Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (36 page)

In view of Cooper’s central role in the bribery schemes during the impeachment trial, his resort to bribery in the Tennessee Senate contest seems unremarkable. The twist in the story is Johnson’s supposed repudiation of Cooper’s bribery. Was the Senate seat not worth the price? Had he grown weary of purchasing votes and making shady deals?

Johnson’s return to Greeneville was not a happy one. Once resettled, he described himself as “so solitary as though I were in the wilds of Africa.” He wrote in December 1871, “I long to be set free from this place forever.” He ran for Congress in 1872, losing again. In 1875, he tried again for a Senate seat. This time, at the age of sixty-seven, he won.

Johnson managed only one major speech in his return to the Senate. On March 20, 1875, he took the floor to accuse Grant of imposing military despotism in Arkansas and Louisiana. Johnson also accused Grant of seeking a third term in office, predicting that if there were a third term, “farewell to the liberties of the country.” Johnson quoted from his much-loved Addison’s
Cato
, imploring Grant to discharge his military legions from the South and restore the Constitution in that region. The new senator expressed both disdain for the new constitutional amendments and undiminished fealty to the cause of states’ rights. During a long congressional recess, Johnson suffered a stroke at his daughter’s farm in Elizabethton, Tennessee. A second stroke carried him away two days later, on July 30, 1875. Three of his surviving children were with him.

Five thousand thronged the funeral in Greeneville, though his widow could not attend. Former Senator Fowler, whose vote helped save Johnson’s term in office, delivered a eulogy. Johnson’s body was wrapped in an American flag with thirty-seven stars. His head rested on his well-worn copy of the Constitution.

The Grant presidency, though it lasted for eight years, was inglorious. The former general seemed smaller in civilian office, sometimes inattentive. In sharp contrast to Johnson, Grant delegated much responsibility. A secretary who worked for both men found that Grant could dispatch work in one day that would take Johnson many days.

Grant’s administration was rocked by scandals that reached his war secretary and his chief of staff. Grant retained modest qualities that are admirable in a human being but did not serve him well as the nation’s leader. When urged that a St. Louis butcher was not qualified for an appointment, the president explained that when times had been hard for the Grant family, that man sold him meat on credit and loaned him money. “I intend to appoint this German butcher,” Grant finished, “if it bursts the Republican party.”

Under Grant, the federal government made efforts to protect the freedmen. The Justice Department effectively suppressed the Ku Klux Klan, securing criminal convictions of some 600 Klansmen. Though few went to prison, the campaign succeeded. For a time, antiblack violence flickered out in the South. Congress adopted more civil rights legislation in the early 1870s. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed the right to vote to all Americans, though it was incompletely honored for the next nine decades.

By the time Grant left office in early 1877, Southern violence against blacks had revived. The tangled politics of Reconstruction snarled the presidential election of 1876. Democrat Samuel Tilden won a narrow victory in the popular vote, and had an 18-vote margin in the electoral college before votes arrived from the last three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Each of those states, however, returned two competing vote totals with opposite outcomes, each certified by a different, apparently official body. Many political agents (including Cincinnati lawyer Charles Woolley) spread cash around the three state capitols to acquire the results they wanted. When the election dispute landed in Congress, and then before a special commission, Republicans lined up Southern Democratic support for their candidate, Rutherford Hayes, by promising to withdraw federal troops from the South. That was the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Solid South. For the next four generations, few blacks in the South voted, most whites voted Democratic, and the principal success strategy for blacks was to leave. Andrew Johnson’s vision for his region was realized.

Surely God is on our side, for we have done what we could to ruin ourselves, and yet we have failed to do it.

E
DWIN
S
TANTON

A
NDREW JOHNSON’S IMPEACHMENT,
like the entire Reconstruction era, is one of the Rorschach blots of American history. Scavenging through this political and legal train wreck, historians and writers have drawn very different lessons, vividly illustrating the transitory nature of historical judgments.

Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, Andrew Johnson was celebrated as a healer of the sectional divisions of the war, while the impeachers were depicted as hate-filled gorgons who wished only to oppress noble Southern whites. Many writers insisted that Johnson saved the nation from congressional Radicals who lusted to destroy the presidency and Southern culture. Books by two future presidents, Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, presented both contentions. Wilson portrayed Reconstruction as “the veritable overthrow of civilization in the South,” which placed the “white South” under the heel of the “black South.” Kennedy endorsed the view that Edmund Ross’s vote was “the most heroic act in American history.” A chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, proclaimed that the importance of the case “can hardly be overstated” because Johnson’s acquittal preserved “our tripartite federal system of government.”

Popular culture followed this line. No early film was more powerful than D. W. Griffith’s silent epic
The Birth of a Nation
, released in 1915, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan for staving off the horrors of black rule in the South. The abolitionist villain of the film, who endorses election fraud to empower blacks, was blatantly modeled on Thaddeus Stevens. Twenty-five years later, Hollywood reprised the theme in
Tennessee Johnson
. Strong-jawed Van Heflin portrayed Johnson contending against nasty old Thad Stevens, played this time by Lionel Barrymore (the actor who epitomized aging evil as Mr. Potter in
It’s a Wonderful Life
).

By mid-century, the emergence of the civil rights movement began to change perspectives on Reconstruction. Johnson’s solicitude for white Southerners seemed less admirable. His abandonment of the freedmen seemed misbegotten. His stubborn belief in the states’ rights values of the pre–Civil War Constitution began to look like a bullheaded failure to notice how the war had revolutionized the nation. Johnson’s defense lawyer, Benjamin Curtis, captured many of these elements in a short description: “He is a man of few ideas, but they are right and true, and he could suffer death sooner than yield up or violate one of them. He is honest, right-minded, and narrow-minded; he has no tact, and even lacks discretion and forecast. But he is as firm as a rock.”

The impeachment trial of 1868 seethes with contradictions that have fostered equally contradictory views. As one congressman wrote later, Johnson “was impeached for one series of misdemeanors, and tried for another series.” For many impeachers, Johnson had to be removed because he so effectively confounded congressional Reconstruction. Wielding his veto pen, his patronage powers, his ability to pardon ex-rebels, and his attorney general’s willingness to misconstrue legislation, the president fought tenaciously against Congress’s attempt, as he saw it, to Africanize the South. Johnson was uninterested in negotiation or compromise; his goal was obstruction. Even that was not enough to get him impeached. The first two impeachment attempts failed because they were overtly political, without any superficial gloss that Johnson had violated a criminal law. Despite a three-fourths Republican majority, the House of Representatives would not impeach the president unless it could accuse him of something that felt like a crime.

Stupidly, Johnson remedied that shortcoming when he sent Lorenzo Thomas to replace Stanton as war secretary. By flagrantly violating the Tenure of Office Act, he handed Stevens and the Radicals exactly the weapon they longed for. The president had incontestably committed a crime, or at least a high misdemeanor. Within days, the House adopted its impeachment resolution.

From that high-water mark, the impeachment effort bogged down in the legal arcana of the Tenure of Office Act and of impeachment itself. The schizophrenic nature of impeachment—a political process for removing a leader through judicial-like processes—vexed the effort, from the drafting of the impeachment articles, to the presentation of evidence, to the closing arguments. Ultimately, Stevens’s unswerving view that impeachment was a political process was vindicated in part: the best chance to remove Johnson was under Article XI, which largely charged him with being an unfortunate president, not under those articles accusing him solely of violating a statute.

In the final days before the Senate vote, the political character of impeachment, which the House had rejected when it refused to adopt impeachment articles only months earlier, became undeniable. Johnson advocates and opponents lobbied fiercely. Political deals were struck, notably the personal assurances Johnson gave to Senator Grimes and the appointment of General Schofield as war secretary. Another battle—one fueled by greed, patronage promises, and cold cash—raged in murky corners where Butler and his spy network struggled against Edmund Cooper, the corrupt Kansans, and the Astor House group. One last political reality helped determine the outcome of the trial: the prospect of Ben Wade as president. “Andrew Johnson is innocent,” one newspaper wrote after the acquittal, “because Benjamin Wade is guilty of being his successor.”

Some of the Republicans who supported impeachment, including Ulysses Grant, later expressed remorse over the episode. After all, the republic made it through the last nine months of Johnson’s presidency without any terrifying crises. The overheated rhetoric about the Great Criminal seemed hard to justify after Johnson had shrunk back to human scale, or less. The passion for impeachment began to seem unreal, a fever of the moment that would have cured itself. Johnson’s defense—that conviction would damage the constitutional structure by weakening the presidency—seemed more powerful.

The regrets of hindsight, though, blinked at the exigencies of that moment in 1868 when the legacy of the Civil War seemed to hang in the balance. “An overwhelming majority of the loyal Union men North and South,” recalled Carl Schurz, “saw in President Johnson a traitor bent upon turning over the National Government to the rebels again, and ardently wished to see him utterly stripped of power.” When Johnson refused to negotiate over legislation with the vetoproof Republican majorities in Congress, his influence shriveled. When he used his executive powers to frustrate congressional policy, Congress adopted the Tenure of Office Act and the requirement that only General Grant could issue orders to the military. By systematically eliminating or restricting executive powers, those laws posed a far greater threat to the constitutional structure than impeachment did. Indeed, by February 1868, impeachment was the remaining tool for expressing Congress’s titanic frustration with Johnson. At a time when many feared that blood would run in the streets, impeachment was an essential safety valve, providing—as Ben Franklin, eighty years before, had hoped it would—an alternative to political violence. The legalistic process of impeachment slowed events down, allowing cooler reflection and the consideration of consequences.

Much of the still-accepted wisdom about the Johnson impeachment is wrong. Johnson is sometimes portrayed as the true successor to Abraham Lincoln, reaching out the hand of fellowship to vanquished Southerners. After all, this argument goes, his initial plan for Southern state governments in 1865 had been developed for Lincoln before the assassination. Lincoln’s closest adviser, Secretary of State Seward, performed the same role for Johnson and steadfastly insisted that the Tennessean acted as Lincoln would have. Embracing this theory, John Kennedy agreed that Johnson was “determined to carry out Abraham Lincoln’s policies of reconciliation with the defeated South.”

This theory, however, unrealistically assumes that Lincoln was incapable of changing his course to respond to events. Lincoln was far too good a politician to alienate Congress, as Johnson did. Lincoln was far too strong a leader to accept meekly the black codes and gruesome violence of the restored Southern states, as Johnson did. And Lincoln was far too compassionate a man to ignore the suffering and oppression of the freedmen and Southern Republicans, as Johnson did. That Seward embraced Johnson as Lincoln’s successor reveals more about the secretary of state than it does about Johnson’s stewardship of Lincoln’s legacy. Seward shared with Johnson a lack of concern either for Negro rights or white Southern terrorism. At the end of his long career, having survived a brutal assassination attempt and the deaths of his wife and daughter, Seward desired peace and union far more than he cared about justice. But Johnson, to whom he pledged his all, could bring neither peace nor union.

After the war, the entire nation—North and South—had to unlearn the habits of rage and hate. Lincoln understood that and had begun to bend every energy to that goal. Johnson, in contrast, fed the fires of rage and hate. It was simply his rigid, combative nature. Far from being Lincoln’s political heir, Johnson squandered Lincoln’s legacy. At a most delicate moment in our history, when greatness of spirit was needed, the man from Tennessee could not be more than the forceful, intelligent, and intransigent politician he had always been. The times demanded more. Johnson’s rise from abject poverty to the White House is an inspiring story, but his presidency was so calamitous that it can only be seen as a tragedy.

Many Republicans joined to resist Johnson’s benighted policies after the war, but their undeniable leader was Thaddeus Stevens. A complex, sometimes ruthless man, Stevens sought to expand freedom and equality with sound strategic instincts and a single-minded focus that intimidated his contemporaries and those who have come after. His legacy includes the Fourteenth Amendment, which transformed the nation long after his death. The Reconstruction legislation championed by Stevens worked imperfectly, to be sure, but it honorably aimed to provide physical security and basic rights to the freedmen so they could become full participants in American society. Had he been granted six more months of health, Stevens likely would have won a Senate conviction and driven Johnson from the White House. It is long past time to reclaim Thaddeus Stevens as a great American figure.

Conversely, the myth should be abandoned that there was much of heroism in the acquittal votes of Edmund Ross and John Henderson. The national pantheon should be closed to those who trade votes for cash and patronage favors. As for the denials of misconduct offered by Ross and Henderson after the trial, Henderson’s own observation as a prosecutor is irresistible: anyone capable of committing the crime is capable of denying it.

The notion has been widespread that the votes of the seven defectors “saved” either the presidency or the Constitution, or both. For John Kennedy, Ross’s vote “may well have preserved for ourselves and posterity constitutional government in the United States.” He quotes with approval the self-justifying claims of Senator Ross himself, who insisted twenty-five years after the trial that “the independence of the executive office as a coordinate branch of the government was on trial.” The presidency, according to Ross and Kennedy, was at risk of being “ever after subordinated to the legislative will.” This, too, is wrong.

Johnson’s acquittal did not revive a weak and passive presidency. Indeed, exactly the opposite happened. Johnson’s presidency was stronger than the office would be again until the 1890s. Lincoln exercised unprecedented powers during the Civil War. He called on the states to provide hundreds of thousands of soldiers and proclaimed a blockade of the South. His Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the seceded states. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus in states that did not secede and hired an army of bureaucrats to collect the taxes needed to support a great military. No longer at war, Andrew Johnson’s administration still collected the income tax and maintained an occupying army in ten Southern states. Johnson used every shred of executive power to battle Congress toe-to-toe for three years, pressing his own vision of reviving Southern state governments and Southern society with minimal federal intrusion. Indeed, he fought Congress so well that he brought on his own impeachment. For the next two decades, executive initiative would recede as Congress asserted itself as the dominant power in the national government.

The related claim has been made that Johnson’s acquittal avoided a devastating precedent that would have sapped the power of future presidents, leaving them dangling at the end of strings manipulated by a malign Congress. In this vein, one historian has denounced the impeachment as “the most insidious assault on constitutional government in the nation’s history,” which threatened to alter the constitutional scheme forever. Again, the dramatic assertion is wrong.

What if Johnson had been convicted and removed from office? Would Ben Wade, in ten months as president, have changed the course of American history? That seems unlikely in the extreme. Would Ulysses Grant still have been elected president? Most likely, yes, though some Republicans feared a popular backlash against their party if they succeeded in deposing President Johnson. Would future Congresses have hastened to impeach and remove future presidents with wild abandon? That is difficult to imagine.

In most presidencies, impeachment has been irrelevant. After all, it requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict a president. Most later presidents either enjoyed sufficient support in Congress, or managed not to enrage huge numbers of congressmen and senators, so impeachment never became part of the national conversation. More than all of his predecessors and successors as chief executive, Andrew Johnson was uniquely well suited to become a target for impeachment: the opposing party enjoyed a three-fourths majority in both houses of Congress, he disagreed with that majority on an explosive political issue (Reconstruction), and he aggressively pursued a policy of confrontation and obstruction over that issue, repeatedly vetoing congressional legislation. The wonder is not that he was impeached, but that Congress took so long to do it and then failed to convict him.