The Impeachers Read online

  And if the President—the President of the United States—was to be impeached for treason, bribery, or a high crime or misdemeanor, then the country had to define “high crime.” Originally, the crime warranting impeachment was “maladministration,” but James Madison had objected; the term was hazy. Yet “high crimes and misdemeanors” is fuzzy too. In Federalist 65, Alexander Hamilton clarified—sort of: a high crime is an abuse of executive authority, proceeding from “an abuse or violation of some public trust.” Impeachment is a “national inquest into the conduct of public men.” Fuzzy again: are impeachments to proceed because of violations of law—or infractions against that murky thing called public trust?

  But surely if the only crimes that were impeachable were “high,” then the Founders must have meant “high misdemeanors” as well. For a misdemeanor is a legal offense, ranked below that of a felony. Was a President to be impeached for any misdemeanor—like stealing a chicken—or did it have to be something, well, “higher”?

  Yet the fact remains that the Founding Fathers had anticipated the possible need for an impeachment. Of that, there can be no doubt. A man in a position of power must be held accountable for his actions. And so they outlined a way to adjudicate accountability—to provide, in other words, a way to maintain a responsible and good government, which is to say to preserve the promise of a better day.

  Still, the impeachment of a President seemed no less revolutionary, no less confusing, and no less terrifying for that. Impeachment was the democratic equivalent of regicide, for Benjamin Franklin had said that without impeachment, assassination was the only way for a country to rid itself of a miscreant chief executive who acted like a king. And murder was of course out of the question.

  President Andrew Johnson’s utterly unprecedented impeachment thus presented knotty constitutional issues—and at a very specific, very difficult time in American history. The ink on the Appomattox peace agreement was barely dry, and the country was seeking moral clarity or, more particularly, the restoration of the Union in a country facing the consequence of war, a reconstruction half done, and a popular if unreadable general, Ulysses S. Grant, waiting in the wings to be elected the next chief executive. Driven by some of the most arresting characters in American history—Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Benjamin Butler, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and especially Thaddeus Stevens—it was one of the most significant moments in the nation’s short history, occurring as it did when it did.

  For there were concrete, burning questions to be answered about the direction the country would take: Under what terms would the eleven seceded Southern states of the former Confederacy be allowed to re-enter the Union? Should the states that had waged war against the Union be welcomed back into the House and the Senate, all acrimony forgotten, all rebellion forgiven, as if they had never seceded? President Johnson argued that the eleven states had never left; the Constitution forbade secession, and so the Union had never been dissolved. As a consequence, to his way of thinking, these Southern states should resume their place in the Union, their former rights and privileges restored, as soon as their governments could be deemed loyal—mostly by their renouncing secession, accepting slavery’s abolition, and swearing allegiance to the federal government. In theory, such a speedy restoration would swiftly repair the wounds of war.

  Yet what about the condition of four million black men and women, recently freed but who had been deprived during their lives of literacy, legitimacy, and selfhood? Shouldn’t this newly free population be able to control their education, their employment, their representation in government? Were these black men and women then citizens, and if so, could they vote? In 1865, just after the war ended, the white delegates to the South Carolina state convention would hear none of that. As a northern journalist reported in disgust, to them “the negro is an animal; a higher sort of animal, to be sure, than the dog or the horse.”

  Would the nation then reinstate the supremacist status quo for whites? “Can we depend on our President to exert his influence to keep out the Southern States till they secure to the blacks at least the freedom they now have on paper?” a Union general worried. Allowing white Southerners to rejoin the Union quickly while at the same time denying the black man the vote seemed to many Republicans, black and white, “replanting the seeds of rebellion,” as Thaddeus Stevens said, “which, within the next quarter of a century will germinate and produce the same bloody strife which has just ended.”

  In a South where houses had been burned, crops had failed, and the railroads had been destroyed, soldiers were hobbling home from the front in gray rags, seeking paroles, jobs, and government office. Thousands of people, both black and white, were dying of starvation. Around Savannah, about two thousand persons had to live on charity. Black men and women in the hundreds had been turned off plantations with little or no money and maybe a bushel of corn.

  Visitors from the North frequently found white Southerners smoldering, aggrieved, and intransigent; white Southerners had tried to protect their homes, believing they’d fought for the unassailable right of each state to make its own laws and preserve its own customs. And they wouldn’t surrender such rights easily, having lost the war. “It is our duty,” said South Carolina planter Wade Hampton, “to support the President of the United States so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all our rights as a sovereign State.” Union General Philip Sheridan, renowned for unrelenting aggression during the war, alerted his superiors that planters in Texas were secretly conspiring “against the rights” of the freedmen. In New Orleans, a visitor was stunned to find a picture of Lincoln hanging next to one of John Wilkes Booth, and above them both, a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee.

  All through the South, ex-Confederates were vilifying the black population, and one legislature after another had been passing “black codes,” ordinances designed to prevent freedmen and -women from owning property, traveling freely, making contracts, and enjoying any form of civil rights or due process. “People had not got over regarding negroes as something other than human,” said a journalist traveling through the South. Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean occupying the White House, had acted quickly. While Congress was in recess, he singlehandedly re-established Southern state governments by executive proclamation. He subsequently issued pardons to former Confederates on easy terms and at an astonishing rate. He later nudged out of the Freedmen’s Bureau those who disagreed with his position and tried to shut down that Bureau by vetoing legislation that would keep it running. He vetoed civil rights legislation as unfair to whites and attempted to block passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to blacks. He turned a cold eye on the violence directed toward the freedmen, and he emphatically staked out a position he sought to maintain, saying, “Everyone would and must admit that the white race is superior to the black.”

  Yet on December 4, 1865, at the opening session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, the clerk at the House of Representatives had omitted from the roll call the names of Southern congressmen.

  Battle lines were being drawn, albeit without a bayonet or rifle.

  The four-year period between the death of Lincoln in the spring of 1865 and the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant in March of 1869 seems a thicket of competing convictions, festering suspicions, and bold prejudice. Yet oddly, for years and years, the intensely dramatic event—the impeachment of the U.S. President—has largely been papered over or ignored. For years, we’ve sidestepped that ignominious moment when a highly unlikeable President Johnson was brought to trial in the Senate, presumably by fanatical foes. The whole episode left such a bitter aftertaste, as the eminent scholar C. Vann Woodward said more than four decades ago, that historians often relegated the term “impeachment” to the “abysmal dustbin” of never-again experiences—like “secession,” “appeasement,” and “isolationism.”

  The year before Woodward’s pronouncement, though, Michael Les Ben
edict had brilliantly scrutinized the political dimensions of Johnson’s impeachment, thus breaking with the long tradition of embarrassment, outrage, or silence. Regardless, that tradition has persisted—despite David O. Stewart’s careful study, a decade ago, of how dark money may have influenced the final vote. And though Stewart, a practiced lawyer, is no friend of Andrew Johnson, he too concludes, albeit sadly, that the whole affair was a “political and legal train wreck.”

  But to reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment. “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.”

  Impeachment: it was neither trivial nor ignominious. It was unmistakably about race. It was about racial prejudice, which is not trivial but shameful. That may be a reason why impeachment and what lay behind it were frequently swept under the national carpet. Then too the whole idea of impeachment does not fit comfortably within the national myth of a democratic country founded in liberty, with abundant space, opportunity, and resources available to all. Impeaching a President implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small—unable to listen to, never mind to represent, the people they serve with justice, conscience, and equanimity. Impeachment suggests dysfunction, uncertainty, and discord—not the discord of war, which can be memorialized as valorous, purposeful, and idealistic, but the far less dramatic and often squalid, sad, intemperate conflicts of peace, partisanship, race, and rancor. Impeachment implies a failure—a failure of government of the people to function, and of leaders to lead. And presidential impeachment means failure at the very top.

  In 1868, the highly unlikeable President Johnson was impeached and then brought to trial in the Senate by men who could no longer tolerate the man’s arrogance and bigotry, his apparent abuse of power, and most recently, his violation of law. Johnson’s impeachment was thus not a plot hatched by a couple of rabid partisans—notably the powerful congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens and his counterpart in the Senate, Charles Sumner. For both Stevens and Sumner were unswerving champions of abolition and civil rights—and yet both were long considered malicious and vindictive zealots, cold and maniacal men incapable of compassion or mercy.

  Yet Senator Sumner, the regal advocate of human dignity and political equality, more or less came into his own thanks to historian David Herbert Donald’s two biographies of him, one that earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1961; the other bore the title “The Rights of Man.” As for Thaddeus Stevens, in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage of 1956, John F. Kennedy called him “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement, master of the House of Representatives, with a mouth like the thin edge of an ax.” Kennedy’s depiction of Stevens was derived in part from the diabolical portrayal of Stevens in D. W. Griffith’s controversial movie Birth of a Nation. In 2012, in the film Lincoln, Steven Spielberg mercifully updated the record, with the actor Tommy Lee Jones playing a more likeable person. But Thaddeus Stevens still lurks in the shadows of history, a fiendish figure whose clubfoot was said to be a sign of the devil, and a man vengefully bent on destroying the South.

  Kennedy also applauded the “courage” of the senators who voted against the conviction of Andrew Johnson, ostensibly because they put the best interests of the country above career and politics. Singling out Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, Kennedy soft-pedaled the fact that Ross may have been bribed to acquit Johnson—or if he wasn’t exactly bribed, he successfully importuned Johnson for favors, perks, and position shortly after his apparently courageous vote.

  And then there is President Andrew Johnson. Lambasted as “King Andy” in one of Thomas Nast’s biting political cartoons, Johnson was a self-made man, born in a log cabin, who, though raised in poverty, rose after Lincoln’s assassination to the topmost position in the land. In his youth, Johnson had been a tailor with a taste for stump oratory and politics, and in 1829, at the age of twenty-one, he was elected alderman in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he was living with his wife and children. He then became mayor, then legislator, then state senator, and he was subsequently elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served in Congress for ten years before being elected governor of Tennessee, and he eventually landed in the U.S. Senate as a fierce states’ rights Democrat but also a staunch Unionist.

  Johnson’s heroic, lonely stand against secession—he was the only senator from a Confederate state to oppose it—earned him an appointment as military governor of Tennessee during the war and then the vice-presidential slot when President Lincoln ran for re-election in 1864.

  With a Southern War Democrat on the Republican ticket, Peace Democrats could not easily tag Lincoln as anti-Southern. Johnson also helped Lincoln appeal to the working class, especially the Irish, for Johnson did not approve of the common prejudice against Catholics. Yet his tenure as Vice President began badly. Presumably suffering from a nasty cold, he had medicated himself with a concoction that included some fortifying shots of alcohol. Whatever he drank, Johnson arrived at Lincoln’s second inauguration reeking of whiskey, and after muttering something not quite comprehensible about his being a plebeian and a man of the people, he bent over and planted a sloppy kiss on the Bible. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles shifted uncomfortably in his seat and said to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who would play a key role in the impeachment, that Johnson must be either drunk or crazy.

  Regardless, after the dust of impeachment had mostly settled, Johnson was credited as being the valiant public servant whose plan for reconstruction had been temperate, fair-minded, constitutional, and intrepid. One writer, in the 1920s, anticipating Kennedy’s portrayal, christened Johnson a “profile in courage” whom future generations would regard as an “unscathed cross upon a smoking battlefield.” Johnson was seen for a time as a populist, a champion of democracy and of the beloved Constitution; as a man of principle, flawed perhaps, but honest, upright, brave.

  Perhaps he had been brave—if, that is, one can separate mettle from mulishness. For in the end, Andrew Johnson assumed powers as President that he used to thwart the laws he didn’t like. He disregarded Congress, whose legitimacy he ignored. He sought to restore the South as the province of white men and to return to power a planter class that perpetuated racial distrust and violence.

  Still, Andrew Johnson had once vowed to penalize the traitorous, secessionist South. “The American people must be taught—if they do not already feel—that treason is a crime and must be punished,” he had said just days after Lincoln’s assassination. At the same time, he argued, as he always had, that since secession was illegal, only people could be traitors, not states. His position was that as long as rebels applied to him for pardons, which they amply did, he would amply grant them. A traitor, to Johnson, then became anyone he disliked—mostly Republicans, and especially men like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner.

  Convinced by the summer of 1866 that congressional Republicans were out to get him, Johnson toured the North and West and in a set of speeches remarkable for their vituperation, he shouted out to the crowd that he hadn’t been responsible for recent riots, such as had occurred in Memphis or New Orleans. Blame Charles Sumner; blame Thad Stevens; blame Congress or anyone dubious about the Southern governments he had put into place, crackpot fanatics who wanted to give all people the vote, even in some cases women, regardless of color. Don’t blame him.

  The years right after the war were years of blood and iron: bloody streets, iron men, oaths of al
legiance, as they were called, in which former rebels swore their loyalty to the Union. But to what kind of Union government were they promising to be loyal? For these were years in which the executive and the legislature struggled to define, or redefine, the responsibilities of a representative government—and the question of who would be fairly represented. These were years of sound and fury, of fanaticism and terror, of political idealism and mixed motives, of double-dealing and high principle—and of racism, confusion, and fear. It was a time of opportunism, paranoia, pluck, and tragedy: tragedy for the nation, to be sure, and for individuals, often nameless, who lost their lives in the very, very troubled attempts to remake the country and to make it whole.

  The nation was at a crossroads, and at the very center of that crossroads was impeachment.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mars

  April 15, 1865, Washington, D.C.

  Secretary of War Edwin Stanton leaned over the bedside of his good friend, Abraham Lincoln, and, tears spilling down his cheeks, spoke the memorable phrase: now he belongs to the angels—or the ages. No one is quite sure which word, “angels” or “ages,” Stanton uttered, but each works poignantly well.

  Many were likely surprised by Stanton’s sobs. And his eloquence. Most knew him as hard, implacable, and gruff. He barked out orders to his inferiors, he kept the lamps burning in the War Department all through the night, and he’d organized the Union army with precision. His long beard trailed down to the middle of his chest, as if he had no time to bother with a barber, and he took exercise by standing at his high desk for as many as fifteen hours a day. He was so devoted to the War Department, in fact, that people were likely not surprised, three years later, when Stanton assumed center stage during the impeachment controversy.