JBL,
This is an excellent article from today's Washington Post about the impeachment and Senate trial of Andrew Johnson, the only precedent we have for whether the Senate trial will turn out to be more akin to solemn tragedy or comical farce. Keep in mind this trial took place before CNN, the Internet and O.J.
130 Years Ago, Parallels Up to a Boiling
Point
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 13, 1998; Page A01
The president was a Southern Democrat who'd risen from the class
scorned as "white trash." His personal life inspired widespread snickering.
The Republicans who controlled Congress detested him. They investigated
every aspect of his life and then voted to impeach him. With his fate in the
hands of a few moderates, he hired a claque of lawyers skilled in nitpicking
and pettifoggery.
The president was, of course, Andrew Johnson. The year was 1868.
When news of Johnson's impeachment reached Philadelphia, Republicans
celebrated by firing a 50-gun salute while Democrats threatened to send
scores of armed men to defy Congress.
In 1868, unlike 1998, Americans were not blase about impeachment.
Passions ran high, at least at the beginning. The issue was not sex -- or
even perjury. It was far more incendiary. On paper, the question was
whether the president could fire the secretary of war without the consent of
Congress. In reality, it was a battle over Reconstruction -- over the fate of
former Confederates and former slaves.
Wild rumors spread: Johnson would use the Army to stay in power.
Confederates were marching toward Washington to help him. The
Houston Telegraph reported that the War Department had been burned,
the secretary wounded in battle. The Louisville Democrat asked readers:
"Are you ready once more to take up the musket?"
Many Americans were ready to fight. Iowa's governor, who supported
impeachment, cabled his state's congressional delegation: "100,000 Iowans
are ready to maintain the integrity of the Union." On the same day, a man
from Terre Haute cabled Johnson: "Indiana will sustain you with 100,000
of her brave, stalwart and tried men."
For a while, it seemed that America was on the verge of a second Civil
War. But soon things settled into a spectacle more familiar to today's
impeachment watchers -- one part drama, one part farce and many, many
parts legal hairsplitting, windy speechifying and mind-numbing tedium.
The Secretary of War War
"I am in favor of the official death of Andrew Johnson," an Indiana
congressman said during the House debate on impeachment. "I am not
surprised that one who began his presidential career in drunkenness should
end it in crime."
Other congressmen were almost as nasty. One said the president was
stained with "the filth of treason." Another called him a "despicable,
besotted, traitorous man."
The only American president ever impeached was a tailor by trade. He
grew up dirt poor in Raleigh, N.C., and didn't learn to read until he married
and his bride tutored him. He opened a tailor shop in Tennessee and
drifted into politics. He had a gift for oratorical invective -- populist volleys
directed at the Southern planter elite. He was elected state legislator, then
congressman, then governor, then senator.
In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president and Southern
states began seceding from the Union, Sen. Johnson returned to Tennessee
to campaign against secession. He wasn't opposed to slavery -- he owned
a few slaves himself -- but he was loyal to the Union. When Tennessee
joined the Confederacy, Johnson returned to Washington. On the way, he
was nearly lynched by a rebel mob in Lynchburg, Va.
The only Southern senator who stayed with the Union, he was a hero in the
North -- "the greatest man of the age," said the New York Times. In
1864, Lincoln chose him as his vice presidential running mate. Feeling a tad
sick on inauguration day in 1865, Johnson fortified himself with whiskey --
too much whiskey. Visibly soused, he delivered an incoherent speech, and
forever after his enemies mocked him as a drunk.
When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson inherited the task of reuniting the
nation. He was determined to bring the South back into the Union as
quickly as possible. Under his rules, the rebel states merely had to end
slavery and pledge loyalty and they could send representatives to
Congress. In December 1865 -- only eight months after the war's end at
Appomattox -- those representatives arrived. Chosen in whites-only
elections, they included the Confederate vice president, six members of the
Confederate Cabinet and four Confederate generals.
Northern congressmen were incensed. Asked Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio:
Did any nation in history ever welcome "traitors" into its Congress as
equals? "Would a man who was not utterly insane advocate such a thing?"
Congress refused to seat the Southern delegations. Johnson was outraged.
It was the beginning of the long battle that led to impeachment.
When the Republican-dominated Congress passed a bill giving full
citizenship rights to blacks, Johnson vetoed it. When Congress passed a
bill funding a Freedmen's Bureau to assist former slaves, Johnson vetoed it.
When Congress passed a bill allowing blacks in the District of Columbia to
vote, Johnson vetoed it.
In the South, the all-white "Johnson governments" passed laws denying
blacks the right to vote or buy property or own firearms. Angry
Republicans asked: Are we losing in peace what we won in war?
But Johnson wasn't interested in the problems of former slaves. He wanted
only to reunite the country. He was for union in 1860, he said, and he was
still for union in 1866. He broke with the Republicans and toured the
country campaigning against them.
His strategy backfired. Republicans won big in the election of 1866.
Emboldened, they started investigating Johnson, spreading rumors that he
had conspired with the men who killed Lincoln. Over his veto, they
enacted a Reconstruction Bill that dissolved the "Johnson governments"
and put the South under military rule.
That law gave Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who ran the military, a
great deal of power over Reconstruction. Stanton was allied with the
Republicans. To keep him in office, Congress passed the Tenure of Office
Act, which barred the president from firing Cabinet secretaries without the
consent of the Senate. Johnson asked for Stanton's resignation. Stanton
refused. Johnson asked the Senate to fire him. The Senate refused.
Johnson fired him anyway but Stanton refused to leave, barricading himself
in his office.
Johnson's treasury secretary warned the president that he could be
impeached if he persisted in removing Stanton.
"Impeach and be damned," Johnson replied.
'The Show'
Slowly, painfully, Thaddeus Stevens, the aged, sickly leader of the House
Republicans, shuffled into the hushed Senate chamber on Feb. 25, 1868,
followed by a group of congressmen.
"We appear before you," Stevens said, "and in the name of the House of
Representatives and all the people of the United States, do impeach
Andrew Johnson, president of the United States, for high crimes and
misdemeanors."
Clubfooted, gaunt and grim-faced, Stevens, 76, was an avid abolitionist
who had spent the war urging Lincoln to crush the Confederates
mercilessly, even if "their whole country is to be laid waste." The rebels
hated him so much they detoured on their way to Gettysburg just to burn
down his Pennsylvania ironworks. After the war, he lived in sin with his
black housekeeper and didn't much care who gossiped about it. He
sponsored the impeachment bill, and after it passed, 126-47, the House
named him to the committee that would prosecute the president in the
Senate.
The smart money was betting on conviction. Acquittal, the New York
Times reported, "is looked upon as simply impossible, unless some new
and startling development takes place."
The president hired five crafty lawyers, including his attorney general, and
paid them each $2,000 out of his own pocket. They opted to stall. On
March 13, they asked for another 40 days to prepare their case.
"Forty days!" roared Rep. Ben Butler, the former Union general who was
serving with Stevens as a prosecutor. "As long as it took God to destroy
the world by a flood!"
Butler wanted to start the trial immediately. The Senate compromised,
scheduling the case for March 30.
When that day arrived, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presided over the
Senate, which was stuffed with 150 extra chairs to accommodate House
members. The president did not appear -- nor was he expected -- but the
galleries were packed, mostly with well-dressed women who had
connections to senators, who each got four gallery tickets, or to
congressmen, who each got two.
"Congressmen appear to be very good judges of female beauty," the
Washington Star reported. "We looked and looked in vain for a dozen
plain-looking women in the galleries."
Butler delivered the prosecution's opening statement. He started slowly,
droning on about this unique historical moment, but soon he was orating
grandiloquently: "By murder most foul he succeeded to the presidency and
is the elect of an assassin to that high office!"
After a few hours, Butler's audience began to wilt but Butler kept going.
He was still chugging along on April Fool's Day, when wags in the press
gallery amused themselves by sending notes, purportedly from women in
the galleries, to the congressmen on the floor, and then snickering as they
read the congressmen's replies.
When Butler finally finished his opening statement, he began calling
witnesses who had observed the attempt to remove Stanton from office.
The scene they described barely rose above farce: Gen. Lorenzo Thomas,
the new appointee as secretary, went to Stanton's office and ordered him
to leave. Stanton refused and ordered Thomas to leave. Thomas refused.
Back and forth it went, each man ordering the other to leave, until finally
Stanton poured two stiff shots of whiskey and the dueling secretaries sat
down for a friendly chat.
One witness, a Delaware buddy of Thomas, recalled his efforts to buck up
the general during this historic confrontation: "Said I to him, 'General, the
eyes of Delaware are upon you.' "
The senators burst out laughing.
Next, Butler summoned several newspaper reporters to testify about the
president's speeches during the 1866 campaign. The reporters confirmed
that the president had indeed said many nasty things about his Republican
congressional enemies. To Butler, this was proof that Johnson was
subverting the power of Congress. To most observers, it was proof of
nothing more than politics as usual.
Tedium was setting in. Many hours were spent in the reading of legal
documents and senatorial speechifying. "Spectators found the proceedings
rather uninteresting," the Star reported. Rep. James Garfield was equally
bored: "This trial has developed, in the most remarkable manner, the insane
love of speaking among public men," the congressman wrote in a letter.
"We are wading knee deep in words, words, words . . . and are but little
more than half across the turbid stream."
Newspaper editorialists began complaining about the lack of public interest
in the impeachment controversy. The Baltimore Gazette lamented that "the
greatest act known to the Constitution -- the trial of a President of the
United States" was inspiring "less interest in the public mind than the report
of a prize fight."
Johnson could have enlivened things by appearing at his trial but he never
did. He also refused to make any public comment on impeachment.
Privately, he contemptuously referred to the proceedings as "the show."
Behind the scenes, the president was wooing moderate Republican
senators by appointing officials whom they supported and by sending
signals that he would stop obstructing Reconstruction. "The president," the
Chicago Tribune reported, "has been on his good behavior."
Finally, at the end of April, both sides began to sum up their cases. The
ailing Thaddeus Stevens, who spent most of the trial huddled under a
blanket, rose on wobbly legs to make his final statement. The case was
about Reconstruction, he said, about how the president had usurped
congressional power and helped to create new Confederate governments
in the South. Stevens denounced Johnson as a "wretched man" and a
"pettifogging political trickster," but then his strength gave out and he had to
sit down and let Butler read the rest of his speech.
The next day, while another prosecutor was delivering a long summation,
British novelist Anthony Trollope fell asleep in the gallery, much to the
amusement of the press corps.
Then the defense began its summations, and the president's lawyers more
than earned their $2,000 fees. They quibbled about the definition of "high
crimes and misdemeanors" and concluded that the president's actions did
not rise to that level. They said the Tenure of Office Act was
unconstitutional. They said that violating that act couldn't be an
impeachable offense because the act hadn't been passed when the
Constitution was adopted. Finally, in a delightful demonstration of the art of
legal hairsplitting, they claimed that Johnson could not be convicted of
removing Stanton from office but only of attempting to remove Stanton
from office. After all, Stanton had never left his office -- he was still
barricaded in his suite at the War Department.
As the speakers droned on, the Washington Star tracked the daily
fluctuations in the betting action. On May 2, the odds were 3 to 1 for
conviction. On May 5, the odds were 2 to 1 for acquittal. The next day,
the paper reported: "Today impeachment stock is as unaccountably up as
it was unaccountably down yesterday. The bulls have it."
On May 6, as prosecutor John Bingham prepared to deliver the final
summation of the trial, a false rumor swept the galleries that Sen. James
Grimes had died. Grimes was a Johnson backer, and Republicans in the
galleries began to sing gleefully: "Old Grimes is dead, that bad old man."
Justice Chase gaveled for order and then Bingham began his speech. It
was a full-blown barn-burner. "We stand this day pleading for the violated
majesty of the law, by the graves of half a million martyred hero-patriots
who made death beautiful by the sacrifice of themselves for their country."
After much florid rhetoric, he spoke the last words of the trial: "Before man
and God, he is guilty!"
Now it was time to decide the question -- except the senators insisted on
discussing the matter in secret sessions for a few days.
Finally, on May 16, 1868, they were ready to vote.
Close Call
The galleries and the Senate floor were packed but the room was
absolutely silent as Chief Justice Chase called the roll. Conviction required
a two-thirds majority, which meant 36 of the 54 senators, and everyone
knew that the vote would be close.
"Mr. Senator Anthony, how say you?" Chase asked.
"Guilty," said Henry Anthony, a Rhode Island Republican.
"Mr. Senator Bayard, how say you?"
"Not guilty," said James Bayard, a Delaware Democrat.
Those votes were no surprise. Anthony and Bayard, like most of the
senators, had already announced their opinions. There were 35 certain
votes for conviction and three undecided. The first of the undecided was
William Pitt Fessenden, a Republican from Maine.
"Mr. Senator Fessenden, how say you?" Chase asked.
"Not guilty."
Across the country, crowds packed newspaper offices to get news of each
vote as it came over the telegraph. In the White House, Johnson also
learned of each vote by a separate telegram.
The next undecided voter was Sen. Joseph Fowler. He was from
Tennessee, Johnson's home state, but he was a Republican who'd
frequently voted against the president.
"Mr. Senator Fowler, how say you?"
Fowler mumbled something that sounded like "guilty."
"Did the court hear his answer?" a senator called out.
Chase asked the question again.
"Not guilty," Fowler shouted.
Now it all came down to Edmund G. Ross. A Kansas Republican, Ross
was new in office, having replaced a senator who had committed suicide in
1866. Ross disliked Johnson and voted against his Reconstruction policies.
He'd been seen as a certain vote for conviction until he sided with Johnson
supporters on some procedural motions. Since then, he'd been bombarded
by mail demanding that he vote to convict. But he worried that conviction
would damage the presidency forever. During the vote, he sat at his desk,
nervously ripping papers into strips. When his name was called, he stood
up and the strips fell to the floor.
"Mr. Senator Ross, how say you?"
"Not guilty."
It was over. The president was saved by a single vote. His lawyers
sprinted to the White House to bring him the news. Johnson wept with joy.
He called for whiskey, poured shots for his lawyers, and they celebrated
with a silent toast.
Back in the Capitol, the senators elbowed their way through a rowdy
crowd. "Fessenden, you villainous traitor!" somebody yelled. Fessenden
said nothing and kept moving.
Too ill to walk, Thaddeus Stevens was carried from the chamber in a
chair. Seething with rage, he glared down at the crowd. Someone asked
him what had happened.
"The country," he screamed, "is going to the Devil!" |
