The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Taken together, the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill could bridge the widening and rancorous conflict between Johnson and Congress. Trumbull sent President Johnson copies of both bills.

  Johnson was silent.

  The House and Senate passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill; in the House, only one Republican voted against it.

  Carl Schurz fully expected that Johnson would sign it. So did Lyman Trumbull. White House clerks knew better. Johnson despised the Radical Republicans so deeply that he’d veto any bill that he thought they might have put their hands on. And in the end, he did veto both the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill.

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  WHEN ANDREW JOHNSON vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill on February 19, 1866, there was no mistaking his position, no rationalizing, no pretending he or it would change.

  Trumbull was puzzled. “I thought in advocating it,” he said of the bill, “that I was acting in harmony with the views of the President.”

  Not at all. Johnson listed his objections, one by one. He claimed the Freedmen’s Bill would authorize a military court system in the South, where there already was a civil one. He said it cost too much; the Freedmen’s Bureau was just a patronage scheme for blacks, after all; and besides, the freedmen would earn respectability and prosperity only through their “own merits and exertions.” He ignored the statistics: that the Bureau had educated almost a million people and had effectively worked with black activists, evangelicals, and Northern aid societies to wipe out illiteracy. He ignored the letters and pleas from Southerners, white and black, who said the Bureau protected the freedmen, or tried to protect them, from unfair labor contracts, violence, local guerilla organizations, and the destruction of their schools. Johnson agreed that the freedmen should be protected by civil authorities—state authorities. Each state could take care of itself.

  Johnson also said the bill was unconstitutional because the eleven former rebel states had not yet been seated by Congress. They belonged in Congress. After all, he repeated, they’d never left the Union. As a result, Johnson said that he, as President, would reject all legislation concerning the freedmen until representatives from these former rebel states were admitted to Congress.

  That last statement seemed to be his major point. He wanted to force Congress to do his bidding—and in fact he was denying the legitimacy of a Congress that refused to embrace, with virtually no questions asked, the representatives of the former Confederacy. With this point made clear, the President flung the bill right back in the face of the legislature, whose authority he seemed completely willing and happy to undercut.

  Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, no Radical, noted with tart displeasure that if Johnson could “veto one bill upon that ground”—that Congress, as presently constituted, was basically illegitimate—“he will and must, for the sake of consistency, veto every other bill we pass on that subject.”

  “The President has sold us out—and we may as well look the matter square in the face now as at any time in the future,” a former Union intelligence officer groaned. In South Carolina, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent conceded that the President obviously “has gone all over to the South.” In Cleveland, the Leader said that “the news of the Veto Message has awakened through the North a feeling of indignation in every loyal breast, only equaled by the joy manifested by every Copperhead.”

  Conservatives and Democrats were overjoyed. “The South and the Government are in the same boat one more time, thank the gods!” the Montgomery (Alabama) Ledger exulted, and in Kentucky, Johnson was praised as courageous and independent. Former Attorney General Jeremiah Black told Johnson that his veto message had gladdened the hearts of millions, and in New York City, at the large hall of the Cooper Institute, the city’s best-known conservative politicians, bankers, and lawyers—men like Henry Raymond of The New York Times, Hamilton Fish (later Grant’s secretary of state), journalist Parke Godwin and William Cullen Bryant of the Evening Post, and Congressman Edwin D. Morgan—praised the President’s policy as hastening reconciliation, peace, goodwill, and business. Secretary of State Seward applauded Johnson from a platform wrapped gaily in red, white, and blue bunting. Behind Seward loomed giant pictures of the President and Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman. It was a triptych of heroes—although the Chicago Tribune parodied the meeting as a bunch of Rip van Winkles come to sing, “Oh dear, we are all fagged out, and cannot battle for Right any longer.”

  A smiling Seward brushed aside all insults. By marginalizing Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner—casting their positions as obstructionist and extreme—Seward believed he and Johnson could lure conservative and perhaps moderate Republicans into a new Union party. He and Andrew Johnson would be at the helm of this party, and the country would inevitably follow them, wherever.

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  TOWARD THE END of the Lincoln administration, William Pitt Fessenden had replaced Salmon Chase as treasury secretary, and then Hugh McCulloch, sleek and mild and blond, had in turn replaced Fessenden just the month before Lincoln’s death. McCulloch would remember his job as “laborious and thankless,” but he served Johnson loyally and advised him carefully, particularly on the financial issues about which Johnson was said to lack both understanding and interest. And McCulloch consistently praised Johnson as a man of integrity thoroughly devoted to the country; he’d admired his brave stand against secession back in 1860, and he completely shared the President’s conviction that suffrage should be a matter for the states to decide. When it came to extemporaneous speaking, though, McCulloch did not trust the President’s judgment.

  Johnson wanted to address a throng of boisterous fans in celebration of Washington’s birthday, but McCulloch gingerly warned the President that, if he must, then he should stick to pleasantries. Johnson assured his secretary that he merely planned to greet the well-wishers, but the fact was that he could never resist a crowd. And it was a pretty large crowd, singing and chanting, that had marched to the White House from a rally at Grover’s Theater. Arriving at the portico, they yelled out for the President to come and say a few words, and Johnson happily, gratefully, complied. But he proceeded to unleash such a startling chain of venomous epithets and head-turning images—about decapitation and crucifixion—that many people, then and later, had to assume Andy Johnson was completely drunk.

  He hadn’t been drinking; he was seething. By his lights, he, the President, had been traduced, humiliated, and insulted. Congress had refused to seat Southern delegates in defiance of his stated preference that they do so. Men like George Downing had dared to argue with him. The Radicals were insatiable and insolent. Hadn’t Charles Sumner called him Pharaoh? It was his life that had been endangered during the war, not the lives of the freedpeople. Didn’t Thad Stevens say that if a British king ignored Parliament the way Johnson ignored Congress, it would’ve cost him his head? This posse of maniacs and revolutionists was conspiring to overthrow the government and boot him out of his job, to topple everything sacred and then to nail him to the cross. These traitors were none other than Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Wendell Phillips.

  Johnson worked himself up to a pitch, and whatever veneer of composure he had adopted cracked wide open. Mixing self-pity with pride, he balefully described his origins, his diligent life as a tailor, his fixed devotion to the Constitution, and the fact that he was cut from the same patriotic cloth as the noble George Washington. Whatever the charms of the White House, he raved on, they held no charm for him. He cared for neither food nor clothing; he was just a simple man, without frill or ambition, who wished only to do his duty by his country. And lest anyone forget, he’d been willing to sacrifice everything for the Union. “Who has suffered more by the rebellion than I have?” Johnson burst out. “If my blood is to be shed because I vindicate the Union and insist on the preservation of the Government in its or
iginal purity, let it be shed out,” he cried. “The blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured out as the last libation as a tribute to the union to the States.”

  Dumbfounded by Johnson’s tirade, George Templeton Strong began to think the unthinkable: impeachment. Strong almost groaned, “Imagine it!!!!!” Johnson seemed unfit for office. William Lloyd Garrison too wondered if Johnson wasn’t guilty of an impeachable offence, like the usurpation of power, “in undertaking to reconstruct states for peremptory admission into the Congress of the United States”—and in attacking “some of its most estimable and distinguished members as assassins who are conspiring to take his life.”

  Edwin Stanton decided not to resign as war secretary, which he’d said he’d been considering: he could not abandon the military, especially now that Johnson was seemingly unhinged. If the President wanted him gone, let the President fire him. But it was with something like relief that Senator William Pitt Fessenden heard of Johnson’s tirade. “The long agony is over,” Fessenden concluded. “He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust, and must sink from detestation into contempt.”

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  RELINQUISH ALL BITTERNESS and spleen, the President suggested, although he himself did just the opposite. Forgive white Southerners their trespasses. For though Johnson’s tirade stupefied even his admirers, it tapped into deeply held beliefs about mercy and redemption, and if the rhetoric seemed empty, it effectively replaced political issues with foggy but familiar injunctions to forgive and forget. And that offered solace to those tired of war, tired of fighting, and tired of problems with no easy solutions.

  The institution of slavery had been abolished, its sinfulness washed clean, and those who did not forgive were themselves with sin, like the vindictive and vengeful Thaddeus Stevens, a man without mercy or magnanimity. We are one people, united in sympathy, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher preached. As for the South, “their mistakes, their evil cause, belonged to the system under which they were reared, but their military skill and heroic bravery belong to the nation.”

  “My enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead,” Walt Whitman reminded his readers in a recent poem aptly called “Reconciliation.” Whitman’s friend the essayist John Burroughs praised the poem’s commitment to peace, benevolence, and a kindly compassion.

  The poet Walt Whitman once said, “Life is seen more richly in Washington than at any other one point on this continent.” Living there during the Johnson administration, he composed the three essays about American politics and culture later published as Democratic Vistas.

  Burroughs had met Walt Whitman in the rubber supply store of Allen, Clapp & Company, located between 10th and 11th Streets in Washington. The poet was large, muscular, his beard shaggy, his shirt collar open, his soul large. “I was struck with the look of him as he sat there in the gas light,” Burroughs said. Whitman extended a warm hand, and the two men became friends for a lifetime.

  Burroughs learned that Whitman lived in a room with just a bed and a table and a chair, that he ate not much more than bread and tea, and that he ambled “looking old and young, both at the same time.” Whitman continued to deliver tobacco and sweet crackers to the homeless Southern boys down with fever and the Union soldiers still recuperating, if they could recuperate, in the district hospitals. A Democrat before the war, Whitman had no fondness for what he called the “scum” of politics: rabid partisanship. To him, both Johnson and the Radicals were ferocious, divided, and divisive. He was seeking reconciliation, the kind that rockets transcendentally above the petty concerns of petty people.

  This too was the desire of novelist Herman Melville, for whom it was also time to forgive. Melville had sprung into vogue almost overnight twenty years earlier when his titillating maritime novel Typee, about his escapades as a young sailor in the South Seas, became a bestseller. He then published a number of similar books until 1851, when he produced the strange, brooding masterpiece, Moby-Dick, which few read and fewer understood, a book about obsession, madness, and revenge—and an interracial friendship of symbolic power. He was also writing stories—notably “Benito Cereno,” a complex tale of a slave revolt—and in the summer of 1866 produced Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War, a small, red-covered volume of unconventional poems. Confounding the public once again, Melville’s poetry was a combination of Emerson, Browning, and Mother Goose, said one reviewer, who winced at the irregular rhymes, jarring metaphors, and jagged verse. Oddest of all, though, was the prose “Supplement” at the volume’s end.

  In the “Supplement,” hardly read even today, Melville said he wanted what every other “sensible American” wanted: reconciliation. Of course, as he also noted, “nothing has been urged here in the foolish hope of conciliating those men—few in number, we trust—who have resolved never to be reconciled to the Union.” But since Northerners were the victors in the war, they had an obligation to remember that Southern women who scatter flowers on the graves of their husbands, sons, and fathers are “as sacred in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs.”

  What’s more, former Southerners—even secessionists—should be readmitted into Congress because they represent the people. But as George Downing had pointed out to Andrew Johnson, this “people” did not include blacks.

  As for the blacks, Melville had a plan: “paternal guardianship” might be offered the former slaves, although, he warned, any concern for them “should not be allowed to exclude kindliness to communities who stand nearer to us in nature.” We need to be kind to former slaveholders too. “In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty to the blacks,” Melville reminded the reader, “let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen—measures of a nature to provoke, among other of the last evils, exterminating hatred of race toward race.”

  Nervous about insurrections, nervous about constitutionality, nervous about irritating the South, and eager to conciliate, Melville sounded a bit like Andrew Johnson. “Benevolent desires, after passing a certain point,” the novelist added, “can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.”

  Conservative reviewers praised Melville’s political “Supplement.” “So far from spoiling the symmetry of the book, this supplement completes it, and converts it into what is better than a good book—into a good and patriotic action,” The New York Herald’s critic declared, quoting the supplement at length in the paper. At The New York Times, Henry Raymond also admired Melville’s disapproval of Radicals, who would probably pitch the book out the window. Radicals were in fact willing to toss Battle-pieces into the trash. To them, Melville had a smiling, Panglossian view of civil rights. “ ‘Something,’ says this happy optimist, ‘may well be left to the graduated care of future legislature and of Heaven,’ ” Radical editor Theodore Tilton wrote in The Independent. “To which we have only to reply that ‘something’ was left eighty years ago to the graduated care of future legislation and of Heaven; and that something turned out to be a gigantic war, from which we escaped by the skin of our teeth.”

  Yet Melville and Whitman weren’t alone. “Everybody is heartily tired of discussing [the Negro’s] rights,” grumbled The Nation. Melville and Whitman were giving voice to those whites bewildered or oblivious or just uncaring and who didn’t want to turn back the clock so much as bury the past and move on.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Civil Rights

  There was no reason, none at all, to assume that the Civil Rights Bill was objectionable or that it would provoke much controversy, or that it would prevent the healing of the nation. Or that Johnson would veto it. The bill said nothing about a black man’s right to vote—or a white woman’s, for that matter. It contained no controversial language. Its intent was reconciliation and pe
ace. James Gordon Bennett, a Democrat, called the bill sensible. It merely granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power (though excluding Indians who lived in tribes), and it allowed these people, as citizens, to make contracts, to testify in court, and to move, to marry, or to own property. No punishment meted out to a black man or woman could differ from that inflicted on a white person for the same offense.

  “The thing itself is desirable,” Henry Ward Beecher informed President Johnson. “Aside from that, I am persuaded that it would go far to harmonize the feelings of men who should never have differed, or permitted a difference.” Ohio governor Jacob D. Cox, another Johnson ally, told the President that if he wasn’t sure about the bill’s constitutionality—Cox wasn’t either—at least the bill was popular, and it would unite Republicans. Sign it, Cox advised. “It will be well to sustain a point in order to meet the popular spirit and impulse rather than to make a strict construction of duty the other way.” Even Wendell Phillips, who insisted citizenship was meaningless without the right to vote, conceded the bill was at least half a loaf, which meant it was better than nothing at all.

  Not a man to take risks, Lyman Trumbull had showed a copy of the Civil Rights Bill to President Johnson. Johnson didn’t say he objected, and in March, the bill sailed through both Houses. Seward suggested Johnson sign it but said that if he didn’t, Johnson should definitely “find a way to intimate that you are not opposed to the policy of the bill but only to its detailed provisions.” If Johnson were to veto the bill, he continued, he’d thereby “make the support of the veto easier for our friends in Congress.”

  The President paced back and forth. He clearly did not want to sign. “Sir, I am right,” he burst out to his secretary, though it’s not clear what he was right about. “I know I am right, and I am damned if I do not adhere to it.”