Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (8 page)

The president continued to vacillate on whether to keep Stanton at the War Department. Musing with a senior aide, Johnson expressed admiration for Stanton’s talents, insisting he was “a most valuable man if he were not so controlled by impulses.” Yet the president admitted that Stanton was a bully who “liked to get a man at a disadvantage.” Another Cabinet member thought Stanton retained influence with the president by showing a fawning deference whenever he could. Plenty of advisers urged Johnson to cashier the wayward Secretary and bemoaned the failure to do so. McCulloch at the Treasury Department put the matter simply: Stanton attended Cabinet meetings “not as an adviser of the President, but as an opponent,” yet “the President lacked the nerve to dismiss him,” which was “a blunder for which there was no excuse.”

Though harsh, McCulloch’s verdict was just. Stanton essentially intimidated his superior for months that stretched into years. Some of this mastery over the president came from Stanton’s objective qualities. The war secretary’s close connection to Lincoln and his war service gave him a moral stature that Johnson respected. Stanton’s force of character and intellectual abilities could not be denied, not by a president who was entirely self-educated. When Stanton actually executed Johnson’s wishes, the results were swift and gratifying. The Secretary’s personal integrity could not be questioned, and extended to principles, as well; on more than one occasion, Stanton took political heat for official actions he might have blamed on Johnson. And Stanton commanded broad support in the Republican Congress.

Yet Stanton’s ability to confound Johnson also came from his peculiar personal style. Stanton’s breathtakingly bad manners could give him the initiative in conversations, shielding him from the awkwardness that a situation would create for more sensitive mortals. Stanton’s infrequent fits of charm could seem all the sweeter to those bruised by his customary disdain. By whatever means, the war secretary gained the upper hand, and kept it for a long time, over the strong-willed president he was supposed to serve.

As the months marched on, even Stanton grew sensitive to the charge of disloyalty to the president, but he never loosened his hold on his office. He professed to fear any successor who might be appointed by the president, who was “led by bad passions and the counsel of unscrupulous and dangerous men.” Johnson’s pro-South leanings, his indifference to the freedmen’s condition, his dedication to the states’ rights principles that supported secession in the first place—all persuaded Stanton that Johnson was a dangerous, dangerous man. Pledging to remain at his post until he died “with harness on,” Stanton insisted the nation was in greater peril with Johnson in office than it ever had been during the Civil War.

In the second half of 1866, Johnson wielded a sort of reverse Midas touch. One by one, his political schemes turned to dross until the fall elections delivered a crushing rejection of him and his policies.

First came the National Union Convention in Philadelphia. Convention managers provided high theater on the first day, August 12, when a Massachusetts delegate linked arms with a South Carolinian to lead a procession 7,000 strong. Despite the unifying symbolism, the meeting fell flat. The Republicans and Democrats could not agree on enough to support a new political party. The president blamed the failure on his old colleagues, the Democrats. They could not overlook his wartime alliance with the Republicans. Johnson realized he would have to go it alone, a man without a party in a time of intense party loyalties. To save his policies and his career, Johnson decided to break many of the prevailing rules of presidential deportment.

The president came out swinging. When the official proceedings of the Union convention were presented to him, his remarks challenged Congress yet again. “We have seen hanging upon the verge of the government,” he announced, “a body called, or which assumes to be, the Congress of the United States, while, in fact, it is a Congress of only a part of the states.” He predicted that “every step” taken by Congress would “perpetuate disunion” and even “make a disruption of the states inevitable.” He accused a minority in Congress of seeking to establish “despotism or monarchy itself.”

Having denied the legitimacy of Congress, Johnson set out on an unprecedented appeal to the people of the North. Nineteenth-century candidates for president rarely campaigned openly. Rather than stump for election, most candidates sat placidly at home while a team of agents spoke for them around the country. Even more, sitting presidents did not engage in active politicking to bring policy issues to the people. Johnson resolved to change all that. He was certain the people would support him once he explained the issues to them—the need to protect the sovereignty of the states, to uphold the “Constitution as it is.” His strength as a politician had always been his power as a public speaker. He would apply that strength to the struggle with Congress.

Johnson agreed to speak at a ceremony in Illinois to honor the late Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democrat who lost to Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race. The president used the trip as the pretext for a three-week “Swing Around the Circle” through the vote-rich states of the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. To ensure big crowds, Johnson brought along with him the reluctant Ulysses Grant, Admiral David Farragut, and Secretary of State Seward. The trainload of worthies traveled to Philadelphia and New York, across upstate New York and the Midwest, then down to St. Louis and back to Washington City.

In day after day of nonstop speechmaking, Johnson failed to rally Northern opinion to support him. Dignified and self-possessed in a conference room, Johnson was a different animal on a speakers’ platform or a hotel balcony, looking out over a sea of torchlit faces. His blood rose, his language coarsened, his demeanor became stormy.

In every speech, Johnson boasted of rising through many public offices to the presidency, striking a self-congratulatory note that invited deflation. He always endorsed preservation of the Union, then accused Congress and Thad Stevens of wanting to destroy it. Reflecting his experience in the rough-and-tumble of Tennessee politics, Johnson dealt harsh blows against his enemies. One supporter, political veteran Thurlow Weed of New York, remembered Johnson at the time as “aggressive and belligerent to a degree that rendered him insensitive to considerations of prudence.”

After a few stops, the president’s opponents began to stage confrontations, shouting out questions and challenges that goaded him into ever more strident pronouncements. In Cleveland, he attacked “the subsidized gang of hirelings and traducers” who opposed him; he accused Congress of “trying to break up the Government.” He had defeated the traitors in the South, Johnson thundered, and now would fight traitors in the North. In St. Louis, the president accused Congress of planning the New Orleans Riot (which was actually a police assault on a peaceful black assembly). In a self-pitying harangue, he railed against those who supposedly called him a Judas Iscariot, betraying Republican principles:

In three weeks of speechifying, Johnson’s message failed to register with much of his audience, while he did himself little good politically. Northern voters were not yet ready to abandon the Republican politicians who had won the Civil War. Future President Rutherford Hayes of Ohio dismissed Johnson’s efforts with the observation that “he don’t know the Northern people.” Some said the president was drinking again. For many, Johnson’s speeches became an object of derision. Ulysses Grant spoke for a large section of Northern opinion when he wrote to his wife, “I have never been so tired of anything before as I have been with the political stump speeches of Mr. Johnson. I look upon them as a national disgrace.” A Johnson ally estimated that the Swing Around the Circle cost the Democrats a million votes in the fall elections.

In the 1860s, many states had different election days through the autumn. Starting with Maine’s vote in early September of 1866, an unmistakable pattern formed and held true in most states. By early November, the voters had elected an overwhelmingly Republican Congress. Of 226 members of the House of Representatives, 173 were Republicans. Republicans sat in all but nine of the 52 Senate seats. The president’s offensive had backfired.

Johnson’s acrimonious campaign in the second half of 1866 triggered powerful responses. The prospect of armed violence haunted both sides of the conflict between the president and Congress. Neither was planning insurrection, but each thought the other was.

The president’s opponents feared that he aimed at a military putsch. In July, Republican Senator John Sherman of Ohio wrote his brother, General William Sherman, “I almost fear he contemplates civil war.” At a Republican caucus that month, Radical George Boutwell of Massachusetts accused Johnson of being part of a conspiracy to turn the government over to the Southern rebels. Shortly after Congress adjourned in late July, the governor of Virginia reactivated that state’s militia and petitioned the federal government for weapons. The prospect of armed Virginians in uniform chilled many Northern hearts. Johnson had the power to deny the request but did not do so. Wary of both Virginians and the president, General Grant dragged his feet in responding.

In the third week of August, shortly before his Swing Around the Circle, Johnson suspended martial law everywhere in the country. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts feared that the president was planning a coup d’état, which would mean “revolution and another civil war.” Another Republican senator remembered that the president’s supporters freely discussed the use of force against Congress, a prospect that became “rather common talk.”

Rumors focused on schemes by Johnson to replace Congress. One report had him asking his attorney general whether a Congress consisting only of Northern Democrats and Southern congressmen could supplant the hated Congress of Thad Stevens. Johnson mused to General Grant about the possibility of such an alternative Congress. Versions of this alarming conversation spread like wildfire, often including a follow-up question from the president to Grant: which side would the army support in a showdown? Grant’s reported response ranged from the Delphic “whichever side the law was on” to the steadfast assertion that the army would stand by the current Congress.

Republicans grew jumpy. Stanton told congressional allies that he and Grant feared an armed takeover by the president. An Ohio congressman formed a “club for watchfulness” in August of 1866, while Grant sent an aide to Tennessee to “ascertain all you can with reference to secret Military organizations that are rumored to be forming within the state.” Grant sent a warning to his wartime protégé, General Philip Sheridan, then commanding troops in the South.

As a precaution, Grant quietly transferred weapons away from federal arsenals in the South and canceled plans that would take him out of Washington.

The anxiety on the president’s side was equally high. Reports circulated that midwestern governors met in St. Louis to commission 30,000 “boys in blue” to march on Washington as soon as Congress convened in December. Johnson suspected the Grand Army of the Republic, the new organization of Union Army veterans. In September, he dispatched an agent to investigate its activities. The agent claimed that the GAR, with arms provided by midwestern governors, would march on Washington to unseat the president by force. Citing a report from Indiana, a Cabinet Secretary insisted that “there was a conspiracy on foot to overthrow the government and set up a military dictatorship.” A North Carolina newspaper suggested that Congress might need to be cleared of Radicals “at the point of the bayonet,” as the police in New Orleans had used bullets to clear out the Louisiana Negroes earlier that summer.

Tensions boiled higher when the pro-Johnson governor of Maryland demanded federal troops to keep the peace during that state’s November elections. A former slave state with strong Southern identification, Maryland had just revived its militia, mostly Confederate veterans. The state was angrily divided over the controversial process of deciding which ex-rebels would be allowed to vote. Though Stanton opposed the request for troops, the rest of the Cabinet supported it. General Grant refused to intervene on the side of the governor and his white supremacist party. “If insurrection does come,” he wrote the president, “the law provides the method of calling out forces to suppress it.” The election passed peaceably without federal troops.

By now, Grant’s passive resistance to the president’s initiatives had become as infuriating as Stanton’s. Realizing that he could never discharge the hero of the Civil War, Johnson sought an alternative solution: to find Grant an assignment overseas and replace him with General Sherman, who was more sympathetic to the president’s policies. In a series of testy exchanges in October, Johnson tried to dispatch Grant on a diplomatic mission to Mexico, where Benito Juárez was leading an insurgency against French forces under the Austrian Emperor Maximilian. The president started by asking the general to lead the mission. Grant declined. Then Secretary of State Seward ordered Grant to take the assignment. When Grant declined again, the disagreement played out in a tense scene before the entire Cabinet. Grant insisted that he was a military officer, so the president could not order him on a civil mission to Mexico. Then he walked out.