ANDREW JOHNSON

17th President, 1865–1869

Historian: David O. Stewart

David Stewart spent many years as a trial and appellate lawyer arguing before juries, the US Senate, and the US Supreme Court before becoming an author and serving as president of the Washington Independent Review of Books. On July 19, 2018, he joined Q & A to discuss his book, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy.

Andrew Johnson was a hard man. He was intelligent. He pulled himself up from nothing; never attended school, even for a day, a totally self-made man.… He had a rather bad disposition. He was an angry man, and he was rigid, and those were qualities that served him terribly as president. He was smart, although self-educated. He knew the Constitution and understood laws. He had a lot of political experience, had held most positions you could hold in this country, and had been elected to most of them. So, there’s a good deal to admire in him. As president, his qualities probably would have been unfortunate any time, but at that moment in history, they were a terrible mismatch.

[He got his political start] in Greeneville in eastern Tennessee. He had opened a tailor shop and made a success of it, ran for local office—alderman, mayor, state senator—moved up the ladder, became a congressman and a senator. His moment of public attention was at the beginning of the Civil War when almost all of the congressmen and senators from the South left—they all went back to their home states. Tennessee did secede, although by a fairly close vote; they had a referendum, and it was reasonably close, but Johnson refused to leave the Senate, which did get attention: here was a Southerner who was remaining loyal to the Union.

His father died when he was very young; he was only three or four. He didn’t really grow up in the family much. He was apprenticed out at a very early age—nine or ten. He ran away from his master. He didn’t like being an apprentice.… His own family that he made with his wife was a little bit sad. His wife Eliza, while in the White House, never left her room. She came downstairs once for a grandchild’s birthday party. He would see her every day; he always would go visit her a couple of times during the day. He had a couple of sons who ended up badly. They became alcoholics and didn’t end well. His daughters were quite admirable, had families of their own, and one served as his [official] hostess in the White House, and they were admired even by people who didn’t like Johnson.

Johnson had been military governor of Tennessee, appointed by President Lincoln.… In the 1864 election, Lincoln feared that he would lose. The war had dragged on a long time. Lincoln was being opposed by a war hero, General [George] McClellan. So, Lincoln did what we would call today a move to the middle. He figured that all the good abolitionists and Republicans had to vote for him; they certainly couldn’t vote for the Democrats. So, he wanted somebody to appeal to Democrats. At that time, Republicans were the liberal figures and Democrats were the conservative ones. So, he reached out to Johnson, whom he didn’t know particularly well, as a Southern Democrat who was pro- Union and would broaden his appeal. And it [either] worked, or else Lincoln would have won anyway, but he did win. It wasn’t a smashing win. He got 55 percent of the vote, and that’s only in the loyal states. The Southern states, of course, weren’t voting for him, and he wouldn’t have gotten any votes there. So, I think Lincoln had been right as a politician to be concerned. And then, Lincoln was assassinated just six weeks into his second term as president, and Johnson, who was not especially well prepared for the job, was president.

Democrat Andrew Johnson, shown here in an 1860 photo, was chosen by Republican Abraham Lincoln to be his 1864 running mate as a conciliatory move; he became president upon Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Courtesy Library of Congress

Johnson did start on the wrong foot. He wasn’t feeling well in the morning of Lincoln’s inauguration. He got to the Capitol; he had an attack of nerves, which was odd. He’d been in the Senate… for years, and he’d done an immense amount of public speaking. And so, he asked for some whiskey. The account we have is that he downed three tumblers full of whiskey, which even for a heavy drinker would have an impact in a short period of time. So, he went out to take his oath of office, and everybody in the Senate chamber could tell he was drunk. He spoke erratically. He said things that didn’t make a lot of sense. It was a humiliating experience, so humiliating, frankly, that he left town for at least a week thereafter and stayed in Silver Spring, Maryland. When he came back into town, he was very invisible until the time of the assassination just because it had been such a mortifying experience.

When the assassination occurred in April of 1865, Johnson was in his hotel room. The assassination was a larger plot than just killing Lincoln. They sent someone to kill Secretary of State William Seward, and they sent someone to kill Johnson. Johnson was fortunate that the man who went to kill him, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve and didn’t even knock on the door; he had a couple of drinks in the hotel and then vamoosed up to Gaithersburg, Maryland. So, Johnson slept through it until he was awakened in the middle of the night with the terrible news. He was sworn in as president the next morning when official word came that Lincoln was dead.

Johnson initially struggled to find his feet. Seward was terribly wounded in the attempt on his life and was not available to him. Johnson started out being very vengeful in his public statements. He made it clear he wanted to hang a lot of Confederate leaders.

When Seward recovered and came back, it appears he persuaded Johnson that this was not the right public stance to take. At that point, Johnson did a 180 and came around to the view that we should be very charitable towards the South. Of course, that was what Lincoln had said, but it translated into actions that surprised and upset many Northerners and Lincoln would have found very odious.

Johnson had no problem with slavery. He owned slaves. In his first year in office,… former Confederates would come to him for pardons—something he spent several months doing was meeting with rich former Southerners who could pay for their pardons—and he often told them, “If you’d only listened to me and stayed in the Union, we’d still have slavery.” And he thought that would be great. Underlying it, to be honest, he had very racist attitudes, which came out several times in public statements and also in his policies. He really did think that the freed slaves were a lesser form of human, and it shaped everything, and it was tragic.

Johnson’s White House anteroom would be described as filled with Southerners there to pay court. He had been a poor boy, and he always had a great class resentment towards the aristocracy of the South. And here, all of these people he pretty much hated all his life were crawling to him, came to him on their knees [seeking pardons], and the accounts are he enjoyed that tremendously.

[As he takes office,] we’re still winding up the war. There’s a significant Confederate Army. Joe Johnston’s army is still in the field, and [General Robert E.] Lee has surrendered just days before, so Johnson has to make some peace. There’s another group in Texas, which takes a little longer to get to surrender and give up their arms. Johnson has a lot of struggles with Ulysses Grant over the treatment of the former Confederates. Grant gave his word to the soldiers that they would be treated benevolently, wouldn’t be punished for their role in the war, if they surrendered. Johnson didn’t want to do that. He did want to hang some of them, but Grant succeeded with [changing Johnson’s mind].

Then the first order of business was what to do with the [former Confederate] states. We had no state governments down there. The South was an occupied hostile territory. Congress was not in session. This is an era when Congress only sat four or five months a year through the winter and into the spring. Johnson went ahead and began reconstituting state governments on his own. Lincoln had done that with… Louisiana during the war, but Lincoln had war powers then.… It wasn’t clear at all that Johnson had the power to do this. It was very controversial because what happened was that former Confederates were elected and took control of the new governments. They were the natural leadership of the area, so you had lots of former generals and former Confederate congressmen and cabinet members who were now leading their states, and they managed to get elected as US congressmen and senators.

Reconstruction, in concept, was rebuilding the Union.… Over half a million people were killed [in the war]. Comparable numbers today would be thirty million, in terms of the proportion of the population. It was an immense period of bloodletting, and the result was a tremendous amount of hate between people. Something had to be done to fix that and also to create a government structure that didn’t allow for slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been adopted. Slavery had been abolished. And that’s all Johnson wanted to do. He wanted to have state governments established,… beyond that, his view was they were on their own; that was what the Constitution intended from 1787, and that was what was right. If they wished to discriminate against black people, if they wish to disadvantage the freedmen in any way they chose, it was their business, and they were answerable to their own voters.

[The Thirteenth Amendment had been adopted December 6, 1865, the end of his first year as president.] He didn’t oppose it. The Fourteenth Amendment, [the due process and equal protection amendment, was adopted July of 1868, in his last year]. He opposed that. He thought it was dangerous. Most of the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment—we know about equal protection and due process of law, which is section one—but there were a couple of provisions that dealt with the former Confederates and how we were going to structure our politics now that we were reunited. Johnson disliked those provisions. He thought they were too restrictive and not good for the South.

Johnson’s friends [in the capital] were Democrats and Southerners. [William] Seward had been a prominent Republican leader but threw in with Johnson very early. It’s a complicated story about Secretary of State Seward because he had been seen as a great abolitionist leader, and then he turns out to be essentially the helpmate of this very anti-freedmen president.

[Of] his adversaries, the most significant one, and the one I found most compelling, was Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania. He was a congressman, a fascinating guy. He had been born with a club foot and had to overcome that at a time when being disabled was a real mark. You were thought to have the mark of the devil on you. He was incredibly smart, tough, and totally devoted to the causes of underdogs.… People were afraid of Thaddeus Stevens. They were afraid to debate with him in Congress because he was so quick, he was so incisive, and he’d just leave them gasping on the House floor with a quick repartee, which would make everybody else laugh. So, Stevens was a powerful guy within Congress simply by force of personality and talent. He was devoted to the abolitionist cause. He was an inveterate hater of slavery, and he believed in equality in all things. He was, in many ways, the heart and soul of the Reconstruction effort built in Congress and, ultimately, the impeachment effort.

Edwin Stanton was another tough guy, very talented, smart lawyer; Lincoln had called Stanton his “Mars,” for the god of war, as his secretary of war. He was incredibly productive and efficient and effective as the senior military bureaucrat, a civilian bureaucrat in the military world. I think that was part of [his troubles with Johnson], that Stanton was just good at his job. I also think Stanton was probably just flat out rude much of the time. He was a difficult man. He didn’t put up with fools at all, and he probably managed to intimidate Johnson a little bit, which wasn’t easy.… By the time Johnson wanted to get rid of Stanton, he was at war with Congress, and it became the political flashpoint that led ultimately to the impeachment effort.

Ulysses Grant was general in chief of the army. A real crisis developed because the army was in the South trying to enforce all of these laws that Congress had adopted over Johnson’s vetoes. [Their mission was] to protect the freedmen, to take care of the ex-slaves, make sure they weren’t shot down in the street, to give them the vote, to give them a voice in their governments. The generals who were in charge often would intervene to enforce the law, and as soon as they did, Johnson would toss them out. He ended up removing four of the five who had initially been appointed. This upset Grant tremendously, both because he thought they were good officers doing what they should do, but he also had become a believer in ending slavery.… Stanton was also infuriated by [Johnson’s removal of the generals]. So, both Stanton and Grant developed a program of resisting Johnson from within. They were, at some level, profoundly disloyal to their president.

The Tenure of Office Act was enacted to be in Johnson’s way. It was the brainchild of Thaddeus Stevens. They knew in Congress, the Republicans who were opposing Johnson, that he was scheming against them and that he was firing lots of patronage employees. This was an era of tremendous patronage. The Republicans had won the 1864 elections, so all of the officeholders were theirs, and he was replacing them with Democrats, which was driving them nuts; the whole point of winning was to get the jobs. So, they adopted the Tenure of Office Act to make it hard for Johnson to [fire appointees]. It focused on this ellipsis in the Constitution. The Constitution is very clear how you appoint these senior officials, a cabinet official—the president appoints, and the Senate confirms—but it doesn’t say anything about how you get rid of them.… Stevens is smart enough to know that there was a respectable argument that it was constitutional to have Senate approval required for removing a senior officer. That was what the Tenure of Office Act required. It also created a criminal penalty for violations of it and then added, just because Stevens was a good lawyer, that it was a high crime and misdemeanor. This is the language from the impeachment clause of the Constitution. So, it was a trap that was set for Johnson. Johnson was way too smart not to know that. He knew that if he fired Stanton, which he ultimately did, [he’d be caught]. So, he first tried to remove him under the procedures of the act, and then he suspended Stanton. He sent the notice to the Senate and asked them to confirm his removal. The Senate didn’t. Johnson stewed about that for a time and then just removed him.

There had been efforts to impeach Johnson before.… The second time was a more serious one in the fall of 1867. It was led by Republicans, of course, who thought his policies and his performance in office was a disaster, and so, they wrote that up as impeachment articles. It was reported out by the committee that heard it, the Judiciary Committee. Then on the floor, the minority member of the committee made a very powerful argument that if we remove Johnson because we disagree with him, we’re never going to stop having to argue about whether we should remove the president. There has to be some substance. There has to be something specific. There has to be a crime.… It was a persuasive argument for the congressmen, and so that effort failed by a pretty wide margin. So, they’d been to the well twice, but then when he fired Stanton, Stevens and others think, “OK, we’ve got him now. He violated the statute. We’ve got a crime. It says it’s a high crime and misdemeanor. Now we can move against him.”

… The House votes to impeach him and remove him from office without having specific articles in front of them. Everybody knows what they’re going to charge, but they haven’t written them up yet; they move so fast; they’re so angry. And a couple of days later, Stevens presents the articles of impeachment. They are amended, and then he adds another one at the end. The House proceedings lasted no more than four days. It was very fast.

There were no hearings. It went right to the Senate. This is Thaddeus Stevens; he did stuff; they got it done. In the Senate everything slowed down, and it should have. They gave both sides: you have the House managers, and then Johnson appoints a number of defense lawyers starting with his attorney general, Henry Stanbery. The Senate gives them time to prepare their case. Through this whole period, you have a tremendous amount of publicity, as you can only imagine. It takes about six weeks before the trial begins.

Thaddeus Stevens was an old fellow at that time, in his seventies and sick. People watched him decline. The newspapers were on a death watch describing how bad he looked every day [of the trial], and he really couldn’t perform in the courtroom. He was just too weak. The man who took control of the case was a first-term congressman from Massachusetts named Ben Butler, who was a colorful, but not a great, character. He had had a checkered career as a political general during the war; he was known as “Beast” Butler for the way he treated the occupation of New Orleans. His military achievements were modest at best. He was a clever lawyer, but he was not a judicious lawyer, and I think he tried the case badly, speaking as a trial lawyer.

They addressed the Eleventh Article [of impeachment] first.… I think the House managers decided that their best chance was on the Eleventh Article, which was what I call a catch-all article; it included a bunch of allegations. Very tough sort of thing to defend against, including the Tenure of Office claim concerning Stanton. But it also contained some of the more generic accusations that Johnson really was tearing up the country and disregarding Congress. Johnson had called this Congress illegitimate because the Southern states were not represented. They felt that because it had multiple accusations in it, they might pick up the most support with it, and they fell one vote short.

[Benjamin Curtis, a former Supreme Court justice, defended Andrew Johnson.] That was powerful. He’d left the court, but he had been a justice and was from Massachusetts. Everybody knows what that means during Civil War times; it’s the abolitionist stronghold. But even more powerfully, he had been a dissenter in the Dred Scott case, which was one of the causes of the Civil War, when the Supreme Court upheld slavery in [that] decision in 1857. Simply having him stand up on behalf of Johnson was a powerful statement that Johnson had adherents who were not crazy pro-slavery people. He also made a very strong legal argument on the Tenure of Office Act. He said, “I don’t think it’s constitutional. The president didn’t either. But you don’t have to decide that. All you have to decide is, did he have good reason to think it was unconstitutional. Even if you think that’s the wrong position, is it rational? Is it possible? And if it’s just possible, then his actions were justified.”

It was a party-line vote. The Republicans voted to impeach, and the Democrats did not. In the Senate… they needed a two-thirds majority to convict him and remove him from office, so he needed nineteen Senate votes to be acquitted. [The effort fell short by one vote.]

[The Senate voted on two more of the eleven articles, Article 2 and then Article 3, which had the same outcomes.] Johnson was pleased. He wasn’t ecstatic; it wasn’t his makeup, really. He didn’t go into public and trumpet it. He had to pull in his horns a bit. One of the things that people at the time noted was during the three months or so of the impeachment process, he was not anywhere near as aggressive or controversial as he had been. He was reassuring people, “I’m not going to do terrible things.” He had appointed a very inappropriate guy to succeed Stanton as secretary of war, so he overruled himself and appointed a Union general, John Schofield, who was acceptable and pretty presentable. So, Johnson was calibrating his behavior in a way that made him less threatening and less disturbing. The rest of his presidency, he became a lame duck very fast. He didn’t behave great for the rest of it, but his powers were pretty limited by then. The impeachment proceeding had clipped his wings.

Johnson hoped to run [again in 1868] as the Democrat candidate. He knows the Republicans will not nominate him. He thinks he’s done what Democratic voters wanted him to do, and if you have the Southern states back in the Union, he thinks he’s got a shot. [He lost on the first ballot.] Republicans wanted to have Grant. Grant is not a wildly politically ambitious guy. He’d never been in politics, and he’d had a humble career until the Civil War started. But Grant is frankly appalled by Johnson as president and has come to terms with the fact that he is going to be a candidate for the office [and ultimately wins the election that year].

John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage,… it’s terrible, the chapter on Johnson. The chapter on Johnson should be expunged from every library in the country. It focuses on a fellow named Edmund Ross, who was credited with casting the single vote that saved Johnson’s tail. It calls Ross’s vote the most heroic moment in American history. I actually thought… that Ross’s vote was purchased. Saving Johnson was not a heroic moment.… [In all, seven radical Republicans voted to acquit.] One, Ross went back to Kansas. He ended up as territorial governor of New Mexico for the Democrats, which was where he probably belonged. A number of the other [acquitting Republican] senators ended up resigning because they decided not to pursue their careers. They were not broken men in any way. This melodramatic story was good theater, but not accurate.

I wanted to write a book about [the Johnson impeachment] case because… this case made no sense. I couldn’t figure out who was arguing about what. You read the legal arguments, and they’re clear on their own, but they don’t tend to fit the facts of what’s going on. I finally concluded that it was sufficiently confusing that it wasn’t going to help either side in my case, so I went past it and just moved on to things that mattered to me. But it always bothered me. Here was this huge moment in our history, this presidential impeachment, that I figured if I didn’t understand it, most people didn’t understand it very well.