These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

In Washington, Johnson struggled to regain his feet. Early in 1868, he tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican and Lincoln appointee. But Stanton, hardheaded and uncompromising, barricaded himself in his office for two months. The nation reeled from one constitutional crisis to the next. The House began impeachment proceedings against the president, charging him with violating a recently passed Tenure of Office Act. Congress voted to impeach, 126 to 47, but the Senate vote, 35–19, fell one vote shy of the two-thirds required. Johnson had survived, but impeachment, a constitutional gun that had never before been fired, had for the first time been loaded.