are created equal.”

  During the war, he found common cause with the Radical Republicans because he too thought Lincoln wasn’t waging the war vigorously enough, and as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trumbull had helped write the Thirteenth Amendment. After the war, he was a peacemaking moderate who didn’t want to sever ties to Johnson. Certainly he didn’t want to play into the hands of Democrats and Southern-sympathizing Copperheads. Instead, like many a moderate, he counseled compromise, and in that spirit, or so he thought, and with gold spectacles perched on a dry face beginning to wrinkle, he worked on two related bills, the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, which he introduced in the Senate after it reconvened in early January 1866.

  Trumbull prepared the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill after conferring with General Howard, the head of the Bureau. The bill extended the life and reach of the Bureau—and also authorized its leasing of those forty-acre tracts of unoccupied land to the freedmen for a three-year period, much as General Howard had done in his circular. The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill also validated the land titles already conferred under Sherman’s Special Field Order.

  The secretary of war supported the bill. “Pass it,” said Stanton, “& I will have it executed, so help me God.”

  Thaddeus Stevens thought well of t
he bill but wanted more. If the freedpeople or refugees could not afford to rent or buy their land after the allotted period, they’d be turned away, and this struck Stevens as cruel, so in his updated version of the legislation, he proposed that all forfeited and public lands be reserved for freedmen and refugees. He also wanted the Bureau to provide them with public education. But his amendment was defeated. Conservatives such as Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury opposed it, histrionically conjuring an imaginary Senate gallery teeming with hundreds of indolent freedmen paid by the Treasury Department to come to Washington and “doing nothing to support themselves”—while the white people of the country were taxed to pay for them.

  Trumbull answered with incontrovertible logic, declaring that the pernicious legislative and judicial system had been spawned by slavery and devised in its interest solely “for the purpose of degrading the colored race.” It had to be dismantled, once and for all. Trumbull thus also proposed that citizenship be conferred on all native-born persons regardless of race or color (with the exception of Native Americans unless they were “domesticated,” paid taxes, and resided in “civilized society,” not their own tribes). No one else, then, could be deprived of the rights of citizenship based on race, color, or prior condition of involuntary servitude. That is, black codes would be illegal; blacks would be able to rent and own property, make and enforce contracts, and appear in courts as plaintiffs or witnesses.