Not Douglass nor Langston nor Purvis would become Johnson’s pawn.
And Grant? His supporters swiftly came to the general’s defense with the excuse Grant had given his wife: he’d taken the position to prevent Johnson from mischief. “What mischief has he prevented?” Wendell Phillips wanted to know. “Texas is in anarchy, Tennessee full of assassins, Kentucky becomes once more the dark and bloody ground.” Besides, why did Grant always need so much defending, rationalizing, and justifying? Why did his motives and actions always require explanation? “Butler does not need any explanation. Nobody explains Sumner,” Phillips shouted. “I should like to see a man undertake to explain Stevens.”
Irate and determined, Phillips was again traveling cross-country to depict Congress as spineless, Grant as weak, Johnson as dangerous. And he wasn’t the only one speaking out. The sporadically radical Horace Greeley was declaring that “all that is fishy and mercenary in the Republican ranks combines with everything copperhead to escort Grant as the man destined to curb and restore conservatives to power.” The admirers of Chief Justice Salmon Chase were likewise energized, raising money in the South while spreading rumors that Grant was a drunken philanderer. And Ben Butler presumably put detectives on Grant to find out if the stories about his boozing sprees were true.
Still, Grant’s popularity soared. His name was on the lips of The New York Herald, at one extreme, and the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, longtime abolitionist, at the other. “Grant is true,” Whittier swore. Buoyed by tides of money from New York merchants and a political machine already taking shape, with men like Elihu Washburne at the helm, Grant clubs were springing up nationwide. With the general leaning in their direction, moderates were hoping to quash Thaddeus Stevens and his radical dreams about universal suffrage, land redistribution, and the disenfranchising of former Confederates.
And by selectively communicating in his tight-lipped way, Grant was blocking the President. During cabinet meetings, he affirmed his devotion to the law, which was to say to Congress, and when Gideon Welles nastily asked if Grant didn’t consider the Reconstruction Acts “palpably unconstitutional,” Grant quietly replied with a piercing question of his own: who “is to decide whether the law is unconstitutional?” Annoyed, Interior Secretary Browning decided that this arrogant general was delivering “crude opinions upon all subjects, and especially upon legal questions.”
Accusing Grant of being “tampered with, and I believe seduced by the Radical conspirators,” Welles advised Johnson to make Grant state what he would do if the President were impeached. What if Congress ordered Johnson to leave his office? What if Congress arrested the President? Would Grant and the military defend him? Would Grant obey the orders of the President? Welles’ paranoia was real, palpable, contagious. As was Johnson’s.
With an air of harried intensity, Johnson walked over to the War Department in the brick building on Seventeenth Street to confront Grant. Grant evidently indicated that he would obey the President, and also indicated, or so Johnson understood him to say, that he’d give the secretaryship back to Johnson should the Senate try to reinstate Stanton.
The irascible General William Tecumseh Sherman, who famously declared that “war is hell”—and just as famously loathed politicians—after the war advocated a generous peace that appeared to restore the South to its former status, just without slavery.
Just to make sure, Johnson summoned General William Tecumseh Sherman to Washington to sound him out. Johnson considered Sherman an ally, particularly because Thomas Ewing, Sherman’s father-in-law, was an unofficial adviser to the President. Sympathetic to Johnson to an extent—and still miffed at Stanton for having publicly denounced his peace agreement at the end of the war—Sherman promised to do what he could. His opinion of Washington had not changed, though. Understanding politics and political power as well as the next person, Sherman knew his hotheaded self well enough to stay away from them. “If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years,” he’d again declared, “I would say the penitentiary, thank you.”
Johnson peppered Sherman with questions: What would happen if Congress proceeded with impeachment? Would General Grant obey the President, or would he take his marching orders from the Radical mob in Congress? Though at one time considered unruly, if not mad, General Sherman was calm, conciliatory, and clear. Congress would not impeach the President; Grant would act to prevent any and all violence; Grant would obey the orders of the President. As for himself, Sherman would not take any position that superseded Grant’s authority and particularly not the secretary of war’s job.
But Sherman could not soothe Republicans, especially once Johnson had removed Sheridan and Sickles. The editor-in-chief of the Boston Daily Advertiser wondered if the President were cracked—or pickled. “I am afraid his doings will make us all favor impeachment,” he grumbled. Was it true that the President planned to arrest members of Congress and spark another civil war? “People say that Johnson’s more intimate pals talk as if he contemplated a coup d’état—a purging of Congress after the manner of Cromwell,” the diarist George Templeton Strong reported. Everyone was jittery. “It is not impossible that he [Johnson] is preparing to resist the impeachment with force,” Carl Schurz speculated. Rumors shot through the nation. An armed insurrection was near at hand, spearheaded by the President or by Congress, depending on whom you asked.
Sherman too had heard the rumors, though he was more dismissive. “There have been so many idle threats that both parties are scared,” he conceded. “The President would be wrong to attempt violence against Congress or Congress against the President.”
Yet with Stanton suspended and Sheridan and Sickles removed from their districts, the House Judiciary Committee, which had continued to listen to impeachment testimony, decided to vote yet again on the question when Congress returned in the fall. To everyone’s surprise, one of its members, New York Representative John C. Churchill, a judge from upstate, changed his vote, declaring that Johnson was obstructing the laws of Congress rather than executing them. It was immediately alleged that Churchill had been bribed, although nothing was proved. On November 24, 1867, in a 5 to 4 vote, the committee recommended the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.
Next stop, then, the Judiciary Committee recommendation would go to the full House.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The President’s Message
“Ours is a funny Government in some respects,” Mark Twain noted with demonstrable distaste. Twain was not just referring to racial prejudice, congressional dithering, or the President’s precipitous and autocratic actions. He was pointing to another significant force behind all political jockeying: money. For it was Twain who would coin the phrase “the Gilded Age,” and though it came to denote the theft and greed associated with Grant’s administration, government scams and frauds had been longstanding.
With the end of the Civil War, the line separating the federal government and the unbridled business community had grown progressively blurrier. There were taxes being pocketed and government railroad subsidies grabbed and big business demanding public assistance. Swindling government agents and traders in the West were bilking Native Americans. And the spoils system had spawned a great deal of graft—to the victor, or bosses in power, went the booty. A host of racketeering syndicates, or so-called “rings,” had sprouted up: “Indian Rings, Patent Rings, Stationery Rings and Railroad Rings,” journalist John Russell Young drily noted.
Then there was the currency. During the war, the government had issued paper money, or “greenbacks”—legal tender printed with tough-to-counterfeit green ink—to pay for the war, stimulate the economy, and maintain confidence in the Union. This paper currency was not backed by gold or silver, so after the war, many wanted greenbacks taken out of circulation. Yet those favoring a return to hard currency, or specie, cut across overlapping political lines: Radical Republ
icans on issues of civil rights were often in favor of hard imperishable money over greenbacks. Radical Republican Charles Sumner was a hard-money man who wanted the gold standard restored, as did such moderate Republicans as James Garfield, John Sherman, Lyman Trumbull, and William Pitt Fessenden. So too did rich Democrats. But Radical Republicans like Benjamin Wade were dead set against hard money, as were Radicals Ben Butler and Thaddeus Stevens, who favored greenbacks despite the risk of inflation, arguing that paper money benefitted farmers and workers for whom flat wages had caused particular suffering or who had borrowed heavily. Thaddeus Stevens said he had to fight with Republicans of his own party who wanted a tight economic policy, which was Johnson’s.
And there was the huge war debt, approximately $2.3 billion just before Appomattox. For not only had the federal government printed money during the war, it had borrowed, and now many of the war bonds were coming due. How were the lenders to be paid? In greenbacks or gold? “Public credit should be ‘like Caesar’s wife: above suspicion,’ ” said Republican Senator Henry W. Corbett of Oregon. Hadn’t people purchased those bonds with the assumption they’d be repaid in coin? Then again, who exactly were these bondholders? Were they the patriotic members of the general public, mechanics and farmers, clerks and shopkeepers, or were they an aristocracy of speculators? Hadn’t many of them purchased bonds with greenbacks, which made repayment in specie a windfall for them?
If the war against slavery had united Republicans who otherwise differed, especially on fiscal matters, those differences threatened to splinter the same party or cost them votes in the coming fall 1867 elections. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch’s monetary policy—slowly taking greenbacks out of circulation—had damaged the Republican party, especially in the West. “The Secretary’s ‘contraction’ system, at the time when the industrial interests of the country are not able to bear the increased pressure it entails, is regarded with high disfavor by all engaged in commerce and manufactures,” Mark Twain flatly observed.
Democrats faced their own schisms. Breaking ranks with the hard-money kingpins of the Northeast, many Democrats wanted the national debt paid in greenbacks. Most vocal among them was George Hunt Pendleton, the former Virginia gentleman who’d run for Vice President on George McClellan’s 1864 ticket. Though Pendleton had once denounced paper money as inflationary, he declared that treasury bonds should be redeemed in greenbacks so that Yankee bondholders and banks would no longer be paid interest in specie. Arguing for greenbacks and swearing that his plan was financially stable, Pendleton said he wasn’t suggesting that an infinite supply of greenbacks be circulated, just enough to pay off the national debt. That is, if the $338 million dollar principle of the so-called 5–20 bonds—U.S. Treasury bonds that would mature in twenty years but could be redeemed in five—were paid in greenbacks, not specie, then the Treasury would save $18 million in gold.
Of course there were problems with “Pendleton’s Ohio Idea,” and they were partly concealed in a fog of numbers and a bunch of unanswered questions about taxes, customs revenue, wages, and inflation. And several prominent rich Democrats, including Montgomery Blair and Samuel Barlow, distanced themselves from Pendleton. Manton Marble considered the Pendleton idea not just inflationary but morally dubious. “Greenbacks are a debt,” he complained; “nothing is paid by mere promises to pay.”
Whatever their internal rifts, in the fall of 1867 Democrats had concocted a winning brew, compounded of anger over Republican monetary policy—and racial prejudice. Republicans in Congress recognized the brew’s potency, and soon after the House reconvened in the fall, it forbade Treasury Secretary McCulloch from taking more greenbacks out of circulation. Four states—Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Kansas—had voted Democratic in the fall elections, and governorships in three states—Connecticut, California, and Pennsylvania—went to Democrats. Although Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, was narrowly elected governor in Ohio, the state decisively rejected black suffrage, as did Minnesota and Kansas. “A great many of our party here are mean enough to want it in the south & not in the North,” admitted a Westerner. “We went in on principle,” Senator Benjamin Wade said, “and got whipped.” Thaddeus Stevens unhappily predicted that “the Republicans once beaten into a minority by the force of negro prejudice will never again obtain the majority, & the nation will become despotism.”
“The negro question has shown them the hand writing on the wall,” Thomas Ewing cheerfully informed the President, and conservatives crowed that “any party with an abolition head and a nigger tail will soon find itself with nothing left but the head and the tail.” Yet regardless of the Democratic victories, Johnson knew that he couldn’t safely rely on Democrats any more than on Republicans. “Andrew Johnson is certainly the best-hated man this side of the Atlantic,” George Templeton Strong remarked.
Grant supporters, however, were highly pleased with the results of the state elections. Voters were evidently drifting away from Radical Republicans, and Grant could thus step into the breach and save Republicans from their more fanatical selves. As Thomas Ewing observed with pleasure, “no extreme Radical will be Johnson’s successor.” Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who wanted to be President, could be written off as an extremist, and the Ohio legislature, now controlled by Democrats, would not return Benjamin Wade to the Senate. So from the office of The New York Times, Henry Raymond excitedly counseled the general just to keep his mouth shut: “Say nothing, write nothing & do nothing which shall enable any faction of any party to claim you.”
Ditto impeachment: say nothing and by all means do nothing. “Johnson is as useful to us as the devil is to orthodox theology,” Horace Greeley noted. “We can’t afford to get rid of him till we have elected our President.” Most Republicans didn’t want to make a martyr out of him, especially since Democrats might urge him to counterattack, which would result in a risky confrontation between the executive and the legislature. Besides, Johnson had only about fifteen months left in office, not a very long political life. There was no need to impeach him—unless of course the man grew reckless, as Charles Eliot Norton sneered, given “a man of his temper.”
As for letting Johnson remain in office until the next election and hoping he wouldn’t do anything calamitous, Wendell Phillips was scornful: “With a cabinet composed of his own adherents, all enemies to the nation and its loyal inhabitants; with a treasury full of money, and a large ‘secret service fund’ at his disposal; with military officers in command at the South sympathizing with his views; a general of the army so hedged round with military etiquette, and timid in mental force, as to refuse to assume the responsibility of enacting what may ultimately be the last resort—revolution; with a large Southern population seething with rebellion, hordes of secret societies there, only waiting for the signal to spring to arms—what can’t the President do in all this time?”
House Republican John Bingham didn’t listen to Wendell Phillips. He and his colleague Elihu Washburne both wanted General Grant elected President, impeachment off the table, the party united, and Radical Republicans run out of town. They assumed that if the House passed articles of impeachment, Grant would be lost, for they believed that the impeachers wanted to put the radical Senator Benjamin Wade in the White House, and they weren’t entirely wrong.
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“I BELIEVE THE Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it),” Mark Twain tartly observed. Washington was a den of criminality and caprice, especially in the hallowed halls of Congress, where preening members read newspapers at their desks or dashed off letters and hemmed and hawed over their allegiances. “As politics go, so goes the weather,” Twain continued. “Today it is a Democrat, tomorrow a Radical, the next day neither one thing nor the other….Some people like Washington weather. I don’t. Some people admire mixed weather. I prefer to take mine ‘straight.’ ”
Born Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain had been a riverboat pilot, speculator, reporter, lecturer, and humorist before briefly landing in Washington, where he wrote about political duplicity for several newspapers, saying, “I believe the Prince of Darkness could start a branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it).”
Mark Twain had arrived in Washington, acerbic pen in hand, in November of 1867 as the Washington correspondent for several newspapers, including the New-York Tribune and The Herald. He wasn’t particularly known as a political correspondent but rather as a lecturer and comic author who tickled audiences with a hilarious tale about a frog or stories about his travels in the Sandwich Islands and the Holy Land. “Back from the Holy Land, and he looks it,” Nevada Senator William Stewart remembered the youngish man (Twain was thirty-two) with the thicket of auburn hair whom he had met in a mining camp. Twain had showed up on his doorstep wearing a rumpled suit. “I thought he had been hanged or elected to Congress,” Stewart said.
Briefly employed part-time as Senator Stewart’s clerk, Twain was as keen a political commentator as Washington had. And since he already distrusted cant, pretense, and candy-box mawkishness—as well as racial violence—he didn’t much like the place. When a black man bumped into a white man in the street, “the negro apologized,” Twain reported, “but the white man would not be appeased, and grew abusive, and finally stabbed the negro in the heart.” Fecklessness in the Capitol also repelled him. In Congress he sat through several sessions and jotted down notes about empty-headed whipper-snappers and which of the representatives was ugliest—the tubular Ben Butler, whose head looked like a blister.
The Impeachers Page 24