Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (3 page)

The vice president retired from the Washington scene for several days, recuperating at a nearby estate. He was back in Washington later in March, but rarely presided over the Senate, choosing to stay out of sight. The injury to Johnson’s stature could not be calculated. From that day on, whenever he made a controversial statement, many assumed he had been drunk.

Six weeks after the inauguration, on the morning of April 15, Abraham Lincoln lay dead, struck down by an assassin’s bullet. John Wilkes Booth, an acclaimed actor and Confederate sympathizer, had organized a desperate conspiracy to kill the North’s leaders. Booth himself shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, inflicting the head wound that took the president’s life. At the same time, a second man attacked Secretary of State William Seward in his home, where Seward was recuperating from a broken jaw and dislocated shoulder suffered in a recent carriage accident. The assailant almost crushed the skull of Seward’s son, stabbed two other men, then slashed open Seward’s face and arm. A third conspirator was assigned to kill Andrew Johnson at his room at Kirkwood House. That man, after having a drink to steady his nerves, thought better of the enterprise and hightailed it out of town.

In life, Lincoln had been a controversial figure. He won the presidency in 1860 with only a plurality of the popular vote. His reelection in 1864 was no landslide; he commanded 55 percent of the vote in an election that did not include the Southern states still in rebellion, where he would have been lucky to get one vote in ten. The tragedy of his death began to chip away at any clay feet. The historical Lincoln would eclipse the real Lincoln, rising as a figure of almost mythic resonance for Americans. The president who succeeded Lincoln was bound to be judged by high standards.

Andrew Johnson took the oath of office as the nation’s seventeenth president between ten and eleven on the morning of April 15, in his room at Kirkwood House. The days were turbulent. The war was ending. Six days before, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina would yield in a week. The states would be reunited. To Johnson would fall great challenges. He would need to relieve the enmity born of four years of vicious bloodletting. He would need to bring North and South together, recreating a shared national identity. He would need to help integrate four million freed slaves into American society. As a Southerner and a Democrat who stood by the Union, he could serve as the bridge between the nation’s warring regions, fostering peace and reconciliation. Or, as a Southerner and a Democrat, he could perpetuate the sectional hatred that brought war in the first place.

I am for a white man’s government in America.

A
NDREW
J
OHNSON,
W
INTER
1865

T
HE NEW PRESIDENT
respected Mary Lincoln’s grief, assuring the widow that she could remain in the White House as long as necessary. Johnson set up his temporary office in the Treasury Building, where he remained for the next six weeks. He hired secretaries for the heavy work ahead. Notable among them was Colonel William G. Moore, a thirty-seven-year-old army officer whose diary would provide an invaluable window into Johnson’s presidency.

The nation began to learn about its new president, beginning with his appearance. Johnson was fastidious, always neat in dress and person, and usually struck a serious, thoughtful manner. After meeting the president, British novelist Charles Dickens was impressed, finding his face “very powerful in its firmness…, strength of will, and steadiness of purpose.”

Johnson’s sharp sense of his own dignity had to make the memory of his inauguration all the more painful. By emphasizing his “plebeian” origins, Johnson had granted an unguarded glimpse of his inner heart. Johnson’s father drowned when the future president was a small boy. Apprenticed to a tailor in Raleigh, North Carolina, at age ten, the future president labored for five years at the whim of his master, an experience not all that distant from slavery. At fifteen, the rebellious apprentice ran away with his brother, fleeing into South Carolina for almost two years before returning and resolving matters with his former master. With his mother and stepfather, Johnson led a cart into the Appalachian Mountains, finally settling in Greeneville, Tennessee, to start a new life. Through Johnson’s impressive rise, the rebellious apprentice would continue to dwell within the man, making him angry and resentful at times when it would have been far better not to be.

In an era when politics was never far from violence, Johnson demonstrated ample personal courage. Once, told that an assassin awaited him at a public meeting, Johnson started his speech by placing a pistol before him. After describing the threat, Johnson roared out, “I do not say to him, ‘Let him speak,’ but ‘let him shoot!’” After long seconds of silence, Johnson remarked with satisfaction, “It appears I have been misinformed.”

When Mrs. Lincoln finally left Washington, Johnson’s family filled the White House—Eliza, his wife of almost forty years, two daughters (one married, one widowed), one of his two surviving sons, and five grandchildren. When little ones interrupted presidential meetings, their grandfather indulged them; visitors were expected to do the same. One of the president’s few recreations was to skip stones with the grandchildren in nearby Rock Creek.

An indeterminate illness often kept Eliza Johnson in bed. During the White House years, the president worked across the hall from her sickroom, looking in on her during the day. She, in turn, tried to moderate his searing temper. A White House worker remembered her staving off eruptions by gently touching the president’s arm and saying, “Now, Andrew.” The Johnsons had endured the deaths of a son and a son-in-law. Their older surviving son was a notorious alcoholic.

Though Johnson maintained a warm family circle, he kept the world at bay. In a letter, he advised a daughter “to be friendly with all and too friendly with none.” In times of stress, the self-educated Johnson sought solace in historical and political books. One close aide wrote that the president was “lonely in the center of forty millions of people, and unhappy even to miserable, on that pinnacle of power.” Johnson’s bodyguard remembered his employer as “the best hater I ever knew.”

The new president had little humor. An aide referred to Johnson’s “grim presence,” adding, “in almost daily contact with him for over two years, I never saw him smile but once.” There are no funny Andrew Johnson stories, no recorded flashes of wit or self-deprecation. He once claimed to like circuses and minstrel shows, then added that he rarely attended them because he “never had much time for frivolity.”

When it came to slavery and blacks, Johnson held the conventional views of Southern whites. Some of Johnson’s early statements were virulently racist. In a congressional speech in 1844, he explained that blacks were “inferior to the white man in point of intellect—better calculated in physical structure to undergo drudgery and hardship,” and also stood “many degrees lower in the scale of gradation…between God and all that he had created than the white man.” Johnson opposed one bill that year because it “would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, humpbacked, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly headed ebon-colored negro in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.” Those who met with Johnson, including former slave Frederick Douglass, concluded that his racist views were strongly held. Johnson did not support emancipation of the slaves until the third year of the Civil War.

His views on race did not change when he became president. He confided to a friend in late 1865 that “everyone would, and must admit that the white race was superior to the black.” In his annual message to Congress in December 1867, Johnson proclaimed that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people,” adding, “no independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands,” but rather ended with “relapse into barbarism.” Stressing “[t]he great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics,” the president warned his countrymen: “Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now [being made] to Africanize the half of our country.” For Johnson, black political power in the South would be a greater evil than the Civil War, or even slavery.

In the first days after the assassination, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio acclaimed the new president. A leading Radical Republican, Wade decided that he preferred Andrew Johnson to Lincoln. “Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness,” he explained, “to deal with these damned rebels.” The new president showed little evidence, at first, of that handicap. Johnson sounded like a man bent on vengeance, repeatedly insisting that “[t]reason must be made infamous and traitors punished.” When Wade suggested hanging a baker’s dozen of Confederate leaders, Johnson objected that the number must be higher.

The president’s enthusiasm for revenge pitted him against General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant. At the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Grant had paroled General Lee and his soldiers in return for their pledge not to take up arms again. The new president bridled at Grant’s leniency. “I frequently had to intercede for Gen’l Lee and other paroled officers,” Grant testified later. “The President at that time occupied exactly the reverse ground…that they should be tried and punished.” The dispute with Johnson placed Grant’s honor at stake. He had given his word to soldiers who would not have surrendered if they thought they could be executed for treason. Ultimately, the president abandoned his effort to prosecute former Confederate officers.

In his first weeks as president, Johnson searched for footing in the difficult political situation. He asked Lincoln’s entire Cabinet to stay on, a course that implied a continuation of Lincoln’s policy of reconciliation with the South. With Secretary of State Seward incapacitated by his accumulated injuries, Johnson relied heavily on Edwin Stanton, the able secretary of war.

The greatest challenge facing Johnson was reconstruction: reconstruction of the Southern states, and reconstruction of the Union with the South in it. For months, Northern leaders had argued over this question. Lincoln was inclined to set easy terms for Southerners to create new state governments, and then to return to the Union. During the war, when Union troops occupied large parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, Lincoln allowed the formation of state governments with the participation of only 10 percent of each state’s voters from the 1860 election.

Radical Republicans, a term used to describe the most adamant opponents of slavery, criticized Lincoln’s approach. They insisted that the leaders of the rebellion should be disqualified from the new governments. They argued that the nation must reconstruct the South as something new, not merely restore Confederate state governments. According to Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the Radical chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, what was needed was “a radical reorganization of southern institutions, habits, and manners.” The prospect, he admitted, “may startle feeble minds and shake weak nerves,” but “[s]o do all great improvements in the political and moral world. It requires a heavy impetus to drive forward a sluggish people. When it was first proposed to free the slaves, and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble? The prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting-maids in Congress, were in hysterics.”

The argument over reconstruction included a central legal disagreement. Radicals contended that the Southern states were conquered territories, or had committed suicide, and thus could be governed by the victorious United States in any way it saw fit. The Constitution gives Congress the power to ensure that each state has a “republican form of government,” the Radicals pointed out, and Congress had to do so for the “new” Southern states. Stevens, the most determined advocate of radical change, demanded that large Southern plantations be confiscated and distributed to the freedmen. The Constitution, he added, must be amended to match the new reality of the United States, vindicating the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence. He thought the nation was “like a giant that had outgrown its garments, and if its new constitutional garment would not fit, it must be enlarged.”

Johnson, in contrast, embraced the principle that the states were sovereign entities joined in an indissoluble union. He held the metaphysical view that despite the acts of secession and four years of war, the Southern states never left the Union. “There is no such thing as reconstruction,” he said six weeks after taking office. “These States have not gone out of the Union, therefore reconstruction is not necessary.” He denied the national government’s power to intrude on state prerogatives, certainly not to vindicate such a foggy notion as a “republican form of government.” It made no sense to him that the Congress could tell the states what to do. As he explained to a British interviewer:

After the war, in Johnson’s view, the federal government had only to help Southerners form their governments. Once formed, those sovereign state governments had the untrammeled right to do what they thought best. He might nudge Southern leaders to adopt certain policies—he suggested they extend the vote to black men who could read or owned $250 of real estate—but he denied the power of the federal government to dictate those policies. Most of all, he wanted the Southern states quickly to reconstitute their governments, elect representatives to Congress, and resume their role in the nation.

Johnson thus became the leading advocate of states’ rights, of preserving “the Constitution as it is,” without changes beyond the prohibition of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment. He had an almost mystical confidence in the Constitution drafted in 1787, never mind that it had not prevented a calamitous civil war. An aide remarked that Johnson stood apart from established religions but “[i]f he had a bible at all, as far as I could learn, it was the Constitution of the United States.”

Shortly after Johnson became president, War Secretary Stanton presented a plan for the reconstruction of North Carolina that he had developed for Lincoln. Under the plan, the president would appoint a governor for the state. That governor would call a convention to write a new state constitution that, at a minimum, would bar slavery and rescind secession.

Johnson issued the North Carolina plan on May 29, 1865, six weeks after taking office, largely as Stanton had prepared it. Johnson’s action included two controversial elements. First, it signaled that he would exclude Congress from the process of reconstructing the state’s government. Lincoln had proceeded the same way during the war, but he had been exercising emergency war powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This was now peacetime. Those powers had evaporated. Though Johnson could not invoke emergency war powers, as a practical matter he could act on his own because Congress was in recess, not scheduled to meet again until December, more than six months away. Johnson could have called Congress back into session but chose not to do so. He preferred to take advantage of the opportunity to shape the restored Southern states on his own. By cutting Congress out of his reconstruction effort, Johnson courted conflict with that body.

In addition, Johnson rejected Stanton’s recommendation that the freed slaves of North Carolina be guaranteed the right to vote. For Johnson, the Southern states, not the federal government, should decide the rights of the freedmen and freedwomen. Secretary of State Seward explained this policy in simple terms: “According to the constitution those citizens acting politically in their respective states must reorganize their state governments. We cannot reorganize for them.” In a separate proclamation, the president began to recede from his demand for vengeance against the “traitors.” His proclamation granted amnesty for all but the wealthiest and most powerful former Confederates, including restoration of their voting rights. Only six weeks after the end of the war, the former rebels were to regain control of their own governments, without any role for the freed slaves.

An early challenge to Johnson’s policy came from Thad Stevens of Pennsylvania, who would swiftly become the new president’s leading opponent. Then seventy-two years old and in his sixth term in Congress, the Radical leader was a bold, polarizing figure. Stevens shared with Johnson both humble birth and a largely fatherless childhood. Stevens’s father, a farmer and surveyor in northern Vermont, slid into drink, finally drifting away from the family. Stevens’s determined mother put her clever second son through Dartmouth College. Stevens made the most of that advantage when he moved to Pennsylvania, becoming a feared lawyer and an iron manufacturer of middling success.