Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (6 page)

In late November of 1865, the powerful politicians in Stevens’s parlor shared a dire view of the nation’s dangers. They deplored the new state governments in the South and the black codes they had adopted. They were incensed that former Confederates were arriving to take seats as senators and congressmen. The outcome of the Civil War, they feared, was being reversed, with ex-rebels regaining power and the freedmen delivered into a different form of bondage. All that blood, all that sacrifice, all would have been spent for naught.

For Stevens and his guests, the Union victory could be preserved only by excluding from power the men who led the secession, and by protecting the freed slaves. Stevens urged an ambitious program for challenging President Johnson’s minimal reconstruction of the South. As one recalled, the determined man from Pennsylvania “at once assumed dominating control in opposition to the President’s plan.” To that end, he proposed to streamline Congress. He wanted to slice through the pontificating speeches and backroom deal-making, the corrosive disagreements between the House and the Senate, all of which paralyzed legislative action. Stevens wanted a fighting Congress, one that could take on the president and defeat him. Never before or since has anyone succeeded with such a plan. The Republican leaders unanimously approved Stevens’s strategy.

The first step was to bar from Congress the new Southern representatives and senators who would support Johnson’s policies. The Constitution provided a simple tool for this job. Each house of Congress has the exclusive power to decide whether a member has been elected properly and is entitled to take his seat. If the Republicans used that power to exclude the Southerners, their majorities would be unassailable.

On December 4, Edward McPherson, clerk of the House of Representatives, opened the new session by calling the roll of congressmen. McPherson had a special relationship with Stevens. As a young man, he read law with Stevens, then parlayed the older man’s support into a congressional seat from the Gettysburg area. Now McPherson executed his mentor’s plan. As he read the roll, he left out every congressman from the eleven seceded states. When a Tennessee representative asked to be recognized, McPherson refused to brook any interruption. When the roll call was done, the Tennessean tried again. McPherson protested that he could not recognize the man since his name had not been called. After Stevens pressed to move on to other business, the Southerner begged to speak. “I cannot yield [the floor],” Stevens replied calmly, “to any gentleman who does not belong to this body.”

The Southerners had no recourse. The House had the power to exclude them, and did so; the Senate soon exercised its own power to exclude the senators from the South. Under the Constitution, President Johnson could do nothing to prevent those exclusions. To ensure that the Southern representatives would leave town, Congress refused to pay their living expenses. The Thad Stevens Express was rolling down the track.

The second step in Stevens’s plan involved creating a combined House-Senate committee to address Reconstruction. The Joint Committee on Reconstruction—sometimes called the Joint Committee of Fifteen—would “inquire into the condition of the states which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented” in Congress. This joint committee would compile a single factual record that would underlie congressional proposals for dealing with the South. Through the Joint Committee, Republican leaders in the House and Senate would be able to work out their differences in private, not in acrimonious contests over competing legislative proposals. In fact, the Joint Committee would become a powerful tool for shaping Reconstruction. Without debate, the House approved the Joint Committee on a straight party vote; the Senate concurred eight days later.

“Awkward Collision on the Grand Trunk Columbia R.R.” Between “A.J.” and “Thaddeus.”

Stevens and his Radical allies, who comprised only a third of Congress, could not dominate the Joint Committee. Though Stevens was on that committee, he conceded the chairmanship to the “moderate” Fessenden of Maine and left off more polarizing Radicals like Charles Sumner and Ben Wade. The Committee of Fifteen included two other Republican moderates who would play central roles in the impeachment trial, John Bingham of Ohio and Senator James Grimes of Iowa. Even though Stevens and the Radicals were a minority on the committee, they would use it to direct the public agenda for Congress, and the nation. Johnson’s navy secretary warned the president that the Joint Committee was “revolutionary”; he described it as “an incipient conspiracy.” If Stevens had heard those accusations, he might well have answered, “Exactly.”

The war between the President and Congress goes on…. At each session [the Radicals] add a shackle to his bonds, tighten the bit in different places, file a claw or draw a tooth, and then when he will be bound up, fastened, and caught in an inextricable net of laws and decrees, more or less contradicting each other, they tie him to the stake of the Constitution and take a good look at him, feeling quite sure he cannot move this time. But then Seward, the Dalila of the piece, rises up and shouts: Johnson, here comes the radicals with old Stevens at their head; they are proud of having subjected you and are coming to enjoy the sight of you in chains.” And Samson summons all his strength, and bursts his cords and bonds with a mighty effort, and the Philistines (I mean the Radicals) flee in disorder to the Capitol to set to work making new laws stronger than the old, which will break in their turn at the first test….

G
EORGES
C
LEMENCEAU
, S
EPTEMBER
1867

A
T THE START
of 1866, Congress set off on two paths to reconstruct the South. Charged with developing long-term solutions, the Joint Committee of Fifteen asked the president to take no further steps on Reconstruction until it could act. He replied, carefully, that he planned no further action at the moment. With that hedged assurance, the Joint Committee formed five subcommittees of three members each to inquire into conditions in specific Southern states. Over the next several months, the subcommittees heard 145 witnesses, including 35 Union Army officers and 71 Southerners (six of them black). The hearings assembled, as Stevens intended, a damning litany of Southern persecution of freedmen and whites who had supported the Union. That litany would provide the essential factual context for the political struggles of the next two years.

Simultaneously, the full committee confronted a startling consequence of the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery forever when it was ratified in December 1865. A new political reality became urgent. The constitutional prohibition against slavery had the perverse effect of increasing the political power of the Southern states. Based on a painful compromise struck when the Constitution was written in the summer of 1787, each slave had been counted for political purposes as three-fifths of a human being. Thus, when allocating congressmen among the states, and when assigning electoral votes in presidential elections, every one hundred slaves counted as sixty “persons.”

The abolition of slavery made the three-fifths ratio obsolete. Because of what a New York congressman called a “moral earthquake [that] has turned fractions into ciphers,” each black person now would be counted in full, not as three-fifths. This “moral earthquake” had a precise mathematical impact. With four million freedmen counted as full persons, the rebel states would be able to claim twenty-eight
more
congressmen—and twenty-eight
more
electoral votes—than they had in 1860. The penalty for provoking and losing the brutal civil war would be a substantial increase in the political power of the South. For many Northern politicians, this outcome seemed completely outrageous.

In only two weeks, the Joint Committee produced a draft constitutional amendment—it would be the fourteenth—to correct this arithmetical outrage. The proposal stated that if a state denied the right to vote on the basis of “race or color,” then citizens of those excluded races would be omitted from the calculations allocating congressmen and electoral votes among the states. Instead of counting as three-fifths of a person for political purposes, or as a full person, blacks would not count at all unless the state gave black men the vote. Though most Northern states also denied voting rights to blacks, their Negro populations were small enough that the amendment would have little impact on their share of congressional seats. But blacks were in a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and were close to it in Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. The draft Fourteenth Amendment would dramatically slash the political power of those Southern states unless they extended the vote to the freedmen. This proposal reflected practical politics as well as a commitment to equal rights. Because the freedmen were expected to vote overwhelmingly for Republican candidates, Stevens and his allies wished to support their right to vote.

The issue of suffrage, though, proved to be even more complex. In a day-long stemwinder on the Senate floor, Sumner of Massachusetts insisted that the proposal did not go far enough. The freedmen’s right to vote must be guaranteed directly, he demanded, as it was in his home state, not merely encouraged in this roundabout fashion. Harkening to the 200,000 blacks who served in the Union Army, Sumner insisted, “If he was willing to die for the Republic surely he is good enough to vote.”

The Democratic leader of the House, James Brooks of New York, attacked the amendment from another quarter, warning of the risks of equality. Western states would lose seats in Congress because of the amendment’s impact on “coolies” there. Then he pointed to the most obvious limitation on the suffrage: that women did not vote. Brandishing letters from suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Brooks promised an amendment to grant women the vote, proclaiming to great applause, “I am in favor of my color in preference to any other color, and I prefer the white women of the country to the negro.” Female suffrage would empower New England states, which had seen many males leave for opportunity in the West and South. Brooks also questioned whether states would lose the right to impose literacy tests or property qualifications, all of which could prevent Negroes from voting (and would be employed for that purpose for another hundred years). With the proposed amendment mired in such questions, President Johnson made it clear that he opposed any constitutional change at all.

While the Joint Committee wrestled with the constitutional amendment, the full Congress addressed conditions in the South, particularly the black codes adopted by Johnson-sponsored state governments. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who defied characterization as a Radical or a moderate, met with Johnson at the White House to gather the president’s views about two bills he was pressing to aid the freedmen. Trumbull went away convinced that Johnson would accept both bills. Passed in late January, Trumbull’s Freedmen’s Bureau bill extended the life of that agency, which was the nation’s most important effort to protect the former slaves. The legislation authorized the bureau to help freedmen enforce contracts, own property, testify in court, and own arms. Trumbull’s second bill, the proposed Civil Rights Act, would reverse the black codes. It specifically conferred citizenship upon all persons born in the United States, guaranteeing to them the same civil rights “enjoyed by white citizens.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau bill was first to reach the president for his signature, and it presented a critical decision for Johnson. Until this point, his party identity had been clouded. Though a Southern Democrat for his whole life, he was elected on the Republican ticket and retained Lincoln’s Republican Cabinet. The legislation came from a Congress in which Republicans enjoyed two-thirds majorities in both houses. This could be an opportunity for Johnson to work with Congress and also to demonstrate his compassion for the freedmen. He would be joining the effort to do justice for those who labored in bondage for so long.

Johnson vetoes the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.

The president saw the occasion differently. For him, the bill presented an opportunity to stop the Radicals in their tracks and to protect the states from federal power. He confided to a Cabinet member his concerns about “the extraordinary intrigue which he understood was going on in Congress,” which aimed at “nothing short of a subversion or change in the structure of the government.” Thad Stevens and his allies, the president believed, intended “to take the government into their own hands,…and to get rid of him.” Andrew Johnson would never back down from a challenge to his authority.

Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill with a message calculated to infuriate Republicans. Turning a blind eye to racial violence in the South and the abject condition of the freed slaves, Johnson could not “discern in the condition of the country anything to justify” the powers proposed for the Bureau. The freedman, he assured the nation, is “not so exposed as may at first be imagined”; and if he thinks he is, he “possesses a perfect right to change his place of abode.” Nothing could justify the expense of the Freedmen’s Bureau, he concluded, or the expansion of federal powers at the expense of the states, or the bill’s substitution of military trials for the right of Southern whites to trial by jury in their own courts. The president’s concern for Southern whites, and his indifference to the former slaves, led a Radical newspaper to describe his approach as one that “ties up the children so that they shall not bite the rabid dog, and turns loose the rabid dog so that he can protect the children.”

The veto message ended with a crescendo of defiance, a passage written by Johnson himself. He chastised Congress for enacting legislation for the South after refusing to seat the Southern representatives. He claimed the right to press this critique because, as president, he was “chosen by the people of all the States.” Yet Johnson ignored the impact of the war on his own election in 1864. The citizens of the Confederacy had not voted for him any more than they voted for the congressmen and senators then seated in the Capitol. By his own logic, he could claim no greater legitimacy than could Congress. Indeed, Johnson’s challenge to Congress only emphasized his own shaky political foundation. Selected for the Republican ticket as a symbol of unity between North and South, and then elected with Republican votes, he now chose to obstruct the policies of that party. Most Republicans insisted that voters chose Abraham Lincoln,
not
Johnson, and that he violated his obligation to those voters by opposing the party’s legislation.

Johnson’s veto met with groans and anger across the North. An Iowa newspaper declared him “the most deliberately bad man out of prison in the republic.” The
Pittsburgh Commercial
urged the president’s friends “to tell him plainly that persistence in the path he has taken must lead to fatal estrangements,” a view echoed by the Radical
Chicago Tribune,
which declared that Johnson “has severed himself from the loyal [Republican] party and united with its enemies, North and South.” Southern newspapers, in contrast, applauded the president’s courage and determination. One pronounced him “all right on the negro question.”

Republicans in Congress reacted swiftly. Senator Trumbull felt betrayed. He had sought the president’s views on the legislation, and Johnson had raised no objection. Now the president vetoed the bill outright. Without the legislation, Trumbull insisted, the freedmen “will be tyrannized over, abused, and virtually reenslaved.” Nevertheless, the Senate failed on February 20 to muster the two-thirds majority required to pass the bill over Johnson’s veto.

Without any attempt at compromise or negotiation, Johnson had won the first round with Congress. For a bull-headed politician like him, the successful veto and the angry cries of his opponents meant only one thing—that he should step up his attack against Stevens and the Radicals. Attack had been his style for almost forty years in public life, and he was not about to change.

Johnson did not wait long. On the night of Washington’s Birthday, February 22, political supporters congregated outside the White House and called for remarks honoring the first president. They got a full dose of Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.

At times enraged, at times self-pitying, for an hour and ten minutes the president complained that “an irresponsible central directory”—that is, the Joint Committee of Fifteen—was assuming “nearly all the powers of Congress,” thereby “concentrat[ing] the powers of the government in the hands of the few.” To the penitent South, he extended “the right hand of fellowship.” No such hand reached out to those “men—I care not by what name you call them—still opposed to the Union.” When the crowd called upon him to name those “other” men who were enemies of the nation, Johnson was ready:

President Johnson addressing Washington’s Birthday crowd at the White House, 1866.

The president thus embraced the former rebels as patriots and denounced the Radicals as traitors. But he was not done. Johnson went on to imply that those named Radicals not only were enemies of the government, but actually were plotting his murder: “I have no doubt [their] intention was to incite assassination.” He offered himself as a willing sacrifice, asking only that “when I am beheaded I want the American people to be the witness.” Stirred by his looming martyrdom, Johnson asked to be laid on an altar to the Union so “the blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured out as a fit libation to the Union of these States.” A grisly libation, to be sure.