Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (14 page)

With the defeat of the impeachment resolution, partisans of President Johnson could abandon one effort they had just initiated. Collector Henry Smythe of New York, threatened with impeachment himself earlier in the year, had circulated a subscription among the 1,200 patronage employees of his Custom House. The subscription stated that each employee would contribute the predetermined amount next to his name, which was proportionate to the worker’s income, “for the cause of the country, and opposed to the impeachment of President Johnson.” Despite some initial resistance, all employees made the compulsory contribution, beginning at $5 apiece and rising from there. No one ever accounted for where that money ended up.

I regard [the president] as a foolish and stubborn man, doing even right things in a wrong way, and in a position where the evil that he does is immensely increased by his manner of doing it.

S
ENATOR
J
OHN
S
HERMAN
, M
ARCH
1, 1868

T
HE COUNTRY DID
not stand still while the House of Representatives wrestled with impeachment. The Freedmen’s Bureau marshaled a food relief effort in response to poor harvests in the South. While North and South failed to reconcile, East and West strained to join each other. Bold men were planning the next surge in construction of the railroad that would tie the nation together. As soon as the spring thaw permitted, the Chinese crews of the Central Pacific would resume laying track east from California. Mostly Irish crews of the Union Pacific would work west, through Wyoming. Mormon crews would pitch in when the two lines reached Utah. In New York, financial titans Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould fenced for control of the Erie Railway, a battle that would extend for months. The nation was growing. In March of 1867, Czar Alexander II of Russia had ordered negotiations to sell Alaska to the United States. The two nations quickly agreed on a price: $7 million. Soon Congress would have to appropriate the funds to pay for the deal.

The cultural rage of the winter season was the lecture tour of British novelist Charles Dickens. In Boston, the queue for tickets to his readings lasted from morning till night. Patient devotees warmed themselves in the street with strong drink and blazing stoves. Scalpers demanded as much as $15 per ticket (at least $210 in current values). New York newspapers proclaimed “Dickens Fever” and reported skyrocketing prices for tickets to his lectures.

By early January, Washington had its own literary lecturer in the form of humorist Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). When he postponed an appearance, Clemens ran a notice in a local paper explaining that his manager fell ill while listening to a rehearsal of the talk. “[U]pon my sacred honor,” Clemens wrote, “I did not think it would be so severe on him.” To speed his manager’s recovery, he pledged, “I will not read the lecture to him any more.”

For ten Southern states, the reconstruction mandated by Congress was under way. (Because Tennessee reentered the Union in 1866, it avoided this stage of Reconstruction.) Under army supervision, Southerners registered once more to vote, but this time the freedmen participated, while many ex-rebels abstained or were excluded for their disloyalty.

In Virginia, for example, 105,000 freedmen registered alongside 120,000 whites. With many whites boycotting the election, Virginia’s voters chose delegates for a convention to write a new state constitution, barely two years after a Confederate-dominated convention had adopted one under President Johnson’s sponsorship. Of the 102 delegates to Virginia’s new convention, twenty-four were blacks and a majority were Republicans. The political activity sharpened racial tensions. The army arrested a black delegate, Lewis Lindsay, for giving a speech “calculated to incite the colored against the white.” Newspapers fretted over the risk of a race war.

This new Reconstruction unleashed the political energies of blacks and the fury of whites. Emancipation had brought a social revolution, but Johnson’s state governments preserved white political dominance. Not anymore. Now the revolution reached into political life. State constitutional conventions for Alabama and Louisiana met in November, while five other states (Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida) elected delegates to their conventions. Georgia’s convention met in December. These conventions, disparaged by many Southern whites, turned political expectations upside down. Black delegates won elections and proudly took their seats. Because many black delegates had limited education, they often followed the lead of white Republicans, or of those blacks who traveled from the North to experience this unprecedented opportunity for political engagement.

Nevertheless, the reality of black men in public office provoked powerful feelings in both races. The state conventions wrote charters for state governments that would be elected by white and black voters. The new state constitutions incorporated guarantees of equal rights, Negro suffrage, and mandatory public education.

Under the new state constitutions, black men would serve as state officials, legislators, even congressmen. In a fitting turnabout, the Reconstruction governments of Southern states would provide the votes needed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Southern whites recoiled from this political revolution, appalled by the prospect of “Negro rule.” As the freed slaves entered Southern politics, white violence evolved into politically motivated intimidation.

In the White House, the president took no break from his brutal schedule. As one of his aides remembered, it was as though he wanted to do all the work of the executive branch himself. Johnson rose at dawn and reviewed papers until family breakfast at 8
A.M.
Office matters consumed him from 9 until 4, though he occasionally ducked across the hall to look in on his wife, and always welcomed the grandchildren. After a break for dinner and a walk or carriage ride, he would preside over the social event of the evening. He finished his day with more paperwork and political visitors until 11
P.M.
, often swapping information with those newsmen he trusted. Johnson was enjoying good health, free from the painful kidney stones (he called them “gravel”) that sometimes beset him. Ten years earlier, he had lost some use of his right arm when it was broken during a train derailment. The injury did not limit his political activity, though prolonged handshaking must have been a trial.

Having easily withstood the impeachment assault, and buoyed by Democratic Party advances in the 1867 elections, Johnson turned to the offensive, starting with the military. He swiftly removed two more commanders in the South—General John Pope (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida), and General Edward Ord (Mississippi and Arkansas). Southerners had complained that both men enforced Congress’s Reconstruction program rather too well. Over a six-month period, Johnson had supplanted the commanders for four of the five military districts in the South. He also transferred another general serving in Alabama, for the same reason. General Pope vividly described what was at stake in the president’s management of Reconstruction:

Southern whites instantly grasped the meaning of Johnson’s dismissal of the commanders. “The rebels are rejoicing,” complained the head of the Republican Party of Georgia, “and are now bragging that Reconstruction is a failure.”

General Grant, a far more difficult target for Johnson to strike, continued to be an irritation, and worse. The new commander in New Orleans, General Winfield Scott Hancock, reversed many of the orders of his ousted predecessor, Philip Sheridan, exactly as Johnson had intended. But then Grant reversed Hancock. Unwilling to challenge the general-in-chief directly but equally unwilling to sit silent, Johnson called upon Congress to approve an official vote of thanks to Hancock. Congress, recognizing that the gesture would be a swipe at Grant, did not comply. In both Houses, according to Clemenceau, the president’s message met laughter, “and neither body descended to the point of discussing it seriously.”

Johnson’s thorniest problem was his suspended War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, who stubbornly refused to resign. With the Senate back in session, the Tenure of Office Act required that Johnson ask that body to concur in Stanton’s permanent dismissal. The president could have thumbed his nose at the statute, asserting that the Constitution gave him authority to fire Stanton. Johnson, however, judged it unwise to flout the law, which had been written by Thad Stevens himself. Alternatively, Johnson could appoint a replacement for Stanton. If he followed that course, the Senate would never vote on whether Stanton’s dismissal was proper, but would simply decide whether to confirm a new war secretary. The president rejected this simple and reasonable strategy, doubting that the Senate would confirm anyone he would want to appoint. Had Johnson been willing to appoint a compromise choice for war secretary, the coming crisis could have been avoided altogether.

On December 12, Johnson sent the Senate a report justifying Stanton’s dismissal. In doing so, the president accepted the procedures of the Tenure of Office Act, a course that would undercut his credibility if he ever wished to challenge that statute. He explained that he requested Stanton’s resignation in August because the two men lacked “mutual confidence and general accord.” Stanton’s refusal to resign was “a defiance, and something more,” which “must end our official relations.” The president ridiculed Stanton’s claim that the Tenure of Office Act protected him; Stanton himself had judged the statute unconstitutional! Johnson also detailed specific grievances. His Reconstruction policies followed the plans drawn up by Stanton for President Lincoln, yet Stanton now spurned those policies in favor of congressional Reconstruction. Johnson complained that Stanton did not relay to him a message about the New Orleans situation in late July 1866, which degenerated into the massacre. He concluded with the incontestable assertion that he could not work with this war secretary.

On January 10, a Senate committee recommended that Stanton be restored to office. A fresh confrontation between Congress and the president was under way.

Johnson thought he had a contingency plan for this turn of events. Months before, he had extracted a commitment from Grant, as interim war secretary, that he would not physically relinquish his War Department office if the Senate did not uphold Stanton’s dismissal. This commitment gave Johnson some additional options. If Grant held onto the office in defiance of the Senate’s action, Johnson might file a court challenge to the constitutionality of the Tenure of Office Act. Or, if Grant returned physical control of the office to Johnson—which seemed to boil down to giving the president the key to the office door—the president could try to keep Stanton out of the office by rushing over another interim Secretary. But if Stanton regained control of the War Office, Johnson’s choices would be fewer and worse. Thus, the president was depending on Grant, a man he scorned as a political bumbler. Both relying on the general, and thinking him a bumbler, were mistakes. Grant would prove Johnson’s match through an extended bout of maneuvering, backstabbing, and public recriminations.

Grant later insisted that his course was clear once he realized that violations of the Tenure of Office Act could be punished by a $10,000 fine and time in jail. According to Grant, he did not make that discovery until the night that the Senate committee recommended that Stanton be reinstated. (Some suspect that Stanton himself enlightened the general on this legal point.) After discussing the law’s penalties with his staff and with General Sherman, Grant concluded he could not remain in the office if the Senate reinstated Stanton. He would not be lured into committing a crime, certainly not when he was expecting to run for president in a few months.

On the next morning, January 11, Grant and Johnson talked at the White House for over an hour. The dynamics of the conversation were complex. By now the two men had considerable experience with each other, little of it good. Neither liked or respected the other. Grant, the subordinate who rarely acted that way, was a man of instinct and action. He saw before him a long-winded, tricky politician. Johnson, the beleaguered president whose natural Southern constituency was still excluded from the government, saw a sullen, tongue-tied soldier with intellectual gifts below the norm. Both knew that Grant had been undermining Johnson for at least eighteen months while Johnson worked to undermine the Reconstruction statutes.

Later, Grant claimed to have told the president that if the Senate reinstated Stanton, he would give up the office. Johnson insisted that Grant said no such thing. With only those two men in the room, there is no way to know what happened. Perhaps Grant made his statement quietly while Johnson attempted to steamroller him, so the president simply missed it. By one account, Johnson offered to pay any fine Grant might face for violating the Tenure of Office Act. The full dimensions of their misunderstanding would emerge soon enough.

Consulting again with General Sherman, Grant concluded that the president should appoint Ohio Governor Jacob Cox as war secretary. Cox, a moderate Republican with a solid war record, stood a good chance of Senate confirmation. Sherman made the recommendation to Johnson, but the president did nothing about it. Grant and Johnson saw each other at a White House levee on the night of January 13, but neither mentioned the problem with Stanton. And so it festered.

While Grant and Johnson were misunderstanding each other on January 11, the Senate debated Stanton’s fate in secret session. The senators voted 35 to 6 to restore him to his office, on a straight party vote. Why would Senate Republicans restore to office a secretary of war whom the president could neither trust nor work with? How could that situation serve the nation? The principal factor had to be blazing Republican anger. One observer thought the Radicals gained courage and energy during Congress’s holiday recess. Certainly, Johnson had enraged his opponents anew when he removed Generals Pope and Ord from Southern commands. Many Republican senators supported Stanton solely because Johnson wanted him out.

On the morning after the Senate’s action, Grant took a few mundane steps that launched the nation toward its first presidential impeachment. He went to his office at the lead-colored brick building that held the War Department, a half-block west of the Executive Mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. After locking and bolting the door from the outside, he gave the key to his adjutant. Then he left for his other office at Army Headquarters. There, Grant sent a letter to Johnson acknowledging that the Senate had restored Stanton and thereby removed him as interim secretary of war. For the rest of the day, the general-in-chief bounced around Washington City like a pinball.