On Saturday, March 7, a petulant, pugnacious President received a summons to appear before the Senate. He said he would make some reply, sometime, maybe soon. Composed, he welcomed martyrdom. Or he would bring his case to the people. As for his enemies, he swore he’d show “these damned scoundrels, what fate is in store for them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
All the President’s Men
There had been enough men to set impeachment in motion, but there were still plenty who, although they disliked Andrew Johnson, disliked impeachment more. And so Johnson was able to assemble a dazzling team of lawyers to defend him.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis had been a star. Esteemed for his keen and often unassailable arguments and highly recommended by Daniel Webster, Curtis was only forty-two in 1851 when Millard Fillmore appointed him to the Supreme Court. Just six years later, Curtis became even more well known as one of the two judges who had passionately dissented from Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion in the notorious case of the formerly enslaved Dred Scott. Taney had claimed that Dred Scott possessed no rights a white man was bound to respect, stating that black people were not and could not be citizens. Refuting him, Curtis skillfully argued that five states had already given blacks citizenship and that their living on free soil made them free; he also said, in a final maneuver, that the court couldn’t really argue the case if it ruled that Scott had no standing before it.
Convinced that the chief justice had contaminated the Constitution by subordinating it to politics, Curtis then indiscreetly released his dissent to the press before the majority opinion was published. Though he denied having done this, it was too late. Scandalized and offended, Taney accused Curtis of intentionally inflaming public opinion, which of course he had. Curtis resigned from the bench that same year, claiming he couldn’t maintain his family in Washington or properly educate his children on the salary of a Supreme Court judge—in 1851, it was $4,500 ($135,000 today)—and he hated living in boardinghouses. President Buchanan was glad to see him go.
Yet though he’d willingly alienated Roger Taney, Curtis remained a conservative interpreter of the Constitution. What he hated was politics. And abolitionists. Though he’d dissented in Dred Scott, he’d defended the draconian Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed Southern slaveholders to travel North, nab runaways, and drag them back into slavery—assisted, if need be, by the full force of the federal government. Later he’d supported Johnson’s policies. And he’d always detested radicals like Charles Sumner, whom he called “a person of no practical power, or ability, a declaimer, and rather sophomorically at that.” He dismissed the rest of the Radical Republicans as demagogues.
A Boston Brahmin educated at Harvard and Harvard Law, Curtis was a chunky man whose hairline had receded to such an extent that his forehead dominated his upper face, not unlike Daniel Webster—or Andrew Johnson, for that matter. He spoke in a low, muffled voice. He claimed to belong to no party (patently untrue) and in 1864 voted for War Democrat George McClellan over Abraham Lincoln. After the war, he insisted that the former Confederate states had never left the Union and that their immediate restoration, in the terms Johnson had first proposed, was right and just. He despaired of the recent reconstruction laws passed by Congress and though the unmistakably boorish Andrew Johnson was not his cup of tea, Curtis did come to respect the President, or so he tried to convince himself. “He is a man of few ideas,” Curtis said of Johnson, “but they are right and true, and he could suffer death sooner than yield up or violate one of them. He is honest, right-minded, and narrow-minded,” Curtis concluded. “He has no tact, and even lacks discretion and forecast. But he is as firm as a rock.”
Curtis contended, or his friends would contend, that he defended President Johnson from motives purely patriotic: “that in the intense excitement of party feeling the Senate might be hurried on to an act not only of injustice to an individual, but unconstitutional, and perilous to the country.” No doubt this was true; but the statement that his “services at the trial were wholly gratuitous—that for all the labor and expense bestowed upon the case he neither asked nor received remuneration” was simply false. Each of Johnson’s defense lawyers was paid a fee of $2,025 and then an extra $100 through funds quietly managed by Secretary of State Seward, Attorney General Henry Stanbery, and lawyer William Maxwell Evarts, whom Seward had brought on board. They apparently concealed the financial arrangement, even from the touchy Johnson, who had said more than once he wouldn’t stoop to bribery or financial hanky-panky to secure acquittal. “How would I feel after I bought it?” Johnson exclaimed. “How would I feel if my conscience told me I owed my acquittal to bribery? I will do nothing of the kind.” Johnson’s secretary, Colonel Moore, consequently arranged for William Seward and the others to handle money matters “with extreme caution,” Moore declared. “If the President would suspect his purpose, he would stop it.”
Also arguing for Johnson was William Maxwell Evarts, a diminutive man with mushroom-colored skin. Grandson of Roger Sherman, who had signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, Evarts was one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, famous for a “wit, diamond-pointed” that “cut into a legal problem, as one would cut into a pineapple—laying aside deftly the skin and the rind and getting at once at the pulp and juice of the controversy, and then sugaring it with a clear style.” As Henry Adams said, Evarts was “confident in times of doubt, steady in times of disaster, cool and quiet at all times, and unshaken under any pressure.”
Noted New York lawyer and raconteur William Maxwell Evarts, whom Henry Adams called “an economist of morals,” ably defended Andrew Johnson at his impeachment trial, delivering a closing argument that lasted four days.
Unlike Curtis, Evarts enjoyed politics, and he aspired to higher office—in particular, the one on the Supreme Court that Curtis had abandoned. Previously assistant district attorney for the Southern District of New York under Zachary Taylor, Evarts had been somewhat troubled by the policies of Franklin Pierce and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, even though he too at one time defended the Fugitive Slave Law. He helped establish the Republican party, he chaired the New York delegation to its national convention in 1860, and though he’d initially wanted his friend Seward to win the White House, at the convention he moved that the nomination of Lincoln be unanimous.
When Lincoln appointed Seward in his cabinet as secretary of state, Evarts hoped to take Seward’s place as senator from New York, but that didn’t happen. Nor was he nominated to replace Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1864; Lincoln instead chose Salmon Chase. But the suave Evarts took disappointment in stride and was eventually rewarded when Johnson nominated him as attorney general, when Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him secretary of state, and finally when he became U.S. senator from New York.
Evarts was known as a moderate. “He undoubtedly represents the old statesmen of the North, Adams, and Webster and Hamilton,” a Missouri judge observed. “If he belongs to the Radical party, he is certainly vastly different from most of his party.” The moderates wanted to defeat impeachment, believing that Republican success—and Grant’s—depended on it. So early in 1868, Seward advised Johnson to telegraph Evarts, promising him a post if he signed on to Johnson’s team. Evarts, like Curtis, considered Andrew Johnson somewhat vulgar, and later claimed that Johnson the man was of little consequence; he sought only to defend the office of the President. “I pride myself on my success in doing not the things I like to do,” he also said, “but the things I don’t like to do.” When ribbed about working to defend Johnson on the sabbath, Evarts tellingly replied, “ ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Evarts, ‘but you know what the Bible says we may do in case an ox or an ass falleth into a pit.’ ”
Despite his considerable legal prowess, Evarts was, to Gideon Welles, a “cold, calculating, selfish man,” and even Seward found him detached and devious. Charles Sumner, who was fond of him, thought he shoul
d never have defended Johnson, and Sumner’s secretary Moorfield Storey was bewildered. “I wonder why Mr. Evarts takes the case,” Storey said. Henry Adams would baptize Evarts, without irony, “an economist of morals.” After the trial, Johnson nominated Evarts to be attorney general and Evarts, economizing those morals, readily accepted.
Evarts, however, was not the first choice to head the defense team. Jeremiah Black was. “Jeremiah S. Black in defense of Andrew Johnson against the Republican party,” a Democratic lawyer later observed, “would have been an ever-living treat to students of the pathology of party politics.” Black became a problem early on. Assuming that Johnson couldn’t get a fair trial in the Senate, the crafty Black urged the President to resign so that the Democrats in 1868 could nominate him as their standard-bearer, a martyred hero trampled down by the likes of Beast Butler and the Radical Senator Wade.
But Johnson was a scrapper who would never consider backing down, and William Seward hated the idea of Johnson resigning, which would leave him out in the cold. Besides, Seward didn’t want Johnson to headline the Democratic ticket. Contriving to oust Black, Seward quietly undertook a smear campaign against him. Black had been representing an American client who claimed rights to the lucrative guano (a rich fertilizer) in the small, uninhabited island of Alta Vela, near Haiti and just south of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). When government officials from Santo Domingo claimed ownership of Alta Vela, they expelled Black’s client, destroyed the plant, and sold the rights to the guano to an American company in which Seward’s friend Thurlow Weed had a financial interest. Furious, Black petitioned the federal government to investigate. Nothing happened. Black then asked Secretary of State Seward to dispatch an armed navy vessel to protect, which is to say repossess, the island. Seward refused. Black asked Johnson to intervene. He too refused.
The Alta Vela matter neatly furnished Seward with ammunition against Black. Black’s son and law partner had presumably solicited a letter from four of the impeachment managers (Butler, Stevens, Bingham, Logan) in support of the Alta Vela claim, which was also signed by Representatives James Garfield and James G. Blaine. The letter seemed to suggest that Black would throw the trial and sell out Johnson for their help with Alta Vela. At the same time, Butler’s former aide-de-camp was accused of circulating the letter in order to discredit Black. Whatever the truth behind the letter, the situation was complicated and ugly and left Black no choice but to resign from Johnson’s defense team.
Black blamed Seward. “Mr. Seward’s little finger it appears is thicker than the loins of the law,” Black complained to the President. Thaddeus Stevens too thought Seward had manipulated the whole affair. Seward was helping his pal, the political boss Thurlow Weed—and promising Johnson that Weed would come through with money and political clout. Black was out by March 19.
Ohio War Democrat William Slocum Groesbeck replaced Black. A commanding presence, partly because of his height and partly because of his wealth, this Cincinnati lawyer and politician little known outside of Ohio joined Curtis, Evarts, and Attorney General Henry Stanbery, who’d resigned from the cabinet in order to serve on the team. Johnson liked Groesbeck and had once toyed with the idea of replacing Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, whom he had begun to distrust, with the Cincinnati lawyer.
Thomas A.R. Nelson of East Tennessee rounded out the group. An articulate politician from Johnson’s district whom Johnson trusted, Nelson had been a Unionist like Johnson and had courageously campaigned with him against secession. To his constituents in East Tennessee, Nelson was a champion until the Confederates captured and imprisoned him in Richmond. To win his freedom, he vowed to keep his Unionist feelings to himself, and he did so until federal troops occupied Tennessee. Then he changed sides again. But though a Unionist, he’d always opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, he supported McClellan over Lincoln in 1864, and he wholly endorsed Andrew Johnson’s policies of reconstruction.
“Of these men,” Emily Briggs quipped, “Stanbery is the tallest; Evarts the smallest; Nelson the grayest, Curtis the fattest, and Groesbeck the Adonis.”
And all of them were committed to winning the trial of the century in a century that had already seen the trial of the century: that of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. But the impeachment trial was different. The impeachment trial was about the President himself, not about his murderers—even though Johnson believed the impeachers wanted to murder his presidency, and even though the impeachers believed Johnson had been conniving to murder the idea of a more perfect Union for which they’d fought. And so Andrew Johnson represented the painful division in the nation between the impeachers, grown larger and more visionary, and those who wanted to stop them: “To the one he is a vile, provoking obstruction,” The New York Herald rightly noted, “to the other, a constitutional lighthouse, sending forth beacon rays warning of the rocks and shoals and quicksands that environ the ship of state.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Trial, First Rounds
“The world moves, and we move with it.”
—BENJAMIN BUTLER
Outside the Capitol, a cordon of police stretched along the building, and soldiers walked back and forth to protect it from the swarms of people who’d gathered there on Friday, March 13, 1868. The weather was gloomy and overcast, but people had come by railway car, by carriage, by plain cab, and on foot, clenching precious pasteboard tickets of admission, numbered, dated, and color-coded—red for one day, blue for the next, green for another. Members of Congress had been limited to four tickets per senator, two per each representative, and two for the chief justice, members of the Supreme Court, and the cabinet. Other people, not included in official rosters, scrambled to find or buy one on the sly. Only eight hundred tickets to the impeachment trial had been printed, and they were known as the hottest item in town.
The ticket-holders slowly entered the sloping galleries overlooking the Senate chamber at ten that morning and took seats in one of the eight tiers of benches. There was Salmon Chase’s daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, the epitome of style, who wore fawn-colored silk, Etruscan earrings, and bangles of frosted gold. She had an appetite for the White House even larger than that of her insatiable father, and already she was thought to be campaigning for Johnson’s acquittal on her father’s presidential behalf.
Both men and women gather at the impeachment trial, as depicted by W.S.L. Lewett.
More subdued was Benjamin Wade’s wife in a black cloth dress, although she’d placed a brown rose in her hair. Brash Ben Butler’s dark-eyed, sharp-minded daughter Blanche sat as near her father as she could and exchanged glances with the soldier Adelbert Ames, whom she would soon marry. The notorious former Confederate spy Belle Boyd settled herself in the galleries; so did the sculptress Vinnie Ream, a fidgety young woman with chestnut ringlets that spilled down her shoulders, and Ottilie Assing, the German-Jewish journalist and intimate friend of Frederick Douglass. There were no black men or women in those galleries that day. They seemed not to have received any tickets.
With opera glasses, the women and men in the galleries peered at the scene below. On a raised platform at the head of the chamber stood a massive desk and carved chair that was reserved for the president of the Senate. To the right and the left of this desk, two long walnut tables had been placed, one for the managers and the other for the President’s defense team. On each table there were piles of blank paper, rows of pens and inkstands, silver ice-pitchers on silver trays, and an assortment of water glasses. About one hundred cane-bottomed oak chairs and a few small sofas sat behind these tables, reserved for members of the cabinet, the House, and the judiciary. Behind them was the large semicircle of rosewood desks that the senators occupied.
The acoustics were poor, but at one o’clock, Benjamin Wade, as president pro tempore of the Senate, soundly banged his ivory gavel on the desk. He then rose and left his seat on the platform, and Chief Justice Salmon Chas
e gravely swept into the chamber and took his place at the head of the room, as presiding judge. He too sharply rapped the Senate to attention, calling the High Court of Impeachment into being.
The impeachment managers slowly filed into the chamber. Boutwell looked like one of the Salem witch trial’s hanging judges, said a critic, but all eyes were turned on Thaddeus Stevens, who’d been carried into the room and carefully placed in his chair, where he half reclined. Despite his conspicuous pallor, “he looked strong enough to live as long as a hemlock,” a journalist remarked, “which never dies until its sap is dead.”
In a booming voice, the sergeant-at-arms summoned Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, to appear. He called three times for Johnson, just as the circular shape of Ben Butler was seen scrambling into the chamber. People laughed uncertainly. Many confessed they’d been imagining an Andrew Johnson shackled in chains, but since Johnson had not been compelled to show up, he did not and would not for the duration of the trial. His lawyers had begged him not to speak, even though he wanted to present his own case. But they couldn’t trust what he might say when excited.
The Impeachers Page 30