The Impeachers

by Brenda Wineapple

  Doubtless, he noticed the changes in Congress he’d worked hard to prevent. The first black member of the Senate had been Hiram Rhodes Revels, who’d occupied the seat previously held by Jefferson Davis, and Blanche K. Bruce, born a slave in Virginia, was currently the new senator from Mississippi. Pinckney Pinchback of New Orleans had been the first black governor of Louisiana, and he was waiting to be sworn in as senator.

  In the House of Representatives, John Menard of Louisiana, the first black man ever elected to Congress, arrived in Washington in January 1869, and though Democrats successfully challenged his election, he addressed the House, the first black man ever to do so. As a friend noted, “the ice is now broken.” Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, born a slave, then became the first black congressman. South Carolina’s at-large representative had been Reverend Richard H. Cain, another black man, who would be re-elected in 1876. South Carolina also sent Robert De Large to the House, as well as the renowned Robert Brown Elliott, who alleged that former Confederates, now considered respectable, were cheering on the Klan. From Georgia came Jefferson Long, the only black congressman from Georgia throughout the nineteenth century; from Alabama, Benjamin Turner; from Florida, Josiah T. Walls, teacher and lawyer, also born a slave. “The whirligig of time has brought about its revenges,” black schoolteacher Charlotte Forten had said.

  Time had wrought other changes too, for the old stagers had been leaving the stage. Benjamin Wade had already failed to win re-election to the Senate, and in 1869, the fifty-five-year-old Edwin Stanton, his health ruined by the long siege in the War Department, breathed his last—just after President Grant, in a gesture of gratitude and mercy, appointed him to the Supreme Court. Fessenden, Grimes, and Van Winkle had all died within two years after they voted to acquit Johnson, and a weakened William Seward caught a fatal cold in the fall of 1872. Chief Justice Salmon Chase died after a stroke in the spring of 1873, and Charles Sumner suffered a massive heart attack the next March.

  The eloquent Robert Brown Elliott was selected to deliver a funeral oration for Sumner, who’d been pushing for a new civil rights bill, which would prohibit racial discrimination in schools, churches, hotels, burial grounds, and also in jury selection. Just before his death, Sumner had begged Representative George Frisbie Hoar to get the legislation passed. It did, thanks in no small part to Ben Butler’s tenacity, though it passed without the clause mandating integrated schools. President Grant signed the bill into law in 1875, the year Johnson returned to Washington.

  Still associated with patronage politics and chicanery of all kinds, Ben Butler had continued to fight for Radical issues: that federal bonds be paid with greenbacks, that women have the vote, that working days be shortened to eight hours. And the scent of corruption followed him wherever he went. After losing and regaining his seat in the House of Representatives, in 1879 Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts, much to the horror of the Brahmins. For the liberal wing of the Republican party had been pecking away at the foundations of Radical Reconstruction. Free traders, civil service crusaders, and for the most part advocates of hard money, they included Congressman James Ashley, the man who had first introduced articles of impeachment against President Johnson, as well as journalists Whitelaw Reid and Murat Halstead of The Cincinnati Commercial. Even old Democrat William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post signed up, and the Republican weathercock Horace Greeley. “What the South wants now is not military commanders, and carpet-bag Congressmen, and stump orators, and collectors of internal revenue, but missionaries,” Greeley’s Tribune declared.

  Before drifting to the Democrats, Lyman Trumbull joined this Liberal conclave of these so-called missionaries, and so had former Radicals and once blunt Johnson-haters like Anna Dickinson, who in front of a large audience wondered why, if the war had in fact ended, the government insisted on its military occupation of the South. The war was over; freedmen were citizens. “Before the law they stand on a level with the whitest man here. [Applause] That being the case there is no need and there should be no excuse for special legislation for any special class of people, since there is none such in the Republic. [Applause, again.]” The time had come to clasp hands, embrace amnesty, to welcome former Confederates in the body politic.

  “Liberal Republicanism is nothing but Ku-Klux-Klanism disguised,” Wendell Phillips exclaimed. After his election to the Georgia House of Representatives, Henry McNeal Turner, a black preacher and politician, was hounded by the Klan, denied his legislative seat, his church torched. “We meet the relics of slavery in the railroad cars, in the churches, and everywhere, but above all, we meet them when we come up for civil and political rights,” Turner declared. Until President Grant more or less broke up the Klan, it had continued to rampage through the South, targeting black voters, office-seekers, teachers, anybody speaking out or learning how to read and write. But new groups, like White Liners, emerged, often with ties to the Democratic party. On Easter Sunday, 1873, a white paramilitary group killed more than eighty black men in Grant Parish, Louisiana, where black men controlled the local government. The men accused of the murders went free. Congressman Robert Brown Elliott went so far as to accuse New York’s Tammany Hall of funneling money to the South to keep up the violence and get the Democrats back into power.

  Linking the increased number of crimes against black men and women to the war against various Indian tribes in the West, Wendell Phillips insisted over and over that “the great poison of the age is race hatred.” Still considered crazy or foolish or both, Phillips had not slid backward. The struggle for equality was far from over. “When I see that Capitol at Washington, with its pillared halls crowded with black and white, Indian and Saxon, Christian, Pagan and Jew, looking up with the same gratitude to the same banner, and uttering the same shibboleth of nationality in a hundred tongues,” Phillips said, “I shall feel that the American Anti-Slavery Society has done its work, and that the epoch is ended.” It had not ended, not yet, not by a long shot.

  “We turned around, and instead of looking fearlessly and relentlessly in the face of the great problem, we went to work and called up our magnanimity,” Phillips again took to the stump. “We forgot the war record. You would have thought we had been out on a picnic.” And magnanimity, what is it? Phillips asked, when the magnanimous Yankee claims that “New Orleans is an idle tale, and Memphis is a romance, and there never was any such man as Forrest.”

  But Phillips’ audience was increasingly consumed by getting and spending. “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct forces in American politics,” The New York Times patronized. “They represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party have outgrown.”

  The winds cooling whatever ardor there may have been for a Phillips or a Garrison were blowing in Johnson’s direction. “I am only trying to carry out the measures Mr. Lincoln would have done had he lived,” Johnson had told his bodyguard. In coming years, that would become scripture: Johnson had been simply trying to execute Lincoln’s policy of malice toward none when he was viciously thwarted by the implacable Furies known as the Radicals.

  Those who insisted Johnson was only following Lincoln’s lead conveniently forgot that Lincoln had said, just days before being shot, that since slavery had caused the war, this terrible war would be waged “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” Lincoln had not blinked. Despite his penchant for kindness and mercy, there was no reason to suppose he would have betrayed a people that he’d fought hard to free.

  Like Lincoln, those who understood that slavery had caused the war also understood how it was slavery that lay behind Johnson’s impeachment. And thus not to eli
minate the monstrous power of slavery or its aftereffects, and not to prevent its recurrence in any form, Charles Sumner declared, “leaves the country prey to one of the most hateful tyrannies of history.”

  To forget, then, that it was slavery, pernicious slavery, that lay behind the impeachment of Andrew Johnson is to ignore Lincoln’s response to secession, to the war, and hence to slavery itself. “If slavery is not wrong,” Lincoln had said, “nothing is wrong.”

  To forget the reasons why Andrew Johnson was impeached, to denude or belittle them, ignores how a divided, culpable nation had destroyed so many lives, and how it then came near to destroying itself. If those reasons are forgotten, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson seems unreasonable or ludicrous. It was neither.

  The impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson represented yet another attempt to preserve the Union and free the slaves, which, to the impeachers, were the self-same thing: to preserve the Union meant creating a more perfect one, liberated at last from the noxious and lingering effects of an appalling institution that treated human beings as property.

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  THAT SLAVERY AND its effects lay at the heart of Johnson’s impeachment does not suggest that the verdict was wholly unjust or the trial improperly conducted. Certainly, and despite the various and reasonable reservations about the chief justice’s behavior and motivations, thirty-five men of good faith voted to convict Johnson—and some men of good faith had voted to acquit him.

  A strong and sound case had been made by both sides, despite the sniping and the grandstanding, and despite the legal pyrotechnics. Underlying questions about the meaning of impeachment had been deftly argued, and they were not finally settled, nor could they be. Even now, those questions are not settled: was impeachment to be understood as a judicial matter, where the Senate decided if an actual law or statute had been broken; or was impeachment designed to punish malfeasance in office, “where there was no actual crime committed,” as Thaddeus Stevens had reasoned. And Charles Sumner had made a good point: in the matter of Andrew Johnson, or perhaps impeachment generally, the violation of a law and malfeasance in office were not unconnected. “As well separate the Siamese twins,” he explained, “as separate the offences now charged from that succession of antecedent crimes with which they are linked.”

  Nor was one specific issue, brilliantly examined from both points of view, immaterial: that is, whether a President, and not an ordinary citizen, might test the constitutionality of a law by violating it, whether or not you argued that Andrew Johnson had indeed violated a law or whether that law had been ambiguously worded.

  That the impeachment of a President is a court of last resort, solemnly undertaken, was amply and ably demonstrated. Congress had been reluctant to impeach Johnson, but many impeachers believed that, after a war that separated the Union, the fate of the country was at risk. Yet they were forced to wait until no one could wait any longer. Certainly not all the impeachers were without their failings, but many did firmly and forcefully maintain that impeachment implied a commitment to—and responsibility for—a just nation.

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  WELCOMING HIM BACK, a large bouquet of flowers had been placed on Andrew Johnson’s polished desk in the Senate. Faulting President Grant and the scandals associated with his administration, The Nation gushed that Johnson’s comeback augured a new age of personal integrity. Thurlow Weed, too, eagerly praised Johnson in order to damn Grant. The country could rejoice: Johnson was an honest man, and these were dishonest times. As for Johnson’s impeachment: it had been triggered by a delusion.

  Even some of the impeachers were now voicing regret. With hindsight—and growing conservatism—several former Radicals repudiated their vote. Congressman George Julian, who had fought slavery for thirty years, said the impeachment had been cooked up by partisans in a reckless moment, though Julian did concede that the Civil War had understandably unnerved the country. Congressman James G. Blaine likewise recalled that at the time of the verdict, the “cool-headed” Republicans regarded it as a “fortunate exit from an indefensible position.”

  Blaine complimented himself as a man in possession of a very cool head. It was true, he said, that Johnson had been guilty of trying to obstruct passage of the Fourteenth Amendment; of ignoring the rights and safety of the formerly enslaved; of a willingness to return the reins of power to the formerly rebellious; and of insisting that the black man be denied the vote but counted in determining the number of representatives to send to the House. It was true that Johnson bore responsibility for the slaughters at Memphis and New Orleans. “Could the President have been legally and constitutionally impeached for these offenses,” Blaine continued, “he should not have been allowed to hold his office for an hour beyond the time required for a fair trial.” That is, though the list of Johnson’s transgressions was long, Johnson had been tried on the technicality known as Tenure of Office Act, which would be repealed in 1887.

  His acquittal had therefore been correct, he claimed, and Blaine’s own vote a function of frenzied politics and bad times.

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  MANY OF THE men in Congress who’d voted to impeach Andrew Johnson back in 1868 offered to shake Johnson’s large hand, although privately they said they were glad he possessed far less power these days. Several colleagues asked him to keep his mouth shut. They may have known he intended to settle old scores, and they should have known the man could never resist an audience. In Washington less than a month, Johnson delivered a harangue on the Senate floor. Patting himself on the back as the lonely Constitution-crusader, he blasted Grant as the military despot trampling on the liberties of the nation.

  Sneering innuendos won him few friends. Here was Andrew Johnson, it was said, a village alderman who rose up to be one of the greatest criminals of the age.

  In the galleries sat Frederick Douglass and also Phoebe Couzins, who was soon to be the country’s first female lawyer. They symbolized the present and the future. Johnson was the past come alive again. It was ominous.

  When he finished speaking, the galleries emptied, largely in disgust. Andrew Johnson had not discovered the better angels of his nature.

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  IMPEACHMENT HAD EVIDENTLY been designed to remedy peculiar situations for which there were no remedies. The impeachment of a sitting President was uncharted territory. Given the somewhat ambiguous instructions in the Constitution, it is largely uncharted to this very day. It was successfully used to threaten Richard Nixon, who resigned from office to escape impeachment, and it was waged with partisan fury against William Jefferson Clinton. But the walls did not come tumbling down. For the framers of the Constitution considered that if impeachment removed the President from office, the office of the President—the presidency itself—would remain intact. That was their aim.

  In 1868, the situation was far more serious, the consequences more far-reaching, than those of Richard Nixon’s bungled burglary or of Clinton’s peccadillos. The country had been broken apart, men and women lay dead. And yet the nation lurched toward a renewed sense of itself, ready with the opportunity, for the first time, of fulfilling its promise of a free and fair republic in which the blessings of liberty and justice were secured for everyone. Reasonably and with passion, the impeachers had argued that the Constitution allowed the removal of a President precisely to protect and preserve—and perfect—this republic. They had been undertaking this work, despite Andrew Johnson, for three years, waging impeachment as a threat, and moving ahead with the reconstruction legislation he hated.

  But in 1868, there was the matter of both the law and the man, this President, this Andrew Johnson, who had proved even to his supporters—there were always fewer and fewer—that he was incompetent, inadequate, unfit for office, and a menace to the welfare of the people, all the people, he had sworn to serve. The impeachers believed tha
t with Andrew Johnson, a man who was not an adroit leader, not a supple thinker, and not a humanitarian but a man who’d repeatedly vetoed postwar legislation, imperiled the lives of at least four million people, sought to inflame racial tensions, render black citizens defenseless, and restore civic power to slaveholders, who’d insulted Congress as well as individuals, and who had coarsened public discourse—that with this man, this President who would and did break the law, no future worth the many hopeful lives lost on the battlefield, in the cities and the countryside, would ever be possible.

  It was therefore preferable—necessary—to impeach Andrew Johnson, hopefully to convict and remove him from office, and then to bear the consequences.

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  DURING THE CONGRESSIONAL recess, just four months after he’d returned to Washington, Andrew Johnson died of a stroke while visiting one of his daughters. Buried in Greeneville, Tennessee, at his request, he was wrapped in the American flag, his head placed on a copy of the U.S. Constitution.

  In retrospect, a modern biographer generously eulogized him as a child of his time who failed to grow with it. True, he never grew into the presidency but rather clung to opinions benighted at best, and his legacy was that of white supremacy and spite. Yet under his watch, the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified, and in spite of his obvious displeasure and the obstructionist campaign he’d mounted against them, the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments would soon help complete the structure the impeachers had envisioned: a house not divided but inhabited by equals, free and fair.

  True too that Andrew Johnson had been saved largely through the generosity of his enemies who, though they did not care for him, allowed him to serve out his term. Yet, with that, the impeachers had done the best they could—and their best was far better than that of Andrew Johnson. As for the impeachment itself: it had proceeded in an orderly, even elegant fashion despite its being a somewhat improvised affair and despite the corruption or bribery and self-interest that gnawed at its edge or threatened its execution. The arguments it had inspired were cogent, lucid, and genuine, and were initiated by the very process that tested, renewed, and again sustained the government, this time without a war.