The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  The principled Charles Sumner made no secret of his desire to see Johnson booted out of the White House. Thanks to the President, Senator Sumner said, “there was a war still being waged upon loyal Unionists, without any distinction of color, so that both white and black are sacrificed.” But the Judiciary Committee wasn’t making much headway on the question of whether Andrew Johnson should be impeached, or for what crime. For one thing, it seemed distracted by Johnson’s peccadillos, according to testimony leaked to the public. There had long been rumors about dissolute behavior. “Johnson has resigned himself to drunkenness and now whoreing is added and prostitutes are seen emerging at late hours of the night,” Judge William B. Napton of Missouri had noted with disdain.

  More recently, the Judiciary Committee heard the sensational testimony of General Lafayette Baker. During the war, Baker was in charge of the Federal Detective Bureau. In its two-story brick headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, the agency had operated under the umbrella of Stanton’s War Department, although Baker also ran a rogue group of spies that arrested rebels, counterfeiters, and other disloyalists, presumably without much regard for their constitutional rights. When Baker’s position was eliminated, Stanton continued to pay him for various clandestine tasks, and after Lincoln was shot, Stanton sent Baker to track Booth and his conspirators, which he very successfully did.

  Baker had also set up a sting operation to nab the notorious Washington pardon-broker Mrs. Lucy Cobb, the pretty black-eyed woman whom Baker and many other Washington insiders said had been intimate with the President. But though Democrats scoffed, saying Baker “never told the truth, even by accident,” a caricature of Mrs. Cobb had been circulating through Congress showing Mrs. Cobb holding a baby whose face bore an uncanny likeness to Andrew Johnson’s. That proved nothing, of course, except what everyone already knew—namely, that pardons were being bought and sold in the District, and that neither Mrs. Cobb nor General Baker was to be trusted.

  When the Fortieth Congress convened, it authorized the Judiciary Committee to continue the investigation of Andrew Johnson’s actions and indiscretions, although one member of the committee, Andrew J. Rogers, a Democrat, strongly protested that not a particle of evidence against Johnson had been found. Newly seated in the House, Ben Butler asked to be added to the committee. Ohio Representative John Bingham vehemently objected. A member of Congress almost steadily since 1854, Bingham prided himself on his integrity and thoroughly disliked Butler, whose integrity was a matter of dispute. Still, the perpetually peevish Gideon Welles distrusted Bingham, calling him a “shrewd, sinuous, tricky lawyer”—not unlike Butler himself, but with far more subtlety, if far less talent.

  Ohio Representative John A. Bingham had prosecuted the alleged conspirators to assassinate Lincoln and helped draft the Fourteenth Amendment. Though reluctant at first to impeach Andrew Johnson, when Bingham “puts his hand on the wheel,” a journalist noted, “he never looks back.”

  Angular and slightly stooped, the grimly sober John Bingham buttoned his coat tightly at his waist, and while usually a nervous, long-winded man sometimes called a gasbag, he could be eloquent. “When he puts his hand on the wheel,” said journalist Emily Briggs, “he never looks back.” Previously an anti-slavery Whig, Bingham was instrumental in the drafting of the Fourteenth Amendment and believed the former rebel states should be admitted to Congress if they ratified the amendment—but he also believed that these same states had to allow the vote to all men, without distinction to race. At the same time, he was pleased the amendment didn’t mandate black suffrage nationwide.

  Bingham taunted Butler, first by making fun of the general’s military failures. “I did all I could, the best I could,” Butler serenely replied. “But the only victim of the gentleman’s prowess that I know of was an innocent woman hung upon the scaffold, one Mrs. Surratt.” The reference to Surratt, in whose boardinghouse the conspirators had met, was a pointed jab. As assistant judge-advocate during the trial of the Lincoln assassination conspirators, John Bingham had been partly blamed for her conviction and execution. Butler argued that Surratt didn’t necessarily know that Booth intended to assassinate Lincoln when his kidnapping plan fell through, and if she didn’t know, she shouldn’t have been found guilty of conspiracy. Butler’s argument hit its mark—that is, John Bingham—especially since it was generally believed that Surratt had been victim of a rush to judgment.

  Poor Bingham, Emily Briggs wryly observed. “He can comfort himself with the idea that there is one the less of the so-called gentler sex to perpetrate mischief.”

  Butler also knew that after Lincoln’s assassination, Surratt’s son John, another alleged conspirator, had successfully sneaked out of Washington. A recognized courier for the Confederacy, presumably working out of the tavern his mother owned in Maryland, he’d been stuffing secret messages in his boot to carry to Richmond until at least 1864, when his mother rented out the tavern and moved to Washington, where she ran her boardinghouse on H Street. There, John Surratt had shared a room with his former classmate, a small, handsome, weak man named Louis Weichmann, who would end up testifying against Mrs. Surratt.

  Doubtless, John Surratt was valuable to another friend, John Wilkes Booth, who drafted Surratt into his knuckle-brained plot to abduct Lincoln. “I was led on by a sincere desire to assist the South in gaining her independence,” John Surratt would proudly say. “I had no hesitation in taking part in anything honorable that might tend toward the accomplishment of that object.”

  When Surratt fled Washington, he’d escaped first to Canada and then to Rome, where he enlisted in the Papal guard under a pseudonym. But an acquaintance from Maryland, Henri Beaumont de Ste Marie, recognized him and informed Rufus King, the U.S. minister, adding that Surratt had confessed his complicity in the assassination plot—and had named such coconspirators as the Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin.

  The U.S. government dragged its feet. Eventually it was the Vatican’s secretary of foreign affairs, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, who ordered Surratt’s arrest. But either with uncanny luck or the assistance of the Papal guard, or both, Surratt managed yet another escape, landing eventually in Egypt, where he was arrested and this time extradited.

  Back in Washington, Surratt was indicted for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and was to be tried by a criminal, not a military, court. For four months he awaited trial in conditions that permitted him to wander freely around his section of the jail, except at night, and he received plenty of reading material and choice delicacies to eat.

  George Boutwell had been asking why the government had not acted sooner to arrest Surratt. What did the President know? Was the President implicated in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln, and was he covering it up? James Ashley, ruining an already spotty reputation, traveled throughout the country trying to scrounge up information on Johnson’s role in the Lincoln assassination. He met a number of times with convicted perjurer Charles A. Dunham in Dunham’s jail cell—Dunham assured Ashley he could produce letters between Booth and Andrew Johnson, which he never did, and said he also had damning information about John Surratt. William Seward joked that pretty soon he too would likely be “tried with Surratt for conniving at the attempt upon his own life.”

  Dunham never delivered anything, but later he alleged that Ashley had urged him to manufacture evidence. The brouhaha served only to damage Ashley’s reputation even further and, not coincidentally, to pour cold water over impeachment. Walt Whitman remarked that “there is much talk about impeachment—but I think it is very doubtful if there is any impeachment.” Emily Briggs said impeachment had “growled and thundered in the political horizon, but for some unaccountable but wise reason it has all subsided.” And as Henry Dawes noted, “if nothing is done to give it new life it will die of too much nursing.”

  Dawes was partly right, but Butler was not going to let the matter drop. Joining with Ashley and George
Boutwell—“a baleful trio of buzzards as ever perched in the House,” a renowned historian mocked them—Butler persisted. What had happened to the diary of John Wilkes Booth, and why were eighteen pages missing? Testifying before the Judiciary Committee, Stanton remembered the diary coming to the War Department with the pages already torn out. Had Andrew Johnson ordered those missing pages to be cut in order to conceal his own hand in Lincoln’s assassination?

  When the Judiciary Committee began investigating his finances, Andrew Johnson exploded. “I have had a son killed, a son-in-law die during the last battle at Nashville, another son has thrown himself away, a second son-in-law is in no better condition, I think I have had sorrow enough without having my bank account examined by a Committee of Congress.”

  He presented an impenetrable, stubborn front; he looked neither tired nor disconcerted nor ill; he walked with a decided step, smiled a bit, dressed well, and conscientiously combed his mouse-gray hair.

  The Judiciary Committee trudged forward. It interviewed General Rufus Saxton, who had been fired from the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina; it received reports about land and property returned to former Confederates. It interviewed men who had been pardoned by the President and men who had been sacked. It interviewed Thomas Conway, fired from the Freedmen’s Bureau in New Orleans, and General Fullerton, who replaced him. It heard testimony about the President’s responsibility for the massacre in New Orleans, and it asked if Johnson had somehow given preference to former Confederates when the railroads seized during the war were sold, or if he’d been involved with an improper sale and seizure of cotton after the war. It asked if the President had obstructed passage of the Fourteenth Amendment or if he had used intimidation to block Colorado’s admission as a state to the Union. And it returned to the matter of that Booth diary and those missing pages to discover whether Johnson had ripped them out. “The President’s cook is daily expecting a summons from the impeachment committee for putting black pepper in the soup,” sniped a Boston paper.

  The committee had been told to keep its tedious process going, even when Congress took its spring recess—“to sit all summer on the impeachment eggs,” as Emily Briggs put it. By now Thad Stevens had his doubts; yes, certainly Johnson deserved impeachment, but the country did not need the “fussy, unnecessary and absurd” actions of a committee that took any oral testimony whatsoever. “They should not have called a witness,” Stevens declared, “but reported that Congress had quite sufficient ground for the impeachment, if they desired to take that political step, in the encroachments and usurpation of the President.”

  “Instead of investigating charges of impeachment against the President of the United States on specific allegations, charges extending to every crime and every folly which a wicked, bad man could be guilty of,” Stevens later said, “the investigation entered upon with a malignity and feeling which could do no credit to so high a tribunal.” That damaged the process and the outcome. “These innumerable eggs were thrown into the nest of his investigation, until it was more than full,” Stevens lamented. “They thought to break the elephant’s back, broad as it was, by piling upon it straws.”

  The country could and should—and in time would—bear witness that Andrew Johnson had failed to execute the law. He had used every means in his power to defeat or suppress it. He’d sought to arrogate to himself the power of Congress, and instead of taking the President to task for his official malfeasance, the committee, as far as Stevens was concerned, was “making a mere pretense of prosecuting impeachment.”

  On June 3, 1867, the Judiciary Committee hatched its eggs, voting five to four against a recommendation of impeachment although it decided to continue its investigation. It also lamely voted to censure Johnson, which was tantamount to a slap on the wrist. The revolutionary farce is over, the shameful crusade ended, Democrats crowed, and yet the publisher James Gordon Bennett said Congress should definitely reconvene for a special session in July to expel the President. Otherwise the war would have been fought in vain.

  Walt Whitman took to his desk to celebrate the spirit of democracy, which was wider, deeper, and grander than the party politics of paltry men. “Amid whatever clouds, seductions, or heart-wearying postponements,” the poet rejoiced, “we have never deserted, never despaired, never abandoned the Faith.” Thaddeus Stevens had never abandoned the faith, but he was far more cynical than Whitman about craven politics and paltry men.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A Revolutionary Period

  “The situation was approaching mutiny on one side, or else treason on the other.”

  —ADAM BADEAU

  Impeachment was an extreme measure—as yet, much too extreme—and impeachment would not settle the immediate question, already deferred far too long: how, when, and under what conditions could the so-called former Confederate states re-enter the Union? So in late February 1867, just before it adjourned, the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States again placed itself across the path of the President by passing a different measure, known as the Military (or First) Reconstruction Act.

  The act placed ten formerly seceded states into five temporary military districts. (Tennessee was excepted since it had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.) Each of these five districts might contain only one state, as was the case of the First Military District, which included Virginia; or they might cover several states, as was the case of the Third Military District, which included Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Supervising each district was a military commander (none below the rank of brigadier-general) charged with keeping the peace, preventing insurrection, and punishing all agitators. This commander thus had the authority to remove civil officers, should the need arise, and although the civil courts would remain open, he could authorize a military tribunal, should he see fit.

  The Reconstruction Act also outlined the qualifications for a state’s readmission to Congress. The five military commanders were to oversee elections in the several states they superintended. Any adult male citizen, regardless of race or color, who had resided in his state for at least one year and had not previously been disqualified by felony or because of his participation in the rebellion was eligible to vote for delegates to the state’s constitutional convention. These chosen delegates would then draft a new state constitution, to be ratified by the voters of that state, again regardless of his race or color; the new constitution was required to grant voting rights, in all future elections, to black men. Then, after ratification of the new constitution, the state could elect a governor and legislators to replace the governments Johnson had established.

  If and when Congress approved the state’s new constitution, that state’s newly elected representatives and senators would be admitted into Congress—provided too that the state had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, conferring citizenship on black men and women and guaranteeing their civil rights. Thus, the power structure of the South was forever to change, or so exclaimed House Speaker Schuyler Colfax with pride: the Military Reconstruction Act guaranteed that “new wine could not be put in old bottles.”

  But as John Sherman explained to his brother, the act left the actual machinery of voting to the individual states. That is, a state could allow former rebels to vote, should it so choose. The only real objection the Southern states might have to the Military Reconstruction Act would be the granting of suffrage to black men, Senator Sherman added. But they could get around that: the states could impose qualifications on voters—say, by mandating that a citizen had to own property in order to vote, or by introducing “poll taxes,” which forced an otherwise eligible voter to pay a fee at the polls. In this way a state government could keep black men, who owned little property, or poor people, black or white, from exercising their right to vote.

  Wendell Phillips predicted that the states would turn away its black voters. And he was amazed that Congress had actually allowed President Johnson to appoint the five militar
y commanders in the first place. That’s like putting a “lunatic” in charge of a “lunatic asylum,” Phillips joked without mirth. Further, the act did not mandate the disbanding of the state governments; it did not address the matter of land redistribution or programs for black education. But to most Republicans, particularly moderates, the Reconstruction Act had been a workable compromise cobbled together in the last days of the Thirty-Ninth Congress to reorganize the South without stepping on too many toes. To these Republicans, the Reconstruction Act was a giant leap forward in improving the condition of black and white loyalists in the South by endowing them with real political power.

  White Southerners and Democrats perceived the Reconstruction Act quite differently. To them, it created martial law in the South: unheard of. “We are still warred upon with a ruthlessness and fierceness which filled us at once with amazement and despair,” Judge Absalom Chappell complained to the head of the Democratic National Committee. And when the bill had first landed on Johnson’s desk, Democratic leader Francis Blair, Sr., warned the President that the “furious dogs” and “Revolutionists” of Congress had passed it in order to intimidate him, since the threat of impeachment was hanging over his head. But Johnson was already fuming. The “military despotism” bill, as he called it, “gives universal suffrage to the ignorant blacks, thus overriding the provision that each state shall determine who shall be entitled to its suffrage.” The military commanders were to wield arbitrary power over a “beaten, helpless, well nigh hopeless country,” he continued. And even more categorical when talking in private to his secretary, he said he’d rather “sever my right arm from my body” than sign the Military Reconstruction Act.