House Republican John Bingham didn’t listen to Wendell Phillips. He and his colleague Elihu Washburne both wanted General Grant elected President, impeachment off the table, the party united, and Radical Republicans run out of town. They assumed that if the House passed articles of impeachment, Grant would be lost, for they believed that the impeachers wanted to put the radical Senator Benjamin Wade in the White House, and they weren’t entirely wrong.
