The Man Who Saved the Union (63 page)

Grant’s plea failed. Johnson understood where his political support, such as it was, lay. The Republicans would never accept him; his sole hope for continuation in power was to expand his base among the
Democrats, including those who called for Sheridan’s removal. Besides, he believed the principle of executive independence was at stake. If he couldn’t remove Stanton and reassign Sheridan, the presidency might become an impotent appendage of the legislature. He reiterated his instruction to Grant, who duly withdrew Sheridan from Texas.

The decision made Grant realize the political waters were deeper than he thought. “
I feel that your relief from command of the 5th District is a heavy blow to reconstruction,” he told Sheridan. “The act of removal will be interpreted as an effort to defeat the law and will encourage opposition to it.… I do not know what to make of present movements in this capital, but they fill me with alarm.” To William Sherman, who offered sympathy at Grant’s awkward position, he replied, “
It is truly an unenviable one, and I wish I had never been in it. All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations, and act only from motives of pure patriotism and for the general good of the public, has been destroyed. An inside view proves too truly very much the reverse. I am afraid to say on paper all I fear and apprehend.”

W
hen the Republicans returned to Washington in November, they were spoiling for a fight. A first attempt in the House to vote articles of
impeachment failed when a majority decided that, though
Johnson had made himself obnoxious, he hadn’t committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” specified by the Constitution as sole grounds for removal. If Johnson had been looking to patch over his differences with the Republicans, he could have taken this as an opportunity. But he was as determined as they were to have matters out, and he stood on his right to remove Stanton.

Grant again found himself in the crossfire. Sherman was in Washington that winter crafting a new code of army regulations. “
Our place of meeting was in the room of the old War Department, second floor, next to the corner room occupied by the Secretary of War, with a door of communication,” Sherman remembered. “While we were at work it was common for General Grant and, afterward, for Mr. Stanton to drop in and chat with us on the social gossip of the time.” As the controversy between Johnson and the Republicans intensified, Grant told Sherman that he had only recently read the tenure of office law carefully. “It was different from what he had supposed,” Sherman said. “In case the Senate did not consent to the removal of Secretary of War Stanton, and he (Grant) should hold on, he should incur a liability of ten thousand dollars and five years’ imprisonment.” Grant was uncomfortable heading the War Department on even an interim basis; the prospect of prison and financial ruin made continuing in the post utterly impossible. Sherman asked him if he had told this to Johnson. He said he had not but would do so soon.

What happened next became a subject of rancorous disagreement. “
Learning on Saturday, the 11th instant”—that is, of January 1868—“that the Senate had taken up the subject of Mr. Stanton’s suspension,” Grant wrote Johnson in subsequent recapitulation, “after some conversation with Lieutenant General Sherman and some members of my staff, in which I stated that the law left me no discretion as to my action should Mr. Stanton be reinstated, and that I intended to inform the President, I went to the President for the sole purpose of making this decision known and did so make it known.” Johnson at their meeting—on January 14—disputed Grant’s interpretation of the tenure law, saying that he had appointed Grant under the terms of the Constitution, not of any statute, and that Grant therefore was not governed by the act. Grant demurred. “I stated that the law was binding on me, constitutional or not, until set
aside by the proper tribunal. An hour or more was consumed, each reiterating his views on this subject, until getting late, the President said he would see me again.” Grant was sure he had made his intentions plain. “From the 11th to the Cabinet meeting on the 14th instant, a doubt never entered my mind about the President fully understanding my position, namely that if the Senate refused to concur in the suspension of Mr. Stanton, my powers as Secretary of War ad interim would cease, and Mr. Stanton’s right to resume at once the functions of his office would under the law be indisputable.”

Later on January 14 Grant received official notice that the Senate had refused to support Stanton’s suspension. He immediately forwarded the notice to Johnson with a letter of his own. “
According to the provisions of Section 2 of ‘An Act Regulating the Tenure of Certain Civil Offices,’ my functions as Secretary of War, ad interim, ceased from the moment of the receipt of the within notice,” he told the president.

Johnson called a meeting of the cabinet and told Grant he should come. Johnson treated Grant as though he were still war secretary. Grant reminded him that he had been removed by the Senate order. Johnson thereupon related his version of the conversations they had had. He said that Grant had agreed to remain as war secretary until removed by the courts or to resign and allow the president to name another secretary. Grant rejected Johnson’s version—“
though to soften the evident contradiction my statement gave, I said (alluding to our first conversation on the subject) the President might have understood me in the way he said, namely that I had promised to resign if I did not resist the reinstatement,” Grant later recalled. He added, “I made no such promise.”

Johnson insisted that he
had
made the promise. And in a long, angry letter to Grant that got into the papers, he said that four of the five cabinet secretaries present at the meeting attested that he had.

“
I confess my surprise that the Cabinet officers referred to should so greatly misapprehend the facts in the matter,” Grant replied. He refused to retreat. Referring to the letter to Johnson in which he had stated his understanding of their conversations, he said, “I here reassert the correctness of my statements in that letter, anything in yours in reply to it to the contrary notwithstanding.” He said he had accepted the job of acting war secretary simply to ensure continuity in army policy in the South, not to enable Johnson to fire Stanton. And in a tone he had never imagined he would take toward a commander in chief, he concluded: “Mr. President, where my honor as a soldier and integrity as a man have been so violently
assailed, pardon me for saying I can but regard this whole matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to involve me in the resistance of law, for which you hesitated to assume the responsibility in orders, and thus to destroy my character before the country.”

I
f
Johnson hadn’t been so unpopular, Grant might have had to work harder to explain the discrepancy between what he said he had told Johnson and the cabinet and what Johnson and the four cabinet members said they had heard. But Johnson’s removal of Stanton eliminated what scruples most Republicans in Congress still had about going after Johnson, and within days the big story in Washington was the first
impeachment of a president in American history. The nine articles of impeachment approved by the House alleged various high crimes and misdemeanors, but the central one was Johnson’s failure to fulfill his constitutional obligation to ensure that the laws of the United States—in particular the Tenure of Office Act—be faithfully executed.

Some of the
Radical Republicans apparently believed that the mere threat of removal would compel Johnson to resign.
Moorfield Storey, Charles Sumner’s secretary, predicted privately that Johnson would growl till the last moment before retreating like a “
thoroughly ill-bred dog” and submitting his resignation.
Eliza Johnson, the president’s wife, viewed the prospect of eviction from the White House ambivalently. “But for the humiliation and Mr. Johnson’s feelings,” she told a friend, “I wish they would send us back to Tennessee—if it were possible, give us our poverty and peace again, so that we might learn how to live for our children and ourselves. I have not seen a happy moment since I came to this house.”

But Johnson had always been a scrapper, and he scrapped now. It helped him that the Republicans in the Senate, where the trial would be held, weren’t as unified as their counterparts in the House. Though Sumner confidently declared that “
never in history was there a great case more free from all just doubt,” a number of his colleagues weren’t so sure—about Sumner, if not about Johnson.
William Fessenden of Maine, the Senate Republican leader, despised Sumner. After the first impeachment attempt had failed, Fessenden took comfort that the failure frustrated Sumner. “His bitterness beats wormwood and gall,” Fessenden said. He subsequently characterized Sumner as “the most cowardly dog in the parish.”

Another impediment to conviction involved the man who would
succeed Johnson. Benjamin Wade, the president pro tempore of the Senate, had almost as many enemies in the upper house as Johnson did, and these had no desire to make Wade president (on account of there being no vice president). “If impeachment fails, be sure of one fact,” a Washington observer remarked. “Dislike for Mr. Wade has done it.”

The trial began in early March and lasted till the middle of May.
Salmon Chase, who had succeeded Roger Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1864, presided. The House sent Thaddeus Stevens and several colleagues to manage the prosecution; Johnson retained
William Evarts, a distinguished member of the New York bar and a harsh critic of Johnson’s reconstruction policies who nonetheless thought the president deserved capable counsel. The senators, sitting as the jury in the case, weighed matters constitutional (What precisely were “high crimes and misdemeanors”?), political (Was it smarter to remove Johnson by conviction now or by election six months hence?) and philosophical (Was this exercise of the impeachment power a vindication of democracy or its perversion?). In the end the prosecution persuaded a solid majority but not quite the necessary two-thirds. Seven Republicans crossed the line to vote with the Democrats, sparing Johnson by a single vote.

55

W
HILE THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN
J
OHNSON AND THE
R
EPUBLICANS
convulsed Washington and the East, a more violent struggle of much longer duration was playing out in the West. The contest for mastery of what would become the United States, between the indigenous peoples of North America and the European settlers and their descendants, had begun with the first clashes between the
Indians and the English in Virginia and New England in the early seventeenth century; it continued with
King Philip’s War, the
French and Indian War,
Pontiac’s Rebellion,
Tecumseh’s War, the
Creek War, the
Seminole Wars, the
Black Hawk War and the hundreds of raids, massacres and reprisals too minor to merit proper names. The battleground shifted as the frontier of white settlement pushed westward; one group of defenders gave way to another as various Indian tribes were defeated, dislocated or destroyed. By the midpoint of the nineteenth century the eastern half of the continent was essentially pacified; only the territory west of the Mississippi experienced continued resistance. And for a time that resistance was modest. The discovery of gold in California drew hundreds of thousands of adventurers to the Pacific Coast, and though they wreaked havoc on the California tribes, they provoked little conflict with the peoples of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains or the Great Basin. Those peoples stole cattle from unprotected wagon trains and sometimes extorted protection money from the travelers, but they typically acquiesced in the migrants’ passage, recognizing them as a transient annoyance rather than an existential danger.

Things changed around 1860. The discovery of gold and silver in
Nevada,
Idaho,
Colorado,
Montana and other parts of the western interior
brought permanent populations of intruders to regions previously unpeopled by whites. And the outbreak of the Civil War pulled soldiers from frontier forts where their presence had tended to keep the peace. The uncontrolled friction between settlers and Indians in southeastern Colorado in 1864 culminated in a bloody massacre of
Cheyenne and
Arapaho men, women and children by Colorado militia at Sand Creek. The
Sand Creek massacre reverberated among the tribes of the region and touched off a general war for the Plains. The Cheyenne and Arapaho allied with the Sioux to assault white settlements and outposts across Colorado. A force of a thousand Indians swept down upon the village of Julesburg, slaughtering and scalping the residents and burning the buildings. The attackers tore out telegraph lines and severed the road to Denver, cutting off that town from supplies and reinforcements.

The Sioux took the lead in the fighting, and at the head of the Sioux was a chief of the Oglala band,
Red Cloud. “
The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,” Red Cloud afterward told a delegation of federal officers at Fort Laramie. “I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.”

Efforts by the government to open a more direct route to the gold fields of Montana prodded Red Cloud and his first lieutenant,
Crazy Horse, to launch a new series of attacks. Crazy Horse ambushed parties along the Bozeman road, enticing the commander at Fort Phil Kearny to sally forth in pursuit. The commander,
William Fetterman, a Civil War veteran, had boasted that with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. With eighty-one men he rode into Crazy Horse’s trap, and he and his men were annihilated.

The conflict escalated further with the approach of construction crews of the transcontinental railroad. The Indians of the region hadn’t seen trains before, but they quickly realized that these trains weren’t like wagon trains, here today and gone tomorrow. The railroad established a permanent white presence and consequently a more serious threat to the indigenes’ way of life. When the railroad trains disgorged buffalo hunters who slaughtered the herds on which the Indians depended for food, clothing, shelter and fuel, the conflict became irrepressible. Not long after Crazy Horse crushed Fetterman, a coalition of Sioux and Cheyenne conducted raids against the Union Pacific crews in Wyoming. In one a
hundred Indians attacked a special train carrying government officials and potential investors; the travelers escaped injury but quickly retreated to safer ground.