The Impeachers Read online

  The Democratic New York Herald supported qualified black suffrage, mainly because it seemed expedient. “The radical abolition faction of the North, slavery being abolished, have mounted their new hobby of negro suffrage, and they threaten to ‘ride it rough shod’ over the Southern States, and over the administration if it shall presume to stand in the way,” the paper noted. Since the population of the cotton states was at least one-half freed blacks, the Herald suggested that “upon some fair system of restrictions, we would urge them to incorporate negro suffrage into their new State constitutions.” Suffrage would undercut the platform of Northern radicals by hastening the readmission of Southern states into Congress, and the readmission of Southern states into Congress would presumably bring Democrats back into control of it.

  Intent on making sure that Congress—and Congress alone—handled matters of reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens claimed that the executive branch of government had already accumulated too much power, particularly during the war, when Lincoln appropriated authority rightly belonging to the legislature. As a result, Schuyler Colfax and several other congressional leaders asked President Johnson to convene a special session of Congress as soon as possible, Congress not being due to convene until December 1865, almost eight months after the assassination.

  In no rush to reduce the presidential power that Lincoln had wielded, Andrew Johnson said he was too busy. By nature a suspicious man always looking over his shoulder, Johnson well knew that a bullet, not the ballot, had placed him in the Executive Mansion. He was the Accidental President. And conscious that his accidental presidency could disappear without an electoral mandate, he was reluctant at first to show his hand. But since he had despised secession with every fiber of his being, his hatred of it only strengthened his intention to make the Union whole again and to heal its wounds while he, Andrew Johnson, emerged unequivocally as the nation’s leader. He believed that providence had chosen him to consummate this most sacred task of healing—and to keep his sacred office.

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  THE NEW PRESIDENT seemed “dignified, urbane, and self-possessed,” said the diarist George Templeton Strong, who had earlier thought Andrew Johnson a boor. Johnson positively glowed with republican simplicity and goodness. “I rejoice in having such a plain man of the people to rule over us,” declared the unshakable abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. When the prominent merchants and bankers of New York purchased a magnificent carriage and span of horses for him, the new President straightaway refused the gift. “Those occupying high official positions,” he explained politely, must “decline the offerings of kind and loyal friends.” He was roundly praised for his integrity.

  Delegations from New York and North Carolina, from Massachusetts and Louisiana, and from Illinois and Virginia said he combined Lincoln’s honesty with Andrew Jackson’s grit, and that although he came from the South, he hated the Southern aristocracy. “We plebeians, the majority of the U.S. have great confidence in your ability and sympathy,” a Philadelphia man wrote to Johnson. “You were once one of us who toil.”

  White Southerners feared that Johnson might prove a man who would “out Herod, Herod,” as one planter worried, meaning he’d cruelly punish the South, but many black community leaders voiced hope, “knowing you to be A friend of our ‘race.’ ” The editor of the New Orleans Black Republican declared that “as colored men, we have entire confidence in President Johnson.” Hadn’t Andrew Johnson, just the year before, stood on the steps of the Capitol in Nashville at dusk, and declared to the cheering crowd that he’d be the black man’s Moses, leading them to freedom?

  Johnson also impressed Charles Sumner enough for Sumner to tell a friend that “in the question of colored suffrage the President is with us.” The matter of voting rights for black men remained dear to Senator Sumner’s heart, and he blithely assumed that Johnson agreed with him, although Johnson had said nothing. As one of Sumner’s biographers observes, “Sumner had too often taken silence for consent.”

  Other people shared Sumner’s great expectations. “Johnson, we have faith in you,” said tough-minded Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade. His declaration of faith in Johnson became a mantra, demonstrating to skeptics that Wade, the bluntest member of the most radical wing of the Republican party, approved of the new President. Or at least Wade wanted to believe that even if there wasn’t a program yet in place, Johnson wouldn’t fritter away the fruits of war or obstruct the Republican program for the creation of a more perfect Union.

  In the wake of Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson correctly judged the public mood as one combining grief and fury. During his first weeks in office, he continued to proclaim, as he’d done during the war, that treason was odious, criminal, a capital offense. He offered substantial cash rewards for the apprehension and arrest of such traitors as Confederate President Jefferson Davis as well as several other rebel officials. And on May 1, 1865, Johnson authorized a military trial for the eight persons arrested and then accused of conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward, and General Grant.

  Booth had managed to escape from Ford’s Theater and cross the Potomac to hide in a tobacco barn in Virginia, where a skittish soldier shot him through a hole in the wall. That left seven men and one woman held in irons at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary. With the civil courts in Washington open, there was no constitutional reason for a military trial, and the controversial decision to authorize one offended the public to such an extent that Johnson instructed his attorney general, James Speed, to defend it: because Lincoln, as President, was commander in chief and thus a military personage, his assassination was considered a military crime.

  Just as controversial was the decision to hold the trial behind closed doors. Reporters were not to be allowed into the courtroom; the proceedings would be communicated by one man, the presiding judge, Stanton’s friend General Joseph Holt, to a single representative of the press at the end of each day. This too seemed unconstitutional, a muzzling of the freedom of the press in a country no longer at war. The ruling was reversed, but not before it deeply worried Democrats, who condemned such executive interference in the courts.

  Montgomery Blair, once Lincoln’s postmaster general, was quick to reassure fellow Democratic leaders: President Johnson had authorized the military tribunal merely to dupe the Radical Republicans. “He will break with them soon on the fundamental question of states rights and negro suffrage,” Blair soothed. “Foreseeing this, he probably means for the present to be stiff on the punishment of traitors….There is no principle involved in that.”

  The trial lasted fifty days, during which 360 witnesses told the truth as they had seen or remembered it. Twenty-nine of them were former slaves who testified both for and against the defendants. But whatever anyone—black or white—alleged, or whatever the presumed innocence or guilt of the defendants, the Northern public wanted convictions, particularly because for those fifty days, the public heard about a lot more than the night of the assassination. They heard tales of vials of smallpox smuggled over the border in suitcases by Confederate agents hoping to release them in Northern cities; they heard of attempts to kill President Lincoln with infected clothing. They heard of the horrific conditions at two notorious prisons, Libby in Richmond and Andersonville in Georgia. At the latter, in just one year, 13,000 Yankees had starved or died of dysentery, gangrene, and scurvy, if they hadn’t been lucky enough to be killed quickly by a bullet.

  The eight defendants who shuffled into the makeshift courtroom, initially wearing hoods over their heads (except for the woman, Mary Surratt) to isolate or humiliate them, were thus accused of more than conspiring to kill the President; they were guilty of war crimes. All eight were found guilty. Three of them were sentenced to life in prison; one of them, the man who presumably readied Booth’s horse for his escape from Ford’s Theater, to six years in prison. The rest, includin
g George Atzerodt, who was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson (but got cold feet), and Mrs. Surratt, were summarily hanged with twenty-four hours’ notice. Later it was alleged that several of the judges petitioned President Johnson to convert Mary Surratt’s sentence to life imprisonment. He insisted he never saw the paperwork. Johnson did, however, grant executive pardons to three of the men with life sentences in early 1869, just before he left office.

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  OUT OF RESPECT for the grieving Mrs. Lincoln, Johnson had delayed moving into the White House for six weeks—his family was not arriving from Tennessee until August—and he set up a temporary office in the Treasury Building, where he hung the flag that had been suspended over Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater. Mary Todd Lincoln, who didn’t like Johnson, complained that he failed to pay his respects, but she took some comfort in his administration following her husband’s without a hitch. “It was a remarkable illustration,” said reporter Noah Brooks, “of the elasticity and steadiness of our form of government that its machinery moved on without a jar, without tumult, when the head was suddenly stricken down.”

  In recognition of the deep sorrow afflicting the nation, with hundreds of thousands of its citizens killed and its President murdered, Johnson also called for a national day of mourning, initially slated for the end of May. After that, he hoped the country could move forward—and look forward to a future of reunion and amity.

  It was wishful thinking. The political jockeying over the fate of the nation had begun. Actually, it had never stopped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Accidental President

  “In what new skin will the old snake come forth?”

  —FREDERICK DOUGLASS

  May, 1865

  The city flags were again flying at full mast by the end of May and the dreary black crepe had been removed from buildings. The city was jammed. Spectators were standing on roofs or craning out of windows while the crowds on the street below threw flowers at the triumphant soldiers, come to Washington to celebrate the Union victory in a two-day grand parade. Their rifles flashing in the brilliant sunlight, these soldiers trotted on horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue—a marvelous sight, said the graying poet Walt Whitman, who watched sun-bronzed men, heroes all, and troops decorated with scarves of scarlet. Artillery, ambulances, army wagons participated in a pageant meant to cheer the public into peace. The black regiments had not been invited.

  The new President was poised and solemn. Impeccably dressed, Andrew Johnson stood erect on a large covered platform located in front of the Executive Mansion, and straight as a doorpost, his hair tucked under his ears, he saluted the passing armies as they lowered their regimental flags—many of them tattered and pierced with bullet holes—or shook the outstretched hands of the victors. No longer did he seem the boozy backwoodsman who slobbered over the Bible during his inauguration the previous March. One newspaper alleged that Johnson hadn’t been drunk; the Confederates had obviously poisoned him.

  An eloquent leader of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, Frederick Douglass had escaped from slavery to become a gifted lecturer, writer, and political journalist—and a withering critic of Andrew Johnson.

  “We have an era of good feeling now,” George Templeton Strong noted with hope. Yet many Republicans, particularly Radicals, had grown anxious. “Johnson talks first rate,” Senator Ben Wade said, “but don’t just say the word.” The word was “suffrage.”

  “There is no guarantee for personal civil liberty, but that of political liberty—universal suffrage,” said another Radical. Did President Johnson understand this?

  Men willing to shoulder the muskets of the republic should be allowed to “carry its ballots,” a group of black men from New Bern, North Carolina, petitioned Johnson. It would be patently unfair, they said, to enfranchise the white men who’d fought against the country while denying the vote to black men who’d fought for it. Johnson said little, allowing for a while his self-appointed advisers to believe what they wanted to believe. But when a delegation of black ministers called on him at the White House, he told them with galling condescension that too many former slaves loaf around, looking to the government for handouts.

  “They seem to think that with freedom every thing they need is to come like manna from heaven,” Johnson said.

  The petitioners didn’t need hectoring, and they certainly didn’t need freedom defined for them. They needed a voice in government, they needed representation, they needed to vote.

  “In what new skin will the old snake come forth?” Frederick Douglass then pointedly asked. To him, as he made clear, the snake was slavery. Or Andrew Johnson. The honeymoon with Johnson, if honeymoon it had been, was coming to an end.

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  ON MAY 9, 1865, Andrew Johnson, President for less than a month, issued an executive order that restored Virginia as a loyal state and established Unionist Francis H. Pierpont as its provisional governor. Pierpont would be “aided by the Federal Government,” President Johnson declared, “in the lawful measures which he may take for the extension and administration of the State government.”

  Thaddeus Stevens was troubled. “I see the President is precipitating things,” he gloomily exclaimed. “Virginia is recognized! I fear before Congress meets he will have so bedeviled matters as to render them incurable.”

  Stevens tactfully reminded Johnson that “reconstruction is a very delicate question.” And that Congress understood reconstruction to be a legislative, not an executive, prerogative. More directly, Stevens then added, “how the executive can remoddle [sic] the States in the union is past my comprehension. I see how he can govern them through military governors until they are reorganized. The forcing [of] governor Pierpont, chosen by a thousand votes on the million inhabitants of Virginia as their governor and call[ing] it a republican form of government may provoke a smile, but can hardly satisfy the judg[men]t of a thinking people. Had you made him a military govr. it were easily understood.”

  He too advised Johnson to convene an extra session of Congress—lest many assume “the Executive was approaching usurpation” of legislative authority.

  Charles Sumner was also troubled. “The Pierpont govt is nothing but a sham,” Sumner told the outspoken orator Wendell Phillips.

  Johnson did not heed the advice or the warnings of these Republicans. At the end of May, he issued two proclamations. In the first, he decriminalized former citizens of the Confederacy willing to take an oath of allegiance to the federal government, as long as they hadn’t been high-ranking officers in the Confederate government or military, and as long as they didn’t possess a taxable net worth of more than $20,000. But former high-ranking officers or wealthy planters might apply directly to him for a presidential pardon.

  Almost immediately Washington was teeming with ex-Confederate soldiers, con men, and conspirators, all seeking a presidential dispensation. Women too: Walt Whitman, working as a clerk in the attorney general’s office, saw throngs of white Southern women, young and old, dressed in coal black, come on behalf of husbands or sons or brothers. By summer’s end, Johnson had approved about 2,700 pardons. Eager to strip the wealthy planter class of its former privileges, Johnson was just as eager to earn their thanks.

  Though Thaddeus Stevens was leery about admitting any former Confederates back into the government, whether or not they had been pardoned and no matter what kind of oath of allegiance they swore, Johnson ignored him. Rather, in his second proclamation, the President appointed a former secessionist, William H. Holden, as the provisional governor of North Carolina, “with all the powers necessary and proper to enable such loyal people of the State of North Carolina to restore said State to its constitutional relations to the Federal Government.” Johnson also gave Holden authority to appoint mayors, judges, sheriffs, and constables. And Holden was not obligated to set aside any of the
laws discriminating against blacks passed before the war—laws that prevented free blacks from testifying against a white person, for instance, or laws restricting the movement or the employment of free blacks.

  The governor was also to supervise the election of delegates to a state convention whose purpose was to create a new constitution for North Carolina. This new constitution was required only to repudiate slavery, the ordinances of secession, and the Confederate debt. The citizens eligible to vote were citizens, now deemed loyal, who’d been on the voter rolls of 1860. That obviously excluded the freedmen—and did include many of the men who’d served the Confederacy.

  “Better, far better, would it have been for Grant to have surrendered to Lee,” Wendell Phillips quipped, “than for Johnson to have surrendered to North Carolina.”

  “Is there no way to arrest the insane course of the President?” Thaddeus Stevens asked Charles Sumner. “If something is not done the President will be crowned king before Congress meets.” Congress would not reconvene until December, six months away. “I see our worthy president fancies himself a sovereign power—His North Carolina proclamation sickens me,” Stevens told another friend.

  When Johnson appointed the planter William Sharkey as provisional governor of Mississippi, some moderate Republicans were finally shaken. “I am not well satisfied with the way things are going on,” said Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the conservative North American Review. “Mr. Johnson is making mistakes the consequences of which will be dangerous, & hard to undo.” Even more disturbing was Johnson’s appointment of Benjamin Perry as provisional governor of South Carolina, for Perry had been in the Confederate legislature during the war.