Going to the Devil: The Impeachment of 1868 (2019)

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[RUNNING] [HEAVY BREATHING]

At : p.m., a sharp rap sounded on Andrew Johnson'’s

door.

It was April , . Good Friday.

The caller was a fellow boarder at the five-story hotel on

Pennsylvania Avenue, the Kirkwood House.

Former Wisconsin governor Leonard Farwell, having raced

three and a half blocks from Ford'’s Theater, brought some

disturbing news for the vice president.

“Governor Johnson, if you are in this room, I must see you.”

“Farwell, is that you?” “Yes, let me in.” The president had

been shot, Farwell said.

Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a room across the street from

Ford'’s.

Secretary of State William Seward was bleeding on his own

bed at home, after being stabbed in the face and neck.

And a Confederate sympathizer named George Atzerodt, who had

checked into the Kirkwood House that morning, had until moments

earlier been seated at the hotel bar, quizzing the bartender on

Johnson'’s whereabouts.

A loaded revolver was hidden in his room.

Atzerodt'’s job that evening was to m*rder the vice president.

Civil w*r tensions were flaring anew five days after Robert E.

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses

Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Conspiracy was in the air.

Lincoln had sought to lift the strain by attending that night'’s

performance of the comic play Our American Cousin.

Now, the president'’s lanky frame was arrayed diagonally on a

borrowed bed.

Blood oozed from a . caliber g*nsh*t wound to the back of his

head.

At his side, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a

Radical Republican who'’d criticized Lincoln for his

caution in emancipating Southern sl*ves, held the president'’s

hand and sobbed.

Coming in and out, the Secretary of w*r, Edwin Stanton, a

short-tempered man with tiny glasses framed by a biblical

beard, was interrogating witnesses.

And he was dictating a telegram to announce the assassination

attempt to the world.

Then there was Vice President Johnson.

A virtual non-entity in Washington until now, the

barrel-chested former congressman, senator, and

military governor of Tennessee had been drunk on whiskey when

he was sworn in only days earlier.

Johnson was a lifelong overachiever: the son of

impoverished tavern workers who'’d invented himself with

instinct and nerve.

Senator Sumner, in contrast, was a Harvard law school dandy, as

elegant as he was impractical.

Sumner could turn poetic phrases without the least persuasive

effect among fellow congressmen.

As for Secretary Stanton, his mind was, in industry, equal to

a northern w*r factory.

A cynical figure embittered by the deaths of his first wife and

two children, and his brother'’s suicide, the Ohio-born Stanton

had been a powerful trial lawyer before coming to Washington.

Aided by a young Illinois attorney, Stanton once

successfully defended a patent-infringement case brought

by the inventor of the reaping machine, Cyrus McCormick.

At the time, Stanton had kept his co-counsel, the “long-armed

creature,” Abraham Lincoln, as far away as possible.

But he'’d since come to revere the president.

And when he recalled this evening three years later, at a

dinner with Sumner and the English author Charles Dickens,

he shared two impressions.

First, the dying president'’s labored breath rose and fell

like the sounds of an Aeolian harp.

Second, at his last cabinet meeting, Lincoln had recounted

the dream of a small boat on a big river: one he'’d experienced

before many big battles.

These three men, Andrew Johnson, Charles Sumner, Edwin Stanton,

and a fourth epic figure who was not in the room that night,

Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, would for the next

three years shape the destiny of postwar America.

Beginning as allies before separating into enemy camps,

Stevens, Sumner, and Stanton came to confront Johnson over

their growing alarm that Johnson was determined to betray

Lincoln'’s legacy and unravel a Union victory that had cost

three-quarters of a million American lives, North and South

combined.

It was a concern shared by several senior military

officers, including General Ulysses Grant.

On the other side of the room, Johnson, with the power of the

presidency and the mean tenacity of the eastern Tennessee hills

he hailed from, would jealously protect the power of the

executive office and seek to stop the Radical Republicans

from remaking Southern society along progressive new lines.

First, a tragedy.

And now, an accidental president, a divided country,

and Congress in turmoil during a presidential election year.

This confrontation would culminate with impeachment

charges brought by the House and a trial in the Senate.

It would be the gravest constitutional crisis in the

nation'’s history, before or since.

Who would win?

Who would lose?

And what would the consequences be?

For now, Sumner had the final say.

He asked the vice president to leave the dying president'’s

side.

Johnson'’s presence, he said, offended the grieving first

lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Andrew Johnson once confessed: “If being poor was a crime, I

should have to plead guilty, that I was a great criminal,

that I had been born a criminal, and that I had lived a criminal

a large portion of my life.” To escape hunger, poverty, and

obscurity, he relied entirely on himself.

[Holzer] So, Andrew Johnson, like Abraham Lincoln, is a

quintessential rags-to-riches, a.k.a.

log cabin-to-White House, guy.

He was born in absolute poverty.

[Wineapple] But unlike Lincoln, who dealt with his deprivations

and poverty by becoming more empathetic, Johnson became, I

think, possibly more angry.

Johnson was born in a log cabin: the American mythos so often

imagined and rarely realized.

He attended school not one day in his life.

His widowed mother was a poverty-stricken seamstress and

laundress known as Polly the Weaver who apprenticed her two

sons, Andrew and his older brother William, to a Raleigh,

North Carolina, tailor.

Public readings livened the sewing shop.

And Andy lit up at tales of one book in particular: a volume of

speeches called The American Speaker.

He enjoyed the book so much that a customer gave it to him, his

first material possession, Johnson said.

He used it to shape a forceful speaking style.

“No one cared to read his speeches,” said the East

Tennessee lawyer Oliver Temple, who knew Johnson well.

“But people would listen to the delivery of his bigger

harangues.

These were plentifully seasoned with salt, vinegar, and red

pepper, and served steaming hot.

They had a decidedly pungent taste that most men liked.” Late

in the summer of , -year-old Andrew bundled his

mother and stepfather into a two-wheeled cart and crossed the

Great Smokies into Tennessee.

The eastern extremes of this border state are framed by

mountain ridges and river valleys.

The domain of subsistence farmers, it yielded life

grudgingly.

White working men like Johnson resented both the white

plantation aristocracy and competing black labor.

[Holzer] So eastern Tennessee, rocky, more hard scrabble, was

made for Andrew Johnson.

It was an area of high aspiration and poverty and

people who were scrambling to get on top economically, to

climb that ladder, to pursue the American dream.

And among them was Andrew Johnson.

As Johnson coaxed his blind horse into Greeneville,

Tennessee, his eyes fell on the daughter of a town widow: Eliza

McCardle.

She told friends, “There goes the man I am going to marry.

There goes my beau, girls, mark it.” Andrew Johnson and his

family settled into the back of a tavern.

And the next year, he married -year-old Liza at a ceremony

administered by Mordecai Lincoln, the first cousin of

Abraham Lincoln'’s father.

Liza later descended into a terminal case of consumption

that left her a ghostly presence around her husband and family.

Nearly years would pass before Johnson first made his

way to the nation'’s capital as a Tennessee congressman in the

s, to be followed by Abraham Lincoln and the northern

abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Ohio Senator

Benjamin Wade.

In time, Johnson and the young Lincoln would become acquainted,

as the Illinois congressman voted times for a resolution

known as the Wilmot Proviso to prohibit sl*very in US territory

acquired by way of the w*r with Mexico, while Johnson voted

times against it.

For now, Johnson'’s Greeneville tailor shop was a lively hub for

him and locals to share news and debate politics.

Two years after marrying, Johnson was elected a town

alderman.

And another Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, became president.

The two Andrews shared a vision of individual liberty and

limited federal government.

Yet Johnson was also frequently tone-deaf to his own

constituents, as soon became apparent.

In the state legislature, he would oppose as unconstitutional

a bond issue to pay for new roads, even though Greeneville

badly needed them.

Columbia University historian Eric McKitrick wrote that

“Politics for Johnson was largely a drama of personalities

conspiracies of parasites aristocrats bent on oppressing

the people.” Johnson himself said, “Power is always stealing

from the many to give to the few.” He would be voted out at

the next election.

Responding in kind, Johnson described his neighbors in

Greeneville society as “God forsaken and hell deserving,

money loving, hypocritical, back biting, Sunday praying

scoundrels.” Johnson, explained the East Tennessee attorney

Oliver Temple, possessed “a deep-seated, burning hatred of

all men who stood in his way.” “Besides, he was cautious and

suspicious.

Everything that did not originate with him was viewed

with distrust.” One day, this seemingly offhand observation,

surfacing Johnson'’s suspicion and distrust, would help to

explain his difficulty at administering power in

Washington and finding reliable allies even among those who

shared his libertarian vision.

Still, “A.

Johnson, Tailor” climbed the political ladder to mayor,

governor, congressman, and senator.

He also prospered from hard work and shrewd investments:

accumulating property and wealth.

He bought his first sl*ve in , a -year-old girl named

Dolly who had sought him out by telling him she liked his looks.

Dolly bore three mixed-race children, including a son named

William, the same as Johnson'’s older brother.

The youth once said, “When I was young, Mr. Andrew used to hold

me on one knee and my sister on the other.” If America was

becoming a powder keg of racial and sectional passions, the fuse

ran through Tennessee.

And Johnson, idiosyncratic and contrarian, was not well-liked,

even within his own Democratic party.

[Holzer] The democrats were a united party, and, if you were

an anti-sl*very man, a vexingly effective party through the

middle of the s.

They dominated government.

They dominated the judiciary, the legislature, and, with

pro-southern interest northerners, they dominated the

White House for a time.

Fellow Tennessean James Polk of Nashville was president from

to and did his best to ignore Johnson in the US House

at the time.

State officials redistricted Johnson out of his congressional

seat in .

So he ran for governor instead, and won.

He always faced headwinds.

Once, prior to a debate in Murfreesboro, Johnson was warned

that he wouldn'’t leave alive.

Rather than be cowed, the candidate laid his p*stol before

him and said: “I have been informed that part of the

business to be transacted on the present occasion is the

assassination of the individual who now has the honor of

addressing you.

Therefore, if any man has come here tonight for the purpose

indicated, I do not say to him, let him speak, but let him

sh**t.” With this, Johnson placed a hand on the p*stol and

looked around.

After seconds, he said he'’d apparently been misinformed, and

began his speech.

Although Johnson was not sympathetic to Southern

plantation owners nor to black sl*ves, he consistently argued

that the North-South differences should be resolved within the

national union, instead of outside of it.

For this, he was burned in effigy at Memphis in December

.

And in April , after pro-Confederate forces attacked

Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, touching off the Civil

w*r, Johnson was nearly strung up while traveling through

Lynchburg, Virginia.

He fended off a hostile crowd with his ever-present p*stol.

And when Tennessee seceded in June , Johnson left his

family behind to take refuge in Washington.

In fact, he became the only senator from a rebel state to

remain in Congress.

The New York Times called him “the greatest man of the age.”

But if Johnson was sometimes mistaken as pro-Northern, his

words said otherwise: “The black race of Africa are inferior to

the white man in point of intellect, better calculated in

physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship, standing,

as they do, many degrees lower in the scale of gradation than

the white man.

I wish to God every head of a family in the United States had

one sl*ve to take the drudgery and menial service off his

family.” To the point, Johnson told a Union general: “Damn the

negroes; I am fighting these traitorous aristocrats, their

masters.” The District of Columbia was a political island

between North and South: carved from Maryland and Virginia at a

crossroads of race and ideology.

Ohio congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle, who came to Washington

in , recalled that “On Seventh street, at the margin of

the malaria-breathing canal, was the sl*ve-pen and persuasive

whipping post, in full sight of the capital.

The Maryland sl*ve code was in force, and a more unlovely and

unwholesome town did not exist in the civilized world.” But the

vanguard of a new political force in America was forming, to

be known as the Radical Republicans.

They believed in the emancipation of Southern sl*ves

and blacks'’ equal treatment, including enfranchisement as

voters.

[Stewart] In the s, the Republicans were the

anti-sl*very, pro-rights, progressive party.

And the Democrats were the pro-states'’ rights, very

conservative party.

Very much centered in the South.

[Wineapple] Democrats and Republicans mean different

things than they do today.

It'’s almost as if they were reversed.

Although the Radical Republicans operated at the fringe of their

own party, a successor to the now-defunct Whigs, they were

dogged at adhering to their bold vision.

Among them, Senator Wade, an expert r*fle shot, accepted a

Southern senator'’s invitation to duel almost the moment he

arrived in town, a few years earlier.

And it was Wade who set the terms: squirrel r*fles at

paces with a paper target the size of a dollar coin pinned

over each man'’s heart.

The Southerner withdrew.

One day, Wade would be in line to become president if Andrew

Johnson, when impeached by the House, were to be convicted in

the Senate.

Wade had already made a name for himself in the Ohio state

legislature by standing up to Kentucky lobbyists who'’d

appealed for tougher enforcement in the capture and return of

runaway sl*ves.

Standing before state lawmakers past two o'’clock in the morning

on the third day of the debate, Wade had said, “If you oppress

the weak and defenseless, no power can shield you from the

consequences.” He was defeated for re-election that same year

but continued almost unabated in his rise to Senate leader, a

step away from the presidency at the time.

Republican moderates in Washington initially shunned and

begrudged the radicals: Wade for his ruggedness, and Sumner for

his bombastic effeteness.

Yet after Northern forces were routed at the First Battle of

Bull Run in July , Wade, having ridden out to watch,

showed his mettle.

He told six men who accompanied him, “Boys, we'’ll stop this

damned runaway.” Galloping ahead of scattering Union forces, the

senator, with r*fle raised and his hat pushed back on his head,

ordered the Union soldiers to halt.

And they did.

Wade'’s senate colleague Charles Sumner was, by comparison, a

refined man of unmatched eloquence, who spoke four

languages, but whose European airs combined with lavender

trousers [and shoes with English gaiters] were viewed with

suspicion.

When someone remarked that Sumner did not believe in the

Bible, Ulysses Grant answered, “Why should he?

He didn'’t write it.” For two days in May , Sumner held

the Senate floor with a stemwinder on the subject of

“Bleeding Kansas.” This was the question of whether Kansas

should enter the Union as a sl*ve state or free.

Sumner trained his Tiffany tongue on South Carolina senator

Andrew Pickens Butler, who, though not in attendance, he

belittled as “the Don Quixote of sl*very.” Sumner underscored his

disdain for Butler by imitating Butler'’s habit of spitting as he

spoke.

A South Carolina congressman named Preston Brooks listened to

the first day'’s remarks.

And two days later, Brooks read the -page speech in its

entirety.

Satisfied that he was honor-bound to defend his home

state and blood relative, Brooks selected a gold-knobbed cane and

visited Sumner on the Senate floor.

There, he beat Sumner into a bloody crumpled heap.

Georgia senator Robert Toombs testified that he witnessed the

thrashing and approved of it.

Brooks narrowly avoided expulsion from Congress, but was

assessed a -dollar court fine for as*ault.

In the aftermath, Ohio Senator Wade, looking straight at Toombs

as he addressed the Senate chamber, wondered aloud whether

canings and beatings should be made part of parliamentary

procedure.

Wade said, “If the principle now here announced prevail, let us

come armed for the contest, and although you are four to one, I

am here to meet you.” The old line about pinning a target over

the heart of one of Wade'’s opponents made the rounds again.

Three days later, Toombs placed his hand on the Ohio senator'’s

shoulder.

“Wade,” he said, “what is the use of two men making damned

fools of themselves.” For now, a showdown was averted.

Of these personalities, none, not even Andrew Johnson, would

have a greater impact on post-Civil w*r America than the

progressive Republican congressman from Lancaster,

Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens.

Six foot tall with a hairless head covered by a massive brown

wig, and a club foot that he dragged beside him, Stevens was

a heavy drinker and gambler who lived with a mixed-race woman,

Lydia Smith, who was of white and African American descent.

[Holzer] He believed in a biracial society.

He argued it and he lived it.

He was a unionist.

He suffered during the w*r in his pocketbook when his forge in

Pennsylvania was ransacked by General Jubal Early, who swore

that if Stevens had been anywhere in the neighborhood, he

would have not only k*lled him but distributed his bones to

every state in the confederacy.

[Stewart] What was wonderful to me about Stevens was his

commitment to the cause of the underdog.

His whole life was really devoted to underdogs.

A contemporary said it was as though every wrong in the world

had been done to him.

Stevens was also a strategic thinker who stoked fear in every

Democrat.

Carl Sandburg mythologized him as “a majestic and isolated

figure wandering in an ancient wilderness thick with thorns,

seeking to bring justice between man and man.” Brooklyn preacher

Henry Ward Beecher, in a sermon, referred to Stevens as “one of

those men who are very inconvenient when alive, and

very valuable when dead.” Mark Twain assessed him the “ablest

man” in Washington.

It was Thaddeus Stevens who delivered the closing arguments

leading to the House adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment,

abolishing sl*very.

It was Stevens who rammed through the Fourteenth

Amendment, according citizenship and full rights to “All persons

born or naturalized in the United States.” It was Stevens

who would be the chief architect and enforcer of the Radicals'’

post-w*r vision for a new, racially level Southern society,

known as Reconstruction.

And it was Stevens who delivered the first warning to Lincoln

about Johnson.

The president had appointed Johnson military governor of

Tennessee in , as Grant and his generals gained the upper

hand in the state.

But no sooner did Johnson get to Nashville than he demanded

loyalty oaths from public officials.

And he threw the mayor in jail.

One Union general in Tennessee remarked to his predecessor:

“Since you left here the hostility to the United States

Government and the troops has increased percent.

It seems settled into a fierce hatred to Governor Johnson.” So,

when Lincoln floated the idea of making Johnson his vice

president on a National Union Party ticket in , Thaddeus

Stevens responded: “Mr.

President, Andrew Johnson is a rank demagogue, and I suspect at

heart a damned scoundrel.” It made no difference.

Lincoln faced a tough re-election contest.

Consequently, he dropped his first-term vice president,

Hannibal Hamlin, and ran with Johnson in a pairing that became

known as “The Rail Splitter and Tailor.” The wisdom of the

choice seemed rewarded with their election victory.

Three days prior to the inauguration, Johnson set out

for Washington at Lincoln'’s request, arriving weak and

unsteady.

And on the night before being sworn in, Johnson attended a

“jollification” well past midnight, where he consumed a

great deal of liquor.

The next day, the capital was dark and rainy, and Johnson woke

with a hangover.

A pattern might now have revealed itself.

[Holzer] Whether Johnson was sick or not, there are

variations on the assertion.

Either he had typhoid or a cold.

Or he just drank too much the night before.

“It is often said that he had typhoid fever, but no

independent evidence, doctor'’s diagnosis or statements from

other family members, is given for that,” says the Pulitzer

Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

Johnson'’s private secretary noted that Johnson frequently

took “two or three or four glasses” of whiskey a day.

And Lincoln'’s own assistant secretary of w*r, Charles Dana,

made corroborating remarks after visiting Johnson as Tennessee

military governor and reporting that Johnson had “brought out a

jug” of distilled spirits.

“I concluded that he took it pretty often,” Dana said.

The politically prominent Blair family itself covered for

Johnson following an alcohol-induced breakdown

immediately after he succeeded Lincoln.

Montgomery Blair, a former postmaster general, was to say

of Johnson: “I regret the president'’s illness very much

and still more the whiskey as to the cause of it.” On this

morning, Washington'’s muddy streets were lined with civilian

well-wishers and Union soldiers, black and white, in blue

uniforms.

Johnson asked the outgoing vice president Hamlin for something

to drink.

And Hamlin procured a bottle.

Accounts differ as to whether Johnson threw back “two stiff

wallops” or three full glasses.

But in the furnace-driven heat of the capitol, he became even

more wobbly.

[Holzer] Johnson arrives at the inaugural, and in those days,

the vice president was inaugurated first in the Senate

chamber.

And think of the Senate chamber.

It looked very much as it looks today, except they screwed out

all the desks and took the desks away, and put in chairs so that

more people than or could be accommodated at the ceremony.

And Johnson arrives three sheets to the wind, or five, if you

could count.

The black civil rights leader Frederick Douglass recounted

Lincoln pointing him out to the vice president, only to see

Johnson look back with “bitter contempt and aversion.”

“Realizing that I had observed him, he tried to assume a more

friendly appearance, but it was too late.

Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he is no friend of our race.”

What came next was a harbinger of disaster for Johnson, and

some would say for the country.

While Lincoln'’s inaugural address was a woven masterpiece

of insight and empathy, “let us strive on to finish the work we

are in; to bind up the nation'’s wounds; to achieve and cherish a

just and a lasting peace”, Johnson launched into a harangue

characteristic of his Tennessee days, when he stood before

crowds on a plank across two barrels.

Buzzing on whiskey, Johnson announced: “I'’m a-going for to

tell you that I am a plebian.

I'’m a-going for to tell you here today, yes, today in this place

that the people are everything!” Lincoln closed his eyes.

Some Republican senators covered their faces.

Hannibal Hamlin tugged on Johnson'’s coat to stop.

When sworn in, Johnson raised the Bible and said, “I kiss this

book in the face of my nation of the United States.” Navy

Secretary Gideon Welles whispered to Secretary of w*r

Stanton that Johnson was “either drunk or crazy.” Lincoln told

the marshal not to let the vice president speak outside.

Charles Sumner offered a Senate resolution asking Johnson to

resign.

Thaddeus Stevens was uncomfortable.

Thaddeus Stevens was unhappy.

Thaddeus Stevens was unappeasably suspicious of the

new president, Andrew Johnson.

And Thaddeus Stevens was slowly dying.

The congressman spent much of his time, these days, lying on a

couch just off the House floor.

He was carried around in a special chair because he found

it difficult to walk.

Still, he had the wit to tell the two men who conveyed him,

“Thank you my good fellows.

What shall I do when you are dead and gone?” Mark Twain

described Stevens as a sculpture of “very deep eyes, sunken

unshaven cheeks, thin lips, long mouth, strong, long, large,

sharp nose.” Earlier in life, Stevens had suffered an illness

that left him almost completely bald.

Now, the theatrical wig on his head, often slipping off-center,

was a constant reminder of how unimpressed he was by convention

or appearances.

When a female admirer asked for a lock of his hair, Stevens took

off the wig and offered it to her.

Yet he was mortal and depleted at the very moment when his most

important battle lay just ahead.

Three years later, at the peak of Stevens'’s struggle with

Johnson, a rumor would reach the White House that the congressman

had suddenly passed away.

President Johnson'’s secretary, Colonel William Moore, wrote:

“Received a rumor, at three o'’clock, of the death of the

Honorable Thad Stevens.

The President did not think it could be true and compared Mr.

Stevens to Mount Vesuvius, which at times withdrew into itself

all its heat and vapor, only to burst forth again in flames and

lava.

The rumor proved to be without foundation.” Stevens signaled

the courage of his convictions with almost every word and act.

Once, walking along a narrow path, he had met an antagonist

who blocked his step.

The man said, “I never stand aside for a skunk.” Stevens gave

way, replying, “I always do.” Upon acquiring a cemetery lot at

home in Pennsylvania, he returned it after discovering

that blacks couldn'’t be buried there.

And now, when told that President Johnson considered

himself a self-made man, Stevens said he was “glad to hear it,

for it relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility.” The

Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whose sister Harriet Beecher

Stowe wrote the anti-sl*very novel Uncle Tom'’s

Cabin, said: “It will be remembered that in the dark hour

of his country'’s history, when other men were afraid to speak,

Stevens was not afraid to speak, and when other men were afraid

to be unpopular, he was not afraid to be unpopular.” The

Radical Republicans in the Senate were not the centrifugal

force that Stevens was in the House.

Sumner and Wade were a mere fringe of their party, seeking

to exercise power any way they could.

But, having been frustrated by Lincoln'’s caution, some Radical

Republicans welcomed Johnson'’s ascent.

Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan said providence had

kept Lincoln in office so long as he was useful and then put a

better man in his place.

Wade of Ohio told the new president, “Johnson, we have

faith in you.

By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the

government.” Stevens was much more skeptical.

One particular phrase of the new president'’s gave him pause.

It was that the Southern states had not successfully seceded,

and therefore had never left the Union.

[Stewart] Johnson was a devotee of states'’ rights.

He even had this notion that the confederate states had never

seceded, that there was something almost mystical about

the union.

So when the w*r ended, they were just states again.

And the fact that they had put hundreds of thousands of men in

the field with g*ns didn'’t matter anymore.

With Congress in recess until December , Johnson moved

forcefully, recognizing a rump government of Virginia based in

Alexandria, not Richmond, that had claimed fealty to the Union

all along.

This, along with his appointment of governors in South Carolina,

Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Texas, initiated a

period known as presidential reconstruction.

[Stewart] If they wanted to re-establish systems that were

like what they had with sl*very, if the same people who led the

rebellion and led the Confederacy were going to be

restored to power, that was fine with Andrew Johnson.

He thought that the states had sovereignty.

And the federal government just had no business worrying about

it.

For instance, recognition of Virginia included no mention of

black voting rights.

Rather, Johnson said, “This is a country for white men, and by

God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for

white men.” Thaddeus Stevens, writing to the president in May

, only a month after he took office, urged: “Better call an

extra session of Congress than to allow many to think that the

Executive was approaching usurpation.” But Southern

delegations were rolling into the capital to make their cases

heard.

And on May , , Johnson issued a proclamation pardoning

all rebel participation in the Civil w*r in exchange for

loyalty oaths.

High-level Confederate officials and wealthy Southerners had to

apply to Johnson personally to restore their rights.

Huge demand now arose for a lobbyist known as the pardon

broker.

The president was soon issuing pardons a day, nearly ,

in less than nine months.

[Stewart] Stevens was a smart guy, and he understood where

Johnson was coming from, and he feared it.

Stevens understood not only the personality issue, but also the

power dynamic: that to the extent Johnson did this all

himself, that would freeze out Congress, would limit the

Congress'’s power and expand the president'’s power.

Sumner and Stevens sounded alarms.

Massachusetts senator Sumner pointed up the inconsistency in

Johnson'’s belief that the president could restore states

and their leaders to the Union while the federal government was

powerless to enfranchise black voters.

“Government must stand '‘on the consent of the governed,'’”

Sumner argued.

Stevens again reached out to the president, writing: “I am sure

you will pardon me for speaking to you with a candor to which

men in high places are seldom accustomed.

Can you not hold your hand and wait the action of Congress?” In

a September speech, Stevens publicly warned “the sovereign

power of the nation is lodged in Congress.” He called the South a

“a conquered people” and proposed auctioning off some

million acres of rebel property for . billion dollars to pay

down the w*r-ballooned national deb.

That would leave acres for each adult black male and the

holdings of “nine-tenths of the people untouched,” Stevens said.

Instead, less than a week later, Johnson ordered that all land

confiscated by Union soldiers be returned to its owners,

displacing thousands of black squatters.

And he decreed a cotton tax enacted at Stevens behest go

uncollected.

“I am of the Southern people, and I love them and will do all

in my power to restore them.” Meanwhile, white leaders in the

former Confederate states were implementing restrictive racial

laws known as Black Codes.

[Stewart] The Black Codes varied from jurisdiction to

jurisdiction; states, cities had their own.

But the basic thrust of the Black Codes in the South was to

force the emancipated sl*ves really back to a state of

peonage, at least, if not sl*very.

In some places, a black man who left a white employer could be

arrested and forced to work without wages unless he paid a

fine.

That was the case in Alabama, for instance, which hired out

“vagrant” blacks at public auction.

Louisiana ruled that if a black laborer refused to work

according to contract, he could be fined double the amount of

wages for time lost or be forced to work on public roads or

levees until returning to his employer.

Mississippi prohibited blacks from buying or renting farmland.

In South Carolina, for a black person to work other than as a

farm laborer or as a servant, a license was required.

And in Texas, a black man without a job could be assigned

to a white guardian to work without pay.

At Johnson'’s request, the German American journalist Carl Schurz

engaged in a fact-finding mission to the South, returning

with a devastating report that the president ignored.

Schurz wrote, “There is, as yet, among the southern people an

utter absence of national feeling.

Civil officers are either unwilling or unable to enforce

the laws” even as m*rder, r*pe, and robbery of black victims was

carried out with impunity.

Union General Phil Sheridan, who found himself combatting

indiscriminate violence against blacks in Louisiana and Texas,

said that if he owned hell and Texas, he would rent out Texas

and live in hell.

Examples of the abuse Schurz relayed to the president

included the following: “A freedman named Alfred was taken

from his bed by his master and others and was hung, and his

body still hangs to the limb two months later.” “A freedman named

George was ordered out of his cabin to be whipped.

He was dragged by the heels while dogs bit his face and

body.” “Two freedmen and a woman were taken off a public river

boat.” “The men were tied and hung and then their heads cut

off and their bodies thrown in the river, while the woman , who

could not swim, was also thrown in along with her chickens and

allowed to drown.” Some blacks, believing they'’d been freed by

President Lincoln, were told that was only during the w*r,

and, with the hostilities over, they had to go back to work as

before.

[Stewart] The Schurz report is a powerful indictment of what the

South was, and it was this horribly violent period of the

white people trying to re-establish their primacy.

And they sh**t black people down in the streets.

They string them up.

They cut off their ears.

It'’s beyond contemplation.

On the same day as Schurz'’s report was transmitted to

Congress, Thaddeus Stevens, in another speech, thundered: “If

we have not yet been sufficiently scourged for our

national sin of sl*very, we must expect the still more heavy

vengeance of an offended Father.” He told the editor of

The New York Times Henry Raymond, who had just been

elected to Congress as a Republican, that the rebel

states were “dead carcasses lying within the Union,” and it

was up to Congress to restore and rehabilitate them.

The battle over the fate of post-w*r American now turned to

Washington.

One day in December , just before the president'’s annual

state of the union report, with Congress returning to work,

Charles Sumner of Massachusetts walked into the president'’s

office, and accused him of having “thrown away the

victories of the Union army.” As he left, Sumner picked up his

hat to see that the president had used it for a spittoon.

Thaddeus Stevens lay in wait as the House clerk called the roll,

bringing to order the th United States Congress.

Among those expecting to be sworn in were seven former

Confederate lawmakers, three members of the secession

conventions of and , and nine former Confederate army

officers.

But the clerk, acting on instructions from the Republican

leadership, omitted all names of representatives from the seceded

states.

When an Illinois congressman asked that his friend, Colonel

James Johnson of Arkansas be admitted, having fought against

the rebellion, Stevens erupted: “I do not see what that amounts

to except that he shall not be hanged!” The Pennsylvanian

quickly moved to suspend debate, meaning no Southern congressman

would be seated, and he proposed the establishment of a Joint

Congressional Committee on Reconstruction to consist of

House and Senate members to closely evaluate the former

Confederacy.

President Johnson complained that the joint committee was an

“extraordinary intrigue” amounting to “nothing short of

subversion.” And he hadn'’t seen anything yet.

[Wineapple] His actions for those months while Congress was

not in session had been so incendiary, so imperialistic, so

autocratic that congressional republicans felt that they had

no choice but to not seat those same people who had just waged

w*r and caused the death of hundreds of thousands of

Southerners as well as Northerners.

The new Congress immediately certified the Thirteenth

Amendment, abolishing sl*very, though it included no particular

civil rights protections nor the right for blacks to vote.

And in February , Congress passed the first Reconstruction

legislation, authorizing military courts to try civilian

cases where black civil rights were at stake.

Johnson vetoed it.

Stevens responded with a resolution to prevent the

restoration of any Southern state until this principle

became law.

In a speech on George Washington'’s birthday, the

president called out Stevens and Sumner by name as “opposed to

the fundamental principles” of his government, and accusing

them of trying “to destroy” his presidency.

Carl Schurz wondered if Johnson were drunk again.

A few weeks later, Johnson vetoed legislation extending

citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United

States.

He said the bill would “operate in favor of the colored and

against the white race.” It had been authored by the moderate

Republican Lyman Trumbull of Illinois who did not normally

align with the Radicals.

[Holzer] I actually think the veto of the civil rights

legislation was the moment not only of polarization, but when

ultimate or potential reunification and reconciliation

in the North became impossible.

That was a cruel blo, when Johnson used his view of

national authority, his view of the limits of national

authority, to veto a bill that in his heart he knew would

advance people that he didn'’t think deserved status in the

world.

A now-united Republican Party overrode a President Johnson'’s

veto.

Yet the self-made tailor occupying the White House now

went so far as to pledge , dollars of his own money to

defeat the Fourteenth Amendment, which would grant citizenship

and introduce a powerful stick to extend the vote to black

males.

The amendment proposed to do so by reducing the congressional

representation of all states denying the vote.

Republicans were gaining the upper hand in Washington.

But white mobs in the South were challenging law and order in the

land.

Riots in Memphis and New Orleans in May and July , driven by

rampaging white policeman and some former Confederate

soldiers, left dozens of blacks dead, including women and

children, and hundreds more injured.

[Stewart] They basically slaughter a lot of black people,

and they'’re horrible.

Phil Sheridan, who was the general down there for the Union

Army, said it was an absolute m*ssacre.

It was not a battle; it was just k*lling.

And to have a president who was unmoved by that was

very disillusioning.

President Johnson expressed not a word of compassion for the

victims.

Instead, he said, “another rebellion has commenced, having

its origin in the radical Congress.” Now, heckled by

crowds on a speaking tour of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New

York, and Cleveland, the president called Thaddeus

Stevens and Charles Sumner “traitors,” [Stewart] He

portrayed himself as a martyr-like figure.

He also spoke very openly about violence against the leaders

against him, such as Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens.

And he stated at least once that he was OK if they were hanged.

For Northerners, it caused them, again, because they had

sacrificed so much in the w*r, to wonder: We have a president

who doesn'’t agree with the outcome of the w*r, who'’s not

with us.

And I think that was a very difficult thing for people to

face.

It was no small consolation that congressional elections in late

turned into a landslide.

The Republicans now had the two-thirds majority they needed

to impeach and convict.

Secretary of w*r Edwin Stanton was holed up in his office next

door to the White House with no plans to come out, even though

Andrew Johnson had been trying to fire him for months, since at

least August .

Now, in February , on his first day behind a self-imposed

armed barricade, Stanton sent an aide to ask his wife Ellen for

pillows and blankets.

But she refused, saying he should come home instead.

So, Stanton camped out with a small stove on which he made

himself unappetizing meals.

He did write to his wife, saying, “I have longed much to

see you, but I have not asked you to come while hoping that

love might draw you higher.” Now came the final steps leading to

Johnson'’s impeachment.

A frantic president had become ever-more polarizing in his

attempts to impose an unpopular vision.

At the same time, a desperate Congress, led by Stevens

himself, appeared to be pushing the outer limits of its legal

and legislative authority to strip the president of power.

The previous months had turned increasingly dark for

President Johnson and the Radical Republicans alike.

First, the Supreme Court announced in December that

military rule in the South was unlawful once hostilities

ceased.

[Stewart] At the point you get the Milligan decision, the

military no longer has the ability to try people, to act

against civilians.

And this creates an impotence, which President Johnson is fine

with.

He'’d like to get those troops out of there.

It creates a great conflict within the government as to what

the army should be doing.

And the army, frankly, Stanton in particular, works with

Congress, and essentially, they develop workarounds.

And that'’s when you get into the Reconstruction acts.

That'’s when you get into the greater power for the military

down there to replace public officials.

In March , lawmakers passed the First Military

Reconstruction Act, dividing the unreconstructed states into

five military districts.

Only when a state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment would it no

longer be subject to military occupation and become entitled

to congressional representation.

Stanton urged the president to support the legislation.

Johnson objected, saying the law forced “the right of suffrage

out of the hands of the white people and into the hands of the

negros.” Congress no longer was legislating moderation.

This same month, the Tenure of Office Act, drafted by Thaddeus

Stevens himself as a check on the president, became law.

And while Stanton advised the president to veto legislation

that later would be used to keep him in his job, he rationalized

that once it became law, both he and Johnson were obliged to

respect it.

[Wineapple] What the Tenure of Office Act stipulated is that

any civil officer who had been approved with the advice and

consent of the Senate, such as a cabinet member, could not be

fired without the advice and consent of the Senate.

[Stewart] Thaddeus Stevens, very clever fellow, included a final

provision in that statute that said any violation of this

statute is a high crime and misdemeanor.

So it was an obvious trap.

Founding father James Madison and the First Congress of May

made clear that while Senate confirmation of a

president'’s cabinet and certain other appointees was a requisite

check and balance of the co-equal legislative and

executive branches of federal government, the same official'’s

removal was the president'’s choice alone.

With the introduction of the electoral college at the

Constitutional Convention in , the First Congress

believed that presidents were more likely to be chosen from

big states than from small states.

And it wanted to keep the presidents from appointing too

many big-state officials.

So, confirmation of a presidential appointee was a

desired Senate check.

Still, this restraint on appointive power was not to

prevent a president from removing confirmed subordinates.

Viewed this way, Thaddeus Stevens would have been wise to

doubt the Tenure of Office Act'’s constitutionality.

[Holzer] It probably had absolutely no basis in the

Constitution.

If it had ever gone to court, which the Radical Republicans

managed to prevent, I would assume it would have been

overturned as unconstitutional.

But it was also a brilliant device by the Radical

Republicans who hated Andrew Johnson.

The law for a time protected Edwin M.

Stanton, the secretary of w*r, Abraham Lincoln appointee, who

they believed would carry out a harsh military occupation of the

South.

That March, Congress also passed the Second Military

Reconstruction Act, authorizing Union commanders to register

black and eligible white voters and enforce stricter loyalty

oaths.

Johnson asked his attorney general, Henry Stanbery, how to

get around the law.

And Stanbery advised him that state governments, not military

commanders, held the sole authority to enforce civil

rights legislation.

Dissenting on every major point, Stanton spoke over both the

president and the attorney general.

Now, the Third Military Reconstruction Act, drafted with

Stanton'’s help, passed Congress, overruling Stanbery on every

major point.

Fed up, Johnson wrote to the w*r secretary on August , :

“Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say,

that your resignation as Secretary of w*r will be

accepted.” Stanton wrote back: “Public considerations of a high

character, which alone have induced me to remain at the head

of this Department, constrain me not to resign the office of

Secretary of w*r before the next meeting of Congress.” Johnson

wanted to be rid of his w*r secretary, but apparently didn'’t

believe that he possessed the political power to forcibly

evict him from office.

[Stewart] I'’m not sure we have another example of this in our

history, when you had a senior and powerful cabinet member who

was actively undermining and working against his own

president.

Stanton thought it was much too important a fight to resign,

that he was going to protect what he saw as Abraham Lincoln'’s

legacy and what he saw as the legacy of the w*r.

So that raised the stakes to an almost unimaginable level.

Meanwhile, one official after another turned down President

Johnson'’s offer to become the next w*r secretary.

They feared Stanton'’s wrath at being removed and financial and

legal penalties associated with the new Tenure of Office law.

Eventually, the president seemed willing to settle for just about

anyone who would take the job.

At last, Johnson found somebody gullible or vain enough.

This was Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas: a

long-in-the-tooth Army officer who Stanton once said was “only

fit for presiding over a crypt of Egyptian mummies,” and whom

he'’d threatened to pick up with a pair of tongs and drop out the

nearest window.

On Friday, February st, , Thomas accepted the title of w*r

secretary on an interim basis, thereby perhaps not triggering

the Tenure of Office law in the way that a formal appointment

would.

And he made the rounds of Washington society that night,

dressing in costume at a masquerade ball where he boasted

that he would take the w*r office away from Stanton the

very next day, with force if necessary.

Stanton was suspicious in the best of circumstances, and had

reason for concern.

But he'’d led the Northern army's defeat of the South in the Civil

w*r.

And “the Magnificent Lorenzo”, as newspapers hailed Thomas,

didn'’t present quite the challenge.

That night, as Thomas stayed up boasting, drinking, and

partying, the Senate resolved that the president had “no power

to remove the Secretary of w*r and designate any other officer

to perform the duties of that office.” After midnight, Stanton

himself sent for a friendly judge to order Thomas'’s arrest

the next morning.

And he was.

Released on bail, Thomas beat a path directly to the White

House, where the president showed no concern about his

incarceration.

Instead, he expressed contentment that the dispute

appeared to be heading to the courts instead of Congress.

Tired and hungover, Thomas now walked to the w*r Office, where

a scrum of congressman and others looked out Stanton'’s

window to watch him coming.

Thomas told Stanton, “I am the secretary of w*r ad interim and

am ordered by the president of the United States to take charge

of this office.” “I order you to repair to your room, and

exercise your office as adjutant general.” Thomas repeated his

demand two more times, until Stanton said, “You may stand

there, if you please, but you will attempt to act as secretary

of w*r at your peril.” Thomas gave up, telling his boss, “The

next time you have me arrested, please do not do it before I get

something to eat.” With that, Stanton ran his fingers through

the soldier'’s white hair and ordered a flask of whiskey that

an aide kept in a desk.

Another bottle came from home.

And as the two men shared drinks, Stanton said, “Now this

at least is neutral ground.” [Stewart] Congress is

disregarding the will of the president.

The president is disregarding the will of Congress.

And you'’ve got the secretary of w*r arguably in mutiny and

Johnson arguably in treason.

This is a conflict of a type we'’ve never actually had any

other time in our history.

In fall elections, the Democrats launched a comeback driven by

the doubts of conservative and moderate whites over the

Republicans'’ course for the country.

The Fourteenth Amendment, extending citizenship to all

persons born or naturalized in the United States, was now

circulating among voters in the states.

The crowning achievement of Republican radicals, it

nevertheless posed even greater danger to Republican rule by all

but ensuring that Southern representation would increase

relative to the North in the next Congress.

[Holzer] When we start counting African Americans as five-fifths

of a person instead of three-fifths, as the founders

had calculated their presence in America, without giving them the

right to vote, you will increase representation for the South by

percent.

Now, Southern blacks would be weighted equally with whites,

increasing the South'’s congressional seats, even though

whites could be expected to vote in disproportionately large

numbers relative to recently freed sl*ves.

Stevens lashed out at House colleagues for failing to move

faster at foiling the president.

“The Republicans have been acting a cowardly part, and they

have met a coward'’s fate.” In the president'’s annual message

to Congress that December, Johnson appealed directly to

conservative white fears and prejudices by stating that: “In

the progress of nations, Negroes have shown less capacity for

government than any other race of people.

No independent government of any form has ever been successful in

their hands.

On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own

devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse

into barbarism.” The statement denounced military

reconstruction as tyrannical and warned that the president would

resist any attempt to remove him from office.

Charles Sumner called the address “incendiary” and Johnson

a “full-blown rebel.” Johnson himself asked Ulysses Grant on

which side the army would be in the event of a showdown with

Congress.

Grant replied opaquely that the army would be on the side of the

law.

On that night in February when Stanton had been in greatest

danger of seeing the w*r Office slip away from him, Stevens

limped among his colleagues, shouting, “What good did your

moderation do?

If you don'’t k*ll the beast, it will k*ll you.” The electoral

landscape was moving in the Southern Democrats'’ favor, even

as the president seemed to endorse the idea of having some

of his Republican opponents strung up.

The tide of racial violence was also rising, just as the Supreme

Court had ruled against military occupation of post-Civil w*r

society.

And while w*r secretary Stanton remained barricaded in his

office, the president was seeking actively to have him

replaced.

And yet, Stevens, though weak and deathly ill, had recovered

the cool he needed to orchestrate the removal of an

American president: a constitutional coup d'’état.

Mark Twain, seated in the House reporters'’ gallery, wrote,

“There was a soul in Stevens'’s sunken eyes, but otherwise he

was a corpse that was ready for the shroud.” With heavy snow

falling outside, Stevens handed written remarks to the House

clerk to read on the floor.

It was a declaration of political w*r, stating that

Johnson had obstructed and resisted the law of the land,

most specifically, the Tenure of Office Act.

The House now voted to impeach along party lines.

The president was about to have his political reckoning on the

floor of the US Senate.

He would be defended by some of the ablest legal minds in

America, amid the slosh of dark money, influence, and intrigue

on both sides of the aisle.

But if the Senate, like the House, voted along party lines,

Congress would remove the president.

Of impeachment articles drafted, eight of them related

to the attempted firing of Stanton.

One was something of a technicality related to the

president'’s ability to interact with an Army officer; another

accused him of having slandered Congress.

The th, insisted on by Stevens, was a catchall, so that

if a senator nit-picked any one accusation, he might still

convict cumulatively.

“Unfortunate man!

Thus surrounded, hampered, tangled in the meshes of his own

wickedness, unfortunate, unhappy man, behold your doom.” This was

a presidential election year, with the fall campaign only

months away.

And although General Grant was the likely Republican nominee,

that might change were Senate leader Wade to become president.

On the Democrat side, President Johnson and Supreme Court Chief

Justice Chase, who was to preside over the impeachment

trial, both hoped for the nomination.

Chase'’s motivations were particularly jumbled, as he'’d

already concluded that the Tenure of Office Act was

ill*gal.

Congressman James A.

Garfield, a future president himself, believed that “three

senators, at least, were taken in hand by the Supreme Court

chief justice privately and all the weight of his office and his

influence were brought to bear to save Johnson.”

[Stewart] The coincidence that the impeachment trial took place

in a presidential election year is striking.

And it certainly struck people at the time.

There were a number of Republicans who said, basically,

“What are we doing?

We can just beat this guy in November.

We win the presidency, then we'’re in charge.

Everything'’s good.

And if we try him, we may make him sympathetic.

There may be a backlash against this.

This could be risky.

Maybe we shouldn'’t do that.” And I think what happened in that

case was they just felt Johnson'’s abuses, his wrong

conduct, his violation of the way a president should act, had

piled up.

And I think they felt the eyes of history on them.

On the first week of March, the Senate chamber filled with

Washington'’s famous and powerful.

A thousand tickets a day were printed.

And Chief Justice Chase and Senate leader Wade shared a

dressing room.

The drama heightened one morning as the priggish Chase was late

to appear, having misplaced his outer garment.

Wade fished it out with a cane and said, “Here, Chase, here'’s

your old gown.” The president'’s defense was led by Attorney

General Stanbery, who'’d resigned to serve as Johnson'’s personal

lawyer, and four others.

The prosecution consisted of five congressmen, including

Thaddeus Stevens, but led by the retired general Benjamin Butler.

A fellow soldier once described Butler as crowned by a “head set

immediately on a stout shapeless body and a set of legs and arms

that look as if made for somebody else and hastily glued

to him as if by mistake.” Butler gained the nickname “The Beast”

during the Civil w*r for treating the feisty women of

occupied New Orleans as common delinquents after they'’d taken

to dumping buckets of urine and waste on Union soldiers.

Lincoln and Grant eventually sacked Butler for

underperformance.

This choice of prosecutor, combined with purported

violations of a Tenure of Office Act law that was of uncertain

constitutionality, did not bode well.

[Stewart] And it'’s almost an absurd reduction.

You'’ve got this giant constitutional collision, this

huge cultural, political conflict over what the nation

will look like.

And we'’re arguing about the Tenure of Office Act.

Butler did no favors for his case, either, launching into an

argument that careened so far back into English custom

centuries earlier that it bore no obvious connection to the

present.

If only Stevens were at full power, the arc of the

prosecution might have been brighter.

But he was reduced to ingesting a potion of raw eggs and brandy.

Once, when Butler helped Stevens to his chair, a Southerner was

heard to say he looked like the devil helping an old man into

hell.

Johnson'’s lawyers offered five defenses, the intent being to

attack impeachment from every angle: First, the Tenure of

Office Act was unconstitutional; second, even if constitutional,

it did not protect Stanton since he was appointed by Lincoln, not

Johnson; third, Stanton remained in office, he was still

fortressed at the w*r Office, after all, receiving reports on

the impeachment by telegraph, so Johnson couldn'’t have violated

the act; fourth, Johnson'’s attempt to replace Stanton was

motivated not by criminal intent, but to test the law'’s

constitutionality; and fifth, that impeachment was a judicial,

not a political process, so, having committed no indictable

crime, Johnson was innocent of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

This terminology, high crimes and misdemeanors, remains

confusing even today.

However, founding father Alexander Hamilton specified

that “a high crime is an abuse of executive authority,

proceeding from '‘an abuse or violation of some public

trust.'’” It is a political failing, not a criminal one.

The president, meanwhile, like Shakespeare'’s Macbeth, was

battling a creeping case of paranoia.

His personal aide, Colonel Moore, said that Johnson now

grouped those who opposed him into three broad categories:

enemies who desired his removal because he was an obstacle to

their partisan and unconstitutional schemes; those

who didn'’t really differ from him at all politically, but

opposed his presidency because they'’d failed to control him;

and those whom he'’d offended for opposing secession and the w*r.

Notwithstanding the dark mood in the White House, the Chicago

Tribune reported that gamblers were betting large sums on

acquittal.

It was going to take saintly intervention to carry the

prosecution'’s case.

And all it had was the -year-old pirate Thaddeus

Stevens, who stood up to deliver one of the closing arguments.

Of w*r Secretary Stanton, the old Radical said: “None ever

organized an army of a million men and provided for its

subsistence and efficient action more rapidly than Mr. Stanton.

When victory crowned his efforts, he disbanded that

immense army as quietly and peacefully as if it had been a

summer parade.” Turning to the larger dimensions of the

conflict, Stevens said: “A civil w*r of gigantic proportions,

covering sufficient territory to constitute many states and

nations, broke out, and embraced more than ten millions of men,

who formed an independent government, called the

Confederate States of America.

After expensive and bloody strife we conquered them, and

they submitted to our terms.

Neither the president nor the judiciary had any right to

interfere, to dictate any terms, or to aid in reconstruction

further than they were directed by the sovereign power.

That sovereign power in this republic is the Congress of the

United States.

Andrew Johnson did usurp the legislative power of the nation

by building new states, and reconstructing, as far as in him

lay, this empire.

He directed them to send forward members to each branch of

Congress, and to aid him in representing the nation.

When Congress passed a law declaring all these doings

unconstitutional he proclaimed it unconstitutional, and advised

the people not to submit to it nor to obey the commands of

Congress.

Suffice it to say that he seized all the powers of the government

within these states, and, had he been permitted, would have

become their absolute rulers.

If he were not willing to execute the laws passed by the

American Congress and unrepealed, let him resign the

office which was thrown upon him by a horrible convulsion and

retire to his village obscurity.” As a Senate verdict

neared, President Johnson'’s supporters amassed a

, -dollar acquittal fund managed by an interim official

of the US Treasury department.

Of several influence schemes underway, perhaps the

most-documented involved Republican Kansas senator Edmund

Ross.

He'’d achieved office with the help of a wealthy political

fixer for whom he was now obtaining a presidential

appointment.

This was one of several favors that President Johnson granted

the Kansas senator, during and after the impeachment

proceeding.

Senator Ross had vowed repeatedly that he would vote to

convict on at least one article of impeachment.

But he also seemed to tell whomever asked whatever they

wanted to hear.

The night before the vote, Ross read with alarm a telegram he'’d

received from a p*stol-packing newspaper editor from

Leavenworth, stating that “Kansas repudiates you as she

does all her perjurers and skunks.” The next day, Ross

said, was like looking “down into my open grave.

Friends, position, fortune, everything that makes life

desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by

the breath of my mouth.” He and six other Republicans voted with

Democrats to acquit by one vote.

A White House orderly stationed next to the telegraph operator

at the nearby Willard Hotel came running to deliver the

celebratory word to President Johnson: acquittal!

Stanbery and another defense lawyer, Thomas Nelson, caught a

horse-drawn carriage over.

Nelson said, “Well, thank God, Mr. President, you are free

again.” Stanton, too, received the news by telegraph.

And though he did not resign, he agreed to relinquish the w*r

Office.

Thaddeus Stevens, beside himself, yelled out on the

Senate floor, “The country is going to the devil!”

Charles Sumner called the impeachment trial

“one of the last great battles with sl*very.”

Andrew Johnson, he said,

was the impersonation of the tyrannical sl*ve power.

In him it lived again.” Still, Sumner realized that the Tenure

of Office Act was too flimsy a frame on which to make the case

against an American president.

“I confess my regret,” he said, “that so great a cause, on which

so much depends, should be presented on such narrow

ground.” Union General Ulysses Grant unanimously won the

Republican presidential nomination, and he carried the

general election with the help of first-time Southern black

voters.

Senate leader Benjamin Wade was defeated in his race and

returned home to Ohio to practice law.

Grant nominated the former w*r secretary Stanton to the Supreme

Court, and the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed the

appointment.

But Stanton died a few days later.

In the first of two terms, President Grant asked that the

Tenure of Office Act be revoked.

The Senate only tinkered with the law rather than abolishing

it.

However, the law was repealed in .

And the US Supreme Court retroactively deemed it ill*gal

and unconstitutional in .

George Atzerodt, the carriage repairman and Southern

sympathizer who'’d been supposed to assassinate Vice President

Johnson that night in April , had disappeared into a

cloud of alcohol instead.

He was captured days later, charged, and convicted.

His defense at trial was that cowardice made him an unlikely

k*ller.

The court rejected the claim.

He was hanged along with other co-conspirators.

Andrew Johnson spent three years, months, and days as

president before returning to the “village obscurity” of

Greeneville, Tennessee, as Stevens had hoped he would.

There, he resumed drinking heavily.

On one occasion, called to speak in Nashville, he simply swayed

before the crowd.

In , Johnson ran for Congress as an independent,

torpedoing his own Democrat party'’s candidate.

And three years later, he prevailed on the th ballot to

be elected senator from Tennessee by one vote.

Sworn into office, he died weeks later.

Thaddeus Stevens, in his final days, was heard to say, “My life

has been a failure.

My life-long regret is that I have lived so long and so

uselessly.” He died just before midnight on August , , two

and one-half months after the end of the impeachment trial.

But Minnesota congressman Ignatius Donnelly eulogized the

Pennsylvania congressman this way, saying: “He never flattered

the people.

On the contrary, on all occasions, he attacked their

sins, he assailed their prejudices, he outraged all

their bigotries, and when they turned upon him, he marched

straight forward like Gulliver wading through the fleets of the

Lilliputians, dragging his enemies after him.” The

th-century congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle wrote: “As a

rule, men are remembered as long as they deserve to be.

The world is too busy to preserve dead leaves even as

specimens; let them rot where they fall, if haply the earth

may be fertilized by their timely decay.” Today, President

Johnson and the Radical Republicans, Stevens, Sumner,

and Wade, are hardly known, if at all.

Abraham Lincoln'’s abrupt end was so searing and traumatic for the

American people, and the historians who recorded it, that

his eclipse both enveloped and overshadowed the constitutional

death struggle that followed between Congress and Lincoln'’s

successor, “His Accidency the President,” Andrew Johnson.

And yet, the adjournment of the Johnson impeachment trial, and

its somewhat ambiguous conclusion, is not the ending of

this story.

Instead, two months later, on July , , the Fourteenth

Amendment that Stevens and the Republicans ram-rodded through

Congress was ratified, becoming law.

It was followed, one and one-half years later, by the

Fifteenth Amendment, stating that the right of citizens of

the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the

United States or by any state on account of race, color, or

previous condition of servitude.

More than a century and a half later, the right and imperative

to vote remains the life blood of democracy.