The Impeachers Read online

  “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.”

  Whether he was loved or hated—and he was both—there was no one like Thaddeus Stevens. Born in Vermont during the administration of George Washington, in 1792, Stevens was another self-made man, very much like Lincoln or, for that matter, Andrew Johnson. And he too had been shaped by the loss of a father, a ne’er-do-well who abandoned his wife and four sons, and by extreme poverty. But unlike Johnson, Stevens came to regard poverty as “a blessing—for if there be any human sensation more ethereal and divine than all others, it is that which feelingly sympathizes with misfortune.” His generosity was admired even by enemies, who considered his charity almost obsessive. Sometime in the 1830s, he heard of a widow about to lose her farm to foreclosure. Stevens went to the auction, bid, and won the farm. He paid the widow’s debt and had the sheriff turn over the deed to the widow; then Stevens rode away.

  With the strenuous help of his mother, Stevens had attended the University of Vermont and then Dartmouth. “I was feeble and lame in youth, and as I could not work on the farm, she concluded to give me an education,” he later said. “She worked day and night.” In his will, he stipulated that the sexton of the cemetery where she was buried keep her grave green and plant roses on its four quarters every spring.

  Eventually settling in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he was admitted to the bar, Stevens was known as an inspired litigator with a quick tongue. (Once, when accused of leading a witness, Stevens retorted, “why, he looked so young and innocent, I felt it my duty to lead him.”) Elected to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1831, he proudly defeated wealthy rivals who tried to destroy the free public school system, which he’d helped to establish. By then, though, he suffered from a disease that caused him to lose his hair, and ever after wore an ill-fitting, chestnut-colored wig. Despite this, and despite his decided limp, he stood six feet tall and was considered handsome in a stern sort of way; he was also considered something of a rake, although no indiscretions ever came to light.

  Successful but seeking a wider field, Stevens had moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, amassed a great deal of real estate, and, though he had no head for business, acquired an ironworks; a former employee recalled that “Mr. Stevens used to call it his sinking fund, and only kept it running to give the people work.” During the war, rebel troops went out of their way to destroy it. “I only wish you had been in your works,” a former Confederate told him, “and had been subjected to a little fire yourself.”

  A friend recalled that Stevens had been an abolitionist long before abolitionists had a name. Elected in 1849 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Whig, he fought tirelessly against slavery in the courts and on the streets, protecting and even freeing fugitives whenever he could and often at great risk to himself. In 1852 he defended the men charged with killing and wounding would-be captors of runaways, and for such apostasy, he briefly lost his seat in the House. When he was re-elected in 1858, as a Republican, he soon became chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, which oversaw the difficult task of financing the war, and as its chair, he worked to make sure that former slaves were armed—and freed.

  Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the House of Representatives, said reconstruction should revolutionize Southern institutions—and the country as a whole. Refusing to be buried in a cemetery that discriminated against blacks, he was branded a fanatic.

  Considered the kind of ideologue whose bleak face, Lincoln once said, was always “set Zionward,” Stevens was an unprejudiced, formidable, and visionary leader with a practical streak. He would make a deal, when necessary, because he always considered the big picture. A fighting man, he also wanted to get things done, and as he once said, he had to compromise at times, because “Congress is composed of men, and not angels.” And 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.

  For he never lost his moral compass: justice for all and a fair shot at equal opportunity. Frequently disappointed, he was also an idealist, which accounted in part for his cynicism. “I lead them, yes,” Stevens once said of his colleagues, “but they never follow me or do as I want until public opinion has sided with me.” That wasn’t quite true. A peerless and powerful legislator as well as tactician, he’d pushed military appropriations bills through the House during the war, and he helped pass unpopular laws, such as drafting men into the army, and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, which allowed citizens suspected of crimes to be detained indefinitely without trial.

  Mark Twain was transfixed by Stevens. “Very deep eyes, sunken unshaven cheeks, thin lips, long mouth, & strong, long, large, sharp nose—whole face sunken & sharp—full of inequalities—” Twain jotted in his notebook. “Dark wavy hair Indian, club-footed,——Ablest man.” This ablest man was a terror in debate. “Not seldom a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily charged wire,” Carl Schurz recollected. Stevens would rise by degrees, “as a telescope is pulled out,” another observer dourly said. “And then, reaching to his full height, he would lecture the offender against party discipline, sweeping at him with his large, bony right hand, in uncouth gestures, as if he would clutch him and shake him.”

  Yet despite his cutting wit, Stevens could be charming. Raising one of his long legs and companionably placing his foot on Henry Raymond’s nearby desk—“always the club foot, with characteristic cynicism,” an observer remarked—Stevens might wave Raymond over, and the two very different men would chuckle together as if they agreed, which they mostly did not, about Andy Johnson. He’d never withdraw into conservatism: “all his life he held the outpost of thought,” even Horace Maynard would salute him. Had Stevens been a poet, recalled another colleague, he’d have been worshipped as a seer.

  For more than twenty years, until his death, the man known far and wide as the “Old Commoner” lived companionably with the widowed Lydia Hamilton Smith, a mixed-race woman, who was said either to be his housekeeper or his lover. Lydia Smith helped manage his home, his business, and his family, and together the two of them raised her sons and Stevens’ adopted nephews. He built a brick house in Lancaster, which he deeded to Smith for $500, and in his will, he bequeathed his furniture to her as well as a lump sum to be paid each year for the rest of her life. With the inheritance, she purchased Stevens’ house and made certain his grave was tended.

  By December 4, 1865, Stevens’ health was poor. He had to be carried into the Capitol by two young officers of the House, whom he was said to address with a twinkle. “Thank you, my good fellows,” he chuckled. “What shall I do when you are dead and gone?”

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  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 he was also doctrinaire and arrogant, and he had something of the pompous schoolmaster about him. He larded his prolix speeches, some of which lasted for four or five hours, with citations from the Greeks and the Romans, and containing none of Stevens’ pith, these orations also had none of Wendell Phillips’ high voltage. But he shared with Stevens and Phillips a conviction about the rightness of his views, whether on abolition or civil and political rights for all (with the exception, presently, of political rights for women). Though often sanctimonious, Charles Sumner was definitely a knight ready to break his lance.

  He inspired respect, not love. �
��I hold him to have been the purest and most sincere man of his party,” said Confederate General Richard Taylor, President Zachary Taylor’s son and someone who demonized most Radicals. Even so, Sumner could make himself friendly when he wanted—“but he either does all the talking himself and goes off into long disquisitions,” said a secretary, “or he simply draws out the other person and lets him do the talking, so it is a monologue on one side or the other.” Perhaps ruefully, he once confided to Julia Ward Howe that “I have outlived the interest in individuals.” Yet as Lydia Maria Child explained to a friend, “never in this, or any other country, have I known of a public man, who did treat eternal principles of right so invariably, so steadfastly, and so fearlessly as Charles Sumner. If he don’t get all he claims, he enables us to get more than we should.”

  A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law, Sumner preferred poetry and politics to the legal profession, and in 1851, at the age of forty, he joined the Free-Soil party, a coalition of Massachusetts Democrats and Whigs who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories. Elected to the U.S. Senate, he fought this battle fiercely. But he often misjudged the effect of his jeremiads. In 1856, for example, when he insulted his colleague Andrew Butler, claiming the genteel senator from South Carolina worshipped a harlot named slavery, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks, avenged his uncle’s honor by whacking Sumner senseless with a gutta-percha cane while several colleagues egged him on. It took Sumner more than three years to recover, but Sumner became even keener, if that was possible, on the subject of justice and equality.

  Imposing, he stood over six feet tall, although lately his waist had thickened and the flesh of his face had started to sag. Yet nothing seemed out of place with him. He arranged his luxuriant dark hair with deliberate carelessness, and while Thaddeus Stevens was indifferent to clothes and allowed his wig to sit at a weird angle atop his head, Sumner grandly marched forth in a chestnut-brown coat, lavender or brightly checked pants, and shoes with white gaiters. At times there was something almost childlike about him. “If one told Charles Sumner that the moon was made of green cheese,” a friend chuckled, “he would controvert the fact in all sincerity, and give good reason why it could not be so.”

  Stately and impassioned, if long-winded, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was brutally beaten on the Senate floor in 1856 after denouncing slavery and his Southern colleagues. Opposing Johnson and his policies, during the Grant administration he continued the battle for civil rights legislation.

  Since he was thought to be a confirmed bachelor, it came as something of a surprise when, at the age of fifty-five, he married the widowed Alice Mason Hooper. Her beauty later the subject of a portrait by John Singer Sargent, Alice Hooper was sociable, wealthy, and almost thirty years his junior. She was no match for a man so set in his ways, and vice versa. Soon Democratic Representative James Brooks (no relation to Preston Brooks) in his paper, the New York Express, was publicizing gossip about an affair between Mrs. Sumner and a Prussian diplomat. Sumner’s enemies began calling him “The Great Impotent.” The couple almost immediately separated and later divorced.

  After the war ended, Sumner renewed his battle for equal rights. “Liberty has been won,” he insisted. “The battle for Equality is still pending.” Disturbed that Andrew Johnson had allowed Southern states to ignore black suffrage when they called for new state conventions, he met with Johnson at the White House before Congress convened. The two men danced around each other for over two hours, and Sumner noticed with revulsion when he picked up his silk hat from the floor and prepared to leave that Johnson had used it as a spittoon. “Ignorant, pig-headed and perverse,” Sumner himself nearly spat. And when in December Sumner read the President’s annual message, in which Johnson again left the question of black rights to the individual states, he with contempt called the speech a “whitewashing message” and compared it to Franklin Pierce’s defense of proslavery guerillas before the war. Conservative Republican Senator James Doolittle, a devoted Johnson man, demanded that Sumner retract. Sumner waved him away.

  Though he had badly wanted to chair the new Joint Committee on Reconstruction, he wasn’t even asked to sit on it. Undeterred, he continued to present bill after bill to Congress to protect the freedmen, including one that gave them deeds to land on the South Carolina Sea Islands that they’d been farming. And then he threw down the gauntlet to Andrew Johnson with this warning: “If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become its Pharaoh.”

  Sumner was gearing up.

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  THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT abolishing slavery was part of the U.S. Constitution at the end of 1865 when twenty-seven out of thirty-six states ratified it. Secretary of State William Seward had counted all Southern states, even though they had not yet been admitted to Congress. And so he too, with Andrew Johnson, considered reconstruction basically unnecessary and black voting rights a moot question as far as the federal government was concerned.

  “What’s the use to give us our freedom,” a former slave wanted to know, “if we can’t stay where we were raised, and own our houses where we were born, and our little pieces of ground?”

  Although the Freedmen’s Bureau had been organized without specific instructions about how or even whether to redistribute land confiscated from the rebels, its mandate had overlapped with General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, which allowed freedmen to settle on abandoned coastal property from Charleston to Jacksonville. Sherman had presumably wished to help black families, even if his reasons were not entirely altruistic; the army had over 80,000 black refugees to house and feed, and the sooner these people could take care of themselves, the better. Hence Field Order No. 15: every black family might obtain as many as “forty acres of land and a mule.”

  Those forty acres and that mule furnished Thaddeus Stevens with an opening, for he’d already been hatching a radical plan to redistribute the wealth of the South. Divvy up the confiscated property and give it to the families of former slaves and thus effectively overturn the propertied class system that so long had ruled the region.

  There was, of course, a catch. Special Field Order No. 15 didn’t stipulate that black families actually owned the land they were allotted. While some freedmen might claim a moral right to the land they’d cultivated for generations, and which they were now homesteading, it wasn’t clear that they had a legal right to it. So the legal and moral questions were tricky: Did the land still actually belong to the white planters who’d abandoned it, or should these planters be considered traitors and forfeit any rights to that land? Or were they to be full-fledged citizens of the Union once again, as Johnson wanted to argue, as soon as they were pardoned?

  In South Carolina there was a rumor that Governor Perry was allowing confiscated property to be furtively transferred to former rebels just to keep it out of the hands of the Bureau or to prevent any of it from being used as schools, hospitals, or orphan asylums. And recently pardoned planters were actively lobbying Johnson to give them back any land seized by the federal government. Johnson, sympathetic, ordered the one-armed General Oliver Otis Howard, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, to return to the ex-rebels territory confiscated by the Treasury Department during the war that had not yet been sold to a third party. There were some 450,000 acres at stake, and freedmen had been resettled on much of it.

  Nicknamed the “Christian General” because during the war he’d liked to hand out religious material, General Howard, though an anti-slavery man, was not a Radical, not an abolitionist, and not a peacetime fighter. Still, he considered this disputed land exempt from the President’s injunction to return the land to planters, and in July of 1865 he issued what became known as Circular 13, urging Bureau commissioners to leave alone the forty-acre tracts already occupied by freedmen. Circular 13 also carved out additional forty-acre tracts from the confiscated and abandoned lands to be sold
or leased to freedmen for a three-year period, and at the end of that period, they had an option to purchase the land at its 1860 appraised value.

  The planters protested. Since they’d been pardoned, they argued, they should be able to reclaim their property—particularly if it was being used by the Bureau or was being occupied by freedmen. In New Orleans, for instance, Pierre Soulé, who’d received a special pardon, wanted his mansion back. A minister to Spain under President Buchanan and a former U.S. senator from Louisiana, Soulé thought he deserved it, even if he had served as a buccaneering member of Confederate General Beauregard’s staff and, after Appomattox, helped relocate Confederate veterans to Mexico, where they could resume life as it had been, or even organize another rebellion.

  Soulé’s mansion had been converted early in the war into a “Colored Orphans Home” for the children of freedpeople and black soldiers. Louise De Mortier, a noted free woman of color, who had been a sought-after public speaker, was ably running the orphanage, often raising money by giving concerts locally (she sang) or traveling north to do so. Since the property was being put to good use, the Freedmen’s Bureau initially refused the Soulé request, but the eastern district court ordered the property to be seized and sold. “Shouldn’t we resist in this?” Assistant Commissioner General Absalom Baird asked General Howard. The property was initially sold to Thomas Conway, assistant commissioner of the Bureau in Louisiana, so that the orphanage could be continued, but the sale was not allowed to be completed. Instead, Johnson issued a special pardon to Soulé, who eventually took possession of the mansion. The Louisiana legislature ludicrously proposed to apprentice out the displaced orphans, at no pay; if they ran away, they were to be arrested and handed back to their employer. This would be child labor—or slavery by another name.