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

by Brenda Wineapple

conjuring an imaginary Senate gallery teeming with hundreds of indolent freedmen paid by the Treasury Department to come to Washington and “doing nothing to support themselves”—while the white people of the country were taxed to pay for them.

freedmen would earn respectability and prosperity only through their “own merits and exertions.”

Johnson agreed that the freedmen should be protected by civil authorities—state authorities. Each state could take care of itself.

He wanted to force Congress to do his bidding—and in fact he was denying the legitimacy of a Congress that refused to embrace, with virtually no questions asked, the representatives of the former Confederacy.

By marginalizing Radicals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner—casting their positions as obstructionist and extreme—Seward believed he and Johnson could lure conservative and perhaps moderate Republicans into a new Union party.

It was his life that had been endangered during the war, not the lives of the freedpeople.

Centering yourself

This posse of maniacs and revolutionists was conspiring to overthrow the government and boot him out of his job, to topple everything sacred and then to nail him to the cross. These traitors were none other than Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Wendell Phillips. Johnson worked himself up to a pitch, and whatever veneer of composure he had adopted cracked wide open. Mixing self-pity with pride, he balefully described his origins,

“He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust, and must sink from detestation into contempt.”

Forgive white Southerners their trespasses. For though Johnson’s tirade stupefied even his admirers, it tapped into deeply held beliefs about mercy and redemption, and if the rhetoric seemed empty, it effectively replaced political issues with foggy but familiar injunctions to forgive and forget.

The institution of slavery had been abolished, its sinfulness washed clean, and those who did not forgive were themselves with sin, like the vindictive and vengeful Thaddeus Stevens, a man without mercy or magnanimity.

this “people” did not include blacks. As for the blacks, Melville had a plan: “paternal guardianship” might be offered the former slaves, although, he warned, any concern for them “should not be allowed to exclude kindliness to communities who stand nearer to us in nature.” We need to be kind to former slaveholders too. “In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty to the blacks,” Melville reminded the reader, “let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen—measures of a nature to provoke, among other of the last evils, exterminating hatred of race toward race.”

Yet Melville and Whitman weren’t alone. “Everybody is heartily tired of discussing [the Negro’s] rights,” grumbled The Nation. Melville and Whitman were giving voice to those whites bewildered or oblivious or just uncaring and who didn’t want to turn back the clock so much as bury the past and move on.

there were widespread reports about a black insurrection—the old and feared idea that had haunted white communities before the war.

The city’s respectable white folk—lawyers and doctors and newspaper publishers and former secessionists—said it was a terrible event that would never have happened if only they, the former secessionists, had been allowed to hold political office.

Johnson’s magnanimous policy toward former rebels, his willingness to forgive and embrace them and to welcome them back into the Union, reassured them that white supremacy was true and right and to be defended to the hilt, if not with legislation then with torches, bricks, and guns.

Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill suggested that basic freedoms needed constitutional protection. As James Garfield put it, the war had been fought to break the chains of bondage, but it would have been fought in vain if the injustices sustaining bondage weren’t abolished as well. And since laws like the Civil Rights Act could be repealed when political tides changed, as they surely would,

A newly proposed Fourteenth Amendment, revised and revised again, did confer citizenship—but not the right to vote—on all people born or naturalized in the United States. It also guaranteed these citizens equal protection and due process under the law.

“I have seen death on the battlefield,” declared former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin’s son, who happened to be in New Orleans that day, “but time will erase the effects of that, the wholesale slaughter and the little regard paid to human life I witnessed here on the 30 of July I shall never forget.”

“I don’t care about my dignity.”

“I call upon you here tonight as freemen to favor the emancipation of the white man as well as the colored man,”

Even if that were true, Johnson had no one but himself to blame. The publisher James Bennett had reminded him that the press in an instant could telegraph Johnson’s speeches to the entire nation, that reporters would scurry back to their hotels and transcribe their notes to cable stories as fast as possible. Every word of Johnson’s, every hasty wisecrack and intemperate outburst, would flash on the front page of papers throughout the country. And they did.

“What a muddle we are in politically!” he exclaimed. “Was there ever such a madman in so high a place as Johnson?” Senator John Sherman told his brother that the President had “sunk the Presidential office to the level of a grog-house.” Some moderates were even less kind: they said Johnson might be cunning and skillful, but he was basically a hazy-headed demagogue who should resign his office so it might be said that “nothing in his official life ever became him like his leaving of it.”

One of the chief architects of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was Andrew Johnson. 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.

more evidence of the President’s morbid sensitivity, his need for absolute loyalty, and his wariness.

That is, when Johnson recognized the formerly rebel legislatures of the South and vetoed all Northern bills, was it policy, or abuse?

“There is never a lack of legal texts any more than of religious texts, when men seek to stifle their consciences,”

‘Why should he be impeached—what has he done that he should be impeached?’ ‘Well,’ replied she, ‘he hasn’t done anything yet, but I hope to God he will.’ ” That woman’s response, if typical, suggested that impeachment does require a criminal offense, a breaking of the law rather than an abuse of power, a subversion of Congress and hence a failure to execute the laws of the people. But, as some reasonably argued, shouldn’t deplorable, bigoted, or reckless acts be considered impeachable, particularly if they weakened or flouted other branches of government? In that case, impeachment shouldn’t be considered a legal issue at all.

There was no reason to worry, because Johnson wasn’t going to negotiate with anyone. And true enough, once Johnson made up his mind, he wasn’t going to change it. He was simply unable. He took political decisions and strategy personally,

whole character of our Government,” he cried. The President’s obstinacy—and commitment to white supremacy—began to wear even on the patience of friends.

Dunham never delivered anything, but later he alleged that Ashley had urged him to manufacture evidence. The brouhaha served only to damage Ashley’s reputation even further and, not coincidentally, to pour cold water over impeachment.

“Instead of investigating charges of impeachment against the President of the United States on specific allegations, charges extending to every crime and every folly which a wicked, bad man could be guilty of,” Stevens later said, “the investigation entered upon with a malignity and feeling which could do no credit to so high a tribunal.” That damaged the process and the outcome. “These innumerable eggs were thrown into the nest of his investigation, until it was more than full,” Stevens lamented. “They thought to break the elephant’s back, broad as it was, by piling upon it straws.”

The second blunder that ruined the impeachment

The white people of the South were poor, quiet, unoffending, and harmless, he replied, and didn’t deserve “to be trodden under foot ‘to protect niggers.’ ”

He said he’d read about the rape of a twelve-year-old girl in New York, and no one made a fuss. “If it happened in the South, and the girl was black,” he added with contempt, “what an outcry there would have been.”

since there was no sitting Vice President, as president pro tem of the Senate, Benjamin Wade was next in line for the White House. If Johnson were impeached, then the idea of a Radical like Wade in the Executive Mansion would terrify—or could be made to terrify—the country. Andrew Johnson would be saved.

Third thing stopping impeachment

“The cool way in which the beaten side demanded constant conciliation from the victor was getting to be a joke,” Charlotte Cushman observed. “Then the southerner will come back into all their former glory with undimmed luster after four years of traitorism.”

“Church congregations are organized, not on religious but on political bases,” he remarked, “and the Creed begins, ‘I believe in Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr-President of the United States,’ or ‘I believe in Jefferson Davis, the founder of the Confederate States of America.’

“It is not impossible that he [Johnson] is preparing to resist the impeachment with force,” Carl Schurz speculated. Rumors shot through the nation. An armed insurrection was near at hand, spearheaded by the President or by Congress, depending on whom you asked.

With the end of the Civil War, the line separating the federal government and the unbridled business community had grown progressively blurrier. There were taxes being pocketed and government railroad subsidies grabbed and big business demanding public assistance.

For in it he again asserted that the states formerly in rebellion were part of the Union, that they had never in fact left it, and that the late war had been fought only to preserve the Constitution. What’s more, without the Southern states, Johnson exclaimed, the Union did not exist. Nothing new there. But Johnson also played with the word “slavery,” using it not to refer to the formerly enslaved black population but to white state governments that Congress presumed to hold in thrall, state governments, as Johnson prophesized, that would be subjected to a “negro domination” far worse than the “military despotism under which they are now suffering.”

Wilson’s legal argument carried less weight than his deft response to Boutwell’s call to conscience. The Republican House of Representatives may very well follow its Republican conscience, as Boutwell had suggested, but a House stocked with Democrats might step to a different but just as conscience-stricken drummer. Did Mr. Boutwell really intend to plant a government on the “shifting fortunes of political parties,” Wilson asked.

Yet if Johnson’s motives were patriotic but his actions wicked, shouldn’t he be held accountable for those actions?

VINDICATED, JOHNSON LET loose,

“It is a misnomer to call this question in the South a political question—It is War pure & simple.”

Andrew Johnson was not a statesman. He was man with a fear of losing ground, with a need to be recognized, with an obsession to be right, and when seeking revenge on enemies—or perceived enemies—he had to humiliate, harass, and hound them. Heedless of consequences, he baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people. It was a convenient illusion.

“Johnson acts like a man who allows passion & spite to destroy his judgment.”

An impeachable offense need not be an indictable one, like pocketing the spoons.

“I do not care whether Johnson has stepped on a statute or not,” Phillips raised his voice. “Impeachment is the refuge of the common sense of the nation, which in the moment of difficulty says to the magistrate, you ought to have known by your common sense, and your moral sense, that this has unfitted you for your office.” Cheers.

That he had drifted away from his earlier radicalism was clear. This made him attractive to moderate Republicans and, he hoped, to the Democratic party, which had been his party when he was younger.

Basically, Chase had won a significant victory. The trial of the President conducted mostly as if it were a legal proceeding slanted the definition of impeachable offense toward a breach of law and away from questions of fitness, folly, or the autocratic abuse of power. The tide was already turning.

Certainly his support of such scandalous issues as women’s suffrage, equal justice under the law, and paper currency rubbed a number of people the wrong way. He didn’t care. When he brought Congress a bill allowing women the right to their own wages and property, Wade vehemently exclaimed, “I did not do it because they are women, but because it is right.”