The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  The night of the vote, at least two dozen men thronged the White House, among them General Hancock and General Lorenzo Thomas. Serenaded by the Georgetown College band, they celebrated until after midnight, and President Johnson happily attended Secretary Seward’s gala reception in his home near Lafayette Square where the lights were twinkling until morning.

  * * *

  —

  “THE COUNTRY IS going to the devil,” Thaddeus Stevens groaned right after the vote on the eleventh article.

  Oregon Senator George Williams then called for a ten-day adjournment before the Senate voted on the other ten impeachment articles. Henderson moved to postpone until July 1, and Senator Ross, who continued to dream that the whole thing might evaporate if pushed far enough into the future, suggested that the final vote be put off until September. But it was scheduled for May 26, ten days away and just after the Republican national convention in Chicago. Radicals hoped that by then the rebellious senators among them would have again changed their minds and this time vote to convict Andrew Johnson. If not, at least there would be the election of a new President, a different President and not an accidental one. For Republicans were pretty sure that General Ulysses S. Grant, heroically astride one of his fast horses, would be galloping straight into the White House.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Cease of Majesty

  The cease of majesty

  Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw

  What’s near it with it….

  —Hamlet, III, 3

  The country was far from the nation it hoped to become. Earnest men tossed around words like “justice” and “equality” and “suffrage” although women demanding the right to vote did not have the support of most of them, and Native Americans and Chinese went unmentioned in discussions about citizenship and political rights. “Anglo-Saxon justice cannot go quite to that length,” Georges Clemenceau, still reporting on America for the Paris Temps, caustically observed. “It has difficulty enough in extending as far as the negro.” Reconstruction remained undone.

  Having returned to its legislative function, the Senate discussed whether to admit Arkansas back into the Union, now that it had fulfilled all the requirements: Arkansas would supply more Republicans to Congress, and that was important. Reconstruction had to be completed.

  But much as he too wanted to admit Arkansas into the Union, Charles Sumner believed the Senate should conduct no business with the President until the impeachment trial had officially ended. And despite the vote earlier that day on the eleventh article, Sumner said it was not over. Ten articles of impeachment remained. Sumner had made this point before, but now, as if in tacit acknowledgment of what was to come, he added that even if the President were to be acquitted, Andrew Johnson would forever be a “blasted public functionary.”

  Sumner also noted with disdain that a number of senators continued to hobnob with the President and ask for perks and favors. Insulted and a bit thin-skinned, John Henderson yelled out that no one had a right to judge his conduct or that of his associates, especially since he despised the political course of Andrew Johnson as much as Sumner did. He’d voted against impeachment, he said, “according to the law and the evidence.” Unruffled, even amused, Sumner politely reassured Henderson that he hadn’t been referring to him or any one person, but not able to stop himself, he impishly added that while listening to the honorable senator, he couldn’t help thinking of an old saying: “Who so excuses himself, accuses himself.”

  * * *

  —

  “HOW DOES IT happen that just enough & no more republican Senators are convinced of the president’s innocence,” Ben Butler wanted to know. “I think we shall be able to show where some of these men got their consciences and how much they are worth.”

  “The Democrats only smile when bribery is mentioned,” Butler was told, “and make no defense of Ross, Van Winkle, Fowler, Henderson, & Trumbull.” Men and women of all classes assumed “Ross & some others were bought up.” There must have been payoffs, bribes, and bullying. Some of the allegations warranted a serious look, John Bingham said, and citing probable cause, he asked the House to appoint a subcommittee to investigate. John Chanler, the wealthy New York Democrat who’d called the reconstruction laws wicked and revolutionary, objected, saying the House had no power to put a senator on trial. Bingham explained that no one was talking about the trial of a U.S. senator. But since the Constitution had vested the House with the legal and proper impeachment of a President, the House could and should find out whether corruption had influenced the voting. Besides, Charles Eldridge, Democrat from Wisconsin, had already proposed an investigation into the Missouri delegation’s apparent attempt to strong-arm Henderson.

  Although the House did vote to authorize a committee to investigate corruption, composed of the impeachment managers, everyone knew it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find hard evidence. Sleaziness is hard to nail down.

  * * *

  —

  EDMUND ROSS RECEIVED another telegram. “Probably the rope with which Judas hanged himself is lost, but the pistol with which Jim Lane shot himself is at your service.”

  * * *

  —

  IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH Carolina, at Courthouse Square, black men and women gathered to hear speeches denouncing the President’s acquittal on the eleventh article, and in Memphis, about five hundred black men and women assembled at Greenlaw’s Opera House and passed resolutions denouncing the vote.

  * * *

  —

  WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN briskly justified himself. “The people have not heard the evidence as we have heard it,” he said. “They have not taken an oath to ‘do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws.’ I have taken that oath.”

  Sumner would have none of it. “The apologists are prone to remind the Senate that they are acting under the obligation of an oath,” he scoffed. “It is a mistake to suppose that the Senate only has heard the evidence. The people have heard it also, day by day, as it was delivered, and have carefully considered the case on its merits, properly dismissing all apologetic subtleties. It will be for them to review what has been done.”

  Privately, Sumner wrote Fessenden off as a sneak. “Had he openly joined the enemy several years ago,” Sumner said, “it would have been better for us.”

  * * *

  —

  “FOR MORE THAN two years he has set your laws at defiance; and when Congress, by a special enactment, strove to constrain him, he broke forth in rebellion against this constitutional authority,” Charles Sumner condemned Andrew Johnson and justified his vote. “Perhaps you ask still for something more. Is it a long catalogue of crime, where violence and corruption alternate, while loyal men are sacrificed and the rebellion is lifted to its feet? That also is here.”

  * * *

  —

  GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND, correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, succinctly summarized why impeachment was failing. “1. Bad articles. 2. Lame Managers. 3. Doubtful consequences.”

  Had the managers mangled their case? Should they have emphasized the larger questions of usurpation, power, and responsibility—and the consequences that might follow Johnson’s acquittal? After all, hadn’t Johnson been guilty of bartering the peace and turning the country away from the values it presumably cherished and fought for?

  * * *

  —

  “IF TWO AND two were four last February, in the mind of a Senator, we ask that they shall make four now,” said old-time abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. To the Radicals, the acquittal of Andrew Johnson was utter folly and worse. Senators Fessenden of Maine, Trumbull of Illinois, Henderson of Missouri, and Grimes of Iowa—all of them, it was said, had “died of weakness, meanness, betrayal of their county, and violation of their oaths.” They had been firm on the Tenure of Office Act and the firing of Stanton wh
en it was easy to be firm.

  Maybe a verdict of guilty would have let us think that Trumbull was intelligent, Fessenden was pure, and that Congress was immune to bribery or jobbing, Wendell Phillips said. But you just can’t trust a politician. They’re corruptible by nature. Phillips was not discouraged, and he would not disappear. The impeachment verdict means we must do more, he said, try harder, and finally carve with a sharp blade an amendment into the Constitution that guarantees citizenship for the black population of this country, guarantees the right to the ballot, to education, to land, and to equality, unassailable and tangible.

  Without such an amendment, he concluded, the aristocratic rebel power will ride roughshod over black men and black women all over again—and in just ten years. If not sooner.

  * * *

  —

  “IMPEACHMENT IS DEAD,” The Daily Memphis Avalanche exclaimed with obvious joy. “Johnson is virtually acquitted. Radicalism has gone to——, and the country is safe.” The Baltimore Sun reported that Johnson’s acquittal on the eleventh impeachment article had been received nationwide “with cordial approbation by reflecting men of all parties. Especially is this the case among business men—mercantile, mechanical and others—who are anxious to see the country quieted and trade revived.”

  Conservative Republicans shooed away the claim that Chief Justice Chase had destroyed impeachment—or that Fessenden’s pique, Grimes’ animosity, and Trumbull’s personal ambition had killed it; or that Wade’s greenback radicalism had scuttled it; or that the duplicity of Fowler and Ross had ruined it; or that there had been bribery or fraud. Conservatives believed justice had prevailed. The rectitude of Fessenden, Grimes, and Trumbull had prevailed, ending a “side-splitting farce,” as Republican Edwin Godkin wrote in The Nation.

  Many conservative—and moderate—Republicans thought the impeachment trial should now pack up its tent and go home. “We are beaten and must take it quietly,” Horace Greeley instructed John Russell Young. If the issue had been as simple as Johnson’s perversity, or even his incompetence, he should doubtless be convicted, but the impeachment of a President, a President, was no remedy for the underlying issue—although John Bigelow defined that issue somewhat oddly: that the Republicans’ stupid choice of an incompetent man to run alongside Lincoln had caused all the problems. But since Johnson had only several months more in office, Bigelow then reasoned, Johnson could do nothing more than bring more shame to his already dishonored self.

  Remove Johnson at your peril, Lyman Trumbull had argued. You’ll make him a martyr and, even worse, from Trumbull’s point of view, you’ll so weaken the executive branch of government that the President of the United States will be nothing but a figurehead. And these Republicans also believed they were more likely to win the next presidential election if they showed themselves capable of uniting. No more internal bickering. “Democrats have voted together on every interlocutory question,” George Templeton Strong warned, “and on the final decision, as a strictly partisan corps.”

  Trumbull, Fessenden, and Grimes said they supported Ulysses S. Grant, and that they’d differed with fellow Republicans on impeachment simply on the matter of Johnson’s provable guilt. The prosecution had not made its case about Andrew Johnson. “His speeches and the general course of his administration have been as distasteful to me as to any one, and I should consider it the great calamity of the age if the disloyal element, so often encouraged by his measures, should gain political ascendency,” Trumbull explained. “If the question was, is Andrew Johnson a fit person for President? I should answer, no; but it is not a party question, nor upon Andrew Johnson’s deeds and acts, except so far as they are made to appear in the record, that I am to decide.”

  Wendell Phillips said he completely understood what men like Trumbull meant. “Putting aside such causes of the Senate’s action as women, whiskey, cowardice, greenbacks, Free Masonry, Negro-hate, offices for one’s sixteen pine-tree cousins, a diseased Chief Justice, spite, dyspepsia and noodleism,” Phillips scathingly noted, “—it is evident, on the face of things, that while a very large majority of the people, and specially of the Republican party, wished its success, there was a very strong doubt among the party leaders whether such success would help the party.”

  A conviction would not help the Republican party—precisely because it would elevate Radical Senator Benjamin Wade.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Let Us Have Peace

  Ulysses S. Grant may have detested Johnson, and he may have approved of impeachment, but Republicans working hard to make him the next President regarded impeachment as a radical conspiracy aimed at stopping the Grant juggernaut. Johnson’s conviction would elevate Benjamin Wade, and Ben Wade as interim President could distribute patronage to Radical Republicans, cause inflation by circulating greenbacks, even promote legislation allowing black men—and maybe all women—to vote: incalculable damage that threatened to divide and possibly destroy the party.

  “I think the failure of the impeachment is a good thing,” John Hay declared with relief. “The Republicans lose nothing,” he added. “The party organization seems much better and stronger since than before….Weed and Raymond have wheeled into line for Grant, and all the stragglers are coming in.”

  The nomination of Grant the Silent as a full-throated Republican for President would conveniently and finally take the air out of the impeachment balloon, Hay predicted, a balloon that only those inconvenient Radicals continued to fly.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER SATURDAY’S VOTE on the eleventh article of impeachment, several senators rushed to the Chicago convention to place Ulysses S. Grant securely on the ticket. On May 20, the one-legged General Daniel Sickles, with pride and poise, led a procession of Republicans into the newly built, five-story Crosby Opera House, and General Carl Schurz, now senator-elect from Missouri, temporarily chaired the convention. Eight thousand delegates had arrived, and on the convention’s second day, General John Logan, fresh from the managers’ table at the impeachment trial, nominated General Grant for the presidency.

  A red, white, and blue pigeon flapped its wings, bursting out of the top gallery, and on the stage, as the curtain rose, Thomas Nast’s gigantic painting of General Grant and the Goddess of Liberty starkly celebrated the new birth of freedom. Grant was nominated on the first ballot by all delegates present, including James J. Harris and P.B.S. Pinchback, the first black delegates ever to attend a presidential convention. Men tossed their hats into the air, and the band played “Hail to the Chief.”

  Johnson’s acquittal on the eleventh impeachment article had effectively wrecked Benjamin Wade’s chance to snag the vice-presidential nomination, but just to make sure, circulars suggested Wade’s age essentially disqualified him—he was sixty-nine. And though Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin, whom Lincoln had dropped from his ticket in 1864 in favor of Johnson, suddenly looked good, Smiler Schuyler Colfax, the affable man serving his third term as speaker of the House, became Grant’s running mate on the fifth ballot. Smiler Schuyler had offended far fewer people than had Wade. Republicans collectively exhaled. The ticket could mean more to the country than any vote on impeachment, and Democrats could have Andrew Johnson to themselves.

  As for the Republican platform, it was broad and it was bland. It contained promises to reduce taxes, to eliminate federal corruption, to pay the national debt but sidestepped the suffrage question. Voting rights of black men were to be sustained in the South by virtue of the Reconstruction Acts. Whether black men could vote in the North would be left to the individual states. Wendell Phillips commented that if Johnson had been convicted on the eleventh article of impeachment, maybe the Republican platform would have pledged itself to something rather than to empty nothings.

  The platform also condemned Andrew Johnson. Reminding Republicans that Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanor
s, it noted that thirty-five Republican senators had quite properly voted to convict him. But neither Johnson’s conviction nor his acquittal should ultimately matter if the trial had been conducted fairly, which it had. It was therefore irrelevant how any particular senator voted. Why waste ammunition on one another when there was so much at stake in the coming election?

  “We make platforms to get men into the party—not to drive them out,” Indiana Governor Henry S. Lane cried. That’s what John Greenleaf Whittier thought as well. The Quaker poet who had been pelted with stones and mud for his abolitionism, whose newspaper office had once been sacked and burned while a crowd yelled “hang Whittier,” was singing a different tune. “Impeachment, I see, has failed,” Whittier told Henry Raymond. “Well, it is unfortunate; but let us not lament over it, nor quarrel about it, more than we can help. Our business now is to elect Grant, & in his election impeachment is not an issue at all; and whoever goes for the Republican candidate, must be recognized as a Republican, whatever his views may have been.”

  * * *

  —

  BENJAMIN WADE TOOK defeat with grace and immediately congratulated Schuyler Colfax. Andrew Johnson, hearing of Grant’s nomination, said he could easily beat Grant in November if only the Democrats would nominate him. But the Democrats didn’t want anything to do with him. “The President is surrounded by a lot of fools, who, it is said, have persuaded him that he has some chance of securing the nomination,” the journalist Jerome Stillson observed with derision. The Democratic lobbyist Sam Ward remarked, with some surprise, “I should think he had had enough of the White House pig sty!”