Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (16 page)

On February 20, Johnson again talked with Colonel Moore about appointing Thomas. Even though his aide continued to urge delay, the president would wait no longer. Upon arriving in his office the next morning, Johnson instructed Moore to prepare papers removing Stanton and appointing Thomas. By noon, the tall, thin Thomas was in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Johnson handed two orders to Colonel Moore, who read them aloud. The first informed Stanton that he was removed from office and directed him to relinquish all official papers; the second appointed Thomas as interim war secretary. With conscious dignity, Johnson said he was committed to upholding the Constitution. He adjured Thomas to do the same.

Before taking this fateful step, Johnson had consulted exactly two people, Colonel Moore and Adjutant General Thomas. The list of those he did not consult is long. Not his deft secretary of state, William Seward. Not his determined attorney general, Henry Stanberry. In fact, no Cabinet member knew of this maneuver ahead of time. Equally in the dark were Johnson’s allies in Congress. The president sometimes turned for advice to senior outsiders like Thomas Ewing or Jeremiah Black, a lawyer who had served in Buchanan’s Cabinet. None, however, heard a whisper of Lorenzo Thomas’s impending elevation.

By keeping the Thomas appointment secret, Johnson achieved several dubious results. He ensured that the news would explode into the public mind. He also insulated himself from anyone who might argue against the step. Finally, he guaranteed that his supporters would not be prepared to defend the appointment. The situation drove Navy Secretary Welles, a steadfast supporter, to wish that Johnson would “more freely communicate with his Cabinet and Friends.”

Thomas went to Stanton’s office at the War Department on the morning of February 21 and presented Johnson’s two letters firing Stanton and appointing Thomas. Stanton reviewed the president’s letters, then stalled, asking if he could have time to gather up his personal items. Here the adjutant general committed the blunder of courtesy. “Act your pleasure,” he said. From that moment, Stanton steadily seized the initiative.

The dismissed war secretary requested a copy of Johnson’s order. While Thomas went off to have a copy made by hand, Stanton dispatched messengers to report this stunning development to his friends in Congress. Thomas returned with the copy. General Grant entered Stanton’s office and read over the president’s letter. The two men conferred. Stanton ordered Grant to arrest Thomas. Grant declined. The general-in-chief added, though, that Stanton should hold his office.

Having caught his breath, Stanton could gauge his position. The Senate had voted only a month before that the president had no grounds for removing him. Stanton had done nothing in the last thirty days to alter that conclusion, so he should be able to rely on support from Congress. The president’s choice to replace him, Lorenzo Thomas, enjoyed neither political support nor public reputation. Stanton likely felt insulted to be replaced by such a nonentity. By choosing Thomas, Johnson revealed his desperation to be rid of Stanton. The Secretary made up his mind. He would cross this Rubicon. Stanton told Thomas that he might not obey the president’s order.

Thomas’s response was to announce to the Secretary’s aides that he was the new interim war secretary. Stanton directed them to ignore Thomas. Then Stanton wrote out an order commanding Thomas to stop pretending to be the secretary of war.

Flummoxed by Stanton’s defiance, the adjutant general announced that he would return on Monday, three days hence, to take possession of the office. He retired to report to the president. Johnson received the news stoically, no doubt regretting that he had sent Thomas into such an uneven contest. “Very well,” the president said, adding that Thomas should not wait until Monday, but should take possession of the War Office on the next day.

Johnson sent a notice to the Senate that Stanton had been replaced with Thomas. The news struck “like a thunderbolt,” according to the
New York Times
. Senators converged around the desk of President Pro Tem Ben Wade, craning their necks to read Johnson’s message.

Matters snowballed beyond the president’s control. Four Republican senators swept into Stanton’s office to show their support, then crossed the street to deliver the same message to General Grant. Others sent messages urging the war secretary to hold his ground. The usually prolix Sumner of Massachusetts sent a one-word exhortation: “Stick.”

By midafternoon, the Senate was in executive session to deliberate on the shocking event. The House adjourned in the late afternoon, after a Pennsylvania congressman submitted a fresh impeachment resolution. It was referred to Stevens’s Reconstruction Committee. In the evening, one newspaper reported, “there commenced at once a search for law books.” Radicals Ben Butler, George Boutwell, and others spent the night with the dusty tomes. Impeachment was on every mind.

Thaddeus Stevens remained cool, according to the
New York Herald
, ready to “again try his hand, he thinks with better prospects of success.” In the minutes after the electrifying news arrived from the War Department, Stevens limped from colleague to colleague on the floor of the House, delivering a single message about the president: “If you don’t kill the beast, it will kill you.” More ominous for Johnson, the leader of conservative and moderate Republicans, John Bingham, denounced the president for stirring up more conflict.

After seven hours of secret debate that stretched into the evening, the Senate voted 29 to 6 in favor of a resolution stating unequivocally that the president “has no power to remove the Secretary of War and designate any other officer to perform the duties of that office.” When the Senate adjourned at 10
P.M.
, the road to impeachment lay brightly lit before Stevens and his allies. Here was an impeachable offense to hang around the president’s neck, one the Senate had just declared: Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act. Political Washington stayed up into the night, crowding into hotels and bars to digest Congress’s response to what was widely described as a coup d’état by Johnson.

Stanton’s office was a “blaze of light” that night. Carriages filled with congressmen arrived and left. A Methodist bishop visited. Amid the hubbub, Stanton planned his counterstrike. After conferring with Chief Judge David Cartter of the District of Columbia courts, Stanton swore out an affidavit charging Thomas with violating the Tenure of Office Act by purporting to be the interim war secretary. The papers were completed after midnight. By 3
A.M.
, most of Stanton’s visitors had left.

While Stanton worked into the night, the adjutant general frolicked. A Senate official found Thomas at a masquerade ball at Marini’s Hall. Although Thomas wore a mask, his dress uniform made him easy to pick out. (When President Johnson heard where Thomas was, he exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, a man of his years at a fancy ball!”) On his way to the ball, Thomas assured two acquaintances that if Stanton attempted to bar his entry to the War Office, he would break down the doors. While taking refreshment at Willard’s Hotel, he spouted similar threats. Through the night, the adjutant general celebrated with enough verve to earn a bad head in the morning. As one newspaper phrased it, Thomas “had imbibed in the true Johnsonian spirit.”

Only one companion remained with Stanton through the entire night, Senator John Thayer of Nebraska. Fearing the president would attempt to evict him by force, the war secretary posted infantry on either side of the War Department building. After 3
A.M.
, the two men settled on sofas to rest. Less than an hour later, the Secretary, in a panic, awakened Thayer. “Senator,” he said, “I believe the troops are coming to put me out.”

It was a false alarm, the changing of Stanton’s own guard.

In a letter to his wife on the following day, Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine was glum. The Senate had passed, he wrote, “a very unwise resolution, upon the strength of which Mr. Johnson will probably be impeached.” Fessenden had not voted on the resolution. He deemed opposition to be pointless. The country’s opinion of the president was so low, “which he fully deserves, that it expects his condemnation and removal from office.” Though Fessenden shared that low opinion of Johnson, he could not support impeachment. “Either I am very stupid,” he concluded, “or my friends are acting like fools.”

There was a widespread feeling among well-meaning and sober people that the country was really in some sort of peril, and that it would be a good thing to get rid of that dangerous man in the presidential chair.

C
ARL
S
CHURZ
,
R
EMINISCENCES
(1907)

P
AINFULLY HUNG OVER
and awaiting his breakfast, Lorenzo Thomas answered his front door at 8
A.M.
on February 22. He found an assistant U.S. marshal and a constable. They arrested him on a warrant issued by Judge Cartter a few hours earlier. Thomas persuaded his guards to stop at the White House on the way to court, though they refused to leave his side. The party of three met with the president, who thus learned of Thomas’s obvious predicament. According to Thomas, Johnson said the matter belonged in the courts, then directed Thomas to stop at the attorney general’s house. The arresting officers agreed to that detour as well, though Attorney General Stanberry advised Thomas to retain his own lawyer. At the courthouse, Judge Cartter set bail at $5,000. Two local merchants posted it on Thomas’s behalf.

The interim war secretary retraced his steps in the company of Colonel Moore, who had rushed to help him. After reporting to the attorney general and the president that he had regained his liberty, Thomas went on to the War Department. Boldly, he strode through the main entrance and up to Stanton’s second-floor office. Having been outflanked the day before, when he had the advantage of surprise, Thomas had little hope of success in a renewed confrontation.

When Thomas entered, Stanton was conversing with several Republican congressmen, one of whom seized pencil and paper to take shorthand notes of the encounter. Thomas crossed the Brussels carpet to confront Stanton. The dueling war secretaries spoke slowly, politely.

At this point, Thomas left the Secretary’s office and crossed the hall to that of General Schriver. Stanton and the shorthand writer followed. With a genial laugh, Stanton asked, “So you claim to be here as Secretary of War, and refuse to obey my orders, do you?” Thomas affirmed both propositions and demanded the department’s mails. The two men then abandoned their official poses. Thomas described the scene in memorable terms:

When Schriver’s bottle turned out to be almost empty, a messenger fetched another. Pouring drinks, Stanton said, “Now this, at least, is neutral ground.”

The adjutant general walked back to the White House to report his new failure to the president, who was conferring with friendly senators and Attorney General Stanberry. Johnson’s response was far from helpful. As Thomas reported it, the president told him “to go on and take possession of the office, without stating how I was to do it.” In the coming days, Johnson would repeat that ineffectual command, consistently telling the adjutant general to go to the War Department “and exercise those functions.” Thomas never did figure out how to do so. Neither, it seems, did Johnson.

The situation had no precedent. The nation had two war secretaries. One was barricaded in his office, a half-block from the White House, gathering up the office keys and doubling the guard. The other, mockingly referred to in press accounts as “Lorenzo the Magnificent,” was out on bail. After complying with the Tenure of Office Act in his earlier moves against Stanton, the president had flouted the statute. The spectacle smacked of opéra bouffe or the thrashings of a tinhorn dictatorship, not the grave proceedings of a constitutional republic.

The most pressing question was whether this was the beginning of another civil war. News reports were panicky. They accused Johnson of “thunderbolt” actions representing a “coup d’état.” Some compared it to Napoléon’s seizure of power in 1799. Official Washington was in a lather, more generally agitated than when the nation faced secession and war in 1861. Arriving in the midst of the uproar, one correspondent judged it “to equal that which followed the assassination of President Lincoln, and to excel that caused by the capture of Richmond and Lee’s surrender.”

With the tumult came fears of military conflict. Over the next few days, rumors spread like wildfire. Pro-Johnson forces were supposed to be on the march. The Maryland militia might be in Washington at any moment, along with “several hundred armed roughs” from Philadelphia. Offers of armed support swamped the president: he could have 1,000 men from New Jersey and a regiment of Kentuckians, or 30,000 Virginians, 2,000 men from Louisiana, and 100,000 from Missouri. The New York police reported finding a cache of nitroglycerine as part of a “Guy Fawkes conspiracy” to blow up Congress. A number of congressmen fled the Capitol on hearing the report, which then was dismissed as a dubious promotional gambit by the manufacturer of the explosive.

Martial ardor surged on the congressional side as well. Pennsylvania’s governor announced that “the spirit of 1861 seems again to pervade the Keystone State,” with Union Army veterans offering their services to support Congress. The
New York Herald
reported that “if violence is used in ejecting Mr. Stanton[,] 100,000 men are ready to come to Washington and put him back.” The Grand Army of the Republic, the leading veterans’ organization, urged Congress to stand firm. Its commander-in-chief, Congressman John A. Logan of Illinois, sent an astonishing handwritten note to the GAR’s administrator on February 22, the day after Lorenzo Thomas’s failed “coup”:

Organized into battalions, the GAR veterans formed a private security force throughout Washington City. Logan posted them, in civilian dress, as round-the-clock sentinels, concentrating them near the White House and the War Department. Sleeping on a cot in Stanton’s office, Logan was in position to call out his forces “at a moment’s notice.” He offered to assign 125 GAR veterans to the War Department as a praetorian guard, but Stanton rejected any use of force. No blood, he directed, should be shed on his account. The Secretary chanced an excursion to the curb in front of his building to explain events to his wife on the afternoon of February 22. That evening, a reporter found him “calm and determined.”

Alarming rumors swept through the city, ricocheting off the credulous and the fearful. Any development seemed possible. The frenzy bubbled through a sarcastic report in the
New York Herald
:

Though the tempest had a comic side, the confrontation was in deadly earnest, particularly in a nation with more than a million experienced soldiers—Confederate and Union—spread through every state. General Grant, head of the real army, canceled a scheduled trip to New York. He shunned the public spotlight, a prudent course for the man expected to be the Republican candidate for president later in the year. One day, he was seen “pleasantly engaged guiding his favorite team [of horses] on an afternoon drive and smoking his immortal cigar.” Early in the crisis, when visited by a delegation of anxious Republican senators, Grant maintained his customary silence: “He may have smoked, but he said nothing.”

Johnson worried about the loyalty of the army, and of General Grant. The president’s greatest risk, however, was constitutional, not military, and it centered on that relentless, crippled old man, Thad Stevens. Soon the newspapers would be speculating over who would be appointed to the Cabinet of new President Ben Wade, after Stevens finished up the impeachment trial.

Stevens saw the moment clearly. This was his best chance yet to impeach Andrew Johnson.

While Thomas and Stanton were playing low farce at the War Department, Stevens and his Reconstruction Committee prepared for high drama. Committee members gathered at Stevens’s house at ten-thirty on the morning of February 22. The Republicans were unanimous for impeachment. The two dissenting Democrats interposed objections but were ignored. By noon, the committee adjourned to gather certified copies of the president’s orders dismissing Stanton and appointing Thomas. During an hour’s recess, George Boutwell of Massachusetts led a subcommittee that prepared an impeachment resolution. It was strong on conclusion, weak on details: “That Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors.”

By noon, excited spectators clogged the Capitol. Hundreds were turned away from the House galleries. At 2
P.M.
, the Reconstruction Committee was ready. Stevens’s entrance caused a sensation, then the crowd grew so quiet that even he, weakened by his many ailments, could be heard. The old man seemed invigorated. One reporter wrote that “the atmosphere and excitement of a
coup d’état
is to him the elixir of life.” Stevens called for the committee report. When it had been read, he offered to take an immediate vote, or to allow debate. The Democratic leader, James Brooks of New York City, sprang up with a speech in hand. Stevens yielded the floor, reserving the right to close the debate. He settled back for speeches that extended into the night and then for much of the following Monday.

In private, some Democrats expressed relief that Johnson had erred so badly that he would not be a contender for their party’s presidential nomination later in the year. In public, though, they defended him. Brooks warned that Americans were on the verge of reliving the French Revolution, “baptized in blood.” He struck a threatening note by claiming that four-fifths of the Army’s soldiers were Democrats who would “follow the Democratic instinct and stand by the Constitution and laws of his country.” (Because so many soldiers were black, however, Brooks’s claim was highly implausible.) When he reached the impeachment resolution, Brooks offered a preview of Johnson’s defense at trial.

Though these defenses would be described over the next three months in orations of enervating length, they could be stated simply. First, that the president had the constitutional power to remove members of his own Cabinet, no matter what the Tenure of Office Act said. Second, that the first several Congresses acknowledged that constitutional power by enacting laws granting him the same power. (This argument was not exactly airtight; if the Constitution truly granted the power to the president, why did Congress have to enact laws to achieve the same result?) Third, that the Tenure of Office Act did not cover Cabinet members—like Stanton—who had been appointed by President Lincoln.

House Republicans vied to see who could denounce the president in the most hysterical language. Johnson was capable of “any extreme of madness,” according to John Bingham. Called an “incubus and a disgrace,” the president was compared to Nero, Torquemada, and Emperor Louis-Napoléon, held to be guilty “of the nameless crimes which have been inflicted upon the freedmen of the South,” and labeled “the great criminal of our age and country.” An Indiana congressman was not surprised that “one who began his presidential career in drunkenness should end it in crime.” A Tennessean won the prize for oratorical frenzy by denouncing the president as “the worst tyrant and usurper that history was ever called on to record.”

Democrats responded in kind. A New Yorker proclaimed that “Robespierre, Marat, and Danton were less vindictive than [the Radicals]; and the bloody rule of the Jacobins was mild compared to that which is sought.” Democrats accused their opponents of prolonging the Civil War, overthrowing the Constitution, and supporting Negro supremacy. The Republicans were “blind with rage,” charged a Kentuckian, and would take “the fatal plunge into the sea of revolution.”

While the bitter debate raged, both camps—Johnson and his supporters on one side, and Stevens and the Republicans on the other—feared bloodshed in the streets. Navy Secretary Welles hurried to the White House on the morning of February 22 to deliver news learned from his son. At a social event the night before, army officers were twice commanded to return to their barracks. First came a summons for officers of the Fifth Cavalry, then one for officers of the Washington garrison. Was this a military rising? Would troops march down Pennsylvania Avenue to seize the president?