The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  On December 3, Twain, in Congress again, watched as the President’s secretary carried a bulky parcel into the Senate chamber and handed it to the clerk. The clerk extracted a small pamphlet from it and announced that the President’s annual “Message” had arrived. The journalist John Forney, as secretary of the Senate, read the document aloud. The senators, each of whom had a copy, followed along in more or less dignified silence until Forney finished. Then there was pandemonium.

  A masterpiece of vitriol and venom, the President’s message was the handiwork of Jeremiah Black, the superb constitutional lawyer who’d recently argued in the celebrated Milligan case that civil courts, not military tribunals, should hear civil complaints. Black, who’d once called abolition a “devil’s dance,” was reputed to be sour, sardonic, mean-spirited, and pitiless. Even those who admired him said he never forgot an injury. Johnson often consulted with Black on domestic affairs, and Black darted in and out of the White House so often that he set the jealous Gideon Welles again to complaining.

  Doubtless inspired by the routing of Radical Republicans in the recent elections, Johnson delivered a defiant, polarizing, blinkered document that conservatives like Thomas Ewing hailed as magnificent. For in it he again asserted that the states formerly in rebellion were part of the Union, that they had never in fact left it, and that the late war had been fought only to preserve the Constitution. What’s more, without the Southern states, Johnson exclaimed, the Union did not exist.

  Nothing new there. But Johnson also played with the word “slavery,” using it not to refer to the formerly enslaved black population but to white state governments that Congress presumed to hold in thrall, state governments, as Johnson prophesized, that would be subjected to a “negro domination” far worse than the “military despotism under which they are now suffering.” Johnson declared that the recent Reconstruction Acts of Congress needed to be repealed, for they unconstitutionally sanctioned the vengeance being wreaked upon all (white) classes, sects, parties, and communities. And although the Reconstruction Acts were only provisional measures, Johnson continued, they effectively “enslaved” the states.

  Think of the implications of those acts, Johnson added: black people permitted to “rule the white race, make and administer State laws, elect Presidents and members of Congress, and shape to a greater or lesser extent the future destiny of the whole country. Would such a trust and power be safe in such hands?” Andrew Johnson answered his own question. “Negros have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people,” he announced. If left “to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.” He begged Congress to stop, stop, stop the (radical) attempt to “Africanize the half of our country.”

  It was an astounding broadside. “There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency,” W.E.B. DuBois later remarked with pith, “and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”

  Then, remarkably, Johnson said he had decided against using the armed forces to resist Congress, for he didn’t want to trigger another civil war. That the use of force would be illegal or insurrectionary was not his point, or his concern. Rather, his bellicose conviction was that if he did decide to resist Congress, he would be acting as he’d always acted, merely to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution was, once again, the curtain behind which Johnson hid, not very successfully, his prejudice, his arrogance, and his authoritarianism.

  “The President’s Message is making a howl among the Republicans,” Twain reported. Moorfield Storey, Sumner’s young secretary, was horrified by the President’s message. “Incendiary in its suggestions, illogical in argument, low and narrow in its tone, it completely shows to my mind the unfitness of the signer, for I will not call him author,” Storey said, calling the whole document an “abominable appeal to prejudice.”

  “If anything could warrant impeachment,” Storey burst out, “it seems as if that document might.” He wasn’t the only person stupefied by the President’s insolence and bigotry. “One thing is very sure: the message has weakened the President,” Mark Twain noted. “Impeachment was dead, day before yesterday. It would rise up and make a strong fight to-day if it were pushed with energy and tact. But it won’t be done.”

  To Twain, as to others, it wouldn’t be done because Congress was a bunch of moral jellyfish.

  * * *

  —

  AN EXCEPTION WAS Massachusetts Representative George Boutwell. For two days after the President had delivered his spiteful message, Boutwell defended the Judiciary Committee’s new resolution in favor of Johnson’s impeachment. The House of Representatives was crammed with eager onlookers instructed not to applaud or cheer. But if the people in the galleries were riveted on the proceedings, about two-thirds of the representatives weren’t paying attention. They wanted to ignore what they knew was coming.

  George Boutwell stood, his hands trembling but his argument steady. By the term “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitution did not only mean an actual violation of federal law. Rather, a civil officer, even a President, might be removed from office if, for example, he violated a civil law in one state that was not applicable in another. “Practically it would be found impossible to anticipate by specific legislation all cases of misconduct which will occur in the career of criminal men,” Boutwell argued. Since that would be unreasonable, the Founders used the term “high crimes and misdemeanors” precisely and in accordance with the rule of reason, which lay at the foundation of English common law.

  Boutwell then cited such opinions as those offered by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, no. 65, where Hamilton said that impeachment should result from the misconduct of public men or abuse of the public trust. That is, impeachment did not depend solely on an indictable offense per se. “At the present moment,” Boutwell explained, “we have no law which declares that it shall be a high crime or misdemeanor for the President to decline to recognize the Congress of the United States, and yet should he deny its lawful and constitutional existence and authority, and thus virtually dissolve the Government, would the House and Senate be impotent and unable to proceed by process of impeachment to secure his removal from office?”

  It was a good question.

  Should Johnson remain in office, the consequences would be disastrous, Boutwell went on. Johnson commanded the army and the navy. Deploying them, he could prevent black men from voting. And why assume he would do otherwise? A man of courage and tenacity in pursuit of a bad cause, Andrew Johnson had single-handedly restored the rebellious states to the Union, had appointed Southern governors, disbursed funds to them, suspended the loyalty oath, and had effectively returned ex-Confederates to offices, all in defiance of Congress. He had vetoed all Reconstruction Acts, campaigned against the Fourteenth Amendment, restored land to planters and confiscated railways to rebel owners. He had declared that black men in the South had no right to vote whatsoever. In other words, Andrew Johnson had usurped the function and the will of Congress. “If you are satisfied these tributary offenses were committed as the means of enabling him to accomplish this great crime,” Boutwell asked, “will you hesitate to try and convict him upon those charges of which he is manifestly guilty?”

  There was nothing inflammatory about Boutwell’s speech, nothing incendiary about his manner. If impeachment was voted down, Boutwell said, he would abide by that decision. But he implored the members of the House to follow their consciences, as he was doing, and thus to impeach President Andrew Johnson.

  The chair of the Judiciary Committee was Iowa Representative James F. Wilson. Not yet forty years old, this boyish man who’d started life as an apprentice to a harness-maker wore a scraggly goatee that seemed to magnify his pudgy face. He’d been considered more or less Radical when he’d supported the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery and later when he’d defended the enfranchising of
black men in the District of Columbia. But since Wilson had continued to vote against recommending Johnson’s impeachment, and since he’d written the committee’s minority report, it was fitting that he answer Boutwell. Wilson was concise. He refuted the legal precedents, cogent as they were, by arguing that impeachment depended on an indictable offense, not a “bundle of generalities.”

  Wilson’s legal argument carried less weight than his deft response to Boutwell’s call to conscience. The Republican House of Representatives may very well follow its Republican conscience, as Boutwell had suggested, but a House stocked with Democrats might step to a different but just as conscience-stricken drummer. Did Mr. Boutwell really intend to plant a government on the “shifting fortunes of political parties,” Wilson asked.

  Refusing to impeach Johnson did not imply that he, Wilson, endorsed the President or his policies. “I am not here to defend the President,” he declared, “for I believe him to be the worst of the Presidents.” He would not, however, impugn Andrew Johnson’s motives, which he believed patriotic.

  Yet if Johnson’s motives were patriotic but his actions wicked, shouldn’t he be held accountable for those actions? And who could really know his motives anyway? Or, even if you could, did his motives offer comfort or compensation, never mind freedom, to the people who’d been injured by those actions? But with his argument, Wilson had held out to Republicans, particularly moderates, a thin reed of good intentions, should they choose to seize it to justify their refusal to impeach. They could believe that their own motives were pure, their condemnation of Johnson undiminished. And they could collectively share the blame that Wilson said they all deserved for the terrible mistake they’d made when they nominated Andrew Johnson to be Lincoln’s running mate. That blunder was, he said, “a political crime.”

  Wilson’s strategic mea culpa achieved its intended result. Far better to fall on one’s own sword than to spear a President and, by so doing, possibly damage the presidential office. With men like the very capable Ohio Representatives John Bingham and James Garfield pulling levers behind the curtain, and James Wilson speaking in front of it, the House of Representatives voted against the impeachment resolution, 108 to 57.

  “The impeachment ‘question’ is killed,” one of Grant’s fans rejoiced. Another noted with relief, “the country is tired of Butler & the blacks.”

  * * *

  —

  VINDICATED, JOHNSON LET loose, just as Wendell Phillips had predicted. He dismissed another of the five military commanders, General John Pope, who supervised the Third Military District (Alabama, Florida, Georgia). “I fear there will be sad calamities here unless this fiendish & malignant spirit is quelled,” General Pope informed General Grant. “It is a misnomer to call this question in the South a political question—It is War pure & simple.” Pope had witnessed the rush of black voters to the polls—89,000 of them in Alabama, a larger number than white voters, and in Georgia as many as 95,000, which was almost the same turnout as white voters. But when General Pope said black men should be allowed to serve on juries, Johnson removed him from the district.

  “Shall the Union men & Freedmen, be the slaves of the old negro aristocracy or not?” General Pope wondered in despair.

  Johnson also dismissed the commander of the Fourth Military District (Arkansas and Mississippi), General Edward O.C. Ord, who, though no radical, admitted that “the black population have a gloomy prospect before them.”

  And on December 12, Johnson sent to the Senate a fairly long paper outlining why he had suspended Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. Stanton was a double-dealer. Look at his slippery handling of the Tenure of Office Act, which Stanton himself had deemed unconstitutional; the scoundrel now hid behind the very law he’d criticized and refused to resign. Or take the fact that Stanton had told the Judiciary Committee he’d never doubted the President’s authority to reorganize Southern state governments and then had reneged. And he’d withheld from the President the telegram that General Absalom Baird had sent about a possible riot in New Orleans in the summer of 1866, begging for instructions on how to handle it if there was one, so that it was Stanton who’d been responsible for that riot, not the President. Johnson did admit that he might not have helped Baird even if he had known, but he would have liked to have had the choice.

  There was absolutely no cause for regret, none at all, about the suspension of the disloyal Edwin Stanton, Johnson went on, and especially not while the administration’s true hero—the true Republican hero—was the interim war secretary, none other than General Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was already reducing government expenditure, already fattening Treasury coffers, and already saving lives and careers—principally, that is, or so it seemed to the President, the career of Andrew Johnson.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Blundering, Roaring Lear

  Andrew Johnson, acting as one of the chief architects of his own impeachment, was tangling with Ulysses S. Grant and precipitating a crisis that he didn’t know how to resolve or, more to the point, that he didn’t want to fix.

  Stony-faced, Grant avoided talking about the upcoming presidential election, even to his friend William Tecumseh Sherman, who with sensitivity had advised Grant not to tell him what he, Grant, did not yet want to reveal, especially since Sherman wouldn’t approve. Sherman, who hated politics and hated Washington, was there only to draft a report on the “Articles of War” for Congress and, as a member of the Peace Commission, to map out treaties between the white settlers homesteading along new railroad lines and the various Indian tribes affected by them. To Sherman, both parties were responsible for the resulting violence—though the Indians had the worse end of the bargain, if you could call the history of broken treaties a bargain, as he wryly remarked. Still, Sherman preferred the West to the capital.

  While Sherman was in town, the President frequently summoned him to the White House, seeking his advice, only to ignore it. This was especially true during the second week of January, 1868, when the President and the popular General Grant were at odds. The issue was Johnson’s suspension of Edwin Stanton as war secretary, a matter that the Senate Committee on Military Affairs was then discussing. When news leaked that the committee would soon vote on whether Stanton should be reinstated, Grant suddenly realized that if Stanton’s position was upheld, Grant, as interim war secretary, would find himself in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. He would have no business staying in the War Department—and could be sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000.

  So on Saturday, January 11, Grant told the President in person that if the committee voted to reinstate Stanton, then he, Grant, would have to step down. Johnson offered to pay the fine and serve the jail term, which in any case he assumed wouldn’t be imposed, but if Grant wished to resign, he should do so quickly so the President could immediately appoint someone else to the post. According to Johnson, Grant said he didn’t know what he’d do—but indicated, again according to Johnson, that if he decided to resign, he would submit his resignation before the Senate committee voted. When Grant left the Executive Mansion, Johnson expected to talk with him again Monday morning.

  Grant remembered the Saturday meeting differently. Denying that he’d promised Johnson anything, he alleged that the President knew full well that he considered the Tenure of Office Act binding unless and until the proper legal tribunal set it aside. Grant also claimed he told Johnson that if Stanton was reinstated, Grant’s duties as interim secretary of war ceased then and there. And he’d never promised to continue the conversation on Monday.

  No one really knows what happened between the two men that Saturday. And strict truth was not really the issue. The issue was the growing friction between the plainspoken General Grant—that is, when he did speak—and the prickly Andrew Johnson. The issue was the conflict between a bona fide war hero and a Republican apostate; between a popular presidential aspirant and a sitting President nursing his own
aspirations. The issue was the execution of the reconstruction laws—or their undoing.

  Anticipating trouble, Grant consulted with Sherman over the weekend. They decided Sherman should tell Johnson that if the President were to replace Stanton with a moderate Republican, Grant could step aside. No one would object to Ohio’s outgoing governor General Jacob Dolson Cox, a tolerably popular Republican opposed to universal suffrage: he was perfect for the secretary of war job. Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson, a Democrat, thought so too. So did Thomas Ewing, Sherman’s father-in-law, who also urged the President to nominate Cox. Cox would immediately be confirmed, Ewing explained. “No direct vote will be taken on Stanton. Indirectly this will sanction his removal.” Case closed.

  Johnson did not nominate Cox. He did nothing. And Monday morning, Grant didn’t go back to the Executive Mansion to meet with the President. Instead, at about eleven, Sherman went to see Johnson to lobby for Cox’s nomination, but Johnson ignored him. Sherman suspected that Johnson might have a Copperhead in mind for the post. “Well I have done my duty, and if Stanton is white-washed and thrust back in the office it is not my business,” Sherman wrote his wife. “I want to befriend Mr. Johnson, but I cannot give my consent or assistance to having in the Cabinet a man who may decide that the war was wrong or unnecessary.”

  That evening, at eight o’clock, the full Senate overruled the President’s suspension of Edwin Stanton as war secretary in a 35 to 6 vote. Stanton was to stay. Even moderates had voted to sustain him.

  Johnson was probably surprised, but the perspicacious Sherman wasn’t—Republicans had voted to save their own—but he did wonder why Stanton would wish to return to a position where he wasn’t wanted, at least not by the President. “But he & the President both are strong stubborn willful men that would embroil the world rather than yield their point,” Sherman decided. He was right—Stanton and Johnson were stubborn. And so was Grant.