The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

“Men in pursuit of justice must never despair.” —THADDEUS STEVENS

Andrew Johnson had sought to obstruct, overthrow, veto, or challenge every attempt of the nation to bind its wounds after the war or to create a just republic from the ashes of the pernicious and so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery. Recently eradicated, to be sure, by proclamation, by war, and by constitutional amendment, its malignant effects stalked every street, every home, every action, particularly but not exclusively in the South. “Peace had come, but there was no peace,” a journalist would write.

In Federalist 65, Alexander Hamilton clarified—sort of: a high crime is an abuse of executive authority, proceeding from “an abuse or violation of some public trust.” Impeachment is a “national inquest into the conduct of public men.” Fuzzy again: are impeachments to proceed because of violations of law—or infractions against that murky thing called public trust?

Impeachment was the democratic equivalent of regicide, for Benjamin Franklin had said that without impeachment, assassination was the only way for a country to rid itself of a miscreant chief executive who acted like a king. And murder was of course out of the question.

For in the end, Andrew Johnson assumed powers as President that he used to thwart the laws he didn’t like. He disregarded Congress, whose legitimacy he ignored. He sought to restore the South as the province of white men and to return to power a planter class that perpetuated racial distrust and violence.

those who are good enough to fight for the Government are good enough to vote for it; and that a black heart is a more serious defect in an American citizen than a black face.”

Called insane when he insisted that 200,000 troops were necessary to suppress the rebellion in Kentucky, he refurbished his reputation by becoming an inspired soldier, devoted to the Union. Grant admired him hugely, and Sherman completely trusted Grant. “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk,” Sherman drily noted when someone tried to denigrate Grant, “and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

“Gossip of my having presidential aspirations is absurd and offensive to me,” he told Grant, “and I would check it if I knew how.” Sherman loathed Washington politics, never sought political office, and in 1884 famously refused a presidential run: “I will not accept if nominated,” he declared, “and will not serve if elected.”

“Those occupying high official positions,” he explained politely, must “decline the offerings of kind and loyal friends.” He was roundly praised for his integrity.

Andrew Johnson, just the year before, stood on the steps of the Capitol in Nashville at dusk, and declared to the cheering crowd that he’d be the black man’s Moses, leading them to freedom?

Andersonville in Georgia. At the latter, in just one year, 13,000 Yankees had starved or died of dysentery, gangrene, and scurvy,

“In what new skin will the old snake come forth?” Frederick Douglass then pointedly asked. To him, as he made clear, the snake was slavery. Or Andrew Johnson.

“Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President?” Thaddeus Stevens asked Charles Sumner. “If something is not done the President will be crowned king before Congress meets.” Congress would not reconvene until December, six months away. “I see our worthy president fancies himself a sovereign power—His North Carolina proclamation sickens me,” Stevens told another friend.

the eleven states of the Confederacy had never actually been out of the Union because they did not have the legal right to secede. (That’s like saying a murderer could not kill because killing was against the law, Thaddeus Stevens acidly remarked.)

Lincoln was flexible and kind and brilliant—with a deft, manipulative mind whose point of view kept enlarging over time; Johnson was a brave but obstinate man whose convictions, over time, calcified into a creed.

Near Hilton Head, South Carolina, a former Treasury agent named Albert Browne heard of the young black boy who’d been ambushed by a pardoned Confederate soldier who shot him fifty-seven times, mostly in the face and head. “What most men mean to-day by the ‘president’s plan of reconstruction’ is the pardon of every rebel for the crime of rebellion, and the utter refusal to pardon a single black loyalist for the ‘crime’ of being black,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson tersely observed.

Black men and women in Andersonville, Georgia, were told that because Abraham Lincoln was dead, they were no longer free. Mary Stewart, a former slave, was working for Thomas Day in Tangipahoa, Louisiana. When Day’s son told her “he was going to kill the damned free niggers,” he wasn’t exaggerating. He then grabbed her, cut her several times with his pocket knife, and dragged her into his mother’s house. Lucky

“The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing a white man before a tribunal!” a member of this better class exclaimed. “The Southern people a’n’t going to stand that.”

Nashville, Tennessee, where Johnson had been military governor, a Union man told a federal soldier that “if you take away the military from Tennessee, the buzzards can’t eat up the niggers as fast as we’ll kill ’em.”

Democrats also liked to remind Radical Republicans about their hypocrisy: they would give black men the vote but exclude white women. White women were at least able to read and write, and while they couldn’t vote, they didn’t make a fuss about it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the National Women’s Loyal League had collected almost 400,000 signatures of people in favor of women’s right to vote. But many Radical Republicans flinched, saying they did not want to confuse the issue: mixing up women in the call for the vote “would lose for the negro far more than we should gain for the woman.”

Bostonians packed the gorgeous Music Hall on Winter Street to hear Phillips proclaim “The South Victorious.”

“The same oligarchy that broke up the Union condescends to reenter it, with the same steps, with the same usage, under the flag of the same principle,” he sang out. Former Confederates are taking cover under Johnson’s wing, Phillips continued, and if Johnson isn’t a traitor, he’s definitely an enemy. Yes, sure, slavery has been abolished, and black men and women can no longer be sold on the auction block. But were they free to set their own price for their labor? Could they own property? Get married? Could they choose to live where they wanted or travel freely? Could they attend schools—and what schools?

Mississippi Governor William Sharkey began organizing a state militia, composed of ex-rebels, to serve as the state police. General Henry Slocum, head of the Department of Mississippi, protested. The federal army was the state’s enforcement agency; a state militia was not. Johnson initially agreed with General Slocum, but Sharkey heatedly explained to both men that the presence of black troops—some of these federal troops were black—posed a threat to the people (white); that all federal troops, or at least those posted in the South, should be white; that the Freedmen’s Bureau was nothing but a curse that humiliated the (white) South; that there were rumors of an insurrection (black) brewing. The state therefore needed its own militia, Sharkey concluded.

Imagine allowing the militia of a belligerent country to be reorganized right after that country had been defeated: impossible.

“It is a stubborn fact that our truest friends are threatened and persecuted and that the negro is denied his freedom wherever the population has a chance to act upon its own impulses without being immediately checked,” Schurz said. “The struggle against the results of the war is by no means at an end.”

Johnson was a proud, vain, and insecure man who distrusted almost everyone, and his talent for pitting himself against almost everyone, his friend Welles went on to say, would pillory him and warp the course of the entire country for years and years to come.

Not so different than Trump.

Governor Perry of South Carolina and the other provisional governors appointed by Johnson—and reputedly Johnson himself—had proclaimed “this is a white man’s government.” That kind of declaration revolted Stevens. “What is implied by this?” he trenchantly asked. “That one race of men are to have the exclusive right forever to rule this nation, and to exercise all acts of sovereignty, which all other races and nations and colors are to be their subject, and have no voice in making the laws and choosing the rules by whom they are to be governed? Wherein does this differ from slavery except in degree?

“This is not a ‘white man’s Government,’ ” Stevens blasted them. “To say so is political blasphemy, for it violates the fundamental principles of our gospel of liberty….Equal rights to all the privileges of the Government is innate in every immortal being, no matter what the shape or color of the tabernacle which it inhabits.”

“If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power,” Stevens’ voice rang with urgency, “we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.”

They’d come to speak to the President about the vote. “We respectfully submit that rendering anything less than this will be rendering to us less than our just due,” George Downing politely informed Johnson.

Johnson didn’t listen well, and when nervous, as he evidently was, he repeated himself or rambled.

SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL was an intelligent and prudent man considered by

he joined the Republicans, although he was no real friend to black men or women. “We, the Republicans, are the white man’s party,” he had emphatically said before the war. He didn’t support the right of black men to vote, but he did believe in civil rights for all. The great natural truth, Trumbull declared, is “that all men are created equal.”

Johnson despised the Radical Republicans so deeply that he’d veto any bill that he thought they might have put their hands on. And in the end, he did veto both the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill.

he could never resist a crowd. And it was a pretty large crowd, singing and chanting, that had marched to the White House from a rally at Grover’s Theater. Arriving at the portico, they yelled out for the President to come and say a few words, and Johnson happily, gratefully, complied. But he proceeded to unleash such a startling chain of venomous epithets and head-turning images—about decapitation and crucifixion—that many people, then and later, had to assume Andy Johnson was completely drunk. He hadn’t been drinking; he was seething. By his lights, he, the President, had been traduced, humiliated, and insulted.

The Radicals were insatiable and insolent. Hadn’t Charles Sumner called him Pharaoh? It was his life that had been endangered during the war, not the lives of the freedpeople.

“Who has suffered more by the rebellion than I have?”

no reason, none at all, to assume that the Civil Rights Bill was objectionable or that it would provoke much controversy,

It merely granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power (though excluding Indians who lived in tribes), and it allowed these people, as citizens, to make contracts, to testify in court, and to move, to marry, or to own property. No punishment meted out to a black man or woman could differ from that inflicted on a white person for the same offense.

“I know I am right, and I am damned if I do not adhere to it.”

winning combination had been demagoguery and orneriness, with a touch of malice,

trumpism

the President had weirdly alluded to marriages between blacks and whites in his veto message, Trumbull inquired why he had mentioned marriage at all—except, he specifically added, as “an argument to excite prejudice—the argument of a demagogue and a politician.”

“Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill the last damned one of the nigger race, and burn up the cradle, God damn them,” John C. Creighton, a judge in the recorder’s court, shouted from atop his horse. “They are very free indeed, but, God damn them, we will kill and drive the last one out of the city.”

In all, forty-six black people were killed in the Memphis riot; at least five black women were raped, and fifty-three people wounded. Two white men were dead, one of them the policeman who shot himself.

the brick Baptist Church on Main Street, the oldest black church in the city, in ashes; so too the black church on Poplar Street and the Lincoln Chapel, where all that remained were just one Bible, the mainspring of a clock, and a fragment of the melodeon. More than seventy homes and schools and every black church had been torched.

Memphis press that branded black people as barbarians, and called the Freedmen’s Bureau a bunch of “negro-worshippers.” This same press then crowed, with satisfaction, that the black man and his Union friends had just received a good first lesson in civil rights.

“I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times.” —THADDEUS STEVENS

IT WAS CLEAR to Congress that something had to be done. Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill suggested that basic freedoms needed constitutional protection.

hammered together by congressional leaders with clashing visions for the future, this ground-breaking legislation, changing our concept of citizenship, was passed in a spirit of hopefulness. “We were each compelled to surrender some of our individual preferences in order to secure anything, and by doing so became unexpectedly harmonious,” Iowa Senator James Grimes told his wife.