The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Not so the fusty Gideon Welles. “I have sometimes been almost tempted to listen to the accusation of his enemies that he desired and courted impeachment,” Welles would privately mutter.

  Egging on the Republicans, Johnson railed at them, particularly at the Radicals who wanted to depose and destroy him. Over and over, he called Congress a body hanging on the verge of the government; he frustrated the laws of Congress; he branded its leaders as traitors. But Congressman George Boutwell, former governor of Massachusetts, disingenuously noted that Congress was not taking the bait: Never in public session nor in any of the Republican caucuses had the House of Representatives considered or proposed Johnson’s impeachment; “the grounds of his fear,” Boutwell continued, “are known only to himself.”

  Massachusetts Representative George S. Boutwell, one of the principal framers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amdendments, strongly opposed Andrew Johnson’s restoration policies and served as one of the principles prosecuting Johnson’s impeachment.

  His beard trimmed to a point, his sense of purpose just as pointed, George Sewall Boutwell was the industrious son of poor Massachusetts farmers. He’d worked as county clerk, a teacher, a storekeeper, and had studied in the office of a local attorney so that he could practice law. He was also a crafty politician. When he was just twenty-one, in 1839, he was elected as a Democrat to the local school committee, and from there he went on to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, never losing his taste for agriculture or for educational issues. After he suffered a series of political losses, in 1851 a coalition of Free-Soilers and Democrats elected him Massachusetts governor. An opponent of slavery, he eventually joined the Republicans, whose party he helped organize, for he supported equal voting rights and detested all cant about so-called “inferior races.” He would enter President Grant’s cabinet as treasury secretary, and much later, when eighty years old, in 1898, he again left his party—this time the Republicans—to protest American military aggression in the Philippines. Until his death, Boutwell served as president of the American Anti-Imperialist League.

  Gideon Welles labeled Boutwell a Massachusetts fanatic who somehow had helped to plan the New Orleans debacle, for Welles knew that as soon as Johnson created the state government in North Carolina by proclamation in the spring of 1865, an appalled Boutwell had rushed to the White House. Johnson assured Boutwell that his proclamation was tentative—an experiment—which it was not. That interview was the first and last time Boutwell and the President talked together and from then on, Boutwell distrusted Johnson. “A conspiracy was on foot to put the government into the hands of rebels,” Boutwell gathered, “and the president was a party to it.”

  That fall, Boutwell ripped into Johnson in an essay he published in the widely read Atlantic Monthly magazine. Johnson was a dictator, Boutwell said; he’d imposed his policies on the South, organizing provisional governments, inaugurating constitutional conventions, and booting out elected or appointed officers. Such autocratic actions were a usurpation of power—and as such were impeachable offenses. For Johnson and his cabinet were denying the legitimacy of the Congress by demeaning it as a “rump,” and the President was capable of ordering the army to empty congressional halls. Paranoia made for good politics. Boutwell was not a paranoid man, but he understood political expediency.

  And he had good reason to believe his own propaganda. Johnson continued to turn good men out of office, replacing them with lackeys or conservatives. Seward’s office had falsely accused John Nicolay, the American consul in Paris and formerly Lincoln’s secretary, of being lazy, corrupt, and unsympathetic to the President: more evidence of the President’s morbid sensitivity, his need for absolute loyalty, and his wariness. In Augusta, Georgia, Johnson’s Freedmen’s Bureau appointee General Davis Tillson refused to permit blacks to leave flowers on the graves of the Union dead, and when the freedmen protested labor contracts, he cut their rations until they complied. “This tells well for the reconstructed, & still better for our own apostate officers,” a disgusted officer remarked. Wendell Phillips direly predicted that “what New Orleans will be today, Washington will be in December: ruled by the President and his mob—unless the people prevent it.”

  The brashest call for impeachment came from Benjamin Franklin Butler, a former Democrat who’d voted for his friend Jefferson Davis over fifty times during the 1860 Democratic convention. In those days, Butler had held abolitionists in contempt, but after Fort Sumter Butler joined the war effort with such fervor that Lincoln asked General Winfield Scott to curb his pugnacious enthusiasm. A bona fide Radical Republican from then on, he did part company with many of them, particularly on currency reform. He favored greenbacks over so-called “hard” money (or specie) when he entered the House of Representatives in 1866, and in later years, Butler ran for President as a candidate for the short-lived Greenback party. He was a maverick, an opportunist, and a paradox in an age of paradox. Called by a contemporary the “best abused, best hated man in the House,” Butler was accused of vindictiveness, of vaulting ambition, and of vulgarity—and managed to sweep all criticism away with the back of a hand.

  Bald, stubby, and with hooded lids that made him look a bit like the thief he was often accused of being, Butler had been raised by his widowed mother, who ran one of the boardinghouses that lodged the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts. Rejected by West Point, he’d graduated from Colby College in Maine and then studied law. Tremendously successful at the bar, he was an aggressive, hardworking advocate who adored histrionics and a good fight—the wilder and woolier the better—and brazenly championed women, workers, and racial equality.

  After being given command of a regiment of volunteers, Butler achieved a kind of notoriety in 1861 when three black field hands rowed across the James River to Fort Monroe, a Union-held post, and Butler, now a Union major-general, didn’t return them to their rebel master. Declaring them “contrabands of war,” he said that as such they were slaves no more. Butler’s decision was thus an act of emancipation, and the idea of “contrabands” as people—not slaves—entered the Northern vocabulary. Though not an unalloyed abolitionist victory (a contraband was still a kind of property), it was such a radical idea that Jefferson Davis said anyone who captured Butler could hang him then and there.

  Keen and possibly corrupt, Massachusetts lawyer and politician General Benjamin F. Butler, formerly a Democrat, was the Radical Republican who, during the war, declared fugitive slaves free. Elected to Congress, he served as chief prosecuting representative during the impeachment trial, which he said he’d conduct as if he were trying to convict a horse thief.

  In 1862, while Major-General Butler was military-governor of Union-occupied Louisiana, he ruled with a crooked, iron fist. Nicknamed “Spoons,” Butler was said to have pilfered silver servingware, which he presumably stashed in a coffin. He was also called the “Beast,” for he arrested the New Orleans mayor, none other than John Monroe, who would be mayor in 1866 during the riots, and he executed a man for pulling down the Stars and Stripes. And after the Crescent City’s rebellious ladies presumably poured the contents of their chamber pots on the heads of Union soldiers, Butler issued an order that promised to treat all females who harassed his troops as common prostitutes. More troubling were allegations about shady trade in sugar and cotton, perhaps with his brother Andrew. Years later, the historian Bruce Catton, who detested Butler, said that though no one ever proved Butler was dishonest, “there always seemed to be a dead rat behind the wainscoting somewhere.” Or, as Henry Adams noted, “Butler is the only man who understands his countrymen and even he does not quite represent the dishonesty of our system.”

  There was no love lost between Generals Butler and Grant. Butler never won a major battle, and in the spring of 1864, he and his men, having been defeated near Richmond, retreated to a narrow neck of land between the James and Appomattox Rivers, where they were trapped. The retreat was a serious str
ategic blunder. The usually taciturn General Grant noted that Butler had sealed off his army “as if it had been a bottle, strong corked.” Humiliated in public, Beast Butler was now known as “Bottled-Up Butler.” Then, after Butler failed to destroy Fort Fisher near Wilmington, North Carolina, and withdrew his forces, Grant not only asked Lincoln to remove him from his command but to make certain he’d never receive another one.

  Yet Butler retained his own devoted following. “He was no pretender and no hypocrite,” said Assistant War Secretary Charles Dana. And there was a charming effrontery about him. When a boisterous group in front of New York City Hall greeted him with hisses and groans, Butler stood calmly on the platform, a gold toothpick in his mouth, until the crowd quieted down. As he began to speak, someone threw an apple, striking him on the forehead. Butler caught the apple, bowed to the man who’d thrown it, and in his studied way coolly bit into it. The crowd laughed, and Butler continued his speech.

  Almost immediately after Johnson entered the White House, Radicals suggested that he replace Seward as secretary of state with Ben Butler. That was not going to happen, especially since Butler went on record saying black soldiers should, at the very least, be given the vote. Yet because he coveted a cabinet post, Butler was initially reluctant, as were many Radical Republicans, to criticize the President. Regardless, like Stevens, he had hoped to redistribute planter lands to black and white soldiers, and he wanted the leading Confederates to be punished, so when Johnson favored letting them back into Congress, Butler began to lose heart.

  “A collision will come between Congress and the President,” Butler predicted in the spring of 1866, “which if he is not a coward (and I think he is not) will result in revolution.” Butler suggested a plan of reconstruction that allowed all male citizens over the age of twenty-one the right to vote. As for congressional representation, Butler suggested that it be determined by the number of qualified voters. His plan went nowhere.

  In the fall of 1866, Butler ran for Congress from the Essex district of Massachusetts, where he owned some property—he didn’t live there, but he didn’t want to compete with his friend George Boutwell, who lived in Butler’s home district. Such “squatting” struck detractors as another example of Butler’s shiftiness. Ignoring the accusations, Butler successfully attracted excited crowds not just in Massachusetts but throughout the country by demanding that Johnson be impeached.

  “We will not yield to usurpation,” Butler shouted. Revisiting the New Orleans massacre, Butler charged Johnson with conspiring with Mayor John Monroe to foment the riot. He told audiences that Johnson had distorted General Sheridan’s account of the riot in order to downplay it. He reminded them that neither the instigators of the massacre nor the murderers had been arrested. You just couldn’t trust Andy Johnson. “The war did not end with the surrender of Lee,” Butler declared. “The moral victory of every war depends upon the moral gain that is obtained after its close, by the indication and maintenance of the immutable principles of truth for which the contest was inaugurated and waged.

  “Come back to the true principles of justice for all—equal rights for all men—away with the idea this is a white man’s Government—it is God’s government,” Butler cried. “It is made for white men, black men, or gray men—all men, and all men with a perfect equality.”

  Audiences loved him, Massachusetts elected him, the President would come to rue him.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE FALL elections approached, moderate Republicans were hopeful. “The massacre at New Orleans will open many eyes,” said George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly. “If the elections are against us, we shall submit,” declared Rutherford B. Hayes, who placed himself above the fray, and while he wouldn’t dare consider impeachment, he didn’t think Republicans should surrender to the President. “Don’t let Andy Johnson deceive you,” Hayes cautioned a friend. Frederick Law Olmsted considered himself a mild and rational man, but he’d lost his transcendental calm. “The events at New Orleans &c. & Mr. Johnson’s exhibition of Southern White character have greatly strengthened and confirmed the conclusion that the risk of adopting Mr. Johnson’s policy would be too great,” Olmsted told Charles Eliot Norton. Resist Johnson and his plans.

  Johnson was defied. The congressional elections in the fall of 1866 were a Republican landslide, with Republicans gaining more than a two-thirds veto-proof majority in both houses—173 to 53 in the House, and 43 to 9 in the Senate. Memphis and New Orleans had spoken. No new Johnson party had been formed. The “Swing Around the Circle” had shown the President to be vain, vulgar, and vindictive. The London Spectator called him blind and crazy. Tennessee Governor Brownlow said he was a dead dog. Caricaturist Thomas Nast mocked him. Humorist Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby satirized him. Frederick Douglass indicted him. Johnson’s policy had failed. It was failing. It would continue to fail.

  Impeachment was now necessary, Ben Butler cried: election results may vex Johnson, they may rile him, they may momentarily stop him, but they will never change him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Tenure of Office

  January 7, 1867

  Snow had fallen for three days in early January, the sky was leaden, and white powdery stuff drifted up the Capitol steps. Inside, the gallery in the House of Representatives teemed with observers, attentive and breathless, black and white, and they got what they’d come for.

  A barrel-chested James Mitchell Ashley, his face pale, his hands trembling, rose from his seat in the House of Representatives and declared, “I do impeach Andrew Johnson, Vice President and sitting President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.”

  The spectators clapped and stamped, and when the din subsided, Ashley continued: “I charge him with a usurpation of power and violation of law.

  In that he has corruptly used the appointing power;

  In that he has corruptly used the pardoning power;

  In that he has corruptly used the veto power;

  In that he has corruptly disposed of public lands of the United States:

  In that he has corruptly interfered in elections, and committed acts that, in contemplation of the Constitution, are high crimes and misdemeanors: Therefore,

  Be it resolved, that the Committee on the Judiciary be, and they are hereby authorized to inquire into the official conduct of Andrew Johnson.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ASHLEY CALLED for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the President of the United States, he was acting rashly. Most Republicans didn’t think an impeachment resolution should be brought to the House floor, not yet. A group of Republicans had met just before Ashley’s announcement, Ashley among them, and though Thaddeus Stevens had strongly argued for impeachment, claiming that Johnson had single-handedly prevented any reconstruction of the Union, what with his pardons and his vetoes and his putting rebels back in office, many of his colleagues hedged. They said that if an impeachment resolution were to be brought forward at all, it should go to the Judiciary Committee before it reached the full House. In committee, they hoped, impeachment would die a quiet death.

  Ashley had been impatient. But rather than vote Ashely’s resolution completely down, the House authorized the Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 108 to 39, to investigate Ashley’s charges.

  Unsettled by the whole business, but not for long, William Seward too assumed the Judiciary Committee would bury the whole business. The committee certainly wouldn’t recommend impeachment. The Jacobins might be restless, Seward said, but they weren’t to be taken seriously. Besides, Ashley was far from a perfect vessel. “He constituted himself the chief impeacher,” journalist Benjamin Perley Poore recalled with contempt, “and assumed a position that should have been held by a strong-nerved, deep-sighted, able man.” Known by those who disliked him as an ambitious lightweight interested only in his own advancement, Ashley the vain peacock w
as said to promenade up and down the aisles of the House while taking sidelong looks at the ladies’ gallery. Representative Elihu Washburne indicated he wouldn’t touch an impeachment resolution with Ashley’s fingerprints on it, and James Garfield backed off. “If we could succeed in an impeachment of the President it would be a blessing, probably, but it is perfectly evident that with the Senate constituted as it is, we cannot effect an impeachment,” Garfield calculated. “Ashley and such like impracticable men, are determined to push the insane scheme of making the attempt and setting the country in a ferment.” But Ashley said more than once that he had no use for that “rascally virtue, called discretion,” and he long maintained he’d done right in calling for Johnson’s impeachment. “I did it as a public duty,” he later said, “without undertaking to count the cost to myself personally.”

  Historians haven’t been kind. C. Vann Woodward dismissed Ashley as “a nut with an idée fixe,” and Eric McKitrick called him “an occult mixture of superstition and lunacy.” Yet though Congress had its share of mountebanks and cheats, Ashley had been quite serious about ending slavery, and as manager of the House floor, he’d been largely responsible for passing the Thirteenth Amendment. Washington reporter for The Independent, Mary Clemmer Ames, said Ashley was the most genial man in Congress and the kindest. Most men in government were churls; not Ashley. Frederick Douglass ranked him among the likes of Sumner, Stevens, and Benjamin Wade, all of them valiant white men determined to secure equal justice for all. Not only had Ashley fought against slavery and aided in the recruitment of black troops, after the war he rendered his best service to liberty and to the nation by actually attempting to impeach Andrew Johnson. “Yet it has happened to him, as it has happened to many other good men,” Douglass reflected, “to have his best work in the world least appreciated and commended by the world.” William H. Young, president of the Afro-American League of Tennessee, would similarly declare that neither he nor the freedpeople would forget what Ashley had done or stood for, despite the “chill and gloom of ingratitude” with which he was predictably remembered. Ashley’s deeds, Young said, “shall be a precious legacy to our children’s children.”