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

by Brenda Wineapple

shall not be driven by clamor or denunciation to throw away a great good because it is not perfect,” Stevens declared. “I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times. “Men in pursuit of justice,” Stevens concluded, “must never despair.”

The New Orleans Crescent declared that “it is our general belief, fixed and unalterable, that this country was discovered by white men, peopled by white men, defended by white men, and owned by white men, and it is our settled purpose that none but white men shall participate in its government.”

As one historian explained, Johnson had an “itch for speechmaking,” and even in prepared remarks, which could last an hour, he couldn’t resist letting loose about his enemies. Those come to hear him also noticed how often he used the personal pronoun or referred to himself, and how often he called reconstruction “My Policy,” emphasizing the “my.”

New Orleans had become a refrain, an epithet, a reminder of the violence produced by a “My Policy” of pardoning former rebels and ushering them into power.

“Why don’t you hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” Johnson yelled back.

Again, he yelled, “Why don’t you hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?

the Republican Chicago Tribune groaned, “The Ravings of a Besotted and Debauched Demagogue.”

“Proud and sensitive, firm to obstinacy, resolute to fierceness, intelligent in his own sphere (which is narrow),” Beecher declared, “he often mistakes the intensity of his own convictions for strength of evidence.” As for Johnson’s recent speeches, on what planet would they be considered conciliatory?

James Russell Lowell remarked that if the President’s rallies weren’t so pathetic, they’d be funny. Johnson was turning himself into a buffoon. William Cullen Bryant said the President’s behavior was not only indiscreet but stupid.

after New Orleans, Grant was making his position clear: the military must intervene when and if the civil authorities allowed the massacre of men and women, as it seemed too often to be doing.

The man had a penchant for martyrdom. It allowed him to cling to his belief that he was cruelly beset, deeply unappreciated, wholly persecuted, and denied the respect he rightfully deserved. If his great destiny—his crucifixion—was to be fulfilled by impeachment, so be it. For his temperament allowed no other choice. He thus welcomed a struggle to the death, with the hero, himself, going down to defeat in a blaze of unforgettable glory.

frustrated the laws of Congress; he branded its leaders as traitors.

The “Swing Around the Circle” had shown the President to be vain, vulgar, and vindictive. The London Spectator called him blind and crazy. Tennessee Governor Brownlow said he was a dead dog. Caricaturist Thomas Nast mocked him. Humorist Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby satirized him. Frederick Douglass indicted him. Johnson’s policy had failed. It was failing. It would continue to fail. Impeachment was now necessary, Ben Butler cried: election results may vex Johnson, they may rile him, they may momentarily stop him, but they will never change him.

James Mitchell Ashley, his face pale, his hands trembling, rose from his seat in the House of Representatives and declared, “I do impeach Andrew Johnson, Vice President and sitting President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” The spectators clapped and stamped, and when the din subsided, Ashley continued: “I charge him with a usurpation of power and violation of law. In that he has corruptly used the appointing power; In that he has corruptly used the pardoning power; In that he has corruptly used the veto power; In that he has corruptly disposed of public lands of the United States: In that he has corruptly interfered in elections, and committed acts that, in contemplation of the Constitution, are high crimes and misdemeanors: Therefore, Be it resolved, that the Committee on the Judiciary be, and they are hereby authorized to inquire into the official conduct of Andrew Johnson.”

the House authorized the Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 108 to 39, to investigate Ashley’s charges.

James Garfield backed off. “If we could succeed in an impeachment of the President it would be a blessing, probably, but it is perfectly evident that with the Senate constituted as it is, we cannot effect an impeachment,” Garfield calculated.

shouldn’t deplorable, bigoted, or reckless acts be considered impeachable, particularly if they weakened or flouted other branches of government?

They would not co-operate with us in rebuilding what they destroyed; we must remove the rubbish and rebuild from the bottom,”

Congress therefore drafted a bill requiring the President to secure the approval of the Senate before firing or suspending any federal officer, including members of the cabinet, who’d been confirmed by the Senate. This would become the contentious Tenure of Office Act—so contentious, in fact, that it was finally and fully repealed, but not until 1887.

in the unreconstructed South “afford no security to life or property of the classes here referred to, and to recommend that Martial Law be declared over such districts as do not afford the proper protection.”

With the end of the Civil War, the line separating the federal government and the unbridled business community had grown progressively blurrier.

Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, no. 65, where Hamilton said that impeachment should result from the misconduct of public men or abuse of the public trust. That is, impeachment did not depend solely on an indictable offense per se. “At the present moment,” Boutwell explained, “we have no law which declares that it shall be a high crime or misdemeanor for the President to decline to recognize the Congress of the United States, and yet should he deny its lawful and constitutional existence and authority, and thus virtually dissolve the Government, would the House and Senate be impotent and unable to proceed by process of impeachment to secure his removal from office?”

Andrew Johnson had usurped the function and the will of Congress.

Representative John Bingham, who had been opposed to impeachment from the start, rose from his seat. “I stand here,” he said, “filled with a conviction as strong as knowledge that the President of the United States has deliberately, defiantly, and criminally violated the Constitution, his oath of office, and the laws of the country.”

what about the shameless pardon brokerage? What about consorting with traitors and murderers in New Orleans?

Thaddeus Stevens hobbled to the front of the Speaker’s podium, bracing himself against the marble desk. His voice was hoarse. The room fell silent. But the effort to say what he wanted to say was too much for him. He handed his speech to McPherson. “The framers of our Constitution did not rely for safety upon the avenging dagger of a Brutus, but provided peaceful remedies which should prevent that necessity,” McPherson read.

The impeachment resolution passed, 126 to 47. All

Horace Greeley proclaimed that “impeachment is peace.”

“There is something grand to us in this spectacle of a great nation changing an incompetent ruler by the gentle and easy process of law.”

“None are above the law; that no man lives for himself alone, ‘but each for all.’ ” —JOHN BINGHAM

“Our American politics,” Whitman told another friend, “are in an unusually effervescent condition.”

on Christmas Day, Johnson issued a Fourth Amnesty Proclamation, this time to pardon unconditionally and without reservation anyone, whether Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, who’d participated either directly or indirectly in the recent rebellion, and to provide immunity from the charge of treason.

Mark Twain, unable to let the moment pass, wrote his own version of Andrew Johnson’s last speech: “And when my term began to draw to a close, & I saw that but little time remained wherein to defeat justice, to further exasperate the people, & to complete my unique & unprecedented record, I fell to & gathered up the odds & ends, & made it perfect—swept it clean; for I pardoned Jeff Davis; I pardoned every creature that had ever lifted his hand against the hated flag of the Union I have swept the floors clean; my work is done.”

Johnson released a farewell address that typically broadcast his grievances about being misunderstood, abused, and unfairly criticized. “I have nothing to regret,” he concluded.

Those who insisted Johnson was only following Lincoln’s lead conveniently forgot that Lincoln had said, just days before being shot, that since slavery had caused the war, this terrible war would be waged “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ” Lincoln had not blinked. Despite his penchant for kindness and mercy, there was no reason to suppose he would have betrayed a people that he’d fought hard to free.

The impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson represented yet another attempt to preserve the Union and free the slaves, which, to the impeachers, were the self-same thing: to preserve the Union meant creating a more perfect one, liberated at last from the noxious and lingering effects of an appalling institution that treated human beings as property.

The impeachment of a sitting President was uncharted territory. Given the somewhat ambiguous instructions in the Constitution, it is largely uncharted to this very day. It was successfully used to threaten Richard Nixon, who resigned from office to escape impeachment, and it was waged with partisan fury against William Jefferson Clinton. But the walls did not come tumbling down. For the framers of the Constitution considered that if impeachment removed the President from office, the office of the President—the presidency itself—would remain intact. That was their aim.

his legacy was that of white supremacy and spite.

It demonstrated that the American President was not a king, that all actions have consequences, and that the national government, conceived in hope, with its checks and balances, could maintain itself without waging war, even right after one. And that the national government could struggle to free itself from all vestiges of human oppression. It had not succeeded, but it had worked. The impeachers had reduced the seventeenth President to a shadow—a shadow President; that is, a President who did not cast a long shadow, although his regressive policies would.