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

by Brenda Wineapple

“To the one he is a vile, provoking obstruction,” The New York Herald rightly noted, “to the other, a constitutional lighthouse, sending forth beacon rays warning of the rocks and shoals and quicksands that environ the ship of state.”

His appointment of Hancock and Hancock’s acceptance were political maneuvers, not acts of violence. Yet they did strike fear in the hearts of the weak-kneed or paranoid—and Johnson’s recklessness disturbed his defense team. As for the rumors, cooler heads said they should be ignored. “I cannot believe there is really any danger of armed resistance to impeachment, the force which Johnson could command is so small, and the suicidal folly of such a course so evident,” Moorfield Storey wisely observed. “Still,” he added, as if with a shake of the head, “Johnson is an exception to all rules.”

Conservatives, Democrats, Copperheads together dismissed stories about the Klan as a joke, a fairy tale, a Republican bogey contrived to “frighten old ladies in their tea-cups.” Republicans countered that the Ku Klux Klan had come to the assistance of President Johnson—in particular, to prevent black men from voting in the South.

if the President wasn’t removed, a make-believe organization called Ku Klux Klan would devour all blacks. “The Dems pooh-pooh the KKK outrages just as they did the Black Ruffian outrages in Kansas,”

The President had spoken intemperately, he admitted, but his unfortunate statements had occurred during impromptu speeches, when he’d become irritated. Compare this with the diatribes of congressmen. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” Evarts cried with mock solemnity.

The strategy was brilliant: to rouse emotion in his audience by playing on Republican ambivalence, Evarts provided moderates and even radical-leaning Republicans a way out of their dilemma, which was in effect to respect and preserve the office of the presidency even though they disapproved of Johnson for his crudeness, his bias, his obstructionism, and his disdain for a legally reconstructed nation. Evarts thus manipulated fellow Republicans, speaking for those who, like himself, thought Johnson a boor who had actually harmed the peace but who also believed that his conviction would destroy the party. He manipulated fellow Republicans who feigned contempt for politics and political rhetoric, knowing that their contempt was theater, artfully staged.

Whitman’s somewhat cluttered syntax suggests that he was actually very worried. And Whitman wasn’t alone. It seemed the fate of the entire country would soon be decided—though

Though no supporter of the Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, or universal suffrage—he’d opposed them adamantly—Van Winkle had supported the Reconstruction Act of 1867, mainly because he despised former Confederates and did not want them in power.

A sad group

Conviction would mean that Senator Wade, next in line as President, might actually be Grant’s running mate, and with such a red-hot Radical anywhere near the Executive Mansion, the Republicans might lose in November. Acquit—and they could win.

“The grass would be green, and the corn would grow, and men would be happy or miserable, whether Andrew Johnson should be acquitted or condemned,”

“His speeches and the general course of his administration have been as distasteful to me as to any one, and I should consider it the great calamity of the age if the disloyal element, so often encouraged by his measures, should gain political ascendency,” Trumbull explained. “If the question was, is Andrew Johnson a fit person for President? I should answer, no; but it is not a party question, nor upon Andrew Johnson’s deeds and acts, except so far as they are made to appear in the record, that I am to decide.”

Johnson’s conviction would elevate Benjamin Wade, and Ben Wade as interim President could distribute patronage to Radical Republicans, cause inflation by circulating greenbacks, even promote legislation allowing black men—and maybe all women—to vote: incalculable damage that threatened to divide and possibly destroy the party.

Final say on the vote

As for the Republican platform, it was broad and it was bland. It contained promises to reduce taxes, to eliminate federal corruption, to pay the national debt but sidestepped the suffrage question.

if Johnson had been convicted on the eleventh article of impeachment, maybe the Republican platform would have pledged itself to something rather than to empty nothings.

he has openly and covertly worked toward the realization of an avowed object, with an earnestness and consistency worthy of a great cause,” declared John Forney. “That cause, as he presents it, is the restoration of the late rebel States to their places in the Union as co-equal members thereof, under their old constitutions and with their old bodies politic.

Sound familiar?

he has introduced the most fearful system of corruption and demoralization into any government known in modern history.”

Johnson had been steadily and scrupulously restoring a system of slavery, of inequality and indignity by other means. “Before any Senator who was elected as a Republican, who voted for the reconstruction laws, the civil rights bill, or the tenure-of-office bill, who believes in the doctrine of human rights against class privilege, who reveres the memory of the soldiers that fell; for the Union, who believes in progressive civilization and the dignity of labor,” Forney was begging, “before any such Senator votes for Andrew Johnson’s acquittal, we implore him to look ahead.”

vote as he had. To Republicans like Fessenden, the defeat of impeachment ensured the restoration of a laissez-faire government guided by the invisible hand of the best men—not by women, black people, or anyone regarded as a nut. Or by Andrew Johnson.

And conservative Republicans decided that they’d simply done enough. Southern blacks were free. The rest of their lives was up to them.

“The epoch turns on the negro,” Wendell Phillips declared, still able to stir large audiences. “It is not my fanaticism; it is not my prejudice; it is not a fatal conceit. Justice to him saves the nation, ends the strife, and gives us peace; injustice to him prolongs the war. You can’t help it. You may shut yours eyes to it, and say you don’t want to hear about it; but the thunders of a thousand cannons will ring it into your ears, and into the ears of your children.”

But Charles Sumner spoke up, as Sumner always had. “There can be no State Rights against Human Rights.”

ON FEBRUARY 25, 1869, the House of Representatives did pass legislation that would become the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing that the right to vote not be denied or abridged by any state “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, even Peter Van Winkle voted for it, as did Fessenden and Trumbull. Edmund Ross, James Grimes, and John Henderson were absent, though Henderson had introduced the resolution. Sumner abstained: true to himself, he contended that the amendment didn’t go far enough—it did not prevent the states from disqualifying voters on the basis, say, of not owning property; it said nothing about the right of a black man to hold office; it said nothing about how the amendment would be enforced. —

“Dunning school” of historians asserted that reconstruction had been a tragic failure: the so-called “carpetbaggers”—a derogatory term for Northerners come to teach, invest, or to farm—had invaded the South merely to plunder and then profit from its white misery. Freedmen and -women had been nothing more than inferior beings easily manipulated; and the Ku Klux Klan was a patriotic guild that repaired the dignity of white folk. Andrew Johnson had been maligned and mistreated.

White men had overwhelmingly voted for Seymour. It was the 500,000 votes of black men in the South that carried the election for Grant—the votes of black men, that is, who had not been prevented, at gunpoint, from voting.

He scorned black suffrage in the South, which he called an “attempt to place the white population under the domination of persons of color.”

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.

Andrew Johnson triumphantly returned to the U.S. Senate, much the same man: headstrong and quarrelsome, fulminating against reconstruction, black people, and President Grant.

The war was over; freedmen were citizens. “Before the law they stand on a level with the whitest man here. [Applause] That being the case there is no need and there should be no excuse for special legislation for any special class of people, since there is none such in the Republic. [Applause, again.]” The time had come to clasp hands, embrace amnesty, to welcome former Confederates in the body politic.

“If slavery is not wrong,” Lincoln had said, “nothing is wrong.”

To forget the reasons why Andrew Johnson was impeached, to denude or belittle them, ignores how a divided, culpable nation had destroyed so many lives, and how it then came near to destroying itself. If those reasons are forgotten, the impeachment of Andrew Johnson seems unreasonable or ludicrous. It was neither. 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.

Even now, those questions are not settled: was impeachment to be understood as a judicial matter, where the Senate decided if an actual law or statute had been broken; or was impeachment designed to punish malfeasance in office, “where there was no actual crime committed,” as Thaddeus Stevens had reasoned.

sworn to serve. The impeachers believed that with Andrew Johnson, a man who was not an adroit leader, not a supple thinker, and not a humanitarian but a man who’d repeatedly vetoed postwar legislation, imperiled the lives of at least four million people, sought to inflame racial tensions, render black citizens defenseless, and restore civic power to slaveholders, who’d insulted Congress as well as individuals, and who had coarsened public discourse—that with this man, this President who would and did break the law, no future worth the many hopeful lives lost on the battlefield, in the cities and the countryside, would ever be possible.

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. The impeachers had warned the country about these policies as best they could, and offered to us, clearly and without apology, a cautionary tale. And they provided hope.