The Impeachers Read online

  Stanton took charge. He needed to apprehend the persons behind the murder of Lincoln and the attempt on Secretary of State Seward. How many officials had been targeted, and how many assassins were involved? He would bring them to justice. He dispatched detectives, instructing them to dig up as much evidence as possible. He ordered more soldiers to fan out over the city. He sent for General Grant, who had gone to Philadelphia instead of joining President Lincoln the night before. He closed Ford’s Theater and arranged the funeral ceremonies. He oversaw Lincoln’s burial attire, choosing to dress him in the Brooks Brothers suit Lincoln had worn at the second inaugural.

  Convinced that he too had been a target, Stanton was certain that somehow Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was implicated.

  Rumors flew around Washington, around the North, throughout the South.

  It would have been reassuring to prove a conspiracy of Southerners—that would have made sense. Southerners might want to extend the war, not rupture the early peace. Generals Lee and Grant had already met at Appomattox, and General Lee had surrendered, but peace was not going to come easy. In Iowa, one woman was jubilant about Lincoln’s assassination; while in South Carolina, a Union soldier, learning of Lincoln’s death, confided to his diary that “God will punish & forgive, I suppose; but men never can.”

  * * *

  —

  BY TEN O’CLOCK in the morning on the day that Abraham Lincoln died, Edwin Stanton and several other members of the Lincoln cabinet had gathered at the Kirkwood House, a five-story hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue at 12th Street, where Vice President Andrew Johnson lived in a two-room suite on the second floor. They had come to witness the swearing-in of Johnson as the President of the United States.

  Salmon Chase, by then chief justice of the Supreme Court, administered the oath of office. “May God support, guide, and bless you in your arduous duties,” Chase concluded the brief ceremony.

  This was a very different scene from the one that had taken place a little more than a year earlier when, during his inauguration as Vice President, Johnson gestured extravagantly and delivered such a long, incoherent speech that Senator Zachariah Chandler groaned. “I was never so mortified in my life,” he said. “Had I been able to find a hole I would have dropped through it out of sight.”

  This time, Andrew Johnson rose to the occasion. He reassured members of the government and the press first of all by his deportment. Reporters described him as dignified, composed, and sober. He promised continuity: he would keep the members of Lincoln’s cabinet as his own. He reassured Republicans, particularly the more radical wing of the party, that he was “clearly” of the opinion “that those who are good enough to fight for the Government are good enough to vote for it; and that a black heart is a more serious defect in an American citizen than a black face.”

  Although Johnson had been a slave-state Democrat, to George Julian, a Republican representative from Indiana, the new President “would prove a godsend to the country.” After all, Johnson had emphatically declared that “robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime; and crime must be punished.” Johnson had been referring mainly to Lincoln’s assassins, but former Confederates seemed to be put on notice. George Julian was satisfied.

  So too was Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade, who wasted no time meeting with fellow Republicans to discuss how to bolster the President’s cabinet.

  Secretary of State Seward had to go, of course. He had been seriously injured, but more than that, Republicans like Benjamin Wade never trusted the waffling secretary. No one mentioned replacing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. For whatever anyone had previously thought of Andrew Johnson, if they thought of him at all, many people expressed relief that in this sad hour, there was the warhorse Edwin Stanton, battered but unbowed. “Thank God Stanton lives,” said Cincinnati lawyer William Dickson.

  “The country cannot spare you,” the historian George Bancroft wrote Secretary Stanton. If Stanton still considered retiring, he must banish the thought. “Stand your ground,” he was told. “Don’t resign. There is work for you yet to do.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Magnificent Intentions

  “Our whole system is like molten wax, ready to receive an impression.”

  —CHARLES SUMNER

  The marble of the U.S. Capitol sparkled in the sunlight. It was still under construction, the extensions enlarging it half done, and the monument to George Washington, unfinished and underfunded, reached only partway to the sky. Washington: a city of magnificent intentions, Charles Dickens had said. “There is incompleteness wherever the eyes rest,” a visitor to the city observed years after Dickens came and went.

  Incomplete buildings symbolized the state of the country after four long years of war, division, and death—four years during which the city daily watched those plain pine coffins being loaded into open hearses; four years of hunger and privation and of burning cities, of thousands of refugees, white and black, without shelter or means of support. Nothing and no one could go back to the way things were, and there were so many unanswered questions. How would the nation fulfill its mission of liberty and equality, begun a century earlier with the Declaration of Independence? And could a nation so recently divided pull itself together, finally indivisible, or would it remain shattered, shaken, and in pieces?

  By the late spring of 1865, some 40,000 freed blacks had arrived in Washington looking for work. A number of them found jobs and homes in Maryland or Virginia, thanks in large part to the ministrations of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was set up to provide just that: work, education, assistance, even in some cases land. Four hundred acres in Arlington had been divided into small lots for rent. But many people were housed in shanties, stables, cellars, or improvised homes knocked together with tarpaper, and they had no wood, no blankets in winter, no means of subsistence.

  After the war, emancipated men and women flocked to the country’s capital, where they often lived in impoverished conditions, largely ignored by Washington politicians.

  They lived in the shadow of marble government buildings and of the Executive Mansion, itself dingy after those four years of war. Washington in summer was hot; and in winter, the streets and open spaces were thick with black mud or slush and snow—and “dead horses, dead dogs, cats, rats, rubbish, and refuse of all kind,” journalist Jane Swisshelm noted. Pigs rooted in people’s yards. “I have even heard its inhabitants tell stories of nightly pig-hunts in the streets,” a British visitor said, “and of the danger of tumbling over a cow on the pavement on a dark night.” Near the White House were brothels and gambling houses and saloons, where more than one congressman drank too much, and not far away was the street known as Newspaper Row, where harried journalists scribbled news.

  There was no industry in Washington—none except politics. And yet the white marble buildings glistened in the April light of 1865, and the city’s broad avenues possessed a gracious elegance that visitors liked to associate with the South. The actress Charlotte Cushman, visiting the city, noted how people with great fortunes had settled in Washington. Often they were Southerners, she observed, who intended to “get back the political ascendancy dear to every Southern heart.”

  To them, Andrew Johnson actually did seem a godsend in this confusing time, when the country seemed half-finished, the peace rocky, and the state of the Union unclear. Should the South be punished, more than war had already punished it, for its disloyalty? Should the Southern states that rebelled be allowed to come back into the Union without being further penalized for having left? And what about the fate of the former Southern slave who, before the war, had been counted as three-fifths of a person, per the compromise written into the Constitution? (Apportioning representation, the compromise had given the North a net gain—but had also provided slave-holding states a commensurate reduction in federal taxes, which were based on eligible inhabitant
s.) Now free, the former slave would be counted as a full person. That would increase the number of representatives from the Southern states in the House of Representatives—quite unfairly, if persons of color were denied the vote.

  After Appomattox, General William Tecumseh Sherman leaped into the fray. Brilliant and irascible, though something of an amoral pragmatist, the leathery Sherman had known devastation firsthand; his army had caused much of it. But he hated war, which he waged with fury, and he wanted to bring Southerners into the Union on their old footing as soon as possible, hoping magnanimous terms would produce law and order. Far exceeding his authority, Sherman presented Confederate General Joseph Johnston with terms of surrender stunningly more lenient than what General Grant had offered Robert E. Lee.

  Sherman’s so-called “general amnesty” included official recognition of existing state governments in the South, home rule (jurisdiction over state policies and practices), and the restoration of property and political rights in the former Confederate states. However, he did not insist that the former Confederates recognize the Emancipation Proclamation; critics quickly noted that a restoration of their property could be understood as a return of their slaves. And Sherman’s amnesty would easily allow rebellious Southerners—“the worst men of the South,” as Sherman’s brother John, an Ohio senator, called them—to reinstate their state organizations, which would endanger the welfare of freed blacks and those whites who’d been loyal to the Union.

  Edwin Stanton was apoplectic.

  Unlike Stanton, General Sherman assumed that Southern leaders would accept the results of the war and, if left alone, cultivate their own gardens. Simple, generous, impulsively naïve to many, not just to Stanton, General Sherman was seen as selling out the freed men and women, the Unionists, and the Republican party. Even Sherman’s brother cringed. General Sherman’s terms were “inadmissible,” Senator Sherman acknowledged while defending the general, whom he said had merely taken a “simple military view” of the situation.

  War had honed General William Tecumseh Sherman to a thin, wiry point; he was tenacious and temperamental—and exceptional. “No one could be with him half an hour and doubt his greatness,” a journalist once said. Raised by Ohio Senator Thomas Ewing after Sherman’s father died, he attended West Point, married Ewing’s daughter Ellen, and then resigned from the army in 1853 to seek his fortune elsewhere. His stint as a banker in San Francisco left him disillusioned and impoverished, so in 1859 he took a position as head of a new military college in Louisiana. After Louisiana seceded from the Union, Sherman left the college and in 1861 received an appointment as a Union infantry colonel.

  Called insane when he insisted that 200,000 troops were necessary to suppress the rebellion in Kentucky, he refurbished his reputation by becoming an inspired soldier, devoted to the Union. Grant admired him hugely, and Sherman completely trusted Grant. “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk,” Sherman drily noted when someone tried to denigrate Grant, “and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

  At a hastily convened cabinet meeting, with General Grant attending, President Johnson had acted swiftly to reject the Sherman agreement, partly because it might suggest that the general had little faith in Johnson’s abilities. The press had hinted that Sherman was eyeing the President’s job, though General Sherman immediately quashed the preposterous rumor. “Gossip of my having presidential aspirations is absurd and offensive to me,” he told Grant, “and I would check it if I knew how.” Sherman loathed Washington politics, never sought political office, and in 1884 famously refused a presidential run: “I will not accept if nominated,” he declared, “and will not serve if elected.”

  Secretary of War Stanton loudly censured General Sherman in the press, which sparked a nasty public quarrel between the two men. Senator John Sherman begged the angry Stanton to back down. The last thing the country needed was a spat between its secretary of war and one of its most revered generals. Do not drive General Sherman into the ranks of the so-called Copperheads, John Sherman added, using the common nickname for Southern-sympathizing Peace Democrats.

  General Sherman wasn’t a Democrat, he wasn’t a Copperhead, and he claimed that he was just following Lincoln’s lead when he sought to befriend white Southerners after the war. This was the position of many other moderate Republicans as well, for as early as 1863, Lincoln had been laying plans to reunify the country. To that end, he’d issued a “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction,” which included full pardons to any ex-Confederate seeking amnesty, provided that he hadn’t been in the Confederate government or served as a high-ranking officer in its army. The proclamation also included the restoration of property (except slaves) to those same ex-Confederates if they also swore to defend the Constitution and all the laws of the United States, including the Emancipation Proclamation. Once ten percent of the prewar electorate in a formerly seceded Southern state took this oath, they could re-establish a new and loyal state government. Those new loyal governments would be entitled to representation in Washington—if Congress approved, naturally, since it had the right to determine the qualifications of its own members.

  Lincoln had not said anything about voting or civil rights. But his amnesty proclamation was a wartime measure intended, in 1863, to lure Southerners back into the Union while making sure that slaves stayed free. No one knew with certainty what Lincoln’s reconstruction policies, after the war, would actually have been, which is why his last speech was—and continues to be—parsed over and over again. For just days before his assassination, from the balcony of the White House, Lincoln had addressed a large black and white audience on the lawn. Declaring that “we, the loyal people” were not of one mind about what he called reconstruction, or the “re-inauguration of the national authority,” he reminded the audience that reunification could be “fraught with great difficulty.” And he said he was amenable to plans other than his own.

  He also said he was open to enfranchising black men who were “very intelligent” or who had served “our cause as soldiers.”

  While Lincoln lay in state in the East Room of the White House, his cabinet had met, and on Easter Sunday April 16, a dutiful Edwin Stanton read to them a draft of the interim reconstruction plan he’d presented at Lincoln’s last cabinet meeting, which he had revised, per Lincoln’s instructions. Since some Southern states, like Tennessee, were already under the jurisdiction of a military governor loyal to the Union, and since Virginia already had a loyal governor, Stanton suggested putting other states, like North Carolina, whose government was in shambles, under the jurisdiction of a temporary military marshal. That marshal could order the election of new and loyal government officials. The proposal was but a sketch, of course, hastily pulled together, and intended first and foremost to prevent bedlam in the South. It left open the question of voting rights for blacks.

  That evening, before the fireplace in his office at the War Department, Stanton again presented the reconstruction plan, this time to a group of Republicans that included Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, Indiana Representative Schuyler Colfax, and several other members of Congress. Sumner pounced: Stanton had not included a provision for negro suffrage—giving the black man the vote.

  Exhausted, Stanton explained he had not wanted to divide the Republican party, which he knew he would, by including suffrage. Sumner insisted. “This is a moment for changes,” he said. “Our whole system is like molten wax, ready to receive an impression.”

  Sumner’s ideas about reconstruction included full civil and political rights for all black men, and he was not alone. Just days before Lincoln’s assassination, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Salmon Chase, who’d been Lincoln’s treasury secretary, told Lincoln it would be a crime and a folly “if the colored loyalists of the rebel states shall be left to the control of restored rebels, not likely in that case to be either wise or just.” The editor of Harper’s Weekly
similarly noted that if “the political power in the late insurrectionary State be intrusted exclusively to the whites, the colored population will be left entirely at the mercy of those who have always regarded them with contempt, and who doubtless feel bitterly toward them as the real cause of the war which has desolated the South.” Think of it: without the right to vote, the freedpeople might be denied the right to testify in court, to sit on juries, to bear arms, to attend church, even to learn how to read.

  Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, a former slave, put the issue succinctly: “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”

  Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Chief Justice Chase were some of those lumped together as “Radicals,” or “Radical Republicans,” a somewhat loose designation generally intended as a slur and one that referred mostly to policies vis-à-vis the South. (The epithet “radical” seems to have originated in the earlier label “radical abolitionist,” which the Democrat press in particular, but not exclusively, had applied with contempt.) Though Radical Republicans were not necessarily a cohesive group—few groups are—generally speaking, they had believed that the Civil War should be fought first and foremost to emancipate the slaves; after the war, they championed civil rights for blacks and alleged that a reconstruction policy overly lenient to the former Confederate states would unquestionably return the freedmen and -women to a condition like slavery. Radical Republicans had feared that outcome in 1864, while the war raged, and they feared it more now that the war was over. And so they clamored for black voting rights. Many of them argued that the states formerly in rebellion should not be readmitted into Congress until they guaranteed suffrage.

  And so at Charles Sumner’s urging, Edwin Stanton revised his blueprint for reconstruction yet again, including in it a proviso for giving black men the vote. In this, Stanton may have appeared to be a Radical Republican. Yet certain moderate Republicans—and even a number of Democrats—backed granting black men some form of suffrage if certain qualifications were met, like the ability to read and write. These Republicans often thought such a requirement should be levied on white voters too.