But the Supreme Court postponed the McCardle case, and in a hasty, if not altogether slick parliamentary maneuver, Congress retroactively denied the Supreme Court jurisdiction over the case by repealing the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867 under which McCardle had made his appeal. The reconstruction laws were not tested, not yet. Still, it is not at all certain that when Andrew Johnson suspended Stanton he was really thinking about the Supreme Court. That seemed to come later, when Johnson needed to defend his action—a defense probably concocted by Jeremiah Black.
For the moment, though, Johnson was cocky: as for impeachment, Congress wouldn’t dare. McCullagh wasn’t so sure. “Well,” the President serenely replied to the journalist, “let them go ahead. When they bring in the charges, I’ll try and answer them, that’s all.” And he laughed.
McCullagh was startled. Would the President really allow him to print the entire interview—and that the President was laughing? Perhaps he’d like something off the record? Not at all, Johnson happily answered, not at all.
* * *
—
ANDREW JOHNSON NOMINATED William Tecumseh Sherman as General of the U.S. Army in command of the new military Division of the Atlantic. There were no military reasons for this new division, which included the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia, and there were no military reasons for the rank. Johnson had not consulted with the army beforehand. His sole aim was to humiliate General Grant.
Johnson was foolish to assume that Sherman would be willing to resettle in Washington, where his division would be headquartered, or that he would accept a position in rank equal to that of his friend. Sherman wearily told Johnson that the battle-tested Grant, the often-slandered Grant, the Grant who’d seen his soldiers slit the gullets of starving mules to satisfy their own hunger, this Grant now, today, had never been more upset. “If this political atmosphere can destroy the equanimity of one so guarded and prudent as he is,” Sherman explained, “what will be the result with one so careless and outspoken as I am? Therefore, with my consent, Washington never.”
Sherman had lost patience with Johnson. “I suppose that because I gave him full credit for his first efforts to reconstruct the South on principles nearer right than have since been attempted, that I will go with him to the death, but I am not bound to do it,” Sherman complained to his father-in-law. “He is like a General fighting without an army—he is like Lear, roaring at the wild storm, bareheaded and helpless. And now he wants me to go with him into the wilderness.”
Johnson acted as if surprised by Sherman’s refusal to accept the newly created command. And maybe he was. Maybe he had not listened. Maybe he could not listen. Whatever the case—and it’s hard to know—the misunderstanding between the President and another celebrated general again electrified the nation, sparking a new set of speculations about Johnson’s motives. Clearly he wanted to checkmate Grant by offering Sherman a position that implicitly vied with Grant’s and that would bring Sherman to Washington—perhaps to the war office. Sherman would have none of it.
With Sherman’s name spread all over the papers, rumors again flew through Washington. The President’s foes claimed that, fearing impeachment, Johnson intended to resist Congress by military force, with Sherman marshaling troops near the Capitol. Sherman too suspected something of the sort, telling his brother that “the President would make use of me to beget violence, a condition of things that ought not to exist now.”
“Almost every positive affirmative step of his for the last two years has done harm not only to the country, but to himself and his party, if he have any party,” George Templeton Strong confided to his diary. “ ‘Andrew’s Adventures in Blunderland’ would be a good title for a political squib.”
A blundering, roaring Lear. Enraged, Johnson felt he had only one option: to return to the source of the problem, to pluck it out, root and branch, once and for all. To him, that source was Edwin Stanton, secretary of war, in league with the military, with Grant, with all those who had defied or tried to undermine him. If getting rid of Stanton meant he would have to lock horns with Congress, so be it. He said his self-respect demanded it: “If the people did not entertain sufficient respect for their Chief Magistrate, enough to sustain him in such a measure,” Johnson asserted, “then he ought to resign.
“I have ever battled for the right of the people and their liberties and I am now endeavoring to defend them from arbitrary power.” He could not grasp that more and more people thought that he, Andrew Johnson, the Accidental President, was the one wielding power arbitrarily.
Andrew Johnson was not a statesman. He was man with a fear of losing ground, with a need to be recognized, with an obsession to be right, and when seeking revenge on enemies—or perceived enemies—he had to humiliate, harass, and hound them. Heedless of consequences, he baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people. It was a convenient illusion.
Those closest to him were unsure of what he might do next. When another conservative journalist, Jerome Stillson, met with Johnson in the White House in the middle of February, the President paced up and down, vowing to smash his foes.
“Mr. President,” Stillson prodded him. “I’m hanged if I can see why either Grant or Stanton are to remain where they are much longer.”
Johnson stopped. “That’s just it, Mr. Stillson,” the President replied. “There never was a clearer case of insubordination in military history.”
“When is the devil to pay?” Stillson, a Democrat, prodded.
Johnson hesitated. It was impossible, he explained, “for outside people to know how hampered and forced to deliberation and self-control the President is.” But he hinted he might have something up his sleeve. “I am not unwilling, as I have told you time and again, to talk plainly to you and afford you any confidence that I am able to,” Johnson said. “But as it is, I can only give you a general idea of what is going on. My intentions ought to be pretty apparent to you. But I will neither mislead you nor anybody by making direct statements of what I am myself undecided upon, at last as to means.”
Johnson would say nothing more, and he would not take anyone into his confidence.
On Friday, February 21, 1868, the day before Washington’s birthday, a day that dawned bright and clear, President Andrew Johnson entered his office early in the morning and promptly wrote out the directive firing Edwin Stanton.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Striking at a King
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Edwin Stanton was to be replaced by a bumbling desk officer, the sixty-three-year-old Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, a man widely recognized as vain, weak, and completely incapable of performing any public service credible to the country. Or as the Democrats put it, Lorenzo Thomas was a horse’s ass.
Everyone knew he was completely different from Edwin Stanton. Stanton was respected for his organizational brilliance, his indefatigable energy, and his unflagging loyalty. Not so Thomas, who was loyal mainly to his desk, his epaulets, and his alcohol. According to John Hay, if Lorenzo Thomas spoke favorably of any public issue, he’d do so only if the country had already leaned that way. “He was a straw which shows whither the wind is blowing,” Hay had said. The wind was blowing from Johnson’s White House.
Thomas was uneasy, but Johnson assured him he wouldn’t be breaking the law to accept the position without the Senate appointing him. Thomas’ appointment was only as interim war secretary, until there was a permanent appointment. As such, his position was lawful and constitutional—not to worry, the President repeated.
General Thomas went to Stanton’s office, where he handed Stanton a sheaf of papers. Stanton sat down on his office sofa to read them. “Do you wish me to vacate at once, or am I to be permitted to stay long enough to remove my property?” Stanton asked, glancing up. T
homas said Stanton could take the weekend. It was Friday. Saturday was a holiday, Washington’s birthday. Thomas reported back to the President. Irritated that Stanton hadn’t packed up his desk right away, Johnson ordered Thomas to return to the War Department to take charge the very next day, Saturday.
In the meantime, Stanton had sent for General Grant, for it was important to know where he stood. Grant was behind him. He would not order the army to remove Stanton by force. “I want some little time for reflection,” Stanton then told Lorenzo Thomas. “I don’t know whether I shall obey your orders or resist them.” He also informed the House of Representatives that he’d been sacked.
Hearing the news, the excited representatives huddled in groups. Barely able to walk, Thaddeus Stevens limped from one to another, asking over and over, “Didn’t I tell you so? What good did your moderation do you? If you don’t kill the beast, it will kill you.”
Shaking himself as if from a stupor, John Bingham said with revulsion that the President had opened a can of worms—the impeachment—that he’d thought he’d nailed firmly shut. And for what? Why act so recklessly? Why appoint someone without the Senate’s consent? What kind of coup d’état was this?
John Covode of Pennsylvania introduced a formal resolution of impeachment. When James Pike of Maine shouted, “Stand up, impeachers!” almost every Republican jumped to his feet.
In the Senate, Roscoe Conkling was delivering a long-winded speech when the President’s private secretary arrived a little before two o’clock with several sealed messages. Conkling was told to sit. The senators gathered around two Radical Republicans, Zachariah Chandler and Benjamin Wade, who opened the envelopes, which reported that the President had fired Stanton.
Johnson had actually fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
The Senate went into immediate executive session. Charles Sumner sent Stanton a telegram from the Senate floor. “Stick!” was all it said. Several other senators ran over to the War Department to encourage Stanton not to leave his post until the Senate decided what to do. “Resist force by force,” one senator cried. In high spirits, Stanton agreed that if the Senate deemed Johnson’s action illegal, he would definitely stay put in his office and, if he must, sleep there.
Stanton “stuck.” His office under siege, he took his meals at his desk and slept on his sofa. The first night, General John Logan set up a cot in the war office, and a battalion of infantry was stationed on each side of the building in case there was trouble. There was none. Later that night, the Senate declared Stanton’s removal unconstitutional, and Stanton, edgy but energetic, asked David K. Cartter, the chief justice of the District’s Supreme Court, to come by. A former Ohio Democrat, an early Republican, and a staunch Lincoln supporter, Cartter helped Stanton draw up a complaint that charged Thomas with violating the Tenure of Office law. It was after midnight.
That same night, General Thomas went to a masquerade ball where he had much too much to drink. Early the next morning, the morning of Washington’s birthday, he was stumbling around the street, boasting that he would remove Stanton by force, if need be, and that he’d call on General Grant to authorize that force, and if Stanton bolted the door, he’d break it down. It was before nine o’clock that General Thomas, half-drunk, was arrested for violating the Tenure of Office Act.
After being released on $5,000 bail, Thomas went straight to the White House, where Johnson told him he should have taken immediate possession of the War Department the day before. Hungover, Thomas hurried back to Stanton’s office and, as Johnson had told him to do, demanded that the secretary’s keys be turned over to him right away. Bleakly amused, Stanton refused. Thomas began to whine. He’d been arrested that morning before he’d even had time to eat breakfast or have a drink.
Stanton tousled Thomas’ thick white hair, wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and asked an adjutant to fetch him a bottle so that he could offer Thomas a stiff shot of whiskey. The two men clinked their glasses and drank. Stanton reminded Thomas about the report on national cemeteries he’d asked him to prepare. Yes, yes, the general genially replied, he would work on it that very night. The wind had changed direction again.
General Townsend asked Stanton if he’d tricked Thomas into conceding that Stanton was still in charge. With a look of mock astonishment, Stanton asked how Townsend could ever think such a thing.
“When you strike at a king,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had once said, “you must kill him.”
* * *
—
THE NIGHT THAT he fired Stanton, the President had attended a state dinner for the diplomatic corps. Former ambassador John Bigelow noticed that Johnson seemed weary and distracted. After dinner, though, he chatted for a half an hour with a journalist, smiling all the while. Perhaps Johnson had unwittingly wandered into Blunderland, but he was doing exactly what he said he would do all along—prudently, he thought, and without heat, unafraid of impeachment or, for that matter, of Congress. “I know they are capable of doing anything,” he declared. And if he had once delayed in the matter of firing Stanton, he had delayed only so that the country—“the people”—could witness for themselves the kind of man Stanton was, a man who did not resign when he knew he was not wanted, a bully, a conspirator, a backstairs intriguer.
Did the President expect Congress to impeach him?
“I don’t know, indeed,” Johnson bristled. “Nor do I care.”
Georges Clemenceau was wiser. “The President called upon the lightning,” he said, “and the lightning came.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Impeachment
“Impeachment is peace.”
—HORACE GREELEY
As early as seven o’clock on a bitterly cold Saturday morning, the snowy walkways were lined with people, black and white, waiting outside the White House. Newspaper boys yelled “Extra, extra” the way they had during the war, and at the Capitol, the metropolitan police had joined forces with the Capitol police, blue-uniformed and brass-buttoned, to guard every entrance. They stopped a reporter to check if he’d hidden nitroglycerine in the bundle of papers tucked under his arm.
“There are men in Washington who would blow up the Capitol fast enough,” Mark Twain observed, “if they could achieve an illustrious name, like Booth, by doing it and be worshipped as Booth is worshipped.”
Despite the fact that it was Washington’s birthday, a holiday, the House of Representatives had decided to hold a special session, and when the doors of the building opened, men and women pushed into seats usually reserved for diplomats and reporters. “I recall nothing like it for size or eagerness since Mr. Lincoln’s second inauguration,” journalist Benjamin Perley Poore declared. “I suppose there were five or six thousand persons there who could not even get near the gallery doors; the corridors were completely packed for two or three hours.”
In the early afternoon, Poore caught a glimpse of Thaddeus Stevens in one of the committee rooms. He was eating his lunch, which consisted of a few crackers, cheese, and a glass of water. He looked pasty, and news of his death would not have surprised anyone, but he assured Poore that he was “first rate, first rate.” Mark Twain grabbed a seat in the reporters’ gallery and was scribbling notes. Roll was called, and just before it was finished, several more representatives appeared. “Boutwell came in [sensation]; afterwards, at intervals, Bingham [sensation], Paine [sensation], several other committee men,” Twain wrote, “and finally Thad. Stevens himself [super-extraordinary sensation!].”
Stevens leaned on the arm of a friend, and while barely able to walk down the center aisle, he gingerly lowered himself to his seat. Boutwell walked over to him and handed him something.
Twain continued to admire Stevens. “There was a soul in his sunken eyes, but otherwise he was a corpse that was ready for the shroud,” Twain noted. “He held his precious impeachment papers in his hand, signed at last! In the eleventh hour his coveted triump
h had come.” The place fell silent. Stevens passed the papers over to Edward McPherson, clerk of the House, who began to read. Everyone knew what to expect. After Stanton’s dismissal the day before, the matter of impeachment had been swiftly referred to the Committee on Reconstruction. If the committee recommended impeachment, the entire House would vote on Monday, and it would take just a simple majority of its members to impeach Andrew Johnson.
No one spoke, no one applauded, no one protested. The committee vote was announced. With only two members dissenting, it recommended the first impeachment of an American President. Twain saw a sudden brightness light up the faces around him.
Lincoln’s postmaster general until 1864, Montgomery Blair, member of a powerful Democratic family, was an important if unofficial adviser to President Johnson, arguing for the speedy readmission of the Southern states to the Union. His brother Francis Blair, Jr., was a vice-presidential candidate in 1868, on a white supremacist ticket.
Still, the recent cascade of events—the abrupt firing of Stanton, the antics of Lorenzo Thomas, the Senate’s declaration that Johnson had violated the law—had been stupefying. Moderates were panicky, Democrats astonished, Radicals perplexed. James Doolittle begged Johnson to write a letter to Congress and explain himself. Johnson said he’d do nothing of the kind, but he privately suggested that his secretary think about looking for another job.
What was Johnson doing? Edwards Pierrepont, the lawyer who had prosecuted John Surratt, remarked that “Johnson acts like a man who allows passion & spite to destroy his judgment.” The President apparently hadn’t consulted anyone before letting Stanton go. Montgomery Blair, who had wanted Stanton axed for a very long time—and Seward too—had been spotted going to the White House pretty often, but close advisers like Attorney General Henry Stanbery and other members of the cabinet had been left in the dark. So too Jeremiah Black. When asked if he had advised Johnson to rid himself of Stanton, Black had excitedly replied, “The papers talk about me as the President’s chief adviser. That’s all humbug; he sends for me sometimes, but he rarely follows my advice; if he did he wouldn’t make such a damned fool of himself so often.”
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