The Impeachers Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Brenda Wineapple

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wineapple, Brenda, author.

  Title: The impeachers : the trial of Andrew Johnson and the dream of a just nation / Brenda Wineapple.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018034980| ISBN 9780812998368 | ISBN 9780812998375 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Johnson, Andrew, 1808–1875—Impeachment. | United States—Politics and government—1865–1869.

  Classification: LCC E666 .W59 2019 | DDC 973.8/1092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018034980

  Ebook ISBN 9780812998375

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Tom McKeveny

  Cover images: Jesse Harrison Whitehurst/Library of Congress (Andrew Johnson photograph), Granger (impeachment trial engraving)

  Title-page image: “The Senate as a Court of Impeachment for President Andrew Johnson,” as sketched by Theodore R. Davis.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dramatis Personae

  Prologue

  Part One: Battle Lines of Peace

  Chapter One: Mars

  Chapter Two: Magnificent Intentions

  Chapter Three: The Accidental President

  Chapter Four: Moses

  Chapter Five: The South Victorious

  Chapter Six: Not a “White Man’s Government”

  Chapter Seven: Reconciliation

  Chapter Eight: Civil Rights

  Chapter Nine: Mutual Concessions, Mutual Hostilities

  Chapter Ten: Andy’s Swing Around the Circle

  Chapter Eleven: Resistance

  Part Two: Impeachment

  Chapter Twelve: Tenure of Office

  Chapter Thirteen: A Revolutionary Period

  Chapter Fourteen: The Rubicon Is Crossed

  Chapter Fifteen: The President’s Message

  Chapter Sixteen: A Blundering, Roaring Lear

  Chapter Seventeen: Striking at a King

  Chapter Eighteen: Impeachment

  Chapter Nineteen: The High Court of Impeachment

  Chapter Twenty: All the President’s Men

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Trial, First Rounds

  Chapter Twenty-two: The Trial

  Chapter Twenty-three: The Beginning of the End

  Part Three: Verdict

  Chapter Twenty-four: Cankered and Crude

  Chapter Twenty-five: Point-Blank Lying

  Chapter Twenty-six: The Crowning Struggle

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Cease of Majesty

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Let Us Have Peace

  Part Four: Denouement

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Human Rights

  Chapter Thirty: Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  By Brenda Wineapple

  About the Author

  …The cease of majesty

  Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw

  What’s near it with it: it is a massy wheel,

  Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount,

  To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things

  Are mortised and adjoin’d; which, when it falls,

  Each small annexment, petty consequence,

  Attends the boisterous ruin.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, III, 3

  “Men in pursuit of justice must never despair.”

  —THADDEUS STEVENS

  Dramatis Personae

  The Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson

  Presiding: Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon P. Chase

  House of Representative “Managers” Prosecuting Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson for High Crimes and Misdemeanors

  Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, chief prosecuting attorney, Radical Republican

  John A. Bingham of Ohio, Republican

  George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, Radical Republican

  John A. Logan of Illinois, Radical Republican

  Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Radical Republican

  Thomas Williams of Pennsylvania, Republican

  James F. Wilson of Iowa, Republican

  Attorneys Defending President Andrew Johnson Against Impeachment

  Henry Stanbery, former attorney general, lead counsel, Republican

  Benjamin Robbin Curtis of Massachusetts, former Supreme Court justice, nominally unaffiliated

  William M. Evarts, New York attorney, Republican

  William S. Groesbeck, Ohio attorney, Republican

  Thomas A.R. Nelson, Tennessee judge, Republican

  NOTABLE PERSONS IN THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION

  McCulloch, Hugh (1808–1895). Treasury secretary, Republican. Served also in the Lincoln administration.

  Seward, William (1801–1872). Secretary of state, Republican. Served also in the Lincoln administration.

  Stanbery, Henry (1803–1881). Attorney general, Republican. Replaced James Speed. Resigned to serve as Johnson’s chief counsel during the impeachment trial.

  Stanton, Edwin M. (1814–1869). Secretary of war, Republican. Served also in the Lincoln administration.

  Welles, Gideon (1802–1878). Secretary of the navy, Republican. Served in the Lincoln and the Johnson administrations.

  NOTABLE PERSONS IN THE THIRTY-NINTH AND FORTIETH U.S. CONGRESS

  House of Representatives

  Ashley, James (1824–1896). Radical Republican, Ohio.

  Bingham, John (1815–1900). Republican, Ohio.

  Boutwell, George S. (1818–1905). Radical Republican, Massachusetts.

  Butler, Benjamin F. (1818–1893). Radical Republican, Massachusetts; later, Democrat.

  Stevens, Thaddeus (1792–1868). Radical Republican, Pennsylvania.

  Washburne, Elihu (1816–1887). Republican, Illinois.

  Senate

  Fessenden, William Pitt (1806–1869). Republican, Maine.

  Grimes, James (1816–1872). Republican, Iowa.

  Ross, Edmund G. (1826–1907). Republican, Kansas; later, Democrat.

  Sumner, Charles (1811–1874). Radical Republican, Massachusetts.

  Trumbull, Lyman (1813–1896). Republican, Illinois; later, Democrat.

  Wade, Benjamin (1800–1878). Radical Republican, Ohio.

  NOTABLE PERSONS, MILITARY

  Grant, Ulysses S. (1822–1885). Republican. General. Eighteenth President of the United State
s, Republican.

  Sheridan, Philip (1831–1888). Republican. Major-general. Military governor of Texas and Louisiana.

  Sherman, William Tecumseh (1820–1891). Republican. Major-general during war, promoted general of the army.

  NOTABLE PERSONS OUTSIDE GOVERNMENT

  Blair, Montgomery (1813–1883): Republican/Democrat. Postmaster general during Lincoln administration. Brother of Francis Preston Blair, Jr., Democratic vice-presidential candidate, 1868.

  Downing, George T. (1819–1903). African American activist, businessman, entrepreneur, and restauranteur.

  Phillips, Wendell (1811–1884). Radical Republican. Orator.

  Ream, Lavinia (Vinnie) (1847–1914). Sculptor.

  Whitman, Walt (1819–1891). Poet. Anti-slavery Democrat before the war.

  NOTABLE JOURNALISTS

  Ames, Mary Clemmer (1831–1884). Republican. Author of “Woman’s Letter from Washington” for The Independent (Radical).

  Briggs, Emily Edson (1830–1910). Pseudonym, Olivia. Radical Republican, writing for the Washington Chronicle and The Philadelphia Press, who asked would “all this trouble have come upon the land if the men had stayed at home managing business and the women had done the legislating?”

  Clemenceau, Georges (1841–1929). Radical. Anonymous journalist for Le Temps in Paris; later, twice premier of France.

  Douglass, Frederick (c.1817–1895). Radical Republican. Founder and publisher of The North Star. Also, orator, author, diplomat.

  Greeley, Horace (1817–1872). Republican. Editor and publisher of the New-York Tribune; later Liberal Republican presidential candidate (1872).

  Marble, Manton (1834–1917). Democrat. Proprietor and editor of the leading Democratic newspaper, the New York World.

  Raymond, Henry (1820–1869). Republican. Editor and publisher of The New York Times; also U.S. representative and chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  Twain, Mark (1835–1910). Yes, the Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens of Missouri.

  FINALLY

  Johnson, Andrew (1808–1875). Democrat. Seventeenth President of the United States. Military governor of the Union-held portion of Tennessee during the war (1862–1865); Vice President under Lincoln.

  Johnson, Eliza McCardle (1810–1876). First Lady. Outlived her husband by nearly six months.

  Prologue

  February 25, 1868, Washington, D.C.

  A cold wind blew through the city, and the snow was piled in drifts near the Capitol, where gaslights flickered with a bluish light. Throngs of people, black and white, waited anxiously outside or pressed into the long corridors and lobbies.

  At quarter past one o’clock in the afternoon, the doorkeeper of the U.S. Senate announced the arrival of Pennsylvania Representative Thaddeus Stevens.

  Carried aloft in his chair because he’d been weakened by illness, Stevens was helped to stand upright, and after taking a moment to gain his balance—born with a clubfoot, he wore a specially made boot—he linked arms with Representative John Bingham, of Ohio, who had accompanied him to the Senate. The two men strode with slow dignity down the main aisle of the chamber.

  The jam-packed galleries were so hushed that there was no mistaking what Stevens, emaciated but inexorable, had come to say. He formally greeted Benjamin Wade, the Senate’s presiding officer, and then pulled a paper from the breast pocket of his dark jacket and read aloud, each word formed with precision. “In obedience to the order of the House of Representatives, we have appeared before you in the name of the House of Representatives and of all the people of the United States.

  “We do impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors in office.”

  Just the day before, the House of Representatives had voted overwhelmingly, 126 to 47, to undertake this extraordinary step: the impeachment, the first ever, of the President of the United States. No one dared to speak.

  Stevens had been pushing hard for Andrew Johnson’s impeachment for over a year, but previous attempts had failed. Now congressional Republicans believed they no longer had a choice: impeachment was the only way to stop a President who refused to accept the acts of Congress, who usurped its prerogatives, and who, most recently, had violated a law that he pretended to wave away as unconstitutional. But for people like Thaddeus Stevens, the specific law that President Andrew Johnson had violated—something called the Tenure of Office Act—was merely a legal pretext; Johnson should have been impeached by the House and brought to trial by the Senate much earlier, and he had been lucky to have escaped this long.

  That is why Thaddeus Stevens was considered inexorable. Then again, so was Andrew Johnson, who had been heard to say, “This is a country for white men, and, by G—d, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men.” That offended Stevens to the core. He and fellow impeachers believed that the war to preserve the Union had been fought to liberate the nation once and for all from the noxious and lingering effects of slavery. “If we have not been sufficiently scourged for our national sin to teach us to do justice to all God’s creatures, without distinction of race or color,” Stevens had declared at war’s end, “we must expect the still more heavy vengeance of an offended Father.”

  “ ‘All men are created free and equal’ and ‘all rightful government is founded on the consent of the governed,’ ” Stevens insisted in 1867. “Nothing short of that is the Republic intended by the Declaration.” Thaddeus Stevens had fought to create a world where blacks and whites lived in harmony and equal citizenship. Discovering that the place he had chosen for his burial would not inter black men or women, he immediately sold the plot and bought one in an integrated cemetery. He then wrote his own epitaph: “Finding other cemeteries limited by charter rules as to race, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of man before his Creator.”

  But Andrew Johnson had sought to obstruct, overthrow, veto, or challenge every attempt of the nation to bind its wounds after the war or to create a just republic from the ashes of the pernicious and so-called “peculiar institution” of slavery. Recently eradicated, to be sure, by proclamation, by war, and by constitutional amendment, its malignant effects stalked every street, every home, every action, particularly but not exclusively in the South. “Peace had come, but there was no peace,” a journalist would write.

  Stevens continued to read from the paper he’d pulled from his coat pocket. The House would provide the Senate—and the country—with specific articles of impeachment in the coming days but in the meantime “we demand of the Senate that it order the appearance of said Andrew Johnson to answer said impeachment.”

  “The order will be taken,” Senator Wade replied.

  It sounded like a death sentence, an onlooker observed, though not to the young Washington correspondent Mark Twain. “And out of the midst of political gloom,” Twain rejoiced, “impeachment, that dead corpse, rose up and walked forth again!”

  * * *

  —

  “ANDREW JOHNSON WAS the queerest man who ever occupied the White House,” one of his colleagues remembered. As Lincoln’s Vice President, thrust into the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson earned the hatred and opprobrium of most Republicans, particularly those members of Lincoln’s party in Congress who initially hoped that he had become one of them. Although he had been a Democrat, he’d been Lincoln’s running mate, after all. But just six weeks after the assassination, Johnson swerved away from what many considered to be Lincoln’s program for reconstruction and the fruits of a hard-fought, unthinkably brutal war.

  Still, impeachment? That was new territory even for a reviled President, and certainly other chief executives had been reviled: Franklin Pierce, old John Quincy Adams, and on occasion Lincoln himself. Yet never before had Congr
ess and the country been willing to grapple directly with impeachment, as defined in the Constitution. Then again, never before had the country been at war with itself, with more than 750,000 men dead, at the very least, during its Civil War, and countless men and women, black and white, still dying, and murdered, in Memphis, in New Orleans, in other cities and in the countryside, in Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Alabama.

  So in 1868 Congress and the public would have to consider the definition of a high crime and the meaning of a misdemeanor. It was bewildering. “The multitude of strangers were waiting for impeachment,” Twain observed. “They did not know what impeachment was, exactly, but they had a general idea that it would come in the form of an avalanche, or a thunder clap, or that maybe the roof would fall in.”

  For no one knew what the first-ever impeachment of the President of the United States would look like or what sufficient grounds, legal or otherwise, were necessary. No one knew partly because the U.S. Constitution provides few guidelines about impeachment beyond stipulating, in Article II, Section 4, that a federal officer can be impeached for treason, bribery, or a high crime or misdemeanor. The House of Representatives shall have the sole power of impeachment, the Constitution says, and a simple majority of members can vote to impeach. The Senate shall then have the sole power to try all impeachments, and if there is a trial of the U.S. President, the chief justice of the Supreme Court shall preside over it. No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members of the Senate present. A conviction requires the person be removed from office. As for further punishment, the convicted person may or may not be prosecuted by law. That’s pretty much it.