More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 5 - January 5, 2022
Now congressional Republicans believed they no longer had a choice: impeachment was the only way to stop a President who refused to accept the acts of Congress, who usurped its prerogatives, and who, most recently, had violated a law that he pretended to wave away as unconstitutional.
“This is a country for white men, and, by G—d, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.”
“If we have not been sufficiently scourged for our national sin to teach us to do justice to all God’s creatures, without distinction of race or color,” Stevens had declared at war’s end, “we must expect the still more heavy vengeance of an offended Father.”
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.
Should the states that had waged war against the Union be welcomed back into the House and the Senate, all acrimony forgotten, all rebellion forgiven, as if they had never seceded? President Johnson argued that the eleven states had never left; the Constitution forbade secession, and so the Union had never been dissolved.
Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean occupying the White House, had acted quickly. While Congress was in recess, he singlehandedly re-established Southern state governments by executive proclamation. He subsequently issued pardons to former Confederates on easy terms and at an astonishing rate. He later nudged out of the Freedmen’s Bureau those who disagreed with his position and tried to shut down that Bureau by vetoing legislation that would keep it running. He vetoed civil rights legislation as unfair to whites and attempted to block passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which
...more
Yet oddly, for years and years, the intensely dramatic event—the impeachment of the U.S. President—has largely been papered over or ignored. For years, we’ve sidestepped that ignominious moment when a highly unlikeable President Johnson was brought to trial in the Senate, presumably by fanatical foes. The whole episode left such a bitter aftertaste, as the eminent scholar C. Vann Woodward said more than four decades ago, that historians often relegated the term “impeachment” to the “abysmal dustbin” of never-again experiences—like “secession,” “appeasement,” and “isolationism.”
forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment. “This is one of the last great battles with slavery,”
Impeachment: it was neither trivial nor ignominious. It was unmistakably about race. It was about racial prejudice, which is not trivial but shameful.
Impeaching a President implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small—unable to listen to, never mind to represent, the people they serve with justice, conscience, and equanimity. Impeachment suggests dysfunction, uncertainty, and discord—not the discord of war, which can be memorialized as valorous, purposeful, and idealistic, but the far less dramatic and often squalid, sad, intemperate conflicts of peace, partisanship, race, and rancor. Impeachment implies a failure—a failure of government of
...more
For both Stevens and Sumner were unswerving champions of abolition and civil rights—and yet both were long considered malicious and vindictive zealots, cold and maniacal men incapable of compassion or mercy.
a man vengefully bent on destroying the South.
Johnson’s heroic, lonely stand against secession—he was the only senator from a Confederate state to oppose it—earned him an appointment as military governor of Tennessee during the war and then the vice-presidential slot when President Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864.
One writer, in the 1920s, anticipating Kennedy’s portrayal, christened Johnson a “profile in courage” whom future generations would regard as an “unscathed cross upon a smoking battlefield.” Johnson was seen for a time as a populist, a champion of democracy and of the beloved Constitution; as a man of principle, flawed perhaps, but honest, upright, brave. Perhaps he had been brave—if, that is, one can separate mettle from mulishness. 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.
...more
blame Congress or anyone dubious about the Southern governments he had put into place, crackpot fanatics who wanted to give all people the vote, even in some cases women, regardless of color. Don’t blame him.
These were years of sound and fury, of fanaticism and terror, of political idealism and mixed motives, of double-dealing and high principle—and of racism, confusion, and fear. It was a time of opportunism, paranoia, pluck, and tragedy:
While in Lincoln’s cabinet, Stanton encouraged the deployment of black troops; he supported the Emancipation Proclamation; he endorsed the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. His detractors perceived these positions as disloyal because they seemed to contradict his earlier allegiance to the Democratic party and called into question his earlier contempt for abolitionists. They began branding Stanton a traitor.
growing recognition that slavery was an unpardonable sin—and that secession, as a way to preserve slavery, was an unpardonable error.
mandate, he was reluctant at first to show his hand. But since he had despised secession with every fiber of his being, his hatred of it only strengthened his intention to make the Union whole again and to heal its wounds while he, Andrew Johnson, emerged unequivocally as the nation’s leader. He believed that providence had chosen him to consummate this most sacred task of healing—and to keep his sacred office.
It would be patently unfair, they said, to enfranchise the white men who’d fought against the country while denying the vote to black men who’d fought for it.
he told them with galling condescension that too many former slaves loaf around, looking to the government for handouts. “They seem to think that with freedom every thing they need is to come like manna from heaven,” Johnson said.
“Better, far better, would it have been for Grant to have surrendered to Lee,” Wendell Phillips quipped, “than for Johnson to have surrendered to North Carolina.” “Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President?”
Of course there were no precedents for any of this, and there was something improvised about these lurchings into peace.
Stevens proposed they be “held in a territorial condition until they are fit to form State constitutions, republican in fact and in form, and ask admission into the Union as new States.”
For four years we have met them in battle; and now we rush to trust them, and to commit into their keeping the happiness and well-being of others. There is peril in trusting such an enemy.”
“He is nominally a President of a republic, but in reality an absolute ruler issuing decrees (not executing laws), and carrying them out by naked military force.
Johnson consistently delivered speech after stump speech in praise of “the people,” those unsung (white) laborers who struggled to survive every day and who could not parade “family distinctions on account of superior blood.” “The aristocracy in this district know that I am for the people,” Johnson proudly announced in 1845 when defending his seat in the House of Representatives. To him, the aristocracy was any well-born or connected group, like lawyers, that earned their bread “by fatiguing their ingenuity” rather than by the sweat of their brows.
voice of the people,” he summed up, “is the voice of God.” Such platform histrionics appalled sober politicians who didn’t dangle watches or divinities, and they called Johnson a demagogue. Even Democrats took offense.
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.
The high-and-mighty planters who sat on the top rung of Johnson’s ladder were his enemies, but so too were the slaves and free blacks whom he considered below him—and whom he feared might clamber up a rung or two and knock him to the ground.
His foes—there was an ever-growing number—said he catered to the prejudices of whatever crowd he addressed. If they liked, he liked; if they hated, he hated more.
A states’ rights defender who rigorously championed the institution of slavery and a Democrat wary of executive privilege or power, Johnson did support the President’s right to veto bills, a right Johnson would exercise years later when he reached the White House. The contradiction did not bother him.
“Cato was a man who would not compromise with wrong but being right, died before he would yield.”
Bad in the wrong hands
Politics was his religion. “The passion of his life was the desire of power,”
This too was supposed to have been an isolated incident.
One local paper accused Northerners of “seizing upon isolated instances of violence and crime in the Southern States—especially if the negro is in any way a victim—and commenting upon them to the prejudice of the returning loyalty and sense of justice of the Southern people.” But Reid began to wonder. “People had not got over regarding negroes as something other than human,” he decided.
“We are in danger of too much northern managing for the negro,” the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher said. “The black man is just like the white in this—that he should be left, & obliged, to take care of himself & suffer & enjoy, according as he creates the means of either.”
But many of his friends in the anti-slavery movement, notably William Lloyd Garrison, seemed to think that with slavery abolished, their job was finished.
Detractors christened him the great apostle of the abolitionist cranks, a badge he wore with pride. “The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any,”
The South victorious? How was that possible? Phillips suavely answered: What principle had the South surrendered? Certainly not state sovereignty. “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,”
“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.”
“One reason why the Southern people are so slow in accommodating themselves to the new order of things is, that they confidently expect soon to be permitted to regulate matters according to their own notions.”
“He has all the narrowness and ignorance of a certain class of whites,” Sumner complained, “who have always looked upon the colored race as out of the pale of humanity.”
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.
He’d never withdraw into conservatism: “all his life he held the outpost of thought,”
“If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become its Pharaoh.”
“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.”
Johnson’s answer was predictable: the federal government should not impose black voting rights on “the people” of any state. Downing must have smiled to himself, for he quickly replied that in South Carolina, say, most of “the people” were black. Johnson ignored him.
Johnson didn’t listen well, and when nervous, as he evidently was, he repeated himself or rambled. He intended to be the black man’s Moses, he said. The two races, black and white, were natural enemies, he continued, and if “turned loose upon the other”—that is, if “thrown together at the ballot-box with this enmity and hate existing between them”—there’d be a race war. Working himself up, Johnson crossly added that he’d risked life and property in the war, and he certainly didn’t like, as he put it, “to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods and deal in rhetoric, and
...more
