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EDMUND ROSS WENT on the defensive, and vindication was soon the occupation—or preoccupation—of his life. “I have borne in silence, until now, assaults on my character and motives as a member of the court, such as few, if any of my associates have endured,” he grumbled the day after the final impeachment vote. Two months later, he again spoke on his own behalf. “I do not deny that it has been my intention to support a portion of the articles of impeachment,” he said, somewhat pretentiously, “nor that I have given numbers of those who approached me on that subject to understand that such was my intention.” But didn’t men change their minds? he wanted to know. Hadn’t John Bingham, once an opponent of impeachment, changed his mind?
Ross conveniently overlooked the fact that Bingham’s change of mind came after Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act, not before. That was of no concern to Ross, who claimed he’d been singled out and badmouthed because he was a relatively new and powerless member of Congress, patriotic and honest but pursued by the unscrupulous retailer of smut and scandal—Benjamin Butler—while Ross, in his “humble way,” as he put it, had been working hard for Grant’s nomination and didn’t want to see it spoiled by an interim President.
Ross also conveniently forgot that he’d capitalized on Johnson’s acquittal. Less than two weeks after the final vote, Ross proposed that Johnson appoint a friend of his as Southern superintendent of Indian affairs. He said he hated to bother the President since it meant removing one of Johnson’s men, but, he deliberately added, “in consequence of my action on the Impeachment, that I feel constrained to ask.” After Johnson consented, Ross returned to the President, this time requesting that Johnson support a treaty ensuring that eight million acres belonging to the Osage Indians be sold to the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Railroad at a pittance of its worth. The President complied. That wasn’t enough. Ross requested that the President appoint Perry Fuller as commissioner of the Internal Revenue. Johnson again agreed, and when the Senate rejected the appointment, Johnson named Fuller as interim collector of customs in New Orleans. Even that was not enough. Early in July, Ross requested that Johnson appoint Ross’ brother as a special mail agent in Florida. That wasn’t enough either. Ross asked Johnson to appoint a friend of his as agent for the Pottawatomie Indians, another as agent for the Kiowa and Comanche Indians, and a third as surveyor general in Kansas. “I am aware that I am asking a good deal of you,” Ross again explained, “but I feel constrained to do so by the persistent efforts that are being made for my destruction.”
Ross was not the only one demanding or receiving post-impeachment favors. Johnson had attended the wedding of John Henderson and Mary Foote, whose father was then nominated as U.S. commissioner of patents. Johnson named the corrupt customs house collector Henry Smythe minister to Austria, although Smythe had been put under temporary arrest and criminal prosecution. Cornelius Wendell, the printer who’d allegedly arranged an acquittal slush fund, was appointed government director on the Union Pacific Railroad board. And Perry Fuller made Vinnie Ream’s father superintendent of warehouses in New Orleans, although within months Fuller was arrested for a scheme to defraud the government of tax revenue. Edmund Ross guaranteed the bond for Fuller’s release.
Like many conservatives, Ross defended himself by noisily blasting the Radical Republicans. Impeachment had sprung full-blown from “the malevolence of Stevens, the ambition of Butler, the theories of Boutwell, & the folly of an unthinking crowd of party followers,” the lawyer John Codman Ropes reassured William Pitt Fessenden. Ross joined the ranks of those Republicans who considered themselves moderates, not conservatives. Believing themselves merely judicious, they claimed it was “the duty of Congress to make the best of Mr. Johnson.” To celebrate their own judiciousness, they planned a public dinner in Boston to toast Fessenden for what they called his courage, his conscience, and his conviction. The invitation list included Massachusetts Governor Alexander H. Bullock and more than seventy other politicians, industrialists, Brahmins, Harvard trustees, and leading men of the area: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Francis Parkman, jurist Lemuel Shaw, industrialist Amos Lawrence, John Murray Forbes, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., James Russell Lowell, and editor Samuel Bowles: men of probity, prudence, and profound self-regard—an intellectual and often financial elect who regarded blacks and white Southerners with condescension and assumed that they knew best what served the country and their class.
Sumner regarded the Fessenden dinner as a slap in the face. Conservative Republicans certainly wanted to kick Sumner out of the Senate, although several moderates, like Sumner’s friend Edward Atkinson, pointlessly assured Sumner that they intended no insult. As it happened, Fessenden declined the dinner invitation, taking the high ground. “I offer no excuse nor apology, and ask no vindication; nor do I consider myself entitled to any special credit for courage or conscientiousness,” he replied to the New England elite. He said he paid no heed to petty squabbles with unorthodox men—by which, he meant Charles Sumner. Privately, Fessenden said he regretted Edwin Stanton’s firing and didn’t much care for Andrew Johnson, but that he’d been absolutely right to vote as he had.
To Republicans like Fessenden, the defeat of impeachment ensured the restoration of a laissez-faire government guided by the invisible hand of the best men—not by women, black people, or anyone regarded as a nut. Or by Andrew Johnson. “I think we have a better chance now than we had any right to expect so soon for reforming the party & freeing it from the burden of the sins of the extremists who have tried to usurp the leadership,” Charles Eliot Norton rejoiced. “Butler is sinking himself so low that he will hardly be able to hold his head above the mire into which he plunged with native alacrity. The other original impeachers will share his fate.” The impeachment verdict also protected the party, particularly important before a presidential election. As young Republican writer William Dean Howells, whose Radicalism lay in the future, conceded, while it had been “a serio-comic necessity…the impeachment of Presidents is hardly an ‘issue’ to inspire enthusiasm in their election.”
In Appleton, Wisconsin, a twenty-gun salute announced President Johnson’s acquittal, and an extra round was fired to honor Chief Justice Chase. Keen as ever to occupy the Executive Mansion, Chase was arduously trying to convince Democrats that he’d never really left the fold, repeating that he too loathed military despotism in the form of military governments, or commissions for the trial of civilians in peacetime. Where he differed from Democrats was on the question of slavery, though he claimed that he’d never said that Congress should interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. He did affirm that the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery “requires, in my judgment, the assurance of the right of suffrage to those whom the Constitution has made freemen & citizens.”
Making obvious his bid for the nomination by saying he did not seek it—a standard ploy—Chase did set terms on suffrage. For while conservative Republicans skated around it, Chase faced the issue head-on. “I have long been a believer in the justice & wisdom of securing to all citizens [except women] the right of suffrage,” Chase explained to New York World editor Manton Marble. “It is the best guarantee of the stability of institutions & the prosperity of communities.” He could change his party but not his principle. If nominated by Democrats, it was rumored, Chase would insist on putting the right of black men to vote into the Democratic party platform—although he probably knew that would never happen. Still, Chase pointed out that his views were well known to Democrats. Democrats had elected him to the Senate in 1849, and with a party or without one, he would now work as hard as he could to end bitterness and reunite the country, whether in or out of office.
The vagaries of American politics would thus allow Chase, the former Radical, to court Democrats, while Ulysses S. Grant, the former moderate, was the darling of the Radicals, or at least most of them.
Suffrage continued to st
ick in the craw of the country. “The one great duty before us is the reconstruction of the Southern States upon the basis of equal rights for every race and color,” William Dean Howells affirmed. Moderates wanted to keep suffrage a Southern issue, something Republicans could legislate in the former rebel states while leaving the others alone. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 had demanded that the Southern states hold new constitutional conventions with delegates elected by both black and white men, and it stipulated that their constitutions include the right of black men to vote. The state constitutions of the North, though, were not regulated in this way. They could do what they wanted.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and the two Carolinas did fulfill the conditions mandated for readmission to the Union, particularly since a fourth Reconstruction Act, passed on March 11, 1868, over Johnson’s veto, required that a simple majority of the votes cast—rather than the registered number of voters—would be necessary to ratify the new state constitutions. This would prevent what had happened in Alabama, where there were 95,000 registered black voters and 75,000 registered white voters. But only a small fraction of the registered white voters actually showed up at the polls, and though there were 70,182 votes in favor of the new state constitution—and only 1,005 against it—the overall number of voters participating in the referendum didn’t come anywhere near the requisite majority of those registered.
Charles Sumner and other Radical Republicans had argued that black male suffrage was a constitutional issue, and though many of them agreed in principle, they were uneasy about the coming presidential contest. They didn’t want to promise what they couldn’t deliver, and mostly they didn’t want to alienate the conservative and moderate wings of the party. Blacks would vote Republican anyway, they assumed, and they needed their votes in the South. So the Republican platform wound up distinguishing between suffrage for blacks in the South, which they believed necessary, and suffrage for blacks in the North, which they thought wasn’t.
And conservative Republicans decided that they’d simply done enough. Southern blacks were free. The rest of their lives was up to them. In the North, “the man of African descent is as secure as his white neighbor in the possession of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Harvard professor Sherman Adams Hill claimed. “And, however just may be the prejudice of race, which causes his disfranchisement here and there, he has slight cause to complain, so long as the blessings and privileges of a good government are his.” Edwin Godkin, editor of The Nation and at the forefront of the coming Liberal Republicans, insisted that “people are more concerned about the kind of government in which the black man is to share than about the precise mode or time in which he is to share it”—as if to say, we’re tired of this discussion. Back off; let us have peace.
The issue of suffrage would of course not disappear, neither for blacks nor for women. Yet Frederick Douglass considered black suffrage over women’s voting “certainly more urgent, because it is life and death to the long-enslaved people of this country,” as he said. “While the Negro is mobbed, beaten, shot, stabbed, hanged, burnt, and is the target of all that is malignant in the North, and all that is murderous in the South, his claims may be preferred by me.”
“The epoch turns on the negro,” Wendell Phillips declared, still able to stir large audiences. “It is not my fanaticism; it is not my prejudice; it is not a fatal conceit. Justice to him saves the nation, ends the strife, and gives us peace; injustice to him prolongs the war. You can’t help it. You may shut yours eyes to it, and say you don’t want to hear about it; but the thunders of a thousand cannons will ring it into your ears, and into the ears of your children.”
“The day is coming when the black man will vote, and he will be the balance of power,” said black leader Henry Jerome Brown at a convention of black Republicans in Baltimore. “He will then stand by well-tried and true friends.” But Republican James Doolittle argued that the races were distinct—and blacks inferior. In a fury, Irish-born Republican Senator John Conness of California confronted Doolittle. “He rises here and gives us dissertations on the inequality of men, the impossibility of the negro being the equal of the Caucasian,” Conness roared. “The distinction was not made by their Maker. We are not told that there are dividing places in Heaven for classes and castes and colors.” Doolittle chalked up Conness’ anger to Johnson’s acquittal; Radical Benjamin Wade wouldn’t be President, so Conness had lost his pew in Wade’s hypothetical cabinet.
But Charles Sumner spoke up, as Sumner always had. “There can be no State Rights against Human Rights.”
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ON FEBRUARY 25, 1869, the House of Representatives did pass legislation that would become the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing that the right to vote not be denied or abridged by any state “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, even Peter Van Winkle voted for it, as did Fessenden and Trumbull. Edmund Ross, James Grimes, and John Henderson were absent, though Henderson had introduced the resolution. Sumner abstained: true to himself, he contended that the amendment didn’t go far enough—it did not prevent the states from disqualifying voters on the basis, say, of not owning property; it said nothing about the right of a black man to hold office; it said nothing about how the amendment would be enforced.
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WHILE THE COMMITTEE investigating the impeachment conviction subpoenaed witnesses, the House of Representatives was meeting in night sessions that Henry Dawes ridiculed as discussing “one of the most important questions that absorb the public mind in this momentous crisis—none other than whether Vinnie Ream, who is supposed to have unduly influenced Ross, shall longer occupy rooms in the Capitol.” She’d had to move out of her studio so it could serve as a prison for Charles Woolley, but conservatives accused Ben Butler of spitefully targeting her.
Butler didn’t care. “I am sure we ought all to do what we can to save the country and to be refrained by no false notions of delicacy from doing our duty,” he declared. Ignoring the fusillade of abuse hurled against his military service, his success as a criminal lawyer, his character, and even his chubby face, Butler dispatched detectives who for six weeks ransacked telegraph offices, rummaged wastebaskets, and rifled desk drawers looking for proof of bribery while he and members of the committee interviewed witnesses or, in some cases, Butler interrogated them alone. Joseph Fowler called Butler a grand inquisitor feeding on the barroom gossip whispered against senators of integrity like himself.
Because Butler couldn’t firmly establish that the seven senators who’d voted for acquittal had been bought—not even Ross or Henderson—Butler himself was blamed for the President’s acquittal. He’d bungled the prosecution and then the investigation. He’d focused on Woolley instead of the real culprits, men like Seward or Weed. He’d presumably salted away thirty-six volumes of incriminating telegrams he could use to strong-arm colleagues when he needed something from them in the future. It was also said he’d offered Cornelius Wendell $100,000 for information, but since he didn’t want the bribe made public, he’d suppressed evidence. “Bosh!” Butler laughed.
Thaddeus Stevens had noted with regret that anyone could be bought, even the most intelligent and well educated. Wendell Phillips too was convinced that the “money-kings” had paid for Johnson’s acquittal. Deciding to launch his own investigation, biographer and journalist James Parton headed to Washington, and by the time he published his results in The Atlantic Monthly the next year, Parton had been convinced that “the greatest triumph of the Washington lobby was the Johnson lobby.” There was actually more than one lobby, Parton observed, naming them: “The Johnson lobby proper, who wanted to get or keep places and chances under the President; the Chase lobby, who wished to place the President under such obligations that he would drop General Hancock and take up Mr. Chase for the succession; the Pendleton lobby, whose aim was t
o secure the same advantage for Mr. Pendleton; the whiskey lobby, who wanted another year of impunity; and a ‘conservative’ lobby, who had a very lively sense of what would happen if Mr. Wade should change his quarters to the White House.”
Parton’s sources said they knew which senator pocketed exactly how much; which senator had grabbed Indian contracts; and which senator had received railroad shares more valuable than either cash or contracts. These sources knew of nighttime assignations, of customhouses that had raised huge sums and of distillers that had done the same and that, if it had been needed, these two sources had more than a million dollars stashed away. They knew who had lost at cards the night before the final vote, and who changed his vote as a result. The sources went unnamed.
Butler’s investigation didn’t distress most Democrats, and his failure to find hard proof of bribery amused them. “If he could jump Jim Crow into Tammany he would do it tomorrow,” Sam Ward derisively observed, meaning he’d put a black man in Tammany Hall if he could. To them, Butler’s apparent fixation on black people would get him nowhere. “Dissolve your committee and drop your investigation which can do no good—” Ward advised—and repay the President for the price of his acquittal ($25,000).
Sam Ward knew more than he let on. “I am proudest of the part I took in defeating the impeachment of Andrew Johnson than of any of my grand and lofty tumbling,” Ward would exclaim years later. “I contributed my money & effort & we won & saved the country from being Mexicanized.”
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THE STORY OF bribery, whatever story there was, remained so incomplete and elusive that William A. Dunning, a Columbia University academic, contacted Manton Marble in 1906, long after Johnson and Seward and Butler and Sam Ward had all died, to see what he could learn.
The Impeachers Page 41