That same Monday night, while heading to a reception at the White House, Grant and his wife were about to climb into their waiting carriage when a messenger delivered news of Stanton’s reinstatement. Grant silently read the note, boarded the carriage, and rode on to the reception. Later he confessed that he’d been uncomfortable when the President, affably greeting him, warmly clasped his hand. Evidently Johnson hadn’t yet heard about the Senate’s vote on Stanton, and Grant didn’t mention it.
Early the next morning, Tuesday, Grant walked over to the War Department, bolted one of the doors of his office on the inside, locked another on the outside, and handed the keys over to the adjutant, General Edward Townsend, to give to Stanton. “I am to be found over at my office at army headquarters,” Grant explained. “I was served with a copy of the Senate resolution last evening.” He dispatched an official memorandum to the President informing him that he’d vacated the office.
Grant hadn’t resigned as interim war secretary before the Senate vote so that Johnson could choose someone else. Instead, he had handed the keys of the kingdom to Stanton, who wasted no time picking up those keys. Johnson was livid. “This was not the first time Grant had deceived him,” the President’s secretary confided to his diary. Grant had to realize Johnson would be furious.
Stanton was cheerful. Asthmatic and stressed but buoyed up by the Senate, he told well-wishers that he’d come back to protect those without protection. Convinced that his presence in the War Department helped prevent Johnson from aiding former Confederates, he certainly wasn’t going to resign, and there had been no reason to assume he would. Moderates and Radicals both congratulated him on the vindication: Lyman Trumbull, Thad Stevens, Shelby Cullom, James Wilson, Ignatius Donnelly, Henry Dawes, Robert Schenck, and Horace Maynard. They told him not to resign. “Don’t give up the Ship! Keep on, and 500,000 Blues will sustain you,” wrote General W. G. Mark.
“Johnson is now a full-blown rebel,” Senator Charles Sumner said, “except that he does not risk his neck by overt acts.”
By now, though, Stanton had grown leery of Grant, for he’d learned that Grant and Sherman would have thrown him over for Jacob Cox. That’s why, it was said, he had hurried back to his office with what seemed to Grant like undue haste. Grant thought Stanton should have taken at least two days before returning to the War Department. By not waiting, he had compromised Grant, making it seem as though the two of them had been in cahoots. Johnson had already heard rumors to that effect.
Everyone was guarded, jumpy, looking over his shoulder, making accusations. It was, all knew, an explosive situation, one that could permanently cost Stanton his job, Grant the presidency, Johnson his head. At the White House, the President angrily demanded that Grant attend the scheduled weekly cabinet meeting, and when Grant appeared, Johnson could barely control himself. “Why did you give up the keys to Mr. Stanton and leave the Department?” the President badgered the general. “That, you know, was not our understanding.” Grant said that he had not fully examined the Tenure of Office Act when he first accepted the interim post. And he insisted that he had never promised to tell the President if he decided to resign. Johnson disagreed. Hadn’t Grant said that he’d continue the discussion on Monday?
Grant presumably conceded, adding that he’d been busy with General Sherman and other matters. Other matters? A feeble excuse.
Interior Secretary Browning reminded Grant that he’d said he would stay until the courts ruled on the Tenure of Office Act. Gideon Welles, who recounted the conversation in his diary, said that Grant then skulked out of the meeting, shamefaced and miserable. Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch thought Grant had been hitting the bottle. If he had, Grant retained enough composure to refuse being called “Mr. Secretary.”
Sherman and Grant met with the President yet again on Wednesday, January 15, the day after the cabinet meeting. In more control of the situation, Johnson greeted the two generals pleasantly. Grant was clutching a copy of the National Intelligencer, the administration newspaper, which had essentially called him a liar, claiming that he hadn’t kept his Monday appointment with the President because he’d been secretly cooking up a plan with Edwin Stanton. Grant indignantly insisted he had not colluded with Stanton. Johnson coolly said he hadn’t read the article.
Sherman listened in silence. Johnson and Grant seemed eventually to accept each other’s explanations of what had transpired at their last meeting, but without any real rapprochement in the works, Sherman threw up his hands. “I have done my best to cut the Gordian Knot, but have failed & shall do no more,” he said. “The whole matter is resolved into a war between parties, and neither care or seem to care for the service or the Country.” Yet three days later, on January 18, the President again summoned General Sherman to the White House. “I thought by his disregarding my advice on Sunday, he had a plan of action of his own,” Sherman complained, “but from his conversation of today, I find he has none but wants me to do it for him.”
Sherman did not want to be involved. “I’m afraid that acting as go-between for three persons,” he told Grant, “I may share the usual fate of meddlers, at last, and get kicks from all.”
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FOR THE REST of January, a transfixed country read Grant’s and Johnson’s two very different accounts of their discussion about Stanton’s job. The two most prominent men in the country, each politically motivated, were publicly quarreling over issues that could change the course of the entire nation. Newspapers printed gossip about Grant’s drinking and Johnson’s hurling a chair. Overall, though, it seemed the President had been injudicious. Why hadn’t he taken Sherman’s advice and nominated Jacob Cox, who would have been accepted by the Senate? And he had proposed nominating Sherman as war secretary even though Sherman had no use for politics or Washington.
But Sherman did sympathize to an extent with the President. “I feel for Mr. Johnson,” Sherman told his wife, “but must say for his experience he has made some fatal mistakes. He should have taken care to have in his interest at least the half of one branch of Congress.” For Johnson was not a man of even modest ability, “or a good administrator,” Sherman added. “He deals in generalities but when he comes to apply principles to fact, he is lost.”
As for Grant, Sherman also noted that he was more “uneasy than usual, at the criticism on his [Grant’s] mode of getting out of the War Dept.” To exonerate himself and make his position clear, Grant addressed Johnson in a publicly circulated letter, insisting that he hadn’t promised to call on the President on Monday, January 12, or at any definite time, and that he assumed the President knew that. Johnson replied, also in public. If Grant had not wanted to be party to the controversy with the President, never mind Congress or Stanton, he was to return the office to him before the Senate acted so that the President could designate his successor. But Grant had vacated the office without giving Johnson notice of his intention.
Neither man budged. Both were obstinate, both careful, and both of them wanted to control the public’s perception. Johnson asked cabinet members to confirm his version of events, and as usual, they did, except for William Seward, who acknowledged that Grant’s saying he’d give the President advance notice of his intentions had been “indirect and circumstantial, though I did not understand it to be an evasive one.”
Secretary of State Seward was himself a canny man, secretive, intelligent, and adept at playing both ends. But he genuinely liked Andrew Johnson and told his friend the actress Charlotte Cushman that Johnson was “a true firm honest affectionate man—perhaps the truest man he has almost ever known.” Plus, and this was no small consideration, Johnson continued to allow the expansionist secretary of state free rein in foreign affairs. The French had left Mexico, as promised, which was a Seward victory, and more recently, Seward had been negotiating the purchase of Alaska and trying to buy the Danish West Indies, British Columbia, or, according to one h
ostile newspaper, “the whole hemisphere from the glaciers of Greenland to the volcanoes of Tierra del Fuego.”
But Seward was Stanton’s friend too. Together, they had served Lincoln, and together they had waged war. Yet it seemed to many that after Lincoln’s assassination and the attempt on his own life, Seward was no longer the staunch anti-slavery fighter who’d coined such prophetic phrases as “the irreconcilable conflict.” Or as Wendell Phillips would remark, “Seward lost his brains.” But Seward hadn’t really changed. The heart of a conservative had always beat underneath his smooth exterior. And if Seward disagreed with Stanton about Johnson’s Reconstruction policy, he was not eager to undermine the President.
Seward had advised Johnson to leave Stanton alone—to leave him in the War Department. When Johnson didn’t heed his advice and suspended Stanton, Seward offered the President his resignation as secretary of state, which Johnson refused, as Seward knew he would.
Resignation was an empty gesture designed for public approval. Seward didn’t want to resign, and he was sure Johnson wanted him close by. And Seward too had an eye on the upcoming presidential election; there was nothing for him outside of Washington. His wife had died, and so had his daughter. “A man is of no count here who does not represent a power behind him,” Seward told John Bigelow. He had to bolster his position but not alienate Grant, who was edging closer and closer to the nomination; Seward knew he’d fare better with a Grant administration than with the radical Benjamin Wade in the White House.
With Johnson and Grant engaged in a public spat, some Republicans previously skeptical about Grant’s loyalty to the party rushed to his side. Radical Republicans kept their distance. Horace Greeley, that seasonal Radical, distrusted Grant; Ben Butler was downright hostile; Chief Justice Salmon Chase wanted the White House for himself. And Democrats thought Grant nothing more than the puppet of Edwin Stanton, “who has corrupted the mind of Grant,” said Frank Blair, Jr., “and whispered to him the project of absolute and permanent power.” Conservative Senator James Doolittle, friendly with the Democrats, reminded the New York World’s Manton Marble that the cigar-chewing Grant had come out against black suffrage in 1865—and again the next year—because it would spark a war between the races. Now look at him: he was “in favor of negro supremacy.”
Marble hesitated, reminding Doolittle that General Grant could be the candidate of either party—Republican or Democrat, no one was yet sure—and “then we shall know what his opinions on the most momentous issues of our time, have then come to be, before nominating or voting.” Marble didn’t have to wait very long. Johnson ordered General Grant not to recognize Stanton’s authority as war secretary and forbade Grant from following any orders to the army that Stanton might issue. The formerly imperturbable Grant refused.
The news was stunning. The President of the United States had not only impugned the character of the country’s biggest war hero but was asking him to break the law: to disobey the Tenure of Office Act, which protected Stanton’s position as war secretary. The Senate had not approved Stanton’s suspension, as the act had stipulated it should, and Stanton had stayed put.
With icy condescension, Grant formally addressed the President on February 3, again in a public way. “Where my honor as a soldier and integrity as a man have been so violently assailed, pardon me for saying that I can but regard this whole matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to involve me in the resistance of law, for which you hesitated to assume the responsibility in orders, and thus to destroy my character before the country,” Grant wrote. “I am in a measure confirmed in this conclusion, by your recent orders directing me to disobey orders from the secretary of war—my superior and your subordinate—without having countermanded his authority to issue the orders I am to disobey.”
Newspaper editors gleefully covered the dramatic and in many ways extraordinary dispute. “In a question of veracity between a soldier whose honor is as untarnished as the sun, and a President who has betrayed every friend, and broken every promise,” Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune exulted, “the country will not hesitate.” Johnson’s cabinet predictably rallied round the President: Attorney General Henry Stanbery was appalled at the tone of Grant’s most recent letter, Browning dismissed it as “disreputable,” and the irrepressible Welles declared that Grant “has great ambition, and is a most remorseless man.”
Attributed to Thomas Nast, the cartoon depicts Andrew Johnson removing a book too large for him to handle; it’s the “Constitution of U.S.,” which then knocks him over, crushing him.
Congress was a different story. Walt Whitman told his mother that the Republicans “seem thoroughly waked up & full of fight.” “Congress is on its mettle,” Mark Twain reported, “—Stanton, the President, Treasury frauds, reconstruction….Even Wendell Phillips ought to be satisfied now.”
The public quarrel breathed momentary life into a moribund impeachment attempt, or at least into Thaddeus Stevens who, clearly unwell, had to support himself by holding on to the table when he stood. His voice fairly strong, he asked the Committee on Reconstruction—he was its chair—to take control of impeachment proceedings by opening its own investigation. Johnson’s recommendation to Grant that he disobey the Tenure of Office law constituted a conspiracy to obstruct justice, Stevens insisted. And Johnson had actually instructed Grant to disregard Secretary Stanton’s orders.
After a long session, Stevens’ resolution went to a subcommittee, but it never moved out of the committee to the larger House. Doing what he could—which wasn’t much—he demanded that the yeas and nays be recorded for the nation. Only he, George Boutwell, and John Franklin Farnsworth of Illinois voted in the affirmative on impeachment. The other six men on the subcommittee voted against.
“Died: In this city, Feb. 13, at his lodgings in the chamber of the House Reconstruction Committee, our beloved brother, IMPEACHMENT,” Mark Twain composed the obituary. “The malady of the deceased was general debility.” But Twain congratulated Thaddeus Stevens. “Hon. Thad. Stevens, the bravest old ironclad in the Capitol, fought hard for impeachment, even when he saw that it could not succeed.” And to its face, the old ironclad had called Congress a pack of damned cowards—“the finest word,” Twain said, “that any congressional topic has produced this session.”
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CONVINCED THAT GRANT and his friends had blocked the impeachment movement, Thaddeus Stevens chatted with a group of reporters who, after the recent vote, had rushed to his modest redbrick house on South B Street near Capitol Hill. Stevens told them the quarrel between Johnson and Grant didn’t matter, and he didn’t care if Johnson and Grant settled it with fists in his backyard—even though, he chuckled, he wouldn’t want his backyard dirtied by the likes of them. More seriously, he exclaimed, “What the devil do I care about the question of veracity as they call it, between Johnson and Grant? That’s nothing to do with the law. Both of them may call each other liars if they want to, perhaps they both do lie a little, or let us say, equivocate, though the President certainly has the weight of evidence on his side. But Johnson being right or Grant being wrong, it makes no difference.” To Stevens, the issue was the law.
Impeachment was about respect for and obedience to the law.
“The Senate had confirmed the Tenure of Office law. What right had a President to deny, defy, or seek to disobey that law?” Stevens demanded. “If this direct attempt of the President to violate a law made by the Congress of the United States doesn’t render him liable to be impeached, what does?”
Yet Stevens said he would drop impeachment: “There is no sense making ourselves ridiculous before the country.”
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A SWAGGERING ANDREW Johnson granted an interview to the twenty-six-year-old conservative journalist Joseph B. McCullagh, known familiarly as Mack, the Associated Press reporter for The Cincinnati Commercial. The men talke
d for over an hour, with Johnson wondering aloud if he didn’t have a right to dispute congressional legislation. After all, he wasn’t supposed to follow Congress blindly, was he, and how else could he test a law? He was floating what would become a major part of his story: that he’d wanted Grant to sit tight in the war secretary’s chair until the Supreme Court decided on the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act. He could easily imagine the Supreme Court striking down the Reconstruction Acts.
Not only had the Court’s Milligan decision about keeping civil courts open dealt a blow to Radical Republicans, but, more recently, William H. McCardle, the editor of the Vicksburg Daily Times, was challenging them. A former soldier in the Confederate army, McCardle had been arrested by General Ord of the Fourth Military District (Mississippi, Arkansas) for a set of blistering editorials that undermined military commanders and implicitly incited ex-rebels to violence. McCardle wanted to bring his case before a civil, not a military, tribunal to protect himself from Ord. And since under the Judiciary Act amended in early 1867 and known as the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, federal courts had the power to issue writs of habeas corpus “in all cases where any person may be restrained of his or her liberty in violation of the Constitution,” McCardle could go to a federal judge to bring his case before the Supreme Court, which he did. Interestingly, his attorney was Jeremiah Black, who likely helped write the President’s recent and belligerent message to Congress.
Since five of the Supreme Court judges were said to consider the Reconstruction Acts unconstitutional, the McCardle case, as argued by Black, would test them—and they would likely be tossed out by the conservative-leaning court. Or so Black and Johnson hoped. Black was arguing that the exercise of military law, in the form of military courts, was unconstitutional because civil courts were open. “If McCardle gains his case,” Mark Twain nervously predicted, “negro suffrage and the Reconstruction Acts will be dissipated into thin air for the present.”
The Impeachers Page 26