The Impeachers
Page 37
After all, these reconstructed Southern states, if they had Republican senators, would surely vote for conviction, provided they could take their place in the Union soon enough. But they did not come back in time.
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THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY Society celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary on Wednesday, May 13, at Steinway Hall in New York City. His optimism undimmed, his language robust, Wendell Phillips rallied the crowd. “Every great question in American history has involved race,” he told the throngs of cheering people, “and no matter if Presidents betray us, or Senators fail their duty, we will one day see the flag floating from the lakes to the coast, from sea to sea, and it will represent impartial justice to all races and people.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton also spoke that evening. To her fell the unpleasant task of reminding the audience that women too needed the vote. Only with women voting would there be a safe, secure, and lasting reconstruction.
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ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, Edwin Stanton, still barricaded in the war office, sent a note in cipher to John Russell Young. “Those who are well advised think the success of the impeachment certain,” he said. “I have no reason for a different opinion as matters now stand.”
But a backlash against impeachment was growing. The Republican party had been the nation’s first powerful, national anti-slavery party, a motley group compounded of old Whigs, Free-Soilers, former Democrats, conservatives, Radicals, greenbackers, xenophobes, Eastern financiers, and western humorists. With the war over and slavery abolished, the bonds holding them together were starting to frazzle. Conservative Republicans rebuked Ohio Representative Robert Schenk, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, for begging the public to write their senators about the “great danger to the peace of the country and the Republican cause if impeachment fails.”
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EVERYONE KNEW THAT Chief Justice Salmon Chase wanted to be President. And Chase didn’t hide his contempt for General Grant—a small man, Chase sneered, among small men. Chase had been spotted at dinner with Fessenden, Grimes, and Trumbull early in the week, and Senators Henderson and Fowler at different times had ridden in the chief justice’s carriage.
Presumably Chase had told all of them they could be leaders of a breakaway party—or with him they could start a new party, sprung out of Republican ruins. On Wednesday, May 13, Peter Van Winkle, Trumbull, and Waitman Willey all met at Chase’s house to talk about the new movement.
“It is treachery for personal ends and deserves the contempt of all good men,” said James Garfield, who’d heard about the movement.
Although it didn’t form at the time, this was the nub of what would become known as the Liberal Republicans, former reformers and abolitionists who railed against the federal intervention in the South and opposed the reconstruction laws they’d once passed.
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ON THURSDAY, MAY 14, at about half past nine o’clock in the evening, Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy called on Peter Van Winkle in his rooms at the National Hotel, a watering hole for conservative Republicans, Democrats, and Copperheads. The junior senator from Kansas, Edmund Ross, was there along with Lyman Trumbull, John Henderson, and Waitman Willey.
Willey, a former slaveholder, was something of a cipher. He had opposed the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act back in 1864. He’d opposed establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, and he’d voted against its extension in 1866. But he had supported the Civil Rights Bill and the Fourteenth Amendment and the right of black men to vote in the District of Columbia. He’d also supported the Tenure of Office Act. One of his biographers, frustrated by Willey’s fickleness, accused him of sacrificing conservatism “at the altar of political ambition.”
These men were in Van Winkle’s room to talk about the impeachment vote. Henderson told Pomeroy that the eleventh omnibus article would be defeated by four votes. Not at all, replied Pomeroy. We will convict on the eleventh by one vote. Willey was pledged to vote for conviction on the eleventh article.
Edmund Ross said he’d vote to convict on all the articles except perhaps the eighth—about seizing the property of the war office—but Ross wanted the whole thing postponed as long as possible, as if putting it off would make it go away. Trumbull also favored postponement because he wasn’t sure there were enough votes to acquit on the eleventh article. Postponement gave presidential lobbyists more time.
Henderson said he figured there could be a postponement of the vote—and an acquittal of the President—if Johnson reorganized his cabinet, which he’d been told the President would.
Pomeroy scoffed. “Who will take a place in the cabinet now?”
“Reverdy Johnson,” Henderson knowingly answered. “And Mr. Hooper would, Mr. Evarts would.” Hooper would be treasury secretary; Evarts, secretary of state.
Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, once known as an abolitionist, arrived in Washington to finish the term of the Senator Jim Lane. Once there, he boarded with the Ream family, where he seemed enthralled by the sculptress Vinnie Ream.
After the meeting, Henderson slammed the Missouri delegation in the press, saying it had tried to coerce him. The Missouri delegation publicly refuted him. “Without any suggestion or requirement from us, you offered to resign your position as Senator from Missouri, if we would request you to do so. This we did not wish to do,” the delegation declared. “We did not desire you to vote against your conscience, but if you believed the President guilty as charged in the eleventh article, and would vote so, this was all we desired.”
Accusations like these, pitching back and forth, did not look good for the impeachers.
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TRUMBULL STAYED AT the National Hotel with Peter Van Winkle until midnight. The next morning, the day before the vote, Van Winkle said he had changed his mind and would vote to acquit the President.
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DURING THE IMPEACHMENT trial, when the Senate was debating such issues as the admissibility of evidence, Senator Benjamin Wade was silent, and he didn’t vote. Voting wouldn’t look right. President pro tempore of the Senate, Wade knew that if Johnson was convicted, he’d be President, since there was no Vice President. But he might have to cast a vote for conviction if the vote was close. That probably meant that he’d have to decline the vice-presidential nomination at the upcoming Republican convention. It would be the honorable thing to do.
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SOCIETY IS CANKER’D, crude, superstitious, and rotten, as Whitman said. The state of Kansas was no exception.
A newspaper editor formerly known as an abolitionist, Edmund Gibson Ross was a political nobody who didn’t look a person in the face, dressed in black, and walked with a slouch. He’d been sent to the Senate in 1866 to finish the term after Senator Jim Lane put a loaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. No one quite knew why Lane had committed suicide, though it was rumored he had lost the support of his constituency when he supported Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill. More likely, financial chicanery was about to be exposed.
Edmund Ross did not in any way distinguish himself in the Senate. A clerk in the House of Representatives regarded him as a lily-livered and malleable man who “may be artfully operated on without his own apprehension of the fact.” Shortly after Johnson was impeached, the National Anti-Slavery sourly commented that “Mr. Ross is suffering from the effects of bad associations.” One of those bad associations was the conservative Thomas Ewing, Jr., under whose command Ross had served during the war. Another was Perry Fuller, who let Ross know it would be to his advantage—Ross’ seat in the Senate—if Johnson was to stay in the White House.
For Ross, like the other Kansas senator, Samuel Pomeroy, had acquired his seat with the assistance of the shady Indian trader Pe
rry Fuller, an adept backroom politician with a reputation for fleecing the Sac, Fox, and Chippewa tribes before the war and after it, for brokering unfair deals with the various tribes for huge payoffs to himself. An active member of the Democratic National Committee, Fuller was also on familiar terms with General Sherman and with the Ewings. Besides, Ross needed money, and he didn’t want to lose the patronage he already enjoyed. He wouldn’t have that if Ben Wade became President.
Samuel Pomeroy was also an operator, although with a different pedigree. A longtime abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, he’d arrived in Kansas from Massachusetts in 1854 as agent of the Emigrant Aid Company. Once a U.S. senator, he conveniently failed to acknowledge conflicts of interest, for he was also president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway with a yen for lucrative railroad contracts. But unlike Ross, he would presumably benefit if fellow Radical Benjamin Wade went to the White House.
Trying to frame Pomeroy, Andrew Johnson’s allies claimed that he took money for his vote, and with his reputation for dishonesty, Pomeroy could be discredited even if he hadn’t taken a bribe, at least not this time. Nothing was ever proved against him, though Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner would later caricature Pomeroy in their aptly titled novel, The Gilded Age, lampooning him as the chubby, smarmy Senator Abner Dilworthy, a money-grubber who reads his Bible upside down.
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EDMUND ROSS RECEIVED a telegram. “Kansas has heard the evidence, and demands the conviction of the President,” it read. “Every loyal man says impeach the President for his crimes. There is no division here and we hope there will be none in Washington. Signed D. R. Anthony and a thousand others of our best and truest men.” Daniel Anthony, a publisher, was the younger brother of Susan B. Anthony.
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“STANTON IS A brick,” Francis Lieber said. There were people who thought Edwin Stanton would make a good President—he was by far the fittest of them all—but he would not run. He would not even consider it. He was beginning to make plans to return to Ohio, or so one of Johnson’s spies reported. Spies were everywhere, and Stanton may have planted the story himself. He’d been funneling information through John Russell Young to the New-York Tribune.
But the last weeks had taken their toll. Stanton’s nerves were shot. He’d been holed up in the War Department too long. He began sneaking out in the evening from time to time to eat dinner with his family, and while his son kept watch over affairs in Washington, he and his wife secretly traveled to Baltimore for a rest. His chest was tight, his breathing labored.
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ON FRIDAY, MAY 15, the day before the vote, several senators who previously said they’d vote for conviction now said they were voting to acquit the President. Impeachment was a dead duck, said the Democratic press. But since putting General Grant in the White House was a Republican priority, many Republicans sighed in relief. Conviction would mean that Senator Wade, next in line as President, might actually be Grant’s running mate, and with such a red-hot Radical anywhere near the Executive Mansion, the Republicans might lose in November. Acquit—and they could win.
“What in the name of all that’s honest is the matter with our party,” a friend asked Thaddeus Stevens. Radical Republicans believed Grant would win even if Johnson was convicted, and conviction was necessary for the sake of the black population, the South, the nation, the future.
The Radical Republican press also condemned Fessenden, Trumbull, Grimes, and Henderson for their upcoming vote: “History will record that Andrew Johnson was convicted by the country, though it will be compelled to relate how he escaped the consequences of his crimes through the weakness of dishonored Senators.” For the Radical Republicans, it was not the longevity of the party that was at stake. At stake was the soul of the country.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Point-Blank Lying
“There has been more point-blank lying done in Washington during the past week, than ever before in the same space of time, and that is saying a great deal.”
—The New York Times
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, originally the Free African Methodist Society, was founded by Richard Allen, born a slave in Philadelphia. Having managed to buy his own freedom, Allen became a teamster, a chimney sweep, a shoemaker, and a charismatic abolitionist preacher influenced by American Methodism. In 1816, he joined together sixteen representatives from Bethel African Church in Philadelphia and African Churches in Baltimore, Wilmington, and Attleboro, Pennsylvania, and by 1868, there were over 70,000 members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church nationwide. At its annual conference, held in Washington that spring, it declared Friday the fifteenth a day of fasting, and it offered up a prayer that the Senate pass a guilty verdict, in the interest of all humanity, to bring peace to the nation.
Several of the conference delegates later called on Thaddeus Stevens at his unobtrusive redbrick home. He thanked them for their kind compliments, which he said he didn’t deserve, and he promised, should he live, that he would make every effort to be worthy of them. He also apologized for the injustice and the many grievances inflicted upon them by the white men and women who dared to call themselves Christians.
The Democratic press called the conference “Methodistical darkydom,” where “hog and hominy are at a discount and chicken stealing is left off for less sacred churches.”
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SLOWLY RECOVERING, MICHIGAN Senator Howard pulled himself up in his bed. He would get to the Senate if he had to be carried on a stretcher. New York Senator Roscoe Conkling was also ill but just as determined.
Senator James Grimes suffered a paralytic stroke said to be caused by stress. “His temperament is more excitable and delicate than one would suppose, and I think the struggle has affected him,” Fessenden observed.
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ON FRIDAY, MAY 15, the night before the vote, at least half the Republican senators met for three hours at Pomeroy’s house. With the Radical editor Theodore Tilton, who had arrived in Washington from New York, they calculated how they thought the vote would go. They regarded Willey now doubtful on conviction but Ross certain on the eleventh article: Pomeroy had the information from Ross’ own mouth. Earlier that night, when Ross had dinner with Pomeroy and his family, he said he’d vote to convict the President on the eleventh article, the strongest, although he still hoped for a postponement, probably so that he wouldn’t have to do anything at all.
Democratic Senator Reverdy Johnson had been spreading rumors that the eleventh would fail by two votes, but the Republicans at the Pomeroy meeting decided the eleventh impeachment article was close to a lock. The senators should vote on it first.
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ROSS RECALLED THE dinner conversation at Pomeroy’s differently. He insisted that he and Pomeroy had not discussed the vote, except perhaps while he waited on the Pomeroy porch for a streetcar. That’s when he said he hoped for a postponement; otherwise, he hadn’t committed himself one way or the other about his vote.
“There has been more point-blank lying done in Washington during the past week,” said a correspondent for The New York Times, “than ever before in the same space of time, and that is saying a great deal.”
That same evening, Perry Fuller called on Ross at the Capitol Hill boardinghouse, 325 North B Street, where Ross had rooms on the second floor. Fuller knew the house well, for it was the home of his in-laws, the Reams. Perry Fuller and Mary Ream had married in 1865, four years after Robert Ream, head of the household, had brought his family to Washington from Wisconsin, where he had been a clerk in the surveyor general’s office. In addition to the daughter Mary, the Reams had a son, who had enlisted in the Confederate army, and another daughter, Vinnie, whose exact age was never clear. She was born in 1845 or 1847 or 1850, depending o
n who asked.
In days to come, Benjamin Butler would receive an anonymous tip. “If the impeachment managers could make Vinnie Ream tell the truth, they could find just what is wanted to show what made Senator Ross vote not guilty.”
Vinnie Ream probably knew more about the impeachment than many of the impeachers, although she kept remarkably mute: “The shrewdest politician of them all,” Mark Twain had chuckled. For she had her career to consider. Thanks to the generosity of her father’s friend, Missouri representative James Sidney Rollins, a former slaveholder though a Unionist, Ream had been employed as a clerk in Rollins’ office, where she’d met many prominent politicians and studied with great success the art of persuasion. Rollins, evidently smitten, took Ream to the studio of the sculptor Clarke Mills, whose statue of Andrew Jackson, the largest equestrian statue ever produced at that time, loomed over Lafayette Park.
Glancing around the studio, Vinnie Ream exclaimed, “Why, I can do that.” Mills was apparently charmed, and Ream became his apprentice. As Ream’s sympathetic biographer notes, “Vinnie had a faculty for catching the fancy of older men.”
Soon Ream was sculpting such Democrats as Indiana Representative Daniel Voorhees, a former Copperhead known as the “tall sycamore of the Wabash,” and the brash Frank Blair, Jr. These men tilted as far away from the Republicans as possible, but notable Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens, also sat for Ream. Or she worked from photographs, although that isn’t crystal clear. She’d allegedly sculpted Abraham Lincoln during the war when Lincoln rather astonishingly consented to sit for her. Mary Todd Lincoln, who didn’t remember Ream, firmly denied that the President would allow this “self-satisfied and rather presuming” young woman to model him in the White House while a war was raging.