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

by Brenda Wineapple

“This is one of the last great battles with slavery,” Senator Charles Sumner had said. “Driven from these legislative chambers, driven from the field of war, this monstrous power has found refuge in the Executive Mansion, where, in utter disregard of the Constitution and laws, it seeks to exercise its ancient far-reaching sway.”

Johnson was a champion of the underprivileged, the enemy of snobbery and affectation, a plain person, without frills, earthy and ungilded. What you saw was what you got.

“One reason why the Southern people are so slow in accommodating themselves to the new order of things is, that they confidently expect soon to be permitted to regulate matters according to their own notions.”

“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.”

though he’d believed Lincoln hadn’t prosecuted the war fast enough or hard enough—and that he hadn’t abolished slavery quickly enough—Stevens aggressively campaigned for Lincoln in 1864.

THADDEUS STEVENS MAY have been an idealist, and he may have been a crusader—but he wasn’t a Puritan or a perfectionist, which is how Charles Sumner was regarded. Like Stevens, Sumner was principled and sincere, but

Thaddeus Stevens thought well of the bill but wanted more. If the freedpeople or refugees could not afford to rent or buy their land after the allotted period, they’d be turned away, and this struck Stevens as cruel, so in his updated version of the legislation, he proposed that all forfeited and public lands be reserved for freedmen and refugees. He also wanted the Bureau to provide them with public education. But his amendment was defeated. Conservatives such as Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury opposed it, histrionically 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.

Johnson also said the bill was unconstitutional because the eleven former rebel states had not yet been seated by Congress. They belonged in Congress. After all, he repeated, they’d never left the Union. As a result, Johnson said that he, as President, would reject all legislation concerning the freedmen until representatives from these former rebel states were admitted to Congress.

A Democrat before the war, Whitman had no fondness for what he called the “scum” of politics: rabid partisanship. To him, both Johnson and the Radicals were ferocious, divided, and divisive. He was seeking reconciliation, the kind that rockets transcendentally above the petty concerns of petty people. This too was the desire of novelist

since Northerners were the victors in the war, they had an obligation to remember that Southern women who scatter flowers on the graves of their husbands, sons, and fathers are “as sacred in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs.”

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.

Many also pointed a finger at President Andrew Johnson. 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.

Wendell Phillips hated the Fourteenth Amendment, saying it was a “fatal and total surrender,” as he told Thad Stevens.

“I shall not be driven by clamor or denunciation to throw away a great good because it is not perfect,” Stevens declared. “I will take all I can get in the cause of humanity and leave it to be perfected by better men in better times. “Men in pursuit of justice,” Stevens concluded, “must never despair.”

Thaddeus Stevens spoke again, this time elegiacally. “In my youth, in my manhood, in my old age, I had fondly dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for a while the foundation of our institutions, and released us from our obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom, that the intelligent, pure and just men of the Republic, true to their professions and their consciences, would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality or rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich. “This bright dream has vanished,” he concluded. Our institutions are not yet devoid of human oppression or inequality, he went on to say. And yes, we might have done better if we had the cooperation of President Johnson. But we don’t. The President would have the former Confederacy remain a slave empire under a different name. We cannot allow that or forgive that. So we must not delay, we must not give up, we must take and do what we can: “Mutual concession,” Thaddeus Stevens added, “is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”

Johnson was a dictator, Boutwell said; he’d imposed his policies on the South, organizing provisional governments, inaugurating constitutional conventions, and booting out elected or appointed officers. Such autocratic actions were a usurpation of power—and as such were impeachable offenses.

“Come back to the true principles of justice for all—equal rights for all men—away with the idea this is a white man’s Government—it is God’s government,” Butler cried. “It is made for white men, black men, or gray men—all men, and all men with a perfect equality.”

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.

Mark Twain in Washington observed much the same thing. “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.’

Johnson said he had decided against using the armed forces to resist Congress, for he didn’t want to trigger another civil war.

“At the present moment,” Boutwell explained, “we have no law which declares that it shall be a high crime or misdemeanor for the President to decline to recognize the Congress of the United States, and yet should he deny its lawful and constitutional existence and authority, and thus virtually dissolve the Government, would the House and Senate be impotent and unable to proceed by process of impeachment to secure his removal from office?”

Johnson’s recommendation to Grant that he disobey the Tenure of Office law constituted a conspiracy to obstruct justice, Stevens insisted. And Johnson had actually instructed Grant to disregard Secretary Stanton’s orders.

Thaddeus Stevens limped from one to another, asking over and over, “Didn’t I tell you so? What good did your moderation do you? If you don’t kill the beast, it will kill you.”

Stanton agreed that if the Senate deemed Johnson’s action illegal, he would definitely stay put in his office and, if he must, sleep there. Stanton “stuck.” His office under siege, he took his meals at his desk and slept on his sofa.

“If you do not crush Johnson,” Senator Fessenden was warned, “he is determined evidently to crush the Congress & annul the work of Reconstruction.”

“The framers of our Constitution did not rely for safety upon the avenging dagger of a Brutus, but provided peaceful remedies which should prevent that necessity,” McPherson read. Their peaceful remedy was impeachment, whose whole and only punishment was removal from office.

“There is something grand to us in this spectacle of a great nation changing an incompetent ruler by the gentle and easy process of law.” —

To secure Bingham’s and Wilson’s votes, the House had been forced to focus on Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act, an indictable offense, and not, as Stevens would have preferred, the President’s abuse of power. Ill and weak though he may have been, Stevens worried that “the committee are likely to present no articles having any real vigor in them.”

“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.”

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.

‘Conviction means a transfer to the Presidency of Mr. Wade,’ ” he reported them as saying, “ ‘a man of violent passions, extreme opinions and narrow views;

Karl Marx, who called Andrew Johnson “a dirty tool of the slaveholders,” admiringly quoted from Wade’s public statement that “after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day.”

Johnson’s friend, the journalist Joseph McCullagh, told the President that the impeachment trial would be more about blocking Wade than about banishing Johnson.

Assuming that Johnson couldn’t get a fair trial in the Senate, the crafty Black urged the President to resign so that the Democrats in 1868 could nominate him as their standard-bearer, a martyred hero trampled down by the likes of Beast Butler and the Radical Senator Wade.

The impeachers were supposed to argue sweepingly, nobly, and idealistically. They were spokesmen for a rejuvenated nation recovering from the tragedies of war. They were supposed to conjure the more perfect Union that Andrew Johnson had been set on destroying since he had chosen the crooked, not the straight, path for the present and the future,

Yet as the trial continued, impeachers and defenders seemed to be trading places, as when Butler argued technicalities about whether Andrew Johnson had broken a law, and what rules of evidence for breaking a law should include. Or when John Bingham, in a convoluted argument, claimed that whether he prosecuted a beggar or a President, the same rules of evidence applied.

a removal of the Chief Magistrate of the nation for some offence that he has committed against the public welfare with bad motives and for an improper purpose;

the prosecuting managers too often reduced the great legislative act of impeachment to complicated minutiae.

The real issue was reconstruction, Stevens went on to explain. It had always been. For Johnson had encouraged defunct rebellious states to live as unjustly as before and as unwilling to create a free and fair country.

eleventh, or omnibus, article of impeachment, which accused Johnson of repudiating the Thirty-Ninth Congress and its reconstruction legislation.

Had the managers mangled their case? Should they have emphasized the larger questions of usurpation, power, and responsibility—and the consequences that might follow Johnson’s acquittal? After all, hadn’t Johnson been guilty of bartering the peace and turning the country away from the values it presumably cherished and fought for?

“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.”

Republicans working hard to make him the next President regarded impeachment as a radical conspiracy aimed at stopping the Grant juggernaut.

Johnson was bewildered. As he saw it, he’d scored a victory over the impeachers, he and his policies had prevailed, and yet he might lose the contest he most wanted to win: election to the White House on his own merits—he’d been the Accidental President, a mere custodian, thanks to the bullet of an assassin. But he was not dead yet.

Ulysses S. Grant won the presidency by a sizeable electoral margin—214 electoral votes from 26 states for Grant versus 80 electoral votes from 8 states for Seymour. But Grant received only 52 percent of the popular vote. 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.

In March of 1875, after a near-fatal bout of cholera and though he’d been defeated in two congressional races, Andrew Johnson triumphantly returned to the U.S. Senate, much the same man: headstrong and quarrelsome, fulminating against reconstruction, black people, and President Grant.

“I am only trying to carry out the measures Mr. Lincoln would have done had he lived,” Johnson had told his bodyguard. In coming years, that would become scripture: Johnson had been simply trying to execute Lincoln’s policy of malice toward none when he was viciously thwarted by the implacable Furies known as the Radicals.

those who understood that slavery had caused the war also understood how it was slavery that lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.

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.

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. For in an essential way, impeachment had accomplished what it had set out to do. It spoke beautifully and with farsighted imagination of the road not yet taken, but that could exist: the path toward a free country, a just country, a country and a people willing to learn from the past, not erase or repeat it, and create the fair future of which men and women still dream.