The Impeachers Read online

  “God damn you,” replied one of the mob. “Not one of you will escape from here alive.” The reverend was hit in the arm, one of his fingers was broken, his skull crushed by a brick. Dr. Dostie was shot, and his body was tossed into a cart of corpses. An officer grabbed Dostie’s hat and flapped it in the air. “Let Dostie’s skin be forthwith stripped and sold to Barnum,” the Mobile Daily Tribune taunted, “the proceeds to go to the Freedmen’s Bureau and negro newspapers.”

  From his law office on nearby Carondelet Street, Thomas Durant saw former Governor Michael Hahn dragged along the street by the police while rioters from behind stabbed him until his back and bare head dripped with blood. Hahn screamed for the police to kill him and get it over with. Though a Radical, Durant had thought the convention illegitimate and harmful, but he became a target anyway. Hurriedly he left his office, slipped into a nearby alley, and fled New Orleans that night, never to return. Armed rioters ransacked his home.

  The Mechanics Institute was empty. Any men in the procession still alive had scattered. Others lay wounded or dead. But the violence had not stopped. Some men (all blacks) were executed point-blank while kneeling and praying for their lives; others were kicked, cudgeled, and stabbed after they were already dead, sometimes by persons elegantly dressed. A white citizen stopped to kick the body of a black man shot near a millinery shop. A gray-haired man, walking at a distance from the Institute, was shot through the head when a policeman riding in a buggy took aim from his carriage. Another policeman boarded a streetcar on Canal Street and fired his gun at a boy and then dragged him onto the street, where he beat him to a pulp—“pounded to a jelly,” said an eyewitness. One of the delegates darted away from a policeman and crawled on all fours before he was arrested by a less violent officer. He heard someone shout, “Kill the Yankee nigger.”

  “I have seen death on the battlefield,” declared former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin’s son, who happened to be in New Orleans that day, “but time will erase the effects of that, the wholesale slaughter and the little regard paid to human life I witnessed here on the 30 of July I shall never forget.” Within three hours, over one hundred men and women lay dead or dying and as many as three hundred were wounded, perhaps more.

  “It was a dark day for the city,” Warmoth said.

  “It is Memphis” all over again, a reporter cried in horror. It wasn’t, though. Deadly, yes; spontaneous, not at all. The thing had been planned.

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  This huge painting (8 by 12 feet) was part of artist Thomas Nast’s “Grand Caricaturama,” a humorous moving panorama of American history. Nast regularly depicted Andrew Johnson as “King Andy,” and here shows him smiling while black men and women are being slaughtered in the background.

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  GENERAL PHILIP SHERIDAN was the commanding officer in the Gulf instructed to keep an eye on the Texas-Mexico border. On July 30, he’d been doing just that, but when he returned to New Orleans the next day, he discovered that in his absence nothing short of a sadistic massacre had occurred. “No milder word is fitting,” he said.

  “The more information I obtain of the affair of the 30th in this city the more revolting it becomes,” Sheridan told General Grant.

  Federal troops didn’t arrive on the scene until the riot was pretty much over. General Baird said he hadn’t known military action had been required. “Not to know that was to be an idiot,” an eyewitness scoffed. Actually, though, two days before the massacre, an evidently nervous Baird had wired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton asking for instructions. He’d been informed that the convention would be unlawful and that city authorities intended to break it up by arresting the delegates. “I have been given no orders on the subject,” Baird said, “but have warned the parties that I could not countenance or permit such action without instructions to that effect from the President.”

  Stanton did not answer, nor did he turn Baird’s request for instructions over to the President, as Baird had suggested he do.

  Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, did not answer.

  The only man to reply to Baird’s request for instructions was Lieutenant Governor Voorhies, who said that while no arrests should be made, General Baird should place troops on Dryades Street, outside the Mechanics Institute, about an hour before the convention. But Voorhies may have misled Baird about when that hour would be. Whatever the case, whatever General Baird was told, or whether he was hoodwinked or negligent, Stanton’s silence is peculiar. It is inconceivable that he hoped for or even anticipated the agonizing bloodshed, but he had definitely withheld from President Johnson any information about possible trouble. Perhaps Stanton feared that if he told Johnson, the President would somehow prevent the convention from occurring. Perhaps he didn’t want to defy Johnson openly, which he would have to do if he ordered Baird immediately to New Orleans. Perhaps he hoped that the convention, if successful, would discredit Johnson, and if unsuccessful—or if it turned ugly—that too would discredit the President. Certainly Stanton had been upset when Johnson leaked the results of a cabinet meeting during which all members of the cabinet, including Stanton himself, said they opposed the Fourteenth Amendment. Certainly he was sickened by the nonstop violence in the South and the slow dismantling of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

  Democrats believed that the war secretary kept mum to feather his own nest. “Stanton avoids the responsibility of checking the riots and therefore appears to side with the radicals and will be found in league with them,” a critic declared. “If Johnson comes out all right, Stanton will assume the credit. If wrong, he will get the credit from Radicals.”

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps: with motives so mixed, Stanton may not have known himself why he suppressed Baird’s telegram and did nothing. “That he had a political objective in mind seems highly probable,” Stanton’s sympathetic biographers admitted, though a less approving one called the withholding of Baird’s telegram “political passive-aggression.” Certainly Gideon Welles thought Stanton complicit somehow in what he believed was a plot to overthrow the Louisiana government. In a cabinet meeting after the massacre, Stanton “manifested marked sympathy with the rioters,” Welles haughtily wrote in his diary. According to him, Stanton had stormily referred to Mayor Monroe and Louisiana’s attorney general “as pardoned Rebels who had instigated the murder of the people in the streets.”

  Whether Stanton felt responsible for the massacre, in whole or in part, he did deplore it. Whether he was partly to blame is another matter. The only ascertainable fact is that after he learned of the slaughter, Edwin Stanton told Senator Charles Sumner that Johnson and his horrendous Southern policy were at fault.

  The next year, Andrew Johnson would remove Stanton from office. The wonder is that he didn’t do it sooner.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Andy’s Swing Around the Circle

  In 1864, the Republican party, needing votes from War Democrats, had temporarily changed its name to the National Union party, and it was under this banner that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President. Two years later, the National Union party was moribund—though not to Andrew Johnson.

  “The mere fact of the north and the south meeting again in fraternal relations will be a great object lesson,” he exuberantly claimed, “and go far towards allaying sectional strife and promoting concord between these sections.” More to the point, Johnson thought a revived National Union party, consisting of sympathetic Democrats as well as conservative or moderate Republicans, could block reconstruction, crush the Radical Republicans in the fall elections, and put Southerners back into Congress on his theory that they had never left the Union. Johnson would then secure the White House in 1868, not as a Vice President who’d become an accidental leader but as the nationally elected chief executive.

  A National Union convention, a sort of rally for this new party, was to occur in Philadelphia on August 14, 1866.
A month earlier, Thurlow Weed, William Seward’s powerful political ally, had called on Henry Raymond to ask if he would speak at the convention. When Raymond hesitated, Seward pressured the publisher, who was also a U.S. representative. Raymond seemed hesitant though he’d written in his paper, The New York Times, that he supported the convention; but, as chairman of the regular Republican National Committee, Raymond was responsible for preserving that party, and since he wanted to stay its chairman, he worried what might happen if former rebels with “purposes hostile” captured the National Union convention—or, worse, if the Democrats took control of it. He’d have to resign from the Republican party, he explained to William Seward. Seward shrewdly replied that if men like Raymond refused to participate in a convention intended only to strengthen the Republic, then they were responsible for it falling into the wrong hands. Go see the President, Seward advised.

  Raymond approached Johnson, who met him in the White House library, where Johnson assured him that he didn’t wish to restore the Democrats to power, just to bring former War Democrats into the fold in order to rout the Radical Republicans. Johnson said he wanted only to make the Union whole again, and the best way to accomplish this was to find representatives willing to welcome Southerners to Congress. Raymond capitulated.

  In Congress, all Republicans except Raymond slammed the National Union convention as a conspiracy to destroy the Republican party. Outside of Congress, Republicans were similarly skeptical. As General Benjamin Butler told Johnson, “It encourages those against whom every Union soldier has fought for four years, to hope that they may seize the Government of the Country by means of political movements, which in their unholy attempt by arms they have so signally failed to do.” The more moderate Republican William Evarts, later one of Johnson’s attorneys at the impeachment trial, made the same point. The only result of such a convention, Evarts observed, would be “the transfer of the political power in the country from the party which carried the war to the party which opposed it.” A National Union convention risked putting former Peace Democrats, who’d opposed the war, in the driver’s seat; it spelled disaster at the polls; and it had to be a Democratic confidence game—a ruse to get conservative Republicans to bolt their party or undercut it.

  Evarts wasn’t wrong. Democrats intended, as one of them actually said, “to rupture the Republican Party, to form a strong Democratic Party in the convention, and without committing the Democratic Party to any policy, to secure the convention for their purposes.”

  There was another reason Johnson backed a National Union convention. Any plan to admit Southern representatives to Congress would quash the Fourteenth Amendment. And since this was plainly Johnson’s objective, when he asked his cabinet to endorse the National Union convention, three cabinet members actually decided they must resign. Grabbing his hat, Postmaster General William Dennison walked out of a cabinet meeting. Interior Secretary James Harlan also left, and Attorney General James Speed said he wouldn’t participate in any attempt to block the Fourteenth Amendment or damage the Republican party; he too had to go. Gideon Welles brusquely asked Stanton to “show your colors.” Stanton, though he condemned the convention, did not resign. “He holds on like grim death,” an unfriendly paper reported.

  But Republican defections were the least of the convention’s problems. As diarist George Templeton Strong curtly noted, the National Union convention consisted of “Rebels and Copperheads mostly.” Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general infamous for the slaughter of black troops at Fort Pillow, was nominated a vice president of the convention. Peace Democrat Clement Laird Vallandigham, who’d been banished from Ohio during the war for sedition, wanted a seat at the National party table. So did another Peace Democrat, Fernando Wood of New York. Excluded from the proceedings, they had caused a commotion, and though Wood withdrew, Vallandigham insisted that his letter of protest be read aloud. And despite a turnout of about seven thousand—and the symbolic pageantry of Union general Darius Couch, from Massachusetts, a big man, entering on the arm of South Carolina Governor James Orr, a small one—the whole thing fizzled. The roof leaked, the flowers wilted, and the damp feathers of the huge stuffed eagle behind the podium glumly stuck together.

  “As matters now look,” the lawyer Edwards Pierrepont predicted, “Andrew Johnson will not be the candidate of any party.” Again, the man in the White House, with his transparent attempt to head a new party, had managed to alienate both Republicans—for trying to divide the party—and Democrats still indignant that he hadn’t sacked Edwin Stanton.

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  JUST AFTER THE debacle of the National Union convention, during the last week of August 1866, Johnson went on the road to drum up support for what he liked to call “My Policy,” or his effort to get a white supremacist South into Congress as quickly as possible. More to the point, though, he was eager to slam, widely and loudly, the Fourteenth Amendment.

  The pretext for the trip was the laying of the cornerstone in Chicago for a monument to fellow War Democrat Stephen Douglas. Although Johnson hadn’t voted for Douglas for President in 1860, Douglas had notoriously argued against anything that smacked of emancipation or civil rights for black people, and now, as Charles Eliot Norton bitingly observed, “there could hardly be a fitter man, however, than Andrew Johnson to dedicate the monument to Douglass [sic].”

  The trip quickly degenerated into a Barnum-like carnival of unabashed self-promotion. Dubbed “Andy’s Swing Around the Circle,” it was roundly mocked as “the event of the season,” The Nation snickered, “if not the age.” Johnson had intended otherwise, of course, firstly by surrounding himself with able deputies. But Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch had begged off, and so had Edwin Stanton. New to his post, Interior Secretary Orville Hickman Browning said he had too much to do, and the recently appointed Attorney General Henry Stanbery, Speed’s replacement, pleaded poor health. That left William Seward and Gideon Welles and the Postmaster General Alexander Randall. Johnson also dragooned two celebrated war heroes, Admiral David Farragut and General Ulysses S. Grant, along with a retinue of several other generals, including General George Armstrong Custer, who would join them later. Rounding out the party was the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, James Doolittle (who also joined later), the young Mexican minister Matías Romero, members of Johnson’s family (though not his wife), his staff, a caterer, and the press.

  The presidential party departed Washington on a presidential train provided by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and outfitted with private berths, cushioned seats, and luxurious curtains. It would run on a special timetable with the track cleared for its passage. No expense was spared: the party ate from engraved plates of red, white, blue, and gold prepared for the occasion. The dining car was loaded with a seemingly unlimited supply of wines, liquor, and cigars, and the menus typically included terrapin, canvasback ducks, prairie chicken, and champagne, which according to one member of the group, “were far more plentiful than bread and butter or cold water.”

  The Baltimore and Philadelphia city councils declined to host official receptions, and in Philadelphia the mayor had left town. Still, well-wishers greeted the presidential entourage. In New York City, Johnson relished the noisy cheers he heard as he traveled from the Battery to City Hall and then to a gala banquet for 250 men at the elegant Delmonico’s restaurant, where the doors were draped in flags and banners, and throngs of bystanders lined the street for a glimpse of the stocky President treated to a dinner that cost $11,000, said the adversarial press.

  Johnson must have felt as though he had come home, what with the screaming crowds, fluttering streamers, and the wooden stages hastily knocked together in city after city. From New York City by riverboat, the group continued to upstate New York and west, from Albany to Buffalo, stopping along the way in such small places as Seward’s hometown of Auburn. But the trip didn’t go very well. James Doolittle had warned Johnson not to speak
extemporaneously, which was going to be hard for him to resist, and Thurlow Weed, who greeted Johnson in Albany, reminded him that men were like flies; you catch more with honey than with vinegar. Johnson turned a deaf ear. As one historian explained, Johnson had an “itch for speechmaking,” and even in prepared remarks, which could last an hour, he couldn’t resist letting loose about his enemies. Those come to hear him also noticed how often he used the personal pronoun or referred to himself, and how often he called reconstruction “My Policy,” emphasizing the “my.”

  In Springfield, Illinois, home of Lincoln, the houses were shut, the streets deserted, and the flags unfurled over the headquarters of the Grand Army of the Republic, which welcomed only Grant and Farragut. Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert pleaded a previous engagement. When Johnson addressed crowds, he heard hisses and hecklers, particularly when he spoke from the balcony of his hotel in Cleveland. “Three cheers for Congress,” someone yelled. And when Johnson angrily yelled back, “Where is the man or the woman who can place his finger upon one act of mine deviated from any pledge of mine in violation of the Constitution?” more than one person replied, “New Orleans.”

  New Orleans had become a refrain, an epithet, a reminder of the violence produced by a “My Policy” of pardoning former rebels and ushering them into power.

  “Why don’t you hang Jeff Davis?” someone hollered. Captured more than a year earlier, the president of the Confederacy was imprisoned at Fort Monroe; no one yet knew whether to put him on trial for treason in a civilian court in Virginia, where he had been indicted—and where he would likely not be convicted. People jeered. Someone else in the crowd shouted out to Johnson, “Don’t get mad.”