Impeaching Johnson

As Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson inherited the presidency on the morning of April 15, 1865, after Lincoln died from the gunshot wound inflicted by his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Born in North Carolina in 1808 and orphaned at age 10, Johnson looked, on first meeting, like a copy of Lincoln’s own rise from log-cabin poverty. Beginning as a tailor’s apprentice, Johnson moved to Tennessee, won election as mayor of Greeneville, then to the state legislature, then as governor, and finally to the U.S. Senate in 1857.

True, Johnson differed markedly from Lincoln in being a lifelong Democrat, and he had even owned slaves. But he was also a fervent Unionist and owed nothing to the plantation grandees who dragged the nation into civil war. He was the only senator from a Confederate state who refused to withdraw from Congress at his state’s demand, and in 1862, Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of occupied Tennessee. It seemed to Lincoln’s Republicans that pinning Johnson to the Lincoln reelection ticket in 1864 would lure moderate Democrats to support Lincoln and provide the best proof that Lincoln and his party were not simply Southern-haters looking to exact a postwar revenge.

Just how wrong the Republicans were about Johnson became depressingly clear even before Lincoln’s murder. Although he had no love for the thousand-bale planters, he also had no enthusiasm for freed slaves. When Johnson promised black Tennesseans in October 1864 that he would be “your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace,” that future was only as part of “a White Man’s Government in America.” He showed up for his inauguration on March 4, 1865, drunk beyond any hope of disguise, and gave a rambling speech celebrating his “plebeian” origins. “This Johnson is a queer man,” Lincoln remarked, and in April, when the Confederate capital finally fell to Union forces, Lincoln ignored a suggestion that he and Johnson meet there.

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Lincoln had always been reluctant to announce any elaborate plan for the postwar reconstruction of the Southern Confederacy. But he did insist on at least two general principles, the first being that any reconstruction initiatives belonged to the executive branch, not to Congress or the courts, and the second being that the Southern states should be reabsorbed into the normal functions of the Union as soon as possible. Johnson did not disagree with those principles—which is why, for the first six weeks of his presidency, he enjoyed something of a honeymoon with the powerful Republican majority in Congress.

But by the summer of 1865, it was becoming apparent that Johnson had a very different notion from Lincoln of what as soon as possible meant, and a wildly aggressive notion of executive power. On May 29, Johnson issued the first of a series of ever-expanding amnesties to “civil or diplomatic officers” of the Confederacy. He followed that immediately with proclamations authorizing the re-creation of state governments in the defeated Confederacy that could send representatives and senators to Washington when the 39th Congress opened for business in December. They promptly and unwisely elected many of the ex-Confederates Johnson had just amnestied. Johnson’s new state governments grudgingly accepted the abolition of slavery. But they just as quickly replaced slavery with “black codes,” designed to bind the freed slaves into virtual peonage.

This was not what Republicans had fought the Civil War to win. Johnson’s program seemed to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner to be “like a somersault or an apostasy.” Astonished Republicans caucused prior to the opening of Congress and agreed to ban the ex-Confederate members from taking seats, and then created a joint House-Senate Committee on Reconstruction that would reclaim management of the process from the executive branch. They funded the Freedmen’s Bureau, to give economic assistance to the freed slaves; they passed a Civil Rights Act that overturned the “black codes”; and in February of 1867 they adopted the first of four Reconstruction Acts that seized control of Reconstruction from Johnson’s hands and reduced the former Confederate states to occupied military districts.

Johnson, with mounting irritability, vetoed each bill. Congress, with mounting confidence, overrode the vetoes.

Even so, as president, Johnson still had considerable opportunity to interfere with Congress’s Reconstruction plans. The military districts would be ruled by generals whom Johnson appointed, and after Johnson bluntly asked General in Chief Ulysses Grant whom he would support “if I should have trouble with Congress,” rumors began to thicken that Johnson was planning a military coup. That was the moment when the word impeachment came to life in Republican mouths.

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There had been mutterings about impeaching Johnson as early as 1866, and a motion for impeachment made it to the floor of the House of Representatives on January 7, 1867. But the best rationale disgruntled Republicans could offer for impeachment was their political rage at Johnson’s policies, and policies—even Johnson’s—do not qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors. The motion died in the Judiciary Committee.

Emboldened, Johnson gave alienated Republicans a bigger stick to beat him with. Johnson had been purging the cabinet he inherited from Lincoln, and by the summer of 1867, he had successfully forced out any but unquestioning loyalists—except for the formidable secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton. To protect Stanton and other Republican officeholders, congressional Republicans passed the Tenure of Office Act, which insisted that any federal officeholder whose appointment had required the “advice and consent” of the Senate could not be dismissed without similar “advice and consent.” More than that, the bill contained an impeachment trap. A violation of “any of the provisions” of the act “shall be deemed . . . a high misdemeanor.”

Johnson vetoed the act, but the veto was overridden. Enraged, he deliberately put his foot into the trap. When the 40th Congress recessed on July 21, 1867, Johnson suspended Stanton from office and named Ulysses Grant interim secretary of war.

This provided Republicans with what they thought was the key to impeaching Johnson. The explicit manner in which the Tenure of Office Act defined its violations as “high misdemeanors” finally seemed to provide a statutory basis for impeachment. Not quite. Johnson displayed some craftiness of his own by merely “suspending” Stanton, and when Congress reconvened in late November, a second impeachment motion went down to defeat in a floor vote.

This little victory convinced Johnson that he held the winning cards, and on February 21, 1868, arguing “that self-respect demanded it,” Johnson ordered Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas to deliver a dismissal notice to Stanton and assume the duties of secretary of war. Stanton refused; he refused, in fact, to vacate the War Department at all and set up temporary living quarters in his office, confident that Congress would support him.

Which it did, because now Johnson, by dismissing Stanton, was in clear and unambiguous violation of the Tenure of Office Act. With near-glee, the House of Representatives, following the lead of the implacable Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens, voted 126 to 47 to impeach.

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Unhappily for Stevens and the Republicans, the case against Johnson was feebler than it seemed, and obtaining a conviction more thorny with difficulty. The impeachment took the form of 11 articles, bristling with irritation. But irritation does not translate into proof of criminality, and reduced to cold type, the articles sounded petty and spiteful. There was also serious question about the Tenure of Office Act’s constitutionality and even more doubt about the propriety of destroying a president for what amounted to a personnel dispute.

Moreover, the Constitution specifies (Article I, Section 3) that “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments” and that the senators must summon a two-thirds supermajority in order to convict. Nudging that bar a little higher, it also stipulates that when the president is the object, “the Chief Justice” of the Supreme Court “shall preside.” The chief justice, in 1868, was Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s onetime secretary of the Treasury. Chase was aware that if Johnson were convicted, there was no sitting vice president to succeed him (the office had been left vacant when Johnson assumed the presidency). The man who would therefore inherit the presidential mantle would be the president pro tempore of the Senate, the fierce Ohioan Benjamin Wade, and Chase detested Wade. No motion that favored the prosecution was liable to be approved by Chase; and no one else in the Senate who loathed Wade would, no matter how much they disliked Johnson, give a vote that made Wade president.

But it was the House prosecution that turned into its own worst enemy. The House designated seven managers to conduct Johnson’s trial in the Senate, and of the seven, Thaddeus Stevens was the most likely to take the lead. But Stevens was in rapidly declining health, and the primary role in prosecuting Johnson fell instead to the most eminently dislikable of the seven, Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. Butler converted the trial, which began on March 30, into a farce of witness-badgering, legal nitpicking, and bluster.

Johnson, by contrast, allowed his attorney general, Henry Stanbery, to build a sterling defense team that included former Supreme Court justice Benjamin Curtis and William M. Evarts, who had moved the unanimous nomination of Abraham Lincoln at the 1860 Republican convention. It did nothing to hurt Johnson that behind the scenes, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward, had put his New York political machine into action to spread strategic cash and promises of government patronage to swing votes among the senators.

By the time closing arguments ended on May 6, gamblers were already quoting odds in Johnson’s favor. Ten days later, the Senate took its first vote, on the eleventh of the impeachment articles, which the managers hoped would be the most likely to get the required supermajority. It didn’t. The final tally was 35 to convict, but 19 against conviction—just shy of the necessary two-thirds. On May 26, the managers tried again, calling for votes on the second and third articles. They failed once more, and at that point, Chief Justice Chase adjourned the proceedings for good.

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Impeachment wrecked what was left of Johnson’s presidency, and even though he managed to win reelection to the Senate in 1875, his impeachment is almost all that Americans remember about him. But his impeachers did not fare well either. Thaddeus Stevens died less than three months after the trial; three of the managers—Butler, John Bingham, and James F. Wilson—were tarnished by scandals in the 1870s, and none of them enjoyed political success afterwards. There is a deep instinct in the American political soul that prefers to solve its presidential problems at the ballot box, even if it has to tolerate presidential misbehavior in the meantime. Gouverneur Morris argued at the Constitutional Convention that elections, not impeachments and trials, were the best test of any accusations of high crimes and misdemeanors by presidents. “In case he should be reelected,” Morris advised, “that will be sufficient proof of his innocence.” A century and a half later, we have still not fully absorbed that warning.