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

by Brenda Wineapple

Instead of replying to this line of attack—that we must above all protect the office of the President—the prosecuting managers too often reduced the great legislative act of impeachment to complicated minutiae. And the President’s defenders began to argue for government stability and presidential authority, the rock-solid foundation that the country deserved.

Evarts believed that a good number of Republicans would prefer the status quo—and electing General Grant—to throwing Johnson out of office and putting in Benjamin Wade. Evarts was also quite aware of certain goings-on behind the scenes.

With fifty-four men in the Senate, the impeachers needed a two-thirds majority—thirty-six votes, in other words—to convict the President. Only nineteen were needed for acquittal. All nine Democratic senators would vote in a bloc for acquittal, and three very conservative Republicans could be counted on as voting in the Democratic column. That meant only seven more Republicans were needed to exonerate President Johnson.

IF IMPEACHMENT FAILED, what would happen to the South? Wouldn’t Johnson possess unshackled power, particularly over the military commanders stationed there? Apprehensive, both Radical and conservative Republicans pushed to admit the newly reconstructed Southern states into the Union.

But a backlash against impeachment was growing. The Republican party had been the nation’s first powerful, national anti-slavery party, a motley group compounded of old Whigs, Free-Soilers, former Democrats, conservatives, Radicals, greenbackers, xenophobes, Eastern financiers, and western humorists. With the war over and slavery abolished, the bonds holding them together were starting to frazzle.

Chase had told all of them they could be leaders of a breakaway party—or with him they could start a new party, sprung out of Republican ruins.

this was the nub of what would become known as the Liberal Republicans, former reformers and abolitionists who railed against the federal intervention in the South and opposed the reconstruction laws they’d once passed.