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

by Brenda Wineapple

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.

to reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.

Impeachment: it was neither trivial nor ignominious. It was unmistakably about race. It was about racial prejudice, which is not trivial but shameful.

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.

Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, a former slave, put the issue succinctly: “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”

“This is not a ‘white man’s Government,’ ” Stevens blasted them. “To say so is political blasphemy, for it violates the fundamental principles of our gospel of liberty….Equal rights to all the privileges of the Government is innate in every immortal being, no matter what the shape or color of the tabernacle which it inhabits.”