Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (7 page)

Johnson had misplayed his hand. Rather than acting the statesman who wished to unify the nation, he behaved like a political brawler with a grandiose self-image. Many deplored the speech, particularly what a moderate Republican recalled as its “low tone, its vulgar abuse.” Others suspected that it was the product of hard drinking. His own secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, called it a “very imprudent speech” that “turned not only the Republican party but the general public sentiment of the Northern States against him.” A Johnson ally estimated that the speech cost the Democrats 200,000 votes in the fall elections.

Johnson’s divisiveness—his unrelenting us-versus-them attitude—drove away those who might have supported him. Fessenden, chair of the Joint Committee of Fifteen and Johnson’s best hope for an ally among leading Republicans, found “relief” in the president’s “folly and wickedness.” The Maine senator wrote in a private letter that “[t]he long agony is over. He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust, and must sink from detestation into contempt.”

The criticism caused Johnson to dig in even deeper. In late March, Trumbull’s Civil Rights bill cleared Congress. Once more the president vetoed, offering a pastiche of objections that pandered to many prejudices. The bill would guarantee civil rights not only for blacks, he warned, but also for “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, [and] the people called Gipsies.” He criticized the statute’s supposed discrimination against immigrants, was saddened that blacks were not yet worthy of citizenship, and feared that the law would incite racial intermarriage. His real dismay, however, was that the law “would operate in favor of the colored and against the white race,” which would “resuscitate the spirit of rebellion.”

This time the veto did not stand. Johnson’s inflammatory language and unwillingness to compromise was stiffening his opponents in Congress. The law’s author, Trumbull of Illinois, meticulously dissected Johnson’s veto message, adding his own feelings that the president had deceived him. Having invited the president to comment on the draft legislation, Trumbull reported, he never received “the least objection to any of the provisions of the bill.” By a single vote in the Senate, the bill was enacted over Johnson’s objection. Over a glass of claret with an aide, the president was unrepentant. “Sir, I am right,” he declared. “I know I am right and I am damned if I do not adhere.”

For many, Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights bill of 1866 would stand as his defining political blunder, setting a tone of perpetual confrontation with Congress that prevailed for the balance of his presidency. That veto, along with his veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau legislation and Washington’s Birthday speech, fundamentally eroded his support among congressional Republicans. For Andrew Johnson, there would be no compromises and no negotiations with his congressional adversaries. The political life of the nation would be reduced to a simple contest of will and power.

Congress responded in kind. When a vacancy arose on the Supreme Court in the spring of 1866, Johnson nominated Henry Stanberry of Ohio, the lawyer who drafted much of the veto message on the Civil Rights Act. Rather than allow the president to place his man on the high court, Congress eliminated the seat. To ensure that Johnson would never appoint a judge to the Supreme Court, the legislation provided that the Court would shrink to seven justices when the next vacancy occurred. A pattern for ineffective government was forming. Dismayed by Johnson’s exercise of presidential powers, Congress would eliminate or hedge those powers, thereby infuriating the man in the White House even more.

Over the next three months, two bloody incidents undermined the president’s sunny vision of conditions in the South and reinforced the Radicals’ insistence that only federal action could protect the freedmen and Southern supporters of the Union (often called Unionists). First, in early May 1866, came a three-day riot in Memphis, in Johnson’s home state. After a dispute over a carriage collision, white police and firemen stormed through black neighborhoods of South Memphis while nearby federal troops did nothing. Forty-six blacks and two whites were killed. Hundreds of buildings burned. When it was over, a local newspaper wrote, “Thank Heaven the white race are once more rulers in Memphis.” General Ulysses Grant had a different reaction. Southern whites were becoming more defiant, he warned the
New York Times
: “A year ago they were willing to do anything; now they regard themselves as masters of the situation.”

Equally bloody was an episode in New Orleans in late July, when white police attacked a black political meeting. At least 47 blacks were killed and over 100 wounded; 1 policeman died of sunstroke. Arriving a day after the mayhem, General Philip Sheridan reported that the attack was “so unnecessary and atrocious as to compel me to say that it was murder.” A day later, Sheridan’s feelings were stronger: “It was not a riot; it was an absolute massacre.”

A few Johnson loyalists tried to blame the Radicals for the violence, but most Northerners laid the responsibility at the president’s feet. One Republican reported that after Memphis and New Orleans, Americans began to ask, “‘Does this mean that the rebellion is to begin again?’” A Radical congressman wrote in a magazine article that the president “has thrown himself into the arms of the South.” By some measures, some former slaves were beginning to make progress. In May 1866, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported more than seventy schools in Texas were teaching the children of freedmen and were wholly self-sustaining. Many Northerners came to the South to teach those children. Yet the same report found that when federal troops withdrew from an area, violence against blacks increased.

Through the early months of 1866, as Johnson’s missteps and Southern violence shifted public opinion to favor Congress, the Joint Committee turned again to the nascent Fourteenth Amendment. After Charles Sumner’s insistence on Negro suffrage torpedoed Stevens’s simple proposal to fix the three-fifths rule, the panel confronted at least seventy proposed versions. Pressure built for the amendment to address many issues in addition to congressional representation.

Once more, the scene shifted to Thad Stevens’s parlor on South B Street, behind the Capitol Building. Early one morning, Mrs. Smith opened the door for Robert Dale Owen, the idealistic son of Robert Owen, the Scottish visionary who had founded the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. As chair of a wartime commission on the freed slaves, Robert Dale Owen authored a report that inspired the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Now, in late March 1866, he had an idea for breaking the impasse over the Fourteenth Amendment.

Seated in Stevens’s parlor, with bearskins on the floor and panther skins on the walls, Owen outlined a draft amendment that blended several elements and took a gradual approach. After ten years, racial discrimination in voting or civil rights would be banned; until then, persons who were barred from voting in a state because of their race could not be counted in the allocation of congressional representatives among the states. The Owen draft also proposed to bar repayment of debts incurred by the Confederate states. “Read that to me again,” Stevens said. After chewing the matter over, he was sold.

“We’ve had nothing as good as this, or as complete,” he pronounced. “It would be likely to pass, too; that’s the best of it. We haven’t a majority, either in our committee or in Congress, for immediate [Negro] suffrage.” He promised to put Owen’s draft before the Joint Committee. Owen had less luck with Fessenden of Maine, the Joint Committee chairman, who heard him out silently. John Bingham’s reaction was more positive.

During the first half of April, the Joint Committee worked over Owen’s proposal, finally approving a version of it and adding Bingham’s pet language that the states must provide to their citizens “due process of law” and “equal protection of the laws.” By imposing those requirements directly on the states, Bingham’s provision could work a fundamental shift in power between the federal and state governments. Both Congress and federal courts could enforce those guarantees against the states. The traditional principle of state sovereignty, which had encouraged secession and which still inspired Andrew Johnson’s policies, would be reduced, limited by federal protection for individual rights.

The Joint Committee did not release the proposed amendment for several weeks because Fessenden fell ill. In the interim, political resistance mounted to Negro suffrage—even Negro suffrage that would be delayed for ten years—and the Joint Committee dropped that provision. The members concluded that three-fourths of the states would not ratify voting rights for blacks “in any degree or under any restriction.” When the revised version of the amendment emerged at the end of the month, with the suffrage provision stripped out, the president still denounced it to his Cabinet, then leaked minutes of his remarks to the newspapers.

Few now remember the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that caused the greatest debate in 1866. Bingham’s airy guarantees of due process and equal protection—which would remake America in the twentieth century—drew relatively little comment. Focusing on practical matters, Johnson and other opponents trained their fire on the provision that stripped federal voting rights from those who had “voluntarily adhered to the late insurrection, giving it aid and comfort.” In the coming debates, that provision would be weakened steadily. The final version merely barred from federal office those who had taken an oath to support the United States Constitution but then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Of course, Negro suffrage was long gone, replaced by a version of Stevens’s original idea, which would reduce congressional representation for any state where the right to vote was “in any way abridged.” That provision would survive to the final version of the Fourteenth Amendment, but it would never be enforced through long decades when many states systematically denied voting rights to blacks.

With Congress poised to approve the Fourteenth Amendment on June 13, Stevens did not rejoice. “Don’t imagine,” he told a friend, “that I sanction the shilly-shally, bungling thing that I shall have to report to the House.” When he closed the House debate on the amendment, one observer thought he “looked so feeble, the great old man, it makes me sorry.” Nevertheless, the packed chamber hung on his words.

As a younger man, he said, he dreamt of freeing American institutions “from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich.” His “bright dream” had vanished, he said, so Congress had merely “patched up the worst portions of the ancient edifice,…leaving it, in many of its parts, to be swept through by the tempests, the frosts, and the storms of despotism.” In closing, Stevens revealed a willingness to compromise that he often concealed.

Despite his disappointment, Stevens voted for the amendment, which received the two-thirds vote needed to submit it to the states for their approval. If three-fourths of them ratified it, the amendment would become part of the Constitution.

With the amendment on its way to the states, President Johnson mobilized for battle. In an official statement, he expressed “grave doubts” about the provision’s wisdom. He also questioned its validity, since the Southern states were not then represented in Congress. Meeting with one Cabinet member, “he expressed himself in the most decided terms of hostility” to the amendment. Johnson urged state legislators in the South to reject it or delay voting on it.

Two Republican congressmen learned firsthand of the president’s bellicose mood. Calling at the White House when the row between the president and Congress was “at its height,” they hoped to “smooth over the differences.” They had misjudged their president. “He received us politely enough,” one remembered, “and without mincing any words he gave us to understand that we were on a fool’s errand and he would not yield.” Thereafter, the two congressmen joined the extreme Radicals in the House and always voted with them. Johnson could have that effect on people.

We have got to fight Johnson because he will fight us.

S
ENATOR
L
YMAN
T
RUMBULL,
J
ULY
2, 1866

W
ITH ONE EYE
on the congressional elections that loomed in the fall of 1866, Johnson resolved to carry the fight to his foes. The president, according to his own treasury secretary, “was a combatant by temperament. If he did not court controversy, he enjoyed it.” Elected on the Republican ticket, Johnson longed to cut himself free from that party. He did not share its principles, its goals, or its brief history. Yet many of his old colleagues in the Democratic Party mistrusted his pro-Union stance during the war. The time was ripe, Johnson decided, to launch a new party, conservative yet pro-Union, that would support his political agenda and his personal ambitions.

The president’s closest adviser, Secretary of State Seward, described Johnson’s strategy as a subtle one. He intended to prod the Radicals into taking extreme positions. Once Stevens and his ilk were flushed into the open, Johnson aimed to appeal to Republicans who could not stomach the Radicals, and to Democrats who were uncomfortable with that party’s ambivalence toward the Civil War. In mid-June, just after congressional approval of the Fourteenth Amendment, he resolved to call a convention of a new “Union” party, borrowing the name used by the Republicans in 1864.

It was a bold step, but not without potential. Political parties were more fluid in those days. The Republican Party, which ruled Congress and had won the last two presidential elections, was barely a decade old.

Launching the new party gave the president a chance to address nagging personnel issues in his Cabinet, still made up of Lincoln holdovers. There would be no change at the State Department. In the year since the assassination, the president had come to trust William Henry Seward, calling him “faithful, firm and reliable…a truly great man.” Small and slender, with a prominent nose and an addiction to fine cigars, the polished, playful Seward had largely recovered from the carriage accident and assassination attempt of the year before, though knife wounds had robbed one side of his face of most expression. He also had suffered the loss of his wife, who died only weeks after the assassination attempt. Still, Seward regained his vigor and his usually sunny disposition. One contemporary called Seward both a charming talker and a good listener, “a characteristic rare among men who have been long accustomed to lead.”

A devoted supporter of President Lincoln, Seward transferred that loyalty to Johnson. Contemporaries saw the secretary of state’s influence in many of the new president’s policies. One Republican thought it was Seward who persuaded Johnson to abandon the vindictive rhetoric of his first days in office and then brought the Tennessean around to the laissez-faire policy followed in allowing Southern whites to establish their own governments. Some thought the adviser’s influence at the White House had its roots in the pivotal role of Seward’s allies in pushing the Republican Convention of 1864 to nominate the man from Tennessee for vice president. Whatever their political history from 1864, Seward and Johnson developed a particularly close relationship as president and secretary of state.

Though many Southerners viewed Seward as a rabid abolitionist before the Civil War, the reality was different. In the supercharged days of early 1861, with Southern states seceding and no one sure if the nation would survive, Seward was a voice of conciliation, insisting that slavery should be preserved in those states where it already existed but prevented from expanding. Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens were enraged. Through the war, Seward adhered to his conciliatory, gradualist views while many Republicans became Radicals. When Lincoln proposed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Seward urged him to wait for a better moment. By war’s end, the secretary of state was largely out of step with his own party. He strongly approved Johnson’s controversial speech on Washington’s Birthday 1866 and showed relatively little interest in the plight of the freedmen. The secretary of state, insisting that Johnson was implementing Lincoln’s policies, urged the immediate seating of Southern congressmen and senators. He was content to return Southern state governments to the control of former Confederates. In a public letter, Seward endorsed the president’s call for the Union Party convention.

Other members of the Cabinet, however, were entirely too Republican for Johnson’s taste. By asking all Cabinet members to join the call for the new Union Party convention, he intended to force some from office. Three responded by resigning, as Johnson had hoped. Out went the postmaster general, the secretary of the interior, and the attorney general, replaced by Johnson loyalists. Now the president could redirect the thousands of patronage jobs in those agencies. In that era before civil service reform, every federal job could be filled for solely political reasons, making patronage appointments a key to political power. According to his new secretary of the interior, the president now pledged to use that patronage for “the true friends of the Country.”

For months, Republicans had been complaining that Johnson was replacing that party’s loyalists in favor of Democrats. From Maryland to Illinois to Missouri, Johnson’s appointments dismayed the Republican faithful. By summertime, many postmasters, tax collectors, and Indian agents would face demands that they support the new Union Party or lose their jobs. In the seven months before June of 1866, Johnson removed 52 postmasters; over the next four months, more than 1,600 would be sacked for political reasons. He also turned to the tax collection machinery, which one Maine Republican described as “all-pervasive in its character,” with thousands of officials serving at the president’s pleasure. In a single building, the New York Custom House, 1,200 political appointees levied duties on goods imported through the nation’s busiest port. Those highly coveted jobs featured indoor work, no heavy lifting, and plenty of opportunity for graft, both petty and grand.

Republicans watched helplessly as the president turned political custom on its head, delivering to the losing Democrats the spoils of the Republican victory in 1864. Johnson’s use of patronage reminded Republicans of the political reversal they suffered at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. To a party man, it was unnatural.

Senator Fessenden complained that the president was filling federal offices in Maine with “copperheads and flunkies.” (“Copperhead” was a derogatory term used during the Civil War to describe Northern Democrats who supported a negotiated peace with the Confederacy.) In Ohio, Senator John Sherman groused that Johnson was “turning out good men—sometimes wounded soldiers—merely because they adhered to their party convictions, and putting in men who opposed the war.”

Fortified by the president’s greater control over federal patronage, Johnson and his allies focused their energies on the founding of the Union Party. Its convention would meet in Philadelphia in the second week of August.

Johnson’s Cabinet purge was fatally incomplete, failing to reach the prickly secretary of war, Edwin Stanton of Ohio and western Pennsylvania. It was no secret in Washington that Stanton’s loyalty to Johnson was uncertain. Though he answered to the president, the war secretary sympathized strongly with the Radicals. For six months, Johnson had been mulling over candidates to succeed Stanton. Stanton himself, recognizing his compromised position, toyed with the thought of resigning. Yet, month after month, the war secretary remained awkwardly in office. For nineteen months more, Stanton would be a painful stone in Andrew Johnson’s shoe.

Compact and bristling with energy, Edwin Stanton was one of the most difficult people ever to head a federal agency. At a personal level, he could be both insufferable and baffling. Ulysses Grant wrote in his memoirs that Stanton “cared nothing for the feelings of others. In fact it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than to gratify.” Stanton’s shifting moods kept others off balance. “[O]ften petulant, irritating, and senselessly unjust,” according to a contemporary, he also could be “one of the most amiable, genial, and delightful conversationalists I have ever met.” The war secretary seemed “proud of the fact that he had more personal and political enemies than any prominent officers of the government.”

Stanton’s bad temper had its roots in personal tragedies. The death of his first wife and a daughter, followed by his brother’s suicide, haunted him as a younger man. After his second marriage, an infant son died in 1862. Stanton’s own health was erratic, worsened by long workdays and fits of asthma. When stress laid him low, he lived on mush and milk, but kept working.

Stanton had been a formidable trial lawyer, developing a national renown. An Ohioan described Stanton, when young, as always in a hurry; with age, he became abrupt. While defending an 1855 patent infringement case brought by Cyrus McCormick, inventor of a reaping machine, Stanton was contemptuous of a tall Illinois lawyer who was added to the trial team. Referring to Abraham Lincoln, Stanton asked, “Where did that long-armed creature come from and what can he expect to do in this case?” Stanton blocked Lincoln from any active role in the trial. Luckily for Stanton, the future president had a gift for overlooking personal slights.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Stanton’s first service in Washington City came in late 1860, while Democratic President James Buchanan feebly watched the country slide toward secession and civil war. Acting as attorney general for the last four months of Buchanan’s term, Stanton was suspected of slipping Cabinet secrets to the incoming Republicans. When Lincoln’s first war secretary proved unequal to the job, Stanton took over with an efficiency that earned Lincoln’s gratitude and trust. Behind glistening spectacles and the beard of an Old Testament prophet, Stanton was curt, incisive, and forceful. “Folks come up here and tell me there are a great many men who have all Stanton’s excellent qualities without his defects,” Lincoln said. “All I can say is, I haven’t met ’em; I don’t know ’em.” A Republican congressman paid tribute to Stanton’s work ethic: “He lived in the War Office, literally; his bed was there; his food was there; his presence in his own household was a rare event.”

Yet as Stanton fed his gargantuan appetite for work, his modest store of people skills atrophied. According to one contemporary, a Stanton subordinate “had to be a mere cipher, so dictatorial and despotic was he.”

The relationship between Stanton and Andrew Johnson began pleasantly, even respectfully. When Johnson left his post as military governor of Tennessee in early 1865, Stanton wrote with admiration of Johnson’s service “in a position of personal toil and danger, perhaps more hazardous than was encountered by any other citizen or military officer in the United States.” In the days immediately after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson leaned heavily on the war secretary. Tensions arose quickly, though, when Johnson rejected Stanton’s proposal to include Negro suffrage as part of the new state government for North Carolina.

While Johnson steadily moved away from the Republican Party that had placed him in office, Stanton edged toward its Radical wing. By February 1866, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles was sure that Stanton had thrown in with the Radicals, but was not sure whether “the President is fully aware of that fact.” In truth, Johnson referred privately to his war secretary’s duplicity, declaring that he knew no man who could be more obsequious than Stanton. However deferential Stanton might be in person, his opposition to Johnson’s policies drove many official actions. Sitting atop the War Department, Stanton was perfectly placed to thwart Johnson’s efforts to empower Southern state governments. In April, Johnson proclaimed that the Southern rebellion was over, an act that left army commanders unsure whether they could still enforce martial law in the South. With Stanton’s connivance, General Grant circulated a confidential instruction that commanders should continue to use martial law as needed, and that the president could not direct the Freedmen’s Bureau’s actions.

Those actions frustrated Johnson, and more like them followed. In July, Grant authorized commanders to arrest lawbreakers when civil authorities failed to do so, exactly contrary to the president’s wish that state governments resume control over law enforcement. The war within the Johnson Administration emerges in the explanation offered by one of Grant’s senior aides: “A Cabinet Minister [Stanton] and the General of the Army [Grant] were doing their utmost to thwart the President,” the aide wrote, because “the President himself, and all but one of his legal advisers, were engaged in the effort to subvert or pervert the declared will of the people.” According to Grant’s aide, Stanton and the general-in-chief “concerted constantly how best to execute the intent of Congress in spite of [Johnson,] whom Stanton at least deemed a guilty conspirator.” In his escalating war with Congress, Johnson did not command the loyalty of his own senior officials.

In May, a Radical congressman reported Stanton’s assurance that the secretary of war was “heart & soul with us.” Though Stanton claimed to “loathe Johnson’s politics,” he confided that “good men demand him to stay in the Cabinet.” Oddly, despite his mistrust of Stanton, Johnson still listened to the war secretary’s advice. By summertime, Navy Secretary Welles concluded that even though Stanton was “treacherous,” the secretary of war yet could influence the president’s decisions.