Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (34 page)

For those who accept the proposition that a vote can be corruptly purchased with patronage, as well as with greenbacks, the evidence on these questions is stronger still.

On May 14, two days before the Senate vote, Willis Gaylord sent a message to postal agent Legate. “As matters stand now,” Gaylord wrote, “the money to be made is on the other side by appointments, etc. Keep watch of good places and let me know.” By referring to “the other side,” Gaylord may have been counseling an attempt to secure promises of patronage jobs in the (presumably) incoming administration of Ben Wade. Gaylord’s focus on patronage was apt. Fortunes could be amassed in a short time as a revenue collector or Indian agent.

As soon as the Senate votes were tallied, those who had conducted the bribery schemes swamped the president with demands for lucrative positions. On May 18, Edmund Cooper urged a tax collector position in New Orleans for Andrew Lacy, who assisted Woolley and the Astor House group. “I have been saved by so many men,” Johnson remarked, “that I am often accused of ingratitude because I can’t help them all.” He did, however, help a lot of them.

When it came to converting the president’s acquittal into lucrative patronage, Edmund Ross was at the head of the line. For Ross, the biggest prize was making Perry Fuller the commissioner of internal revenue, a position Fuller had pursued for six months. On June 23, while Butler’s committee was hearing witnesses about vote-buying, Ross sent Johnson a letter urging him to name Fuller to the position, referring to their earlier conversation on the matter. Three days later, the president did just as Ross asked.

The negative reaction to Fuller’s nomination was immediate. Press reports referred to Fuller as “that notorious Indian trader and lobbyist,” a man whose “reputation is bad,” a name “associated with corrupt contracts, and with a ring of western adventurers who have been implicated in many of the inequities notorious at Washington.” When the Senate Finance Committee recommended against Fuller’s nomination, Johnson withdrew it.

In response, Fuller set his sights a bit lower. In late August, Johnson appointed him collector at the Port of New Orleans, through which passed the heavy Mississippi River traffic to and from foreign destinations. Because the Senate was in recess, Fuller could take office immediately, without being confirmed. One correspondent wrote disgustedly that Fuller’s appointment resolved any nagging doubt that perhaps Johnson was not so bad after all: “The man who can give the country such public servants has come to posterity and been judged already.”

Fuller arrived in New Orleans in September and set straight to work. He fired 65 Republican employees of the custom house, replacing them with no fewer than 150 worthies, all his creatures. Fuller’s overhaul caused the treasury secretary to fret that expenses “will be considerably increased by Mr. Fuller while those of all other Custom Houses are being reduced.” But Fuller was just getting started.

He appointed Vinnie Ream’s father—Senator Ross’s landlord in Washington—to be superintendent of the warehouses that held imported goods before they were taxed. Goods sent through one of those warehouses, however, were never taxed. Though Fuller served as collector in New Orleans for only seven months, he was arrested in September 1869 and charged with using this scheme to defraud the government of $3 million in tax revenues. A grand jury in New Orleans returned a nineteen-count indictment against him. Fuller won release on a bond that was guaranteed by two United States senators: Edmund Ross of Kansas and an Arkansas senator whose brother was Fuller’s business partner. When Fuller failed to appear on his bond, Ross was called upon to produce the fugitive. The senator never answered in court. According to a later report, Fuller’s New Orleans scam generated more than $50,000 in kickbacks for him. The criminal charges against Fuller were never pursued.

But Perry Fuller’s was only the most lurid name on Senator Ross’s shopping list. According to one Radical newspaper, the president yielded to Ross the control over all patronage appointments in Kansas and the territories of Colorado and New Mexico. In early June, Ross requested the appointment of a friend as superintendent of Indian lands in Kansas and the neighboring Indian Territory (the future Oklahoma). Ross’s letter to Johnson was blunt. “There is a large amount of patronage connected with that office,” he wrote on June 6, “making it very valuable to the possessor.” The appointment was “vital,” the Kansan continued, to maintain his political position after “my action on the impeachment.” The president made the appointment.

A week later, Ross demanded that the president approve a treaty with the Osage Tribe. On the same day, Johnson sent the treaty to the Senate. Two weeks later, Ross wanted his brother appointed a special mail agent in Florida. Shortly after that, the Kansas senator requested three appointments, including the surveyor general of Kansas and two Indian agents. Acknowledging that he was asking much of the president, Ross wrote that he felt warranted in doing so “by the many assurances of kindly personal regard that I have received from you.” Only the candidate for surveyor general was nominated as Ross requested. Undeterred, the Kansas senator also asked the president to grant public lands to a Kansas coal company. Ross’s demands made an impression on Johnson’s bodyguard. The Kansas senator, the guard recalled, “was at the White House a good deal during the last months of Mr. Johnson’s administration,” pursuing “appointments in Kansas.”

Johnson’s patronage largesse was not confined to Senator Ross. Van Winkle of West Virginia, Fowler of Tennessee, and Grimes of Iowa all sent the president requests for appointments, albeit on a more modest scale. Cornelius Wendell, the corruption consultant who designed Johnson’s acquittal fund, received a lucrative sinecure as a government director on the board of the Union Pacific Railroad.

John Henderson of Missouri was not appointed to the Cabinet, despite reports that his vote was purchased with promises of such a spot. In late June, he wed Mary Foote in a Washington ceremony. The president attended the wedding, where Senator Fowler of Tennessee served as a groomsman. With an impressive lack of concern for appearances, Johnson provided a unique wedding gift, appointing the senator’s father-in-law, Elisha Foote, to be commissioner of patents. The Senate promptly confirmed the appointment.

On the same day as the Henderson-Foote nuptials, the president nominated Collector Smythe to be U.S. minister to Austria. The nomination embarrassed so sturdy a Johnson loyalist as Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. It was, Welles noted tersely in his diary, “an appointment that should not have been made.” Welles’s judgment was vindicated ten weeks later when an investigation of the New York Custom House placed the collector under temporary arrest to secure his testimony. One historian estimated at “sixfold” the corrupt overcharges imposed on imports by Smythe’s Custom House. When the Senate would not confirm Smythe for Austria, Johnson nominated him to be minister to Russia. Smythe ran afoul of two more political hazards. The Custom House investigation ripened into criminal prosecutions alleging the theft of $700,000 of tax revenue during Smythe’s watch, while the collector was excoriated for placing on the public payroll the former editor of the
Richmond Examiner
, a prominent Confederate during the war. Despite Johnson’s dogged efforts, Smythe never did join the diplomatic service.

Was this parade of patronage nothing more than the standard act of rewarding one’s friends? The actions of 1868 should not be judged by the standards of the twenty-first century. Plainly, though, the most generous view of Ross’s actions must acknowledge that he strained every muscle to cash in on the president’s sense of obligation after the impeachment vote. Indeed, that surely was one of his expectations when he and Perry Fuller consulted over breakfast on the morning of May 16, and when he and Thomas Ewing, Jr., went on their midnight ramble the evening before. Were those patronage deals reached before Ross saved the president? Did the president know the extent of his obligations to Ross before the Kansan cast his vote? No sporting man would bet against it, not without the benefit of very good odds.

[Acquittal] leaves him less hopelessly in the wrong than he seemed six months ago, and it leaves him in possession of the honors of the field. His escape, to be sure, has been very narrow, but in politics, as in war, an inch of a miss is as good as a mile.

T
HE
N
ATION
, M
AY
21, 1868

T
HE FIRST DAY
of 1869 brought cold drizzle and sleet to Washington City, but callers at the White House found a profusion of fresh-cut flowers and a buoyant Andrew Johnson. The president betrayed no sadness that his time in the Executive Mansion was coming to an end, even though the despised Ulysses Grant would succeed him in office, having defeated the Democratic candidate, New York Governor Horatio Seymour, in the fall election. Supported by his two gracious daughters, Johnson greeted official guests in the Blue Room for an hour. At noon, the doors opened to the public. With the Marine Band playing, visitors left their dripping umbrellas in the anterooms and piled in to offer New Year’s greetings to Johnson. The dapper president smoothly took the hand of each visitor, exchanged a quick word, and turned to the next.

For Johnson, the holiday season had been a good one. On Christmas Day, he issued a proclamation granting amnesty to every former rebel, including Jefferson Davis, something he had wanted to do for months. December 29 might have been his most carefree day in the White House. To celebrate Johnson’s sixtieth birthday, his family invited four hundred children of their friends to a dancing party in the East Room. The children joined in square dances, waltzes, polkas, and the Virginia reel before enjoying refreshments. Mrs. Johnson came downstairs to admire the event, only the second function she attended at the White House.

At the New Year’s Day reception, two guests drew special attention. Noble Hurdle, an aged resident of Georgetown, announced that he had shaken the hand of every president since the Republic began and was happy to shake Johnson’s, “the last President, but by no means the least!” The president thanked Mr. Hurdle for the compliment, muted though it was.

Yet more remarkable was an earlier visitor, Ben Butler of Massachusetts. Despite all his tirades against the Great Criminal in the White House, despite his relentless efforts to remove Johnson from office, Butler delivered a robust two-handed greeting to the president. The two men, recently bitter adversaries, held up the reception line for five minutes while they chatted and beamed happily at each other. What accounted for such a change in political relations? Did this fraternal feeling reflect the realism of experienced politicians who were moving on to the next chapter? Or had the president respected his promise to Senator Grimes during the trial, pulled in his horns, and behaved himself following the dramatic acquittal?

Johnson had indeed honored the most specific commitment he made to Grimes: after seriously considering backing out on the appointment of John Schofield as secretary of war, the president went through with it. The Senate confirmed Schofield’s appointment in late May. On June 1, Johnson thoroughly enjoyed a visit to the War Office, finally rid of Edwin Stanton. With a laugh, the president observed, “It is some time since I was in this room!”

By many measures, though, Andrew Johnson did not change his political course after the acquittal. Not only did he nominate dubious figures like Perry Fuller and Henry Smythe to high positions, but he also kept on vetoing legislation. On June 20, Congress adopted a bill to readmit Arkansas under its new state constitution. The president vetoed; to do otherwise, he explained, would accept Congress’s power to exclude Arkansas’s representatives in the first place. Five days later, Johnson vetoed a law readmitting six other Southern states (all but Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas). Congress enacted both bills over his vetoes.

Johnson continued to support white conservatives in the South. He appointed new military commanders who would take little action to curb violence against blacks. Pleas for military intervention against white violence came from Republican governors in Georgia and Mississippi and the military commander in Tennessee. Johnson did not respond. Using terror tactics to drive the freedmen from the polls, Democrats in Georgia and Mississippi posted gains in the fall elections.

Estimates of the election-year carnage in the South were staggering, though often imprecise. The House Committee on Elections found that in Louisiana more than 1,000 blacks and white Unionists were killed and an equal number wounded, more than 600 killed in Kentucky, and dozens more in South Carolina. From August to October, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported, Georgia saw 31 killings of blacks and white Unionists, 43 nonfatal shootings, 5 stabbings, and 63 beatings. A Republican congressman from Arkansas was assassinated for political reasons. Fifty armed men attacked a plantation owned by a Unionist in Texas, killing seven freedmen. The Ku Klux Klan claimed credit for murdering leading Republicans in Alabama, in Georgia, in Texas, and in South Carolina.

Southern Republicans wrote anguished letters to Northern colleagues, pleading for assistance. From Vicksburg, Mississippi, came the report that “organized bands of desperadoes, cut throats and murderers [are] at large in this state,” driving Republican voters from the polls. Bribery, threats, and force were used for the same purpose in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Many freedmen were blocked from voting. Others were compelled to vote for Democrats.

Much of the worst violence continued to be in Texas. A former governor reported in May 1868 that 250 “union men” had been murdered in the state in the preceding six months. For a price, gangs would kill blacks, Republicans, or federal soldiers. Efforts at self-defense by the poorly armed freedmen often brought catastrophe. Civil war broke out in Brazos County, with whites and blacks forming militias. Twenty-five freedmen died in a battle that drove most blacks and Union families from the area.

Over the summer of 1868, the new legislatures of Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee requested more federal troops to reduce civil violence. The response from Washington was halting and reluctant. War Secretary Schofield issued instructions that military force be applied only upon the president’s order. The attorney general lectured army commanders that the duty of maintaining order “belongs to the civil authorities of the States,” not federal officials. If the man in the White House cared about the mayhem across the South, there was little evidence of it.

In early July, the president grew edgy while Democrats gathered in New York City to pick their candidate for president. Edmund Cooper and other Johnson agents headed to the convention. One of Johnson’s defense lawyers at the trial, Thomas Nelson of Tennessee, placed his name in nomination. The president paced the Executive Mansion awaiting word, his ambition gnawing at him, considering resignation if he was not nominated. After the first ballot, Johnson stood second among the Democratic hopefuls. He was so close to vindication.

Amid the smoldering ruins of his presidency, Johnson could see no reason why the Democrats would not choose him. His administration had been marked by unprecedented conflict with Congress, by unprecedented rates of vetoes and veto overrides, and by an impeachment effort that barely failed. Nevertheless, the president fumed that he had bested General Grant, the Republican candidate, in every confrontation over the last several months, including the impeachment trial. Having been “successful in every single issue heretofore,” Johnson railed that giving the Democratic nomination to anyone else would be “an abandonment of our cause.” Why shouldn’t the Democrats nominate him, he demanded of Colonel Moore: “They profess to accept my measures: they say I have stood by the Constitution and made a noble struggle.”

The prospect of vindication proved to be a mirage. On the twenty-second ballot, the Democrats selected Governor Seymour of New York.

Shortly afterward, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified despite Johnson’s opposition. On July 20, 1868, Secretary of State Seward certified that twenty-eight states—three-fourths of the thirty-seven states—had approved the amendment. He issued a further certification eight days later after receiving notice of ratification by Alabama and Georgia. Seward’s decision to issue the second certification reflects just how messy the ratification process was.

When Congress sent the amendment to state legislatures in 1866, some argued that ratification could be based on approval by three-fourths of the twenty-seven states then represented in Congress (that is, not counting the ten Southern states excluded from Congress). That position never prevailed. Two Northern states (Ohio and New Jersey) ratified the amendment but then attempted to rescind their ratifications after Democrats won control of their state legislatures. Seward concluded that those rescissions were invalid, and so signed the first certification that the amendment had been ratified. Seward issued his second certification because the intervening ratifications by Alabama and Georgia meant that twenty-eight states had ratified without attempting to rescind (that is, excluding Ohio and New Jersey). When Oregon’s legislature purported to rescind its ratification three months later, Seward took no further action. Although Seward did not recognize the attempted rescissions, three Southern states (the Carolinas and Louisiana) were permitted to change their course in the other direction. While ruled by the state governments sponsored by Johnson, all three states rejected the amendment. The new state governments formed under the Reconstruction laws of 1867, however, approved it.

Of the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, the guarantees of due process of law and equal protection would prove most enduring. The reach of the due process clause changed over time, ultimately becoming the source of many personal rights now taken for granted by Americans. The equal protection clause lay mostly dormant until the middle of the twentieth century, when civil rights lawyers persuaded the courts to breathe life into it, making it central to American political and social life.

By the fall of 1868, the end was in sight for the Johnson Administration. The president’s annual message to Congress in December included his familiar denunciation of congressional Reconstruction, which he described as failed and pernicious. Though Johnson’s pledge of better conduct had produced few changes in his behavior, he did become less and less important as his term ran out. By New Year’s Day, 1869, with Ulysses Grant poised to occupy the White House in two months, Ben Butler could pass a few pleasant moments with Andrew Johnson because, finally, Johnson no longer mattered very much.

Thaddeus Stevens never gave up. On July 7, 1868, six weeks after the last votes acquitting Johnson, he presented five new articles of impeachment. Knowing that his days were dwindling, the Pennsylvanian made no effort to cloak the political nature of his accusations. Johnson, Stevens charged, had betrayed Republican principles and replaced Republican officeholders in an effort to build a personal political party. The president had unilaterally created state governments in the South in 1865, usurping the powers of Congress to make the laws. He induced Colorado officials to perjure themselves to defeat statehood, pardoned Union Army deserters so they could vote for Democrats, and returned confiscated property to ex-rebels. In a long speech that he submitted for publication but did not read in person, Stevens ignored the recent impeachment trial, choosing instead to warn his countrymen “not to place our trust in princes.” He ended with an exhortation from graveside:

Representative Thomas Williams, also a former House manager, submitted fourteen more impeachment articles on the same date. The House took no action on any of the new impeachment proposals.

By early August, the newspapers resumed the death watch on Stevens, running daily bulletins on his health. For ten days, he could not leave his room. In bedside chats, Old Thad regretted that when the war came he became “so radical that I had no control over anybody.” His only satisfaction, he said, came from his time in Pennsylvania’s state government, especially the creation of free public schools in the 1830s. When a caller commented on his appearance, Stevens’s wit flashed briefly. He was not concerned about his appearance, he replied, but his disappearance.

As Stevens grew weaker in this lingering public death, he admitted fewer and fewer visitors. On his final evening, he was attended by an aide, a nephew, his sister Loretta, and Mrs. Smith. Two black clergymen prayed with him and left. Late that night, two Sisters of Charity from a nearby Catholic hospital visited. With the consent of Stevens’s nephew, they baptized the dying man. In Stevens’s final moments, his nephew held his hand while Mrs. Smith knelt at the foot of his bed.

On the next day, citizens of Lancaster who lived in Washington carried his casket to the nearby Capitol, where his body lay in state overnight, surrounded by dignitaries and a detachment of Negro soldiers. Mourners came to pay their respects until midnight. The next morning, a crowd watched the funeral party’s progress, the hearse drawn by four white horses, to a special train. When Stevens was buried in Schreiner’s Cemetery in Lancaster, more than 15,000 people overflowed the surrounding streets. Before his death, Stevens had sold two plots in a white-only cemetery, then acquired a space at Schreiner’s because it accepted people of all races. His headstone reads:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, Not from any natural preference for solitude, But, finding other Cemeteries limited as to Race by Charter Rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death The Principles which I advocated through a long life; EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR

That fall, Lancaster Republicans nominated a dead man, Thaddeus Stevens, as their candidate for Congress. He won easily.

For the other House managers, the failure of impeachment proved no obstacle to advancement. No one who saw Ben Butler joking at the White House on New Year’s Day could be surprised by his future success. Butler settled a bitter wartime feud with General Grant and became a political adviser to the new president. He lost his House seat in 1874 but won another term two years later. In 1879, Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts with Democratic Party support. After an unsuccessful run for president on the Greenback Party ticket in 1884, Butler retired from politics.