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THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL 
 
 op 
 PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON 
 
,££§& 
 
THE 
 
 IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL 
 
 OF 
 
 ANDREW JOHNSON 
 
 Seventeenth President of the United States 
 
 A HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID MILLER DEWITT 
 
 Neto ¥orfe 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1903 
 
 t ' , I - ; . 
 
Copyright 1903, by 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and elcctrotyped, March, 1903 
 
 5- 
 
 PREBB OF 
 
 THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY, 
 
 LANCASTER, PA. 
 
 # 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The author, by permission of Martha J. Patterson, 
 a daughter of Andrew Johnson, since deceased, has 
 had the benefit of examining, among the other private 
 papers of the ex-President, a series of scrap-books com- 
 piled by Col. William Gr. Moore, one of- the private 
 secretaries of President Johnson, from documents, 
 periodicals and newspapers of the day; and, for the 
 few statements made, and papers, letters and telegrams 
 cited or referred to, in the following work, not other- 
 wise authenticated, these books are the authority. 
 
 D. M. D. 
 
 December 1, 1902. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 1865-6. 
 
 SECTION I. The Problem of Reconstruction 1 
 
 SECTION II. The Meeting of the Thirty-ninth Con- 
 gress 22 
 
 SECTION III. The First Veto 42 
 
 SECTION IV. The Struggle for the Two-thirds 59 
 
 SECTION V. Colorado, the Fourteenth Amendment and 
 
 Tennessee 87 
 
 SECTION VI. The Appeal to the Country 10S 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Preparations for Impeachment . , 135 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Tenure-of-office and Reconstruction Acts 180 
 
 CHAPTER III.. 
 Edwin M. Stanton 232 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Defeat of the First Impeachment and the Reinstate- 
 ment of Stanton 288 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Impeachment of the President , . 339 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Trial of the President , 404 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The Acquittal ... 515 
 
 CONCLUSION 597 
 
 vii 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL 
 
 OF 
 
 PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 SECTION I 
 
 The Problem op Reconstruction 
 
 The impeachment of President Johnson was the 
 culmination of a struggle between the executive and 
 legislative branches of the government of the United 
 States over the problem of what came to be called 
 Reconstruction— a struggle which, ante-dating John- 
 son's own administration, troubled the administration 
 of his lamented predecessor. At an early period of 
 the civil war, in portions of certain insurgent states, 
 which were swept clear of the enemy and contained 
 an appreciable number of adherents to the cause of 
 the Union, frameworks of government were set up, 
 and" were recognized as such by the authorities at 
 Washington. The refusal of western Virginia to 
 abide by the ordinance of secession necessitated the 
 evocation of a phantom legislature for old Virginia 
 (sneered at by Sumner after its work was done as 
 
2 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "the common council of Alexandria"),* to give the 
 consent required by the Constitution to her dismem- 
 berment; and, in consequence, the old Dominion was 
 represented in 1863 by four senators in the Senate of 
 the United States as well as by two in the Senate of 
 the Confederate States. Tennessee, likewise, was rep- 
 resented in both Houses of Congress; in the Senate 
 by Andrew Johnson until he was appointed her mili- 
 tary governor in March, 1862; in the House until 
 March, 1863; and Louisiana sent two representatives 
 from recovered districts, who were admitted to seats 
 in February, 1863. . 
 
 But, notwithstanding these precedents set with vir- 
 tual unanimity, when President Lincoln sent to the 
 Congress his annual message of December, 1863, out- 
 lining the plan of reconstruction he purposed to fol- 
 low, together with his proclamation of amnesty putting 
 the plan into actual operation, the radical wing of the 
 dominant party inaugurated an opposition so extensive 
 and so fierce as, at one time, to put in jeopardy his 
 re-election, if not his renomination. The plan had 
 two features: first, amnesty to all insurgents (with a 
 few specified exceptions) who would take an oath to 
 support the Constitution, the Union and the acts of 
 Congress and proclamations of the President concern- 
 ing slavery ; second, recognition by the Executive -De- 
 partment of the United States of any republican form 
 of government which might be established in any of 
 the eleven seceded states by insurgents who should 
 have taken the amnesty oath and were qualified voters 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 38th Cong., p. 846. 
 
THE PROBLEM OP RECONSTRUCTION 3. 
 
 in 1860: provided they were not less in number than 
 one-tenth of the votes cast in the state that year. The 
 opposition, passing by the amnesty as beyond their 
 reach, fastened upon the other feature of the plan, 
 seeing that, without the co-operation of the legislative 
 department in admitting senators and representatives, 
 it was impossible of being carried out. Indeed, they 
 declared that the whole matter of reconstruction rested 
 exclusively within the jurisdiction of the legislative 
 branch, and that it was not much better than usurpa- 
 tion on the part of the executive to initiate, or meddle 
 in any way with, the process. Lincoln, however, per- 
 sisted in pushing his plan, and governments were estab- 
 lished in the states of Arkansas and Louisiana, whose 
 delegates were admitted by the National Convention 
 which renominated Lincoln and, for Vice-President, 
 nominated Andrew Johnson of Tennessee despite the 
 vehement protest of Thaddeus Stevens that he was an 
 alien. In the last hours of the session, the Congress 
 sent to the President a reconstruction measure which 
 the majority had concocted with difficulty because of 
 dissensions in its ranks, but the President, withholding 
 his consent, adopted the extraordinary expedient of 
 submitting the congressional plan to the insurgent 
 states not yet reorganized, for them to accept if they 
 preferred it to his own. Lincoln's triumph in the 
 election was followed by the reappearance of senators 
 and representatives from Arkansas and Louisiana and 
 the rapid reorganization of civil government in Ten- 
 nessee; and nothing prevented the readmission of the 
 two former states, to be silently followed by the read- 
 
4 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 mission of the latter, but the filibustering tactics of 
 Sumner, Wilson and Wade, with three other radical 
 senators, aided by an adroit move of Sherman that 
 prevented a vote at the close of the short session.* 
 
 The sudden collapse of the rebellion so soon after 
 the second inauguration and the dispersion of the 
 Congress, left Lincoln, for the moment, absolute master 
 of the whole field; and, during the few weeks he had 
 yet to live, he made no uncertain record of what he 
 meant to do. On the eleventh of April, 1865, in his last 
 speech to the people of Washington he suspended his 
 congratulations on the surrender of Lee to commend 
 his Louisiana experiment, announce the unanimity of 
 his Cabinet on his reconstruction policy and express 
 a modest hope that suffrage might be granted to the 
 intelligent, and the Union soldiers, among the negroes. 
 Once more, on the fourteenth, at the last meeting of his 
 Cabinet, he directed the extension of his plan so as 
 to take in the recovered state of North Carolina, and, 
 with words of charity even for the chiefs of the over- 
 thrown Confederacy on his lips, he went forth unwit- 
 tingly to his death. 
 
 The cessation of the war and the disbandment of the 
 armies of the Confederacy widened the scope of the 
 problem from portions comparatively small of four 
 of the insurgent states containing minorities compara- 
 tively feeble, to the area of the whole eleven with their 
 entire population. The struggle, in consequence, be- 
 came much more formidable and vital under Johnson, 
 and the problem, ceasing to be speculative or experi- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 38th Cong., pp. 1107-11, 1129. 
 
THE PKOBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 5 
 
 mental in any degree, demanded an immediate and 
 practicable solution. It is highly improbable that even 
 Lincoln, with all the prestige with which his re-election 
 and the suppression of the rebellion had crowned him, 
 could have extended his plan over the entire subju- 
 gated section without causing a dangerous if not fatal 
 schism in his party. And Andrew Johnson was not 
 Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had been a Republican 
 from the origin of that party and twice chosen its 
 leader. Johnson had been a life-long Democrat and 
 slave-holder. Nothing but his gallant stand in the 
 Senate, when solitary and alone he faced his colleagues 
 from the South in denouncing secession as treason, 
 could have redeemed such a record in the eyes of Re- 
 publicans, and it was only his subsequent phenomenal 
 course in armed opposition to the rebellion that brought 
 about his nomination for the Vice-Presidency as a 
 shrewd stroke to secure the support of the War Demo- 
 crats of the North and the Union men of his state and 
 section. He came to the presidency under the red 
 cloud of the assassination — a crime that exasperated the 
 Northern people to a vindictiveness reaching the point 
 of frenzy. By the secessionists he was hated as an 
 apostate from his own party, a traitor to his own sec- 
 tion and an oppressor of his own state. The leaders 
 of the party of his adoption he had disgusted by a 
 scandalous exhibition of himself at his inauguration 
 as Vice-President. Lincoln, the radical wing of his 
 party had been most reluctant to assail, and the ma- 
 jority appeared content to follow his lead. Not so 
 with Johnson. At first, indeed, because of his fierce 
 
6 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 denunciations of treason and traitors, many influential 
 radicals were inclined to rejoice at his accession. The 
 day after Lincoln's death, the committee on the con- 
 duct of the war waited upon him and amid their con- 
 gratulations, senator Wade was heard to exclaim: 
 "Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there 
 will he no more trouble in running the government."* 
 But such a burst of feeling, by its very nature, could 
 not but be transitory. No threats to make treason 
 odious would avail to condone an independent policy 
 on the far more vital question of reconstruction; and 
 it needed no inspired prophet to foretell that, if John- 
 son followed Lincoln's plan, the dominant party in 
 the Congress would open a fight upon him compared 
 with which the preceding struggle was but a skirmish. 
 The pressing question was: How shall the work of 
 the soldier be completed by the restoration of the 
 Union for which he fought! To this question there, 
 were two answers logically coherent. One — which we 
 may call the constitutional solution— had for its basis 
 the proposition that, as long as the Constitution itself 
 endures, every one of the United States is indestruc- 
 tible either by the acts of its people or by the power 
 of the federal government; that the territory known 
 by the historical name of a particular state— e. g., 
 South Carolina or Virginia— having a definite geo- 
 graphical boundary, must ever be known by that name 
 and described by that boundary (unless under an ex- 
 press provision of the Federal Constitution the state 
 consent to its own dismemberment) ; that the sover- 
 
 * Julian's Political Recollections, p. 257. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 7 
 
 eignty of every single state over its own affairs is 
 immovably resident in its people and cannot be for- 
 feited to tbe other states or to the general government 
 ( whatever may be tbe case witb a foreign power) by 
 any act of its people; tbat tbe general government has 
 tbe power to enforce upon tbe citizens of any state 
 only tbat supremacy delegated to it by tbe states, and 
 wben tbat is done tbe power is exhausted; and tbat 
 no resistance of the people of a state— much less of a 
 portion of them— can give the federal government 
 any right to go beyond such enforcement and invade 
 those functions of sovereignty resident in the state or 
 the people, which neither has ever delegated or can 
 ever forfeit. Granting these premises it followed, 
 that, as soon as the insurrection of the inhabitants of 
 any state was suppressed or was abandoned and the 
 federal government had replaced its officers, retaken 
 its property and set in motion the enforcement of its 
 laws; its task was accomplished. The rehabilitation 
 of the state itself, if rehabilitation can be said to be 
 necessary at all, was the exclusive work of the people 
 of the state ; they were to bring back the state into its 
 constitutional orbit from which the illegitimate attrac- 
 tion of secession, for the moment, caused it to swerve. 
 This solution was the only one in the mind of the 
 Northern people at tbe outbreak of tbe war. It in- 
 spired the letters of Seward to our ministers abroad. 
 It underlay the pledge the two Houses of Congress 
 made after tbe disaster at Bull Eun. It was tbe ideal 
 of Lincoln before the Emancipation Proclamation, and 
 after with the single modification made necessary by 
 
8 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 that paper. General Sherman took it for granted 
 when he stipulated with General Johnston that the 
 "Executive of the United States" should "recognize" 
 "the several State Governments" on their officers and 
 legislators "taking the oath to the TJ. S. Constitution." 
 
 The other strictly logical solution — which may be 
 called the extra-constitutional— was based upon the 
 proposition that as soon as the insurrection of the 
 Southern people assumed proportions of sufficient mag- 
 nitude to entitle its participants to the rights of belli- 
 gerents, the contest became a civil war between two 
 de facto governments; and the Southern states, being 
 subjugated by the power of the federal government, 
 became conquered lands and people, with no right to 
 name, boundaries, territory, much less statehood. 
 That, therefore, the United States government might 
 rule over these overthrown states as one wide waste 
 or as eleven distinct territories, as the government 
 might choose, and, at any future period, might admit 
 them to the Union as states, with name, boundaries 
 and constitutions such as the conqueror might pre- 
 scribe; or the government might hold them by the 
 naked power of the sword until, having been carved 
 into the shape the federal authority deemed safe and 
 desirable, they might be dragged back into the Union, 
 like bound and mutilated captives by the heels. This 
 was the theory of Thaddeus Stevens, enunciated by 
 him as far back as 1862, and to which he had clung 
 through every vicissitude of the war. 
 
 Another and companion theory to this of Stevens 
 was thought by some to combine the advantage of 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 9 
 
 steering clear of the offensive dogma of state suicide 
 and still accomplishing the same result. This was 
 the Sumner theory, which the statesman of that name 
 had advocated from the outset of the war. It rested 
 for its sole basis on the alleged political equality of 
 the freedman with the white man. The inevitable re- 
 sult of the appeal to arms (so it was reasoned out) 
 must be the emancipation of the slave; and the in- 
 evitable result of emancipation must be the elevation 
 of the blacks to the same level of civil and political 
 rights as that occupied by the whites. Therefore, no 
 state government could be republican in form whose 
 constitution denied the freedmen the right of suffrage 
 simply on account of color or race; and, under the 
 provision of the Federal Constitution obligating the 
 United States to guarantee to every state a republican 
 form of government, the United States were bound 
 to see to it that no state should resume its relations 
 with the Union with a constitution imposing any re- 
 strictions of suffrage upon negroes which did not apply 
 equally to white men. 
 
 Now, no reasonable being could have expected An- 
 drew Johnson with his well-known antecedents to look 
 upon either the Stevens or the Sumner solution with 
 favor. In fact, his position on both had been already 
 publicly defined. As long before as November, 1863, 
 in a letter or telegram to Montgomery Blair, then 
 Postmaster-General,* he had warned President Lincoln 
 against "the proposition of states relapsing into terri- 
 tories and held as such, ' ' and he had, again and again, 
 
 * MePherson"s Hist, of Reconstruction, p. 199. 
 
10 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 while expressing a hope that the suffrage might ulti- 
 mately be granted to the literate and taxpayers among 
 the freedmen, declared that the regulation of the matter 
 was confided exclusively to every state for itself. Be- 
 sides, the Stevens theory had been pointedly condemned 
 by the convention that nominated him for Vice-Presi- 
 dent and by the people who elected him to that office; 
 and, at the period when he was called upon to act on 
 the problem, there can be no doubt that the majority 
 of the Republican party was opposed to negro suffrage 
 qualified or unqualified. On the other hand, the pre- 
 cedents established under Lincoln's administration in 
 setting up Union state governments in Virginia, Ten- 
 nessee, Arkansas and Louisiana over against the old 
 state governments gone over to secession, rendered 
 the constitutional solution impossible of complete appli- 
 cation. The assumption that the old state authorities 
 had incapacitated themselves by treason from partici- 
 pating in the work of restoration was universal. Lin- 
 coln may have had a lingering idea that these were the 
 most natural and logical starting points for the re-estab- 
 lishment of relations between the states and the Union, 
 when immediately after the capture of Richmond he 
 permitted the reassembling of the legislature of Vir- 
 ginia; but the rough repudiation of this movement by 
 Stanton caused him to beat a hasty retreat. And this 
 appears to have been the only departure, if departure 
 it was, from the general belief that secession had shat- 
 tered the governments of the seceding states and' va- 
 cated all their offices. This assumption, made without 
 reflection, was founded on error. Forfeiture of office 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 11 
 
 did not follow from the mere notoriety of the, offence 
 in the case of the authorities of a commonwealth, any 
 more than forfeiture of life and property in the case 
 of an individual. Conviction of treason must first 
 take place in the one case as in the other, and, as was 
 subsequently shown, conviction was impossible. But, 
 erroneous though it was, after the precedents made by 
 Lincoln during the war when a rival government was 
 the only recourse, the assumption was inevitable and 
 constituted a fundamental flaw in the plan of the Presi- 
 dent which his adversaries were not slow to take ad- 
 vantage of. What is the material difference, they 
 asked, between the suicide of a state and the suicide 
 of a state government? "It matters little," said 
 Stevens, whether they are "conquered territories" or 
 are "only dead as to all national and political action, 
 . . . whether they are not out of the Union but only 
 dead carcasses lying within the Union."* And, said 
 others, if the federal government had the right to inter- 
 fere to regulate the suffrage in the case of delegates 
 to a convention to make a new constitution for a state 
 that has forfeited the old, why not interfere to some 
 purpose and dictate the franchise provision 1 ? 
 
 At the Cabinet meeting held by President Lincoln 
 on Friday, the last day of his life, Stanton brought 
 forward a written project for the military government 
 of both Virginia and North Carolina as one district 
 until such time as elections for delegates to frame con- 
 stitutions for the respective states and the adoption 
 of those constitutions should have taken place. His 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 39th Cong., p. 72. 
 
12 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 avowed object in thus presenting his views at so early 
 a date was to satisfy the President that there was no 
 necessity to employ the old state structures as nuclei 
 of restoration. More than one member of the Cabinet 
 objected to the joining together of the two states in one 
 district, on the ground that such union ignored the 
 existing Pierpont government of Virginia. The Presi- 
 dent, yielding to the force of this objection, directed 
 the. Secretary of War to divide his project and submit 
 at a future meeting separate plans for the two states 
 —the one for Virginia to recognize the Pierpont gov- 
 ernment.* Johnson made no change of Cabinet offi- 
 cers, acquiescing even in the appointment of James 
 Harlan in the place of Usher, which was not to take 
 effect until the fifteenth of May, and, especially as there 
 was no alternative, he cannot be blamed for following 
 in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor. As 
 early as the day succeeding Lincoln's death— Sunday, 
 April 16th— at the first meeting of the Cabinet under 
 the new administration, the Secretary of War stated 
 that, in accordance with the directions of the late Presi- 
 dent, he had divided his project of government sub- 
 mitted the Friday before, but copies were not yet 
 ready; and on this ground the matter was postponed. t 
 In the meantime the governors of some of the lately 
 insurgent states, e. g., McGrath of South Carolina, 
 Brown of Georgia, Clark of Mississippi, had called 
 
 * " Lincoln and Johnson," art. in Galaxy of April, 1872, by Gideon 
 Welles, pp. 526-7; of. Stanton's testimony in Impeachment Investiga- 
 tion (1867), p. 401 et seq. 
 
 f Welles, ut sup. 
 
THE PROBLEM OP RECONSTRUCTION 13 
 
 their respective legislatures together to resume the 
 normal relation of their states to the Union as a con- 
 sequence of their submission to the event of the war. 
 Instead of welcoming these overtures, as under other 
 circumstances and influenced -by other considerations 
 might have been done, the Secretary of War ordered 
 the major generals in command in their respective 
 localities to disperse the legislatures and to drive the 
 governors out of office. 
 
 At length, on the fifth day of May, the President 
 directed Stanton to send copies of his divided project 
 to every member of the Cabinet, preparatory to a spe- 
 cial meeting called for Monday, the eighth, expressly for 
 its consideration; and, accordingly, on that date Stan- 
 ton's plan for the reconstruction of Virginia alone was 
 laid before the President and the Cabinet. In compli- 
 ance with the directions of the late President, the Sec- 
 retary recognized Francis Pierpont as governor; but 
 only to ' ' request him to take measures for the re-estab- 
 lishment of the state government and the election of 
 state officers"— in other words to accomplish the over- 
 throw of his own government — and that too under the 
 direction and control of the Department of War. In 
 respect to both these features, the project was entirely 
 altered by the action of the Cabinet. It was put into 
 the shape of an Executive Order of nine sections. The 
 first forbade any recognition of the Confederate or 
 old state government within the limits of Virginia; 
 the following seven provided for the resumption of 
 the federal authority, offices and property within the 
 state; and the last contained a full recognition of the 
 
14 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 government of Pierpont and pledged the aid of the 
 United States in all lawful measures he might take for 
 the extension and administration of the state govern- 
 ment throughout the geographical limits of such state ; 
 and in this shape the Executive Order was promulgated 
 next day. 
 
 So far no difficulty and little dissension had been 
 encountered. The case was one where, before the close 
 of hostilities, the loyal population had attempted with 
 more or less success to reconstruct the state. The 
 cases of Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee were very 
 similar and in such cases the present administration 
 had merely to follow precedents. An equivocal sug- 
 gestion had been made on two occasions, one under the 
 late, and one under the present, administration; but 
 its author on both occasions had given it but feeble 
 support and on both occasions it had been unanimously 
 rejected. But on the ninth was taken up the project 
 for the reconstruction of the state of North Carolina; 
 an entirely new case in the important respect that no 
 loyal government had been set up while the war was 
 in progress, and, consequently, either the old state gov- 
 ernment must be recognized or the work of reconstruc- 
 tion begun from the bottom. Consequently, it was 
 considered a measure of cardinal importance, to be fol- 
 lowed as a model in the reconstruction of the remaining 
 insurrectionary states. The draft submitted provided, 
 first, for the appointment of a military governor to 
 preserve order and to aid the inhabitants of the state 
 in holding an election of delegates to a convention to 
 frame a constitution. It then followed the Virginia 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 15 
 
 order in directing the several departments of the fed- 
 eral executive to proceed in the enforcement of the 
 federal authority throughout the state. Then came a 
 provision, on its face unobjectionable, that "loyal citi- 
 zens of the United States residing within the State of 
 North Carolina," on a day named, "may elect members 
 of a state convention." The Cabinet, after substi- 
 tuting the word "provisional" for the word "military" 
 in the title of the governor, proceeded to the consid- 
 eration of this apparently harmless clause. Welles, 
 the Secretary of the Navy, asked what was meant by 
 the phrase "loyal citizens," and, Stanton admitting 
 that the intent was to include blacks as well as whites, 
 at once the whole subject of negro suffrage was thrust 
 upon the board. It appears that as early as the even- 
 ing of Sunday, the sixteenth of April, a private con- 
 sultation was held by Stanton with such advanced 
 spirits of the Republican party as Sumner, Dawes and 
 Colfax, of which Welles happened to be an unwilling 
 witness for a part of the time, and at this meeting, in 
 face of the fact that under the foregoing administra- 
 tion it had been decided both by the Executive and 
 the Congress that suffrage was a matter exclusively 
 of state regulation, Stanton had allowed Sumner and 
 Colfax to interpolate into his project of government 
 the clause in question, possibly in the hope that the 
 ambiguous phrase might pass muster, leaving its con- 
 struction to himself, or, it may be, to test his colleagues 
 and the President on the subject it embraced. How- 
 ever, when its true intent was thus disclosed Stanton 
 deprecated any preliminary discussion and suggested 
 
16 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 that each member should say whether the negro should 
 vote in North Carolina. A vote was then taken, all the 
 members of the Cabinet being present but Seward, who 
 was still disabled from his wounds and illness. In 
 favor of retaining the provision were the Secretary of 
 War (Stanton), the Postmaster-General (Dennison), 
 and the Attorney-General (Speed). Against, on the 
 ground that the federal government had no power over 
 the question, were the Secretaries of the Treasury 
 (McCulloch), of the Navy (Welles) and of the Interior 
 (Usher)— an equal division. The President, express- 
 ing no opinion, took the paper and the meeting was 
 over.* 
 
 When the subject was again brought before the 
 Cabinet (May 24th), Seward was able to attend and 
 Harlan had taken the place of Usher. The President 
 laid before them his own plan of reconstruction, which 
 followed step by step that of Lincoln, differing only 
 in unimportant details. First, there was a proclama- 
 tion of general amnesty to all insurgents who should 
 take the oath prescribed in the paper, with the excep- 
 tion of certain high officers in the army and navy of 
 the late Confederacy and high civil officials in the Con- 
 federate and state governments and of all persons 
 who had voluntarily participated in the rebellion, the 
 value of whose property exceeded $20,000 — an excep- 
 tion not in Lincoln's proclamation and owing its inser- 
 tion to Johnson's belief that secession was the special 
 work of the men of wealth in the South. Second, a 
 
 * Welles, ut sup., and second paper in Galaxy for May, 1872, at p. 
 666. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 17 
 
 proclamation having particular reference only to the 
 state of North Carolina but designed to be a formal, 
 public, explanatory pronunciamento of the plan to be 
 followed as to all the other states in a similar condi- 
 tion. This paper appointed William W. Holden Pro- 
 visional Governor of the state and declared his duty 
 to be to prescribe rules for the assembling of a con- 
 vention "composed of delegates to be chosen by "that 
 portion of the people of the state who are loyal to the 
 United States, and no others, for the purpose of alter- 
 ing or amending the constitution thereof"; endowing 
 him with authority to enable such loyal people to re- 
 store the state to its constitutional relation with the 
 federal government and to present such a republican 
 form of government as will entitle the state to the 
 guarantee of the United States therefor. Then came 
 the decisive proviso— viz: that in choosing delegates 
 no person shall be qualified as an elector, or eligible 
 as a delegate, unless (1) he shall have taken the oath 
 prescribed by the Amnesty Proclamation, and (2) has 
 the qualifications prescribed by the constitution and 
 laws of North Carolina at the date of her secession. 
 The convention, however, or the legislature thereafter 
 assembled "will prescribe the qualifications of electors 
 and the eligibility of persons to office"— "a power the 
 people of the several states composing the Federal 
 Union have rightfully exercised from the origin of the 
 government to the present time."* 
 
 To this plan the Cabinet, so far as it appears, made 
 no objection. The Amnesty, the exceptions in which 
 
 * MePherson's Reconstruction, pp. 9, 11. 
 2 
 
18 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 were more sweeping than Lincoln's, no doubt, was 
 unanimously approved. Those members who on the 
 ninth seemed to favor the introduction of negro suffrage 
 in some shape or form, though they were now reinforced 
 by Harlan, made no remonstrance. Stanton, having 
 done his duty to his secret friends, thought he had 
 gone far enough in putting forward their ticklish pro- 
 posal and submitted without a word. He subsequently 
 testified before the Impeachment committee : ' ' The ob- 
 jection of the President to throwing the franchise open 
 to the colored people appeared to be fixed, and I think 
 every member of the Cabinet assented to the arrange- 
 ment as it was specified in the proclamation relating 
 to North Carolina."* 
 
 The proclamation in her case was followed at short 
 intervals by similar measures in the case of every one 
 of the six Southern states in the same situation, viz: 
 Mississippi on the 13th, Georgia and Texas on the 17th, 
 Alabama on the 21st, and South Carolina on the 30th 
 of June, and Florida on the 13th of July.f So that, 
 in less than two months, proceedings had been initiated 
 by the new administration for the complete restoration 
 of every, seceding state to the Union ; in the cases of 
 Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, by recog- 
 nizing the state governments raised up in the midst 
 of war and supported by Lincoln ; in the cases of the 
 remaining seven by setting forth the process by which 
 their people returning to loyalty might raise up gov- 
 ernments for themselves. During the fall, under the 
 
 * Impeachment Investigation (1867), p. 401. 
 ■(■ MePherson's Reconstruction, p. 12. 
 
THE PEOBLEM OP RECONSTRUCTION 19 
 
 guidance of provisional governors— Union men, more 
 or less of the type of Andrew Johnson— the citizens 
 of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama 
 and Mississippi (five of the seven states unrecon- 
 structed under Lincoln), having taken the oath with 
 hopeful unanimity, held conventions, annulled the 
 ordinances of secession ; then selected governors, mem- 
 bers of the legislature and representatives in Congress ; 
 inaugurated the new state governments; by their new 
 legislatures appointed senators of the United States, 
 and, with the exception of Mississippi, ratified the 
 thirteenth amendment to the federal Constitution abol- 
 ishing slavery. Irritating embarrassments, it is true, 
 were encountered by the administration. In one or 
 two states a reluctance was manifested to repudiate the 
 debt incurred in the support of the insurrection. Acts 
 were passed for the purpose of guarding the whites 
 against apprehended pauperism or savage outbreaks 
 of the blacks, which imperiled the newly-won freedom 
 and civil rights of the latter. There was a natural 
 disposition to lament the lost cause and to glorify its 
 leaders. Petitions were circulated for the repeal of 
 the test oath which stood in the way of those leaders 
 being admitted to seats in Congress, and, in some in- 
 stances, men were sent to the Senate or to the House 
 known to be incapacitated to serve. The broad scope 
 of the exceptions to the Amnesty frequently hindered 
 the process of reorganization, and, in some cases, 
 brought proceedings to a standstill. Special pardons 
 from Washington fell thick and fast. In short, it was 
 demonstrated now for the first time, as it continued 
 
20 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to be demonstrated years after this period, that it was 
 practicably impossible to carry on any kind of respec- 
 table government in these states without the help of 
 men who had been the leaders of their people in the 
 war. To William M. Sharkey, the provisional gov- 
 ernor of Mississippi whose convention was the earliest 
 held— meeting on the fourteenth of August— President 
 Johnson sent a telegram the next day, making a sugges- 
 tion which shows how fully awake he was to the designs 
 of the radical element of the party: 
 
 "If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons 
 of color who can read the Constitution of the United States 
 in English and write their names, and to all persons of 
 color who own real estate valued at not less than two hun- 
 dred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, you would 
 completely disarm the adversary and set an example the 
 other States will follow. 
 
 ' ' This you can do with perfect safety, and you thus place 
 the Southern States, in reference to free persons of color, 
 upon the same basis with the free States. I hope and 
 trust your convention will do this, and, as a consequence, 
 the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be 
 completely foiled in their attempt to keep the Southern 
 States from their relations to the Union by not accepting 
 their senators and representatives."* 
 
 If this shrewd suggestion had been adopted by the 
 Mississippi convention and followed, as in likelihood 
 it would have been, by the conventions of the other 
 states, the battle of reconstruction either would never 
 have been joined or victory would have perched 
 
 * McPherson's id., p. 19. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RECONSTRUCTION 21 
 
 on the banner of the Administration. It was identical 
 with the suggestion of Lincoln in his letter to Hahn, 
 the governor of Louisiana,* and with the hope he ex- 
 pressed in his last speech to the citizens of Washing- 
 ton. And there can he no doubt that on the issue pre- 
 sented by this overture the President represented the 
 bulk of the Republican party. But the convention re- 
 jected the proposition. The blacks in the state ex- 
 ceeded the whites in numbers by about 80,000. The 
 sense of their inferiority and of their utter unfitness 
 to participate in the government was too universal, the 
 dread of anarchy and bloodshed too pervading among 
 the members to permit of its acceptance. The other 
 conventions did nothing to revive it, and it was heard 
 of no more until a bitterer alternative waked it to life. 
 Notwithstanding these drawbacks, however, the great 
 task of the restoration of the eleven lately insurgent 
 states in constitutional subordination to the general 
 government may be said to have been accomplished, so 
 far as the executive department could accomplish it, 
 when the thirty-ninth Congress met in its first session : 
 four, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee, 
 under Lincoln, the remaining seven under Johnson; 
 Florida and Texas not quite ready, but sure to follow. 
 It remained for the legislative department to do its 
 part, and the Union for which the armies of the North 
 had fought would become once more an actuality. 
 
 * Id., note to p. 20. 
 
SECTION II 
 
 The Meeting oe the Thirty-Ninth Congress 
 
 The Bepublican members of Congress gathered to- 
 gether at Washington at the opening of the session, 
 in December, 1865, under the universal impression that 
 the supremacy of their party in the councils of the 
 nation was at stake. Of the fifty senators from the 
 twenty-five non-seceding states, thirty-nine were classed 
 as Republicans and but eleven as Democrats; and of 
 the one hundred and eighty-four representatives in 
 the House, one hundred and forty-one were classed as 
 Republicans and but forty-three as Democrats. Should 
 the twenty-two senators and fifty-eight representatives 
 from the eleven reconstructed states be allowed to take 
 their seats, the nominal majority of the party in power 
 in the Senate would be reduced from twenty-eight to 
 but six, and the nominal majority in the House from 
 ninety-eight to forty; provided all the recruits sided 
 with the Democrats. And that was precisely what it 
 was foreseen they would be bound to do with but very 
 few exceptions. All those not barred from taking their 
 seats by inability to take the iron-clad oath (as it was 
 called) were Union men of the Andrew Johnson type, 
 sure to gravitate to their old-time party, while those 
 who were so barred would return to their constituents 
 to be soon replaced by others exempt from the dis- 
 
 (22) 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 23 
 
 ability but no fonder of the Eepublican party. Be- 
 sides, tbe nominal majority was by no means stable. 
 Four senators heretofore classed as Republicans, Dixon, 
 Cowan, Doolittle and Norton, were avowed supporters 
 of the President's policy and others were suspected of 
 leaning that way, while there was a growing contingent 
 in the House whose orthodoxy was more or less in 
 doubt. In a word, the dominating motive of the op- 
 position to the Lincoln-Johnson plan of reconstruction 
 was the conviction that its success would wreck the 
 Eepublican party, restore the Democrats to power and 
 bring back the days of Southern supremacy and North- 
 ern vassalage. As Thad. Stevens with his customary 
 frankness said in his first speech at this session: "With 
 the basis unchanged, the eighty-three southern mem- 
 bers, with the Democrats that will in the best times- 
 be elected from the North, will always give them a 
 majority in Congress and in the Electoral College- 
 They will at the very first election take possession of 
 the White House and the halls of Congress."* And 
 the most exasperating feature of the whole perplexing 
 situation was that this catastrophe (to the minds of 
 the entire majority the most sweeping they could con- 
 template) was being brought about by an Executive 
 of their party's own choice. The President with his 
 Cabinet appeared to be pressing on with headlong 
 eagerness a restoration of the Union which could not 
 but prove fatal to the ascendency of the party which 
 had borne the heat and burden of administration dur- 
 ing the war, a result which the President, supported 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 39th Cong., p. 74. 
 
24 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 by his old-time party associates, seemed to regard with 
 the utmost equanimity. 
 
 Under these trying circumstances, the Republican 
 members of the House met in caucus on the Saturday 
 evening before the meeting of Congress to formulate 
 a plan of opposition, and, in the absence of Henry 
 Winter Davis, who had not been re-elected, Thaddeus 
 Stevens, by tacit consent, at once assumed the leader- 
 ship. This man was probably the most remarkable 
 of the time. In his seventy-fourth year, his once stal- 
 wart form was enfeebled not only by age but by dis- 
 ease. His cadaverous countenance was surmounted 
 by a brown wig, and from under beetling brows flashed 
 eyes whose fire the flight of years seemed to have made 
 only the more intense. A cripple from birth, one of 
 his legs terminating in a mere bunch of flesh, his 
 deformity, it is likely, had embittered his spirit. 
 Migrating in the dawn of manhood from Vermont to 
 Pennsylvania, he had spent the greater part of his life 
 on the southern border, and, being a lawyer of emi- 
 nence, he had been often brought in contact with the 
 slave flying for freedom from the adjoining state. His 
 was a soul easily set on fire by any instance of cruelty 
 and oppression coming within his observation, and he 
 learned early to pity the slave with a consuming pity 
 and to hate his master with a consuming hate. Having 
 been an abolitionist of the most uncompromising type 
 before there was an abolition party at all, he hailed the 
 advent of the war as the death-knell of what he branded 
 as the Satanic Institution. The representative of the 
 congressional district of James Buchanan since 1858, 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 25 
 
 lie had never swerved for a moment from his view of 
 the contest. In the dark hour of the Bull Run defeat, 
 he refused to join in the congressional pledge that the 
 war was not a war of abolition or subjugation, and his 
 career from that hour to the present had been one in- 
 cessant effort to wring from his party a repudiation of 
 this unanimous but, as he denounced it, craven resolve. 
 He was for universal, uncompensated emancipation 
 long before Lincoln was forced to concede it, and no 
 pleading of his party associates could restrain him 
 from showering the coarsest vituperation on the 
 tenderness with which the President approached this 
 institution of his deepest abhorrence. He was the 
 open advocate of wholesale and indiscriminate confis- 
 cation of the lands of the insurgents and their distribu- 
 tion among the neighboring f reedmen. Though kindly 
 to individuals with whom he came in personal asso- 
 ciation and by nature not a man of blood, he was the 
 very soul of vindictiveness toward classes who em- 
 bodied principles or customs he detested, and he would 
 not have hesitated to wade through seas of blood to 
 redress the wrongs of the poor and down-trodden. His 
 lifelong and ingrained hostility to negro slavery colored 
 all his thoughts and quickened his every emotion, un- 
 settling his judgment and unfitting him for the intri- 
 cate problems of statesmanship. He was never 
 troubled with any reverence for the limitary provi- 
 sions of the Constitution. He stigmatized that instru- 
 ment as spotted with the weakness of its framers and 
 their times and he welcomed the victory of the North 
 as an opportunity to make it what he thought it ought 
 
26 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to be. He had no love for the Union as long as it 
 was a Union with slaveholding states, and the destruc- 
 tion of his private property in the raids of Lee across 
 the border served only to make the more lurid his 
 chronic rage against the slave-hunters of the Southern 
 section. Like Marat, he shocked the cautious party 
 leaders by the outspokenness with which he hurled his 
 scorching anathemas against the Southern aristocrats. 
 Like Marten, he was not ashamed to shout out the secret 
 purpose which lurked hidden in the heart of hearts of 
 his associates but which they would have blushed 
 openly to avow. He had the courage — nay, the 
 audacity— of his convictions ; and, while he poured out 
 on his opponents invectives that withered to the inner- 
 most fibre and sarcasms that burnt to the bone, to the 
 wavering, the calculating, the time-serving amongst his 
 own ranks, he was the very incarnation of scorn. Since 
 the first year of the war he had dominated the House, 
 though far in advance of the majority in the extreme 
 radicalism of his opinions. He had an ever-ready, 
 biting wit and a sardonic humor. He was short and 
 sententious in speech, and, at times, eloquent from the 
 very concentrated bitterness of his diction. He knew 
 what he wanted, and was restrained by no sense of 
 propriety from saying what he wanted, both for him- 
 self and his party. The popular watchword that this 
 was a white man's government drove him into par- 
 oxysms of anger, and, in face of the shafts of lightning 
 he shot around him on all sides when laboring under 
 such a seizure, the boldest of his adversaries shunned 
 a close encounter, and the more conservative of his 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 27 
 
 own party sank into silence and dismay. The chief 
 weapons of his rule were the remorselessness with 
 which he pushed the party on from the premises agreed 
 upon to their full logical conclusion, and the vigour 
 with which he laid on the lash. Conventionalities he 
 despised and respectabilities he ridiculed. He had but 
 little regard for the opinion of his fellows, good or bad. 
 He would have scorned to play the demagogue, even if 
 a wirepuller could have been found foolhardy enough to 
 suggest such a course. He chose his line at the behest 
 of his deepest passion, and he kept it to the end, regard- 
 less of friends, enemies, party policy, the entreaties of 
 the cautious and the whimperings of the sly. Accord- 
 ing to his creed, the insurgent states were conquered 
 provinces to be shaped into a paradise for the freedman 
 and a hell for the rebel. His eye shot over the black- 
 ened Southern land. He saw the carnage, the desola- 
 tion, the starvation and the shame ; and, like a battered 
 old-warhorse, he flung up his frontlet, snuffed the 
 tainted breeze and snorted Ha! Ha! 
 
 The very fact that he was so far in advance of the 
 bulk of the party contributed more than anything else 
 to his choice as leader in so perilous a crisis. The 
 plan of the President, being destructive of the party, 
 must be blocked at all hazards, and here was the man 
 to block it, as he had shown in the days of Lincoln. 
 Holding in abeyance for the moment his theory of 
 state suicide, he laid before the caucus the following 
 programme : First, to claim the whole subject-matter of 
 reconstruction as the exclusive business of the Con- 
 gress. Second, to regard all that had been done hith- 
 
28 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 erto in the re-edification of the eleven states, as well 
 those reorganized under Lincoln as those nnder John- 
 son, either in effect as not done at all, or as merely 
 experimental, provisional, subject to the approval or 
 disapproval, revision or reversal, ratification or nulli- 
 fication of the Congress. Third, that, each House de- 
 clining to exercise its function of judging of the elec- 
 tion and qualifications of its members in case of per- 
 sons from the eleven states claiming to be senators or 
 representatives, both unite in refusing to acknowledge 
 the right of representation of these states until Con- 
 gress pronounce the reconstructed local governments 
 valid and satisfactory. These propositions being ac- 
 cepted without objection, a committee was appointed 
 which, in ten minutes, made a report directing the clerk 
 of the House to leave off the roll the names of every 
 person claiming to be a representative of any of the 
 eleven states, and presenting a joint resolution for the 
 appointment of a joint-committee of fifteen— nine from 
 the House and six from the Senate— "to inquire into 
 the condition of the States which formed the so-called 
 Confederate States of America and report whether 
 they or any of them are entitled to be represented in 
 either House of Congress," and providing that "until 
 such report be made and finally acted upon by Congress 
 no member from such States be received into either 
 House." This programme was carried out to the let- 
 ter when the House met on Monday, despite the protest 
 of Maynard from the President's own state, and with- 
 out deigning to wait for the President's message.* 
 
 * Globe, supra, pp. 3, 5. 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 29 
 
 That document came the next day, and, in contrast 
 to the unpleasant reiteration of phrases and occasional 
 incoherency of thought which characterized Andrew 
 Johnson's speeches, surprised the Houses and the 
 country by the smoothness of its diction and the power 
 of its argumentation. He dealt with the Stevens 
 theory as follows: 
 
 "States, with proper limitations of power, are essential 
 to the existence of the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 "The perpetuity of the Constitution brings with it the 
 perpetuity of the States; their mutual relations make us 
 what we are, and in our political system this connection is 
 indissoluble. The whole cannot exist without the parts nor 
 the parts without the whole. So long as the Constitution 
 of the United States endures, the States will endure; the 
 destruction of the one is the destruction of the other; the 
 preservation of the one is the preservation of the other. 
 
 "The true theory is that all pretended acts of secession 
 were, from the beginning, null and void. The States can- 
 not commit treason, nor screen the individual citizens who 
 may have committed treason, any more than they can 
 make valid treaties, or engage in lawful commerce with any 
 foreign Power. The States attempting to secede placed 
 themselves in a condition where their vitality was impaired, 
 but not extinguished — their functions suspended but not 
 destroyed. ' ' 
 
 After reciting the first steps of his plan the Presi- 
 dent continues: "The next step" in the process of 
 restoration was "the invitation to the States to partici- 
 pate in the high office of amending the Constitution." 
 A ratification of the amendment forever abolishing 
 
30 IMPEACHMENT OF PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 slavery had been exacted in the interests of future 
 harmony and as "a pledge of perpetual loyalty and 
 peace. ' ' 
 
 "The amendment to the Constitution being adopted it 
 would remain for the States, whose powers have been so long 
 in abeyance, to resume their places in the two branches of 
 the national Legislature, and thereby complete the work of 
 restoration. Here, it is for you, fellow citizens of the 
 Senate, and for you, fellow citizens of the House of Repre- 
 sentatives, to judge, each of you for yourselves, of the 
 elections, returns, and qualifications of your own members. ' ' 
 
 He treats the absorbing topic of suffrage for the 
 freedmen as follows: 
 
 ' ' On the propriety of making freedmen electors by procla- 
 mation of the Executive, I took for my counsel the Consti- 
 tution itself, the interpretations of that instrument by its 
 authors and their contemporaries, and the recent legislation 
 of Congress." He found them all unitedly inculcating the 
 doctrine that the regulation of the suffrage was a power 
 exclusively for the states. "So fixed was this reservation 
 of power in the habits of the people, and so unquestioned 
 has been the interpretation of the Constitution, that dur- 
 ing the civil war the late President never harbored the pur- 
 pose—certainly never avowed the purpose— of disregarding 
 it; and in acts of Congress nothing can be found to sanc- 
 tion any departure by the Executive from a policy which 
 has so uniformly obtained. ' ' 
 
 He expressed the opinion that the settlement of the 
 question was much better left to the several states. 
 "They can each for itself decide on the measure and 
 whether it is to be adopted at once and absolutely or 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 31 
 
 introduced gradually and with conditions. ' ' He avows 
 the belief that- after the tumult of emotions has sub- 
 sided the freedmen "will receive the kindliest usage 
 from some of those on whom they have heretofore most 
 closely depended," and "if they show patience and 
 manly virtues" "will sooner obtain participation in 
 the elective franchise through the states than through 
 the general government even if it had the power to 
 intervene." He affirms that good faith requires their 
 security in their liberty, their property, their right 
 to labor and to claim a just return for their labor.* 
 The message was received with approval on all sides ; 
 by the Republican' majority- except the extreme Rad- 
 icals, by the Democratic minority and by the country 
 at large. Senator Dixon, three months later, could 
 ask with confidence: "Was ever a message submitted 
 to a more approving Congress! Was there ever a 
 message read by a more admiring public ?"f The 
 majority were reluctant as yet to come to an open 
 breach and thus create a dangerous schism in their 
 party, especially as long as, by the President's own 
 admission, they held the key of the situation in the 
 power to refuse to complete the President's plan by 
 the admission of the senators and representatives sent 
 by his reconstructed states. The resolution of the 
 House was passed by the Senate so far as it provided 
 for the appointment of a joint committee, but the 
 Senate refused to enter into a joint pledge of non- 
 action and a joint relinquishment of the privilege to 
 
 * Message in McPherson, p. 64. 
 
 t Dixon's remark: Globe, 1st Sess. 39th Cong., p. 1046. 
 
32 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 admit members until such time as a report was made ; 
 and the House was compelled to content itself with 
 renewing both pledge and relinquishment for itself. 
 
 To the committee of fifteen all matters relating to 
 the eleven states were referred, all credentials of mem- 
 bers from those states were sent there by the House 
 and laid on the table by the Senate. Until this com- 
 mittee should see fit to make its will known, the work 
 of reconstruction was necessarily at a stand-still. The 
 President might fret, especially over the exclusion of 
 his own state. He could do nothing for which the 
 majority could fasten a quarrel upon him. Even 
 Stevens refrained from personal attack. Seizing upon 
 the admission in the message that the late rebel states 
 had lost their constitutional relations to the Union and 
 were incapable of representation in Congress, he as- 
 serted triumphantly that this admission settled the 
 whole question, and with transparent irony claimed the 
 President as his own. "As there are no symptoms that 
 the people of these provinces will be prepared to par- 
 ticipate in constitutional government for some years, 
 I know of no arrangement so proper for them as terri- 
 torial governments. There they can learn the prin- 
 ciples of freedom and eat the fruit of foul rebellion. 
 Under such governments while electing members to 
 the Territorial Legislature they will necessarily mingle 
 with those to whom Congress shall extend the rights 
 of suffrage."* 
 
 But Charles Sumner, no scheme of party policy could 
 restrain. Of that type of men who never feel the need 
 
 * Globe, id., p. 74. 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 3g 
 
 of a revision of their judgments, he had never looked 
 up to a living man as greater than himself nor felt 
 himself impelled to follow any leader. From the very- 
 outset of his career his course was unalterably fixed. 
 His first goal was the emancipation of the negro, and 
 he never deviated an inch from the straight line which 
 led to that end. That goal being reached or sure of 
 being reached, he staked down another— suffrage for 
 the freedmen — and then dedicated to its attainment the 
 same unwearied energies. Like a law of nature, he 
 bent neither to the right nor to the left, crushing with- 
 out pity, because without appreciation of its presence, 
 every obstacle in his path, and deaf alike to solicita- 
 tions to compromise, to appeals for respite or pleas 
 for charity. Like Robespierre, though blood was hate- 
 ful to his sight and offensive to his nostrils, though 
 war had no place in his scheme of things and by 
 hypothesis ought not to exist at all, yet, in pursuit of 
 his purpose, he could look with indifference on the 
 cutting down of legions of men because by some un- 
 accountable fatality they managed to throw themselves „ 
 in his way. Renowned throughout the world as one 
 of the great humanitarians of his day, nevertheless 
 the good old phrase would best express him— he was 
 without bowels. Unemotional in a marked degree, he 
 loved without passion, and hated without warmth. A 
 philanthropist, if that could be called love of his fel- 
 lows which was wholly intellectual. An implacable 
 antagonist, his bosom was too frigid to swell with a 
 gust of righteous wrath and his blood too sluggish to 
 carry him away in the heat of temper. The creed he 
 
34 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 believed in, the course he followed, the theories he ad- 
 vanced, the principles by which he was distinguished 
 assumed somehow in his hands a factitious, unreal 
 aspect. His anti-slavery crusade he nursed and cod- 
 dled and then rode as a hobby. His presupposition that 
 the Declaration of Independence had the force of or- 
 ganic law was fantastic. The argumentation by which 
 he sought to prove that the slaveholding framers of 
 the Constitution believed that no government could 
 be republican in form which disfranchised a portion 
 of its people on account of such a permanent natural 
 mark as race or colour, was ingenious but had no foot- 
 ing on the solid earth. With painstaking elaboration 
 he arranged his speeches_ in blocks, each headed by 
 some ad.captandum label to arrest the attention of the 
 reader and the gaze of posterity. Even his invective 
 was artificial— made up without the excuse of passion, 
 in the silence and solitude of the closet, and read from 
 manuscript, without fervour, on the floor of the Senate. 
 As he did not himself feel the venom of his speech, he 
 had no appreciation of its legitimate effects. With' the 
 cool neutrality of a scientist, he sprinkled upon the 
 skin of his opponent drop after drop of double-distilled 
 aqua-fortis; and when the victim waxed vociferous 
 under the sting, he was shocked at the vulgarity of his 
 violence. He informed a brother senator in scholarly 
 phrase that he was a liar, a hypocrite, a thief, a whore- 
 monger, a trafficker in his own flesh and blood, a traitor 
 to his country and a blasphemer of his God ; and, then, 
 was astonished that the object of his candor did not 
 receive the charge as a friendly admonition. He used 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 35 
 
 habitually epithets which only the hottest anger could 
 excuse, without feeling the slightest warmth in his 
 veins, and he delivered blow after blow such as men 
 deal about them in a paroxysm of rage, without the 
 stiffening of a muscle or a quickening of the pulse. 
 Human rights, in the abstract, were the object of his 
 intellectual worship. The individuals to whom human 
 rights appertained, and the manifold compromises of 
 the social union necessary to the security of human 
 rights in the workaday world never disturbed the com- 
 placency of his contemplation. The slave-power, the 
 slave-holder, the slave-hunter— as a generalized uni- 
 versal—was the object of his most elaborate maledic- 
 tion. The concrete specimens that crossed his path 
 inspired at most a feeble dislike and provoked only a 
 transient growl. His nature lacked spontaneity. He 
 never laughed a full-throated, heartfelt laugh in his 
 life. His smile, when he did smile, was sardonic. He 
 never shed a tear over a defeat, no matter how humili- 
 ating. He never let himself out in a shout of exulta- 
 tion over a triumph, no matter how complete and soul- 
 satisfying. Sumner was tall in stature and appeared 
 stalwart in form. He dressed with the unstudied neat- 
 ness and intuitive taste of a gentleman. He had an 
 Apollo-like head whose hyacinthine locks, tinged with 
 grey and thinned by years, hid a retreating brow. His 
 eye was small and insignificant, his features common- 
 place, his voice harsh, loud and tuneless. He possessed 
 none of the graces of the orator, except the felicity df 
 his diction. He had a multitude of acquaintances, 
 
36 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 many admirers, a few intimates, but hardly one own 
 familiar friend. 
 
 With so self-sufficient and independent a character, 
 it was at all times difficult to co-operate in schemes 
 of party management, and the most carefully laid 
 devices of the politicians were liable to be broken into 
 by so mechanical a strider after ideals. For Lin- 
 coln while he lived, Sumner never cherished a lively 
 admiration, and that such an illiterate plebeian as 
 Johnson should be President of the United States filled 
 him with disgust. In September he declared to a 
 Republican convention in Massachusetts over which 
 he presided that no one could say that "a generation 
 must not elapse before the rebel communities have been 
 so far changed as to become safe associates in a com- 
 mon government. . . . Time, therefore, we must have. 
 Through time all other guarantees may be obtained; 
 but time itself is a guarantee."* And he was now 
 watching his opportunity to denounce the President 
 for his disregard of this important factor. Even on 
 so inappropriate an occasion as the obsequies of the de- 
 ceased senator Collamerf he did not refrain from prais- 
 ing that statesman's course in opposition to the policy 
 of Lincoln, "who," as he said, "undertook in disre- 
 gard of Congress and solely by executive power to 
 institute civil governments throughout that region 
 where civil governments had been overthrown, imitat- 
 ing in the agencies he employed the Cromwellian 
 system of ruling by 'major-generals.' . . . The eggs 
 
 * Speech on " The national security and the national faith '' — quoted 
 by Dixon in Globe ut supra, p. 1046. 
 t Globe, id., p. 56. 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 37 
 
 of crocodiles can produce only crocodiles, and it is 
 not easy to see how the eggs laid by military power 
 can be hatched into an American State." But his 
 opportunity came on the nineteenth day of December 
 when the President sent in a special message setting 
 forth the bright prospects of the Southern states, ac- 
 companied by a report by General Grant of the same 
 optimistic tenor. General Grant stated: "I am 
 satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South 
 accept the present situation of affairs in good faith"; 
 slavery and the right of secession "they regard as 
 having been settled forever by the highest tribunal, 
 arms, that man can resort to"; that they considered 
 "this decision a fortunate one for the whole country." 
 He continued: "My observations lead me to the con- 
 clusion that the citizens of the Southern States are 
 anxious to return to self-government within the Union 
 as soon as possible: that while reconstructing they 
 want and require protection from the Government; 
 that they are in earnest in wishing to do what they 
 think is required by the Government, not humiliating 
 to them as citizens, and that, if such course was pointed 
 out, they would pursue it in good faith."* 
 
 Sumner characterized the message of the President 
 as similar to "the whitewashing message of Franklin 
 Pierce with regard to the enormities in Kansas. That 
 is its parallel, "f And the next day, in support of 
 a sweeping measure of his colleague, which nullified 
 at a stroke all laws of the states lately in rebellion 
 
 * Report in McPherson, p. 67. 
 t Globe, id., p. 79. 
 
38 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 recognizing inequality in civil rights on account of 
 colour and prohibiting the enactment of any such in 
 the future, he delivered one of his elaborately con- 
 structed addresses, in which, after recurring to his 
 doctrine that it was the duty of Congress to enforce 
 negro suffrage in the eleven states under the guarantee 
 clause of the Constitution, by a favorite device of his, 
 viz: reading from letters of correspondents whose 
 names were frequently withheld to shield, as he said, 
 the writers from the anger of the communities they 
 assailed, he unrolled a hopeless picture of the Southern 
 land, "the sickening and heart-rending outrages" 
 which the President attempted "to white wash," "to 
 throw the mantle of official approval" over "the 
 sacrifice of Human -Eights " and to give a "new letter 
 of license" to "rebel Barbarism."* 
 
 Cowan of Pennsylvania, in reply, made a spirited 
 defence of the President and his policy, and Stewart 
 of Nevada created a great sensation by coming out 
 squarely on the side of the administration, opposing 
 any plan "to govern eleven states as conquered 
 provinces," opposing universal negro suffrage, and 
 winding up with the painful interrogatory: "Are we 
 willing to prolong the restoration of the Union and 
 risk the experiment of taxation without representation 
 for fear that the application of the rule that the voice 
 of the majority is law, shall drive us from power ?"t 
 The bias of Cowan and Doolittle and Dixon in favor of 
 the President was well known, but this defection of the 
 
 *Id., 91. 
 
 j. Globe, id., pp. 109-11. 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 39 
 
 young senator from the youngest state shocked the 
 motherly soul of Wilson. Henry Wilson, like Andrew 
 Johnson, sprang from a low grade of the social scale— 
 the one having been a cobbler as the other had been 
 a tailor. But as the two men grew up under the in- 
 fluences of their respective surroundings, while the 
 Tennessean's nature hardened into the fixity of cast- 
 iron, the New Englander's softened so as to run over 
 with every breath of feeling. To his well-born, high- 
 cultured colleague he presented a strong contrast;— 
 not in physical form, for he was dignified in appear- 
 ence, a sleek-looking, clerical figure, with smooth- 
 brushed dingy- white hair; not so much in manner of 
 speech, although he was fluent, given to extemporaneous 
 utterance, powerful on the stump and rolled along 
 with the heave and swell of the practiced exhorter— 
 but in mind and heart. If Sumner was all intellect 
 inaccessible to emotion, Wilson was all emotion -un- 
 restrainable by intellect. His whole heart was dis- 
 solved into a fountain of tears over the wrongs of the 
 black man, and he became the champion of negroes in 
 the concrete as his colleague became the champion of 
 Human Eights as embodied in the negro in the abstract. 
 He now burst forth into a lamentation over the inhu- 
 man incredulity of the senator from Nevada as to "the 
 atrocities and cruelties perpetrated ' ' on the poor, dumb, 
 toiling f reedmen ; and then, with apprehension depicted 
 upon his countenance, protested that he had no appre- 
 hensions.- There had been "a studied and systematic 
 attempt to separate the President from the great party 
 that elected him" ; but he had no fears of the President ; 
 
40 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the President "had labored according to his sense of 
 public duty, to prepare the rebel States for restora- 
 tion." "He had made no issue with Congress and 
 Congress had made no issue with him." "I do not 
 believe any issue will be made by the President." 
 The senator had undoubting faith that "needful 
 legislation" would "receive the sanction and approval 
 of the Executive." "The committee we have ap- 
 pointed . . . will report proper measures; Congress 
 will pass them; the President will sign them; these 
 vacant seats will be filled with loyal men"; and every 
 thing will turn out as the party and Providence have 
 unitedly decreed.* 
 
 The House on the same day listened to the first 
 speech in that body of a member whose career hitherto 
 had aroused great expectations. Henry J. Raymond 
 was an influential party-man and a lifelong supporter 
 of William H. Seward; but what gave him peculiar 
 prominence was he was the founder and editor of the 
 New York Times, one of the leading newspapers in the 
 country. That paper had given to the President's 
 course during the past summer a judicious support, 
 apparently without being aware that it was doing 
 anything less than its duty to the party ; and its editor 
 was now expected to echo with power the opinions 
 of his organ on the floor of the House. His speech, 
 (generally considered a disappointment) consisted 
 mainly of an argument against the theory of Stevens, 
 and its effect was greatly impaired by the incessant 
 interruptions with which he was pestered and which 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 111-2. 
 
THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS 41 
 
 he too good-naturedly allowed. The radicals made a 
 concerted attack upon this deserter who threatened to 
 "become too influential. One after another, they baited 
 him, until at last Bingham of Ohio advanced to give 
 the finishing blow. Plying Raymond with self-con- 
 fident questions, he suddenly landed himself in ap- 
 parent antagonism to the President; and when the 
 victim of his persecution by an adroit turn of the debate 
 took advantage of this mistake, he retreated amid a 
 cloud of expostulations : " I am sorry to see the gentle- 
 man assume that he alone represents the President." 
 "I make no issue with the President." "I respect- 
 fully deny the gentleman's assertion that I seek to 
 make an issue with the President"; and the member 
 from New York was allowed to finish his argument in 
 peace.* And so, with protests of harmony in both 
 Houses, Congress adjourned over the holidays. 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 120-124. 
 
SECTION III. 
 
 The First Veto 
 
 Thus far, it may be said, peace prevailed between 
 the Capitol and ' ' the other end of the Avenue. ' ' The 
 more conservative Republicans of both Houses, anxious 
 that peace should be kept, were casting about for some 
 course of action on which Executive and Congress 
 might unite and thus heal the incipient schism in the 
 party. On the one hand, to satisfy the more impatient 
 friends of the negro, measures should be passed ac- 
 cording full and lasting protection to the freedmen in 
 all their civil rights. On the other, to placate the 
 President, his own state should be immediately read- 
 mitted as the happy prologue to the speedy readmission 
 of all in the same category. Accordingly, on the re- 
 assembling of Congress (January 5, 1866), Trumbull, 
 the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, 
 introduced two bills: one enlarging the powers of the 
 Freedmen 's Bureau, the other protecting the civil 
 rights of the negro. 
 
 From the start, however, the progress of this move- 
 ment was obstructed by the negro-suffragists, whose 
 chief exponents were Sumner in the Senate and 
 George S. Boutwell in the House. As an earnest 
 of what they meant to demand before any of the 
 excluded states should be readmitted, they pressed 
 
 42 
 
THE FIRST VETO 43 
 
 forward the bill conferring unqualified suffrage on 
 the colored men of the District of Columbia, which, 
 after a debate mainly between the partisans of sim- 
 ple manhood suffrage and the partisans of qualified 
 suffrage disclosing serious breaks in the ranks of 
 the majority, passed the House; Mr. Boutwell end- 
 ing the discussion with the expression of his belief 
 "that any restoration of either of the eleven states 
 lately engaged in the rebellion to political power in the 
 Government of this country, which is not coupled with, 
 or preceded by, the condition that the negroes of the 
 South are to vote, opened the way to the destruction 
 of this Government from which there is no escape."* 
 In the Senate, however, the conservatives succeeded in 
 laying the bill upon the shelf and going on with the 
 two measures of Trumbull, the former of which passed 
 the Senate on the twenty-fifth of January, and the 
 latter on the second of February (with a sweeping 
 amendment, added after its introduction, making all 
 negroes citizens of the United States) ; such prominent 
 supporters of the President among the Eepublicans as 
 Dixon, Doolittle, Lane of Kansas and Stewart being 
 numbered with the majority. 
 
 But what finally wrecked this promising scheme was 
 the immovability of the Committee of Fifteen and the 
 temper of the House. The leading members of the 
 former body had no sympathy with the senators seek- 
 ing a compromise with the President. Stevens had 
 been hostile to Johnson from the beginning and Stevens 
 at present ruled the committee. What exasperated 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 309-311. 
 
44 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the President more than any other one thing was the 
 treatment accorded his own state. As early as last 
 Jnne he had proclaimed Tennessee, alone as yet of 
 her insurrectionary sisters, free from insurrection. 
 He had watched the election of her senators and repre- 
 sentatives with solicitude and congratulated himself 
 that every man of them was competent to take the 
 iron-clad test oath. And yet the state was treated 
 like an alien, although one of her citizens was President 
 of the United States. Pressure was brought to get 
 out of the committee a special resolution admitting the 
 members from Tennessee by themselves. "Parson" 
 Brownlow— the fiery governor of the state — wrote a 
 letter to the. Speaker of the House (January 15th) 
 stating : 
 
 ' ' I am decidedly in favor of admitting the Tennessee dele- 
 gation. . . . The Tennessee delegates, as a whole, are loyal, 
 can take the required oath, and would, if in their seats, 
 add to the strength of the Union party. . . . Finally, they 
 ought to be admitted as a means of preventing a rupture 
 between Congress and the President, which for the sake 
 of the country ought to be avoided. The President' ought 
 to be satisfied with the admission of the Tennessee delegates 
 to their seats, and I have no doubt would be. ' '* 
 
 But it was all to no purpose. What the committee 
 did was to report a fourteenth amendment to the Con- 
 stitution reducing representation in states withholding 
 suffrage from male citizens on account of race or colour, 
 which, after a long and hard struggle, passed the 
 House by the necessary two-thirds, on January the 
 
 * For letter see Glole, id., p. 1017. 
 
THE FIRST VETO 45 
 
 thirty-first. Until this amendment, after having been 
 adopted in like manner by the Senate, was ratified by 
 the legislatures of three-fourths of the states, it seemed 
 to be the determination of the omnipotent committee 
 to keep the lately insurgent states out of the Union, 
 including Tennessee. Having apparently committed 
 itself to this view the House took up the Freedmen's 
 Bureau bill which, after a dispute with the Senate over 
 amendments, was finally (February 9) sent to the 
 Executive. Although it was known even before the 
 bill reached the President that he was dissatisfied with 
 some of its features, yet the preponderance of expec- 
 tation was in favor of his signing it. Symptoms were 
 not wanting of growing dissensions. While the debate 
 was going on in the House on the proposed fourteenth 
 amendment, in a. published interview with senator 
 Dixon (January 28), the President expressed doubts 
 of the propriety of making any further amendments 
 to the Constitution, and stated that "the agitation of 
 the question of negro suffrage in the District of Co- 
 lumbia as an entering wedge to the agitation of that 
 question throughout the country was ill-timed, uncalled- 
 for and calculated to do great harm."* On the 
 seventh of February, to a delegation of colored men 
 come to press the granting of suffrage to their race, 
 he declared emphatically he would not adopt a policy 
 that he believed would end in a conflict between the 
 races and the extermination of one or the other.f On 
 the tenth, he told a committee of the legislature of 
 
 * McPh. Recon., p. 51. 
 t Id., p. 53. 
 
46 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 reconstructed Virginia that he was in favor of the im- 
 mediate restoration of these states, that he had fought 
 against the doctrine that a state could go out of the 
 Union and could never he brought to acknowledge it: 
 that from the beginning and before the rebellion there 
 were "extreme men North." "The Government has 
 taken hold of one extreme and with the strong arm of 
 physical power has put down the rebellion. Now, as 
 we swing round the circle of the Union ... if we find 
 the counterpart or duplicate of the same spirit . . . 
 this other extreme, which stands in the way, must get 
 out of it. " * On the other side, the fourteenth amend- 
 ment, despite the eccentric opposition of Sumner who, 
 in a two-days ' carefully prepared speech, belabored the 
 measure in his most classic style as "introducing dis- 
 cord and defilement in the Constitution," "polluting 
 the text hitherto kept blameless" by the verbal rec- 
 ognition of "race and color," was finding support from 
 those conservatives of the Senate who were the authors 
 of the plan of compromise, although its adoption would 
 render it practically impossible for them to furnish the 
 stipulated equivalent for any concession on the part 
 of the President. Nevertheless, as the ten days 
 allowed for deliberation were passing by, the majority 
 kept hoping that all would go well. Eepresentatives 
 even of the radical sort expressed "unfaltering con- 
 fidence" in the President. Some stated that to their 
 personal knowledge the. President endorsed the sub- 
 stance of the bill; Cullom of Illinois going so far as 
 
 * Id., pp. 56-8. 
 
THE FIRST VETO 47 
 
 to say "the bill lias become a law, as I take it for 
 granted the Executive will sign it."* The Committee 
 of Fifteen (so it was stated after the event), was on 
 the point of recommending the immediate admission 
 of Tennessee. A veto of this, the first bill sent to the 
 Executive bearing upon the South, was dreaded by all 
 sections of the party, and all the more because a veto 
 in this case carried with it the veto of the civil-rights 
 bill, a far more important measure, already passed the 
 Senate and sure to pass the House. Yet on Monday, 
 the nineteenth, when suddenly it was whispered that a 
 message from the President was on the way, the Senate 
 galleries were instantly surcharged with an excited 
 throng aware that a message could only mean a veto. 
 
 The President objected to the bill as unnecessary, the 
 existing act not having expired and its powers ample; 
 as prolonging military measures from a state of war 
 where they were proper into times of peace where they 
 were incongruous; as unconstitutional in creating 
 tribunals for the summary trial of offenders without 
 jury and without the right of appeal ; as making a grant 
 of such unlimited powers a part of the permanent 
 legislation of the country, and clothing the President 
 with powers "such as in time of peace certainly ought 
 never to be trusted to any one man. ' ' 
 
 The last and "very grave" objection, upon which 
 the President dwelt longer than any other, was the one 
 that carried the sting : 
 
 "The Constitution imperatively declares, in connec- 
 tion with taxation, that each State shall have at least 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 908, 911. 
 
48 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 one Bepresentative and fixes the rule for the number 
 to which in future times each State shall be entitled. 
 It also provides that the Senate of the United States 
 shall be composed of two Senators from each State, and 
 adds with peculiar force, 'that no State, without its 
 consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the 
 Senate.' " While the original Freedmen's Bureau 
 Bill passed in the absence of the states chiefly to be 
 affected, this was necessarily the case because "their 
 people were then contumaciously engaged in the re- 
 bellion. " " Now the case is changed and some at least 
 of those States are attending Congress by loyal repre- 
 sentatives soliciting the allowance of the constitutional 
 right of representation." When this bill was passed 
 there was ' ' no senator or representative from the eleven 
 States which are mainly to be affected by its pro- 
 visions." "There should be no taxation without 
 representation." The right of Congress to judge of 
 the qualifications of its members ' ' can not be construed 
 as including a right to shut out, in time of peace, any 
 State from the representation to which it is entitled by 
 the Constitution." "At present, all the people of the 
 eleven states are excluded— those who were most faith- 
 ful during the war not less than others. The State 
 of Tennessee for instance"— and the President's 
 soreness over the treatment administered to his own 
 state can be discerned beneath the calm words with 
 which her heroic resistance, her present loyalty and 
 her unforced adoption of the abolition amendment are 
 sketched. The reading closed amidst applause and 
 
THE FIRST VETO 49 
 
 hisses from the galleries which were instantly ordered 
 cleared. The majority in the first flush of its anger 
 was for forcing a vote without consideration, but, after 
 remonstrance from two Republican senators, calmer 
 feelings prevailed and the matter was allowed to go 
 over until the morrow.* The next day, accordingly, 
 the question was put whether the bill should pass 
 notwithstanding the objections of the President, and 
 uncertainty as to the result added to the intensity of 
 the excitement. The bill was originally passed by yeas 
 37 to nays 10— more than two-thirds, and therefore 
 enough to override a veto. The roll-call had not pro- 
 ceeded far, however, before ominous changes appeared. 
 Cowan (who was absent on the first vote), as might 
 have been expected, voted in the negative. Dixon and 
 Doolittle who voted for the bill now went with Cowan ; 
 Stewart, also, and the two West Virginia senators; 
 while, to the consternation of the majority, Morgan of 
 New York joined the nays ; in all, five changes direct 
 from affirmative to negative, besides three former ab- 
 sentees (Cowan, Nesmith and Willey) added to the nays. 
 Lane of Kansas, a staunch friend of the President, and 
 Henderson still voted for the bill. The total stood: 
 Yeas 30 and Nays 18. The President pro-tem. (Foster) 
 arose and announced to the chagrined majority: "Two- 
 thirds of the members present not having voted for 
 the bill, it is not a law." The galleries applauded, 
 hissed, and were cleared again. The thing was done. 
 War had broken out and the first victory was with the 
 President. 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 915, 917. 
 4 
 
50 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The House manifested its ill-temper by passing a 
 concurrent resolution reiterating the caucus decree of 
 the beginning of the session that no senator or represen- 
 tative of any of the eleven states shall be admitted until 
 Congress shall have declared such state entitled to 
 representation. Stevens, after stating that "until 
 yesterday there was an earnest investigation into the 
 condition of Tennessee to see whether we could admit 
 the State," declared that "since yesterday there has 
 arisen a state of things which the committee deem puts 
 it out of their power to proceed further . . . without 
 surrendering the rights of this body to the usurpation 
 of another body."* 
 
 Thursday, the birthday of Washington, was com- 
 memorated by the two Houses assembling in the Hall 
 of Representatives with solemn pomp and ceremony 
 (which, it was thought, parodied the pomp and cere- 
 mony with which the obsequies of the revered Lincoln 
 had been celebrated only ten days before) to honor the 
 memory of Henry Winter Davis, the master spirit of 
 the opposition to Lincoln's policy of reconstruction. 
 On the other hand, the 22d was a great day for the sup- 
 porters of the President. They were bestirring them- 
 selves everywhere throughout the country, holding 
 public meetings, firing guns over his victory, telegraph- 
 ing him words of cheer. In the evening there was a 
 large gathering of Union men in the city of New York, 
 addressed by Secretaries Seward and Dennison; and 
 another in Washington, which at the close of the pro- 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 943-4. 
 
THE FIRST VETO 51 
 
 ceedings marched to the "White House to greet the 
 President; a multitude of people joining it on the way. 
 In response to the shouts of the crowd, Johnson ap- 
 peared on the portico and made a speech. 
 
 There had been two extremes (we give but a part of 
 his remarks), one who were willing to break up the gov- 
 ernment to save slavery; the other to break up the gov- 
 ernment to destroy slavery. He had been against both. 
 He was for the government slavery or no slavery. The 
 attempt of the one extreme had been frustrated and they 
 now acknowledge its futility and ask to be restored. He 
 was in favor of opening the door of the Union. Still 
 maintaining that "the conscious, intelligent traitors" 
 should be punished, he believed in amnesty to the multi- 
 tude. But "the other extreme are now attempting to 
 concentrate all power in the hands of a few at the federal 
 head and thereby bring about a consolidation of the republic 
 which is equally objectionable to its dissolution." "An 
 irresponsible central directory has assumed all the powers 
 of Congress and taken from the Senate and the House their 
 separate power to judge of the qualification of their mem- 
 bers," thus admitting a State to be out of the Union, which 
 was the very thing we all had been fighting against— in- 
 sisting that this a State could not do. "I have opposed the 
 Davises, the Toombses, the Slidells— but when I perceive on 
 the other hand men"— so far had he proceeded when there 
 were loud cries for names — "Call them traitors." "We 
 know them. " " Give us the names. ' ' 
 
 "Well," he hesitated, "I suppose I could give them. 
 I look upon them as being as much opposed to the funda- 
 mental principles of this government and believe they are 
 as much laboring to prevent and destroy them as were the 
 men who fought against us. ' ' 
 
52 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "What are their names?" interrupted a voice. On this 
 the President, amid the most vociferous shouting, burst out : 
 "I say Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania— I say Charles 
 Sumner— I say "Wendell Phillips and others of the same 
 stripe." Another voice here cried out: "Give it to 
 Forney!" (the secretary of the Senate and editor of two 
 papers "both daily" and both filled with abuse of the 
 President). And the President replied, "I do not waste 
 my ammunition on dead ducks. ' ' He continued : " I do not 
 intend to be bullied by my enemies; what usurpation has 
 Andrew Johnson been guilty of that, as a gentleman 
 (Stevens) had said; ought to cost me my head?" The same 
 man had said also that we were in the midst of an earth- 
 quake. "Yes there is an earthquake coming — the ground 
 swell of popular judgment. ' ' In allusion to his own career, 
 he was saying: "Beginning from alderman -and running 
 through all branches of the Legislature," when he was 
 interrupted by a voice, "from tailor up"— "Yes," he said, 
 "and when I was a tailor I always was punctual and did 
 good work — no patchwork, but a whole suit." Passing 
 by this ' ' little f acetiousness, " as he termed it, he came back 
 to the charge of usurpation: 
 
 "They may talk about beheading and usurpation, but 
 when I am beheaded I want the American people to wit- 
 ness. " " I do not want by innuendoes, by indirect remarks 
 in high places, to see the man who has assassination in his 
 bosom exclaim 'This presidential obstacle must be gotten 
 out of the way. ' I make use of very strong language when 
 I say that I have no doubt the intention was to incite assas- 
 sination and so get out of the way the obstacle from place 
 and power. ' ' 
 
 "I know they are willing to wound but they are afraid 
 to strike." "I tell the opponents of the government— I 
 
THE FIRST VETO 53 
 
 care not from what quarter they come— whether from the 
 East, West, North or South— you who are engaged in the 
 work of breaking up the government by amendments to 
 the Constitution— they may seem to succeed for a time, but 
 their attempts will be futile. 
 
 "They may think now it can be done by a concurrent 
 resolution; but when it is submitted to the popular judg- 
 ment and to the popular will, they will find that they might 
 as well undertake to introduce a resolution to repeal the law 
 of gravity as to keep this Union from being restored. ' ' 
 
 With this allusion to the latest move of his opponents 
 and an exhortation to the people to stand by the Con- 
 stitution and the principles of the fathers, the Presi- 
 dent retired amidst the acclamation of his hearers.* 
 
 Though his speech may have weakened the effect 
 of the veto message on the country, none the less did 
 its audacity astound the Radicals. They awoke to the 
 certitude that the President meant to fight for his 
 policy with all the resources of his great office, and that 
 to gain his end he would not scruple to rend their 
 party in twain and make an alliance with its rival. 
 If the calm logical tone of the message drove them from 
 their propriety, the rugged defiance of the speech 
 brought them to a realization of the true nature of the 
 conflict. The twenty-second day of February, 1866, 
 began a new epoch in their calendar. On that day, 
 the chief of political apostates flung his glove into the 
 face of the party of freedom and returned to the 
 horrors of his old creed. From that day, he became 
 
 * McPh., Recon., p. 58 ; cf. newspapers of the day. 
 
54 IMPEACHMENT OF PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 an outlaw undeserving of quarter. From that day, they 
 began to plot the purging of the Senate and his im- 
 peachment and removal. ' The part of the speech they 
 more particularly resented was the imputation cast 
 upon them of a design to assassinate the man they desig- 
 nated as "the acting President," and, in retaliation 
 for so baseless a charge, they went so far as to insin- 
 uate that the man who made it had himself conspired 
 with assassins the death of his predecessor. The day 
 after the speech the Senate took up the concurrent 
 resolution, which the House in a fit of spleen had 
 rushed through the day after the veto, but it was not 
 until the second day of March that it was brought to a 
 vote. The week's debate was chiefly remarkable by 
 reason of a speech by John Sherman, which may be 
 called an elaborate apology for the course of the Presi- 
 dent. He protested that Congress and the President 
 ought to agree on some plan of reconstruction. If they 
 did not in a reasonable time, either House can and will 
 exercise its undoubted power to admit senators and 
 representatives. We have failed in our constitutional 
 duty and have no right to arraign Andrew Johnson for 
 trying to do his by following the foot-steps of his 
 lamented predecessor. The senator declared the 
 course of the President on the subject of negro suffrage 
 was not a subject for censure. With the President's 
 antecedents he could not have done otherwise. "Up 
 to and including the recent veto message . . . there 
 had been no act of Andrew Johnson which in my judg- 
 ment was inconsistent with the high obligations he 
 owed to the great Union party." While he regretted 
 
THE FIRST VETO 5o 
 
 the speech, of the twenty-second and condemned some 
 passages in it as reported, he could not refrain from 
 palliation. The President, he reminded the Senate, 
 "is thoroughly combative in his disposition; he has 
 been fighting all the days of his life ; the very courage 
 with which he resists opponents whenever they present 
 themselves, we commended five years ago as the highest 
 virtue of Andrew Johnson's life"; "Wendell Phillips 
 has arraigned and abused the President in a shameless 
 manner"— classing him with Arnold and Burr, saying 
 "that he had taken. Jeff. Davis's place as a leader of 
 the confederacy," and threatening "impeachment"; 
 Sumner had let drop "an expression about 'whitewash- 
 ing' which greatly wounded and irritated the mind of 
 the President"; and "Mr. Stevens proclaimed Andrew 
 Johnson to be an alien enemy, a citizen of a foreign 
 State, in the convention that nominated him as Vice- 
 President, and therefore not now legally President"; 
 "in a recent debate he made use of an expression that 
 would irritate any man, especially when coming from 
 a leader in the House of Representatives"— quoting 
 the remark of Stevens that if a British King had so 
 violated the privileges of Parliament it would have 
 cost him his head. "Regarding the President as he is, 
 a man who never turned his back upon a foe, personal 
 or political, a man whose great virtue has been his 
 combative propensity; as a man who repelled insults 
 here on the very spot, where I now stand, when they 
 came from traitors arming themselves for the fight; 
 can you ask him, because he is President, to submit to 
 insult? Every sentiment of manhood, every dictate 
 
56 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of nature would induce a man when he heard these 
 words uttered, in the heat of passion to thrust them 
 back." He exhorted the Senate to "cast over the 
 remarks the mantle of charity," and pronounced what 
 was left of the speech, the "ideas" in it, deserving 
 the grave "consideration of the Senate." He sym- 
 pathized very much with the feelings of the President 
 in regard to the long-delayed admission of his own state. 
 Tennessee "was reconstructed . . . before the death 
 of President Lincoln, under ■ his guiding hand, with 
 Andrew Johnson as his main agent." "Its govern- 
 ment was reorganized before President Johnson came 
 here. It was organized by his own personal friends 
 who shared his fortunes. The men who are sent here 
 to represent Tennessee are as true and loyal as either 
 of you Senators, without exception." "I think it is 
 the common feeling and desire of the people of the 
 United States, whom we represent, the mass of the' 
 Union people, that she should be admitted as soon as 
 possible. ' ' There were but two things which he could 
 not forgive. The President "is bound as a principle 
 of honor to select as the agents of the Government 
 those who shared with him the political feelings which 
 gave rise to his election." "If he seeks fellowship, 
 counsel, aid or association from or with those who either 
 took up arms in the recent contest, or who, regarding 
 the war as a failure, would have passively yielded to 
 the rebels, he commits an offense from which no man 
 occupying his high position can or will recover." 
 
 ' ' This is no time to quarrel with the Chief Magistrate 
 unless we are compelled to do so by his base betrayal 
 
THE FIRST VETO 57 
 
 of the obligations he imposed upon himself when he 
 became our candidate."* 
 
 Near the close of this debate Garrett Davis of Ken- 
 tucky enunciated a startling proposition: 
 
 "The President has the right to ascertain and decide 
 what body of men is the Senate and what the House of 
 Representatives, when there are two bodies claiming to be 
 such. He is to communicate with the two Houses of Con- 
 gress. Before he can communicate he must ascertain what 
 men constitute the Senate and what men constitute the 
 House. It is his right to do so, and the people of America 
 will sustain him. ... It ought to have been done at the 
 beginning of the session. . . . 
 
 "Whenever Andrew Johnson chooses to say to the South- 
 ern Senators, 'Get together with the Democrats and the 
 Conservatives of the Senate, and if you constitute a 
 majority I will recognize you as the Senate of the United 
 States,' what then will become of you gentlemen? You 
 will quietly come in and form a part of the Senate."! 
 
 Here was treason most foul uttered in the Senate- 
 house! The radicals could not get over it. Howard 
 denounced it as "revolutionary, unconstitutional, and 
 treasonable"; Wilson, in a speech of a half hour's 
 length, deified the Republican party— "embracing," 
 as he said, "in its ranks more of moral and intellectual 
 worth than was ever embodied in any political organiza- 
 tion in any age or in any land"; "created by no man 
 or set of men, but brought into being by Almighty God 
 
 * For Sherman's speech, see Globe, id., Appendix, p. 124. 
 t Id., App., pp. 300-4. 
 
58 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Himself"; and endowed by the Creator with all 
 political power and every office under Heaven.* 
 
 The concurrent resolution then passed the Senate by 
 a vote of 29 to 18 ; Lane of Kansas, Morgan and Stewart 
 still with the President. 
 
 This was the counter-stroke to the veto. The Ex- 
 ecutive might bar the passage of measures which the 
 Congress desired to enact. But "the Central Direc- 
 tory" (as Senator Cowan said) "carried on its girdle 
 the keys of the Union, ' ' and unless it unlocked the door, 
 the "wayward sisters" could not get in. 
 
 * Globe, App., pp. 140, 142. 
 
SECTION IV 
 
 The Struggle for the Two-Thirds 
 
 But a deadlock on so vital a question, instead of 
 proving fatal to the President, was the one thing more 
 than likely to prove fatal to the party of the Congress. 
 By the masses of the Northern people no plea in ex- 
 cuse for the non-restoration of the constitutional Union 
 for which their soldiers had fought would be admitted 
 — not negro suffrage, not punishment of treason, not 
 salvation of a particular party. The President had a 
 plan which seemed to point directly to the attainment 
 of this supreme object of the popular desire. The 
 leaders of the Congress party had none. Besides, to 
 all appearances the administration was a unit as yet, 
 and moved as a unit. Seward, deaf to the appeals 
 of the radicals who were enraged by the President's 
 speech, stood only the closer to his chief. Stanton, 
 whatever he may have been doing in private, in public 
 betrayed no signs of disaffection. The residence of 
 Secretary Harlan was pointed out as the place where 
 the more belligerent radicals did congregate. But, 
 with this doubtful exception, the Cabinet seemed firm 
 in the support of the President. On the other hand, 
 among the Congressional majority there were every- 
 where signs of division and disintegration. The one 
 remedy proposed by the Joint Committee, indefinite 
 and dilatory as it was, was killed in the. Senate by 
 
 59 
 
60 IMPEACHMENT OP PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the radicals. Sumner read a second studied speech 
 against it, from which Fessenden in his reply culled 
 the following "flowers of rhetoric" with which the 
 senator from Massachusetts assailed a constitutional 
 amendment which two-thirds of his political associates 
 in the House had approved: "Compromise of human 
 rights;" "violating the national faith;" "dishonoring 
 the name of the Eepublic;" "bad mutton;" "muscipu- 
 lar abortion;" "new anathema maranatha;" "abom- 
 ination;" "paragon and master-piece of ingratitude;" 
 "abortive of all good;" "shocking to moral sense;" 
 "the very Koh-i-noor of blackness;" "essential 
 uncleanliness ; " "disgusting ordure;" "loathsome 
 stench;" the men who support it "Harpies;" "Pon- 
 tius Pilate with Judas on his back." "You are now 
 hurrying to drop into the text" (of the Constitution) 
 "a political 'obscenity. " "Here is nothing less than 
 a mighty House of ill-fame, which it is proposed to 
 license constitutionally for a political consideration." 
 
 The amendment received but twenty-five votes, not 
 near the necessary two-thirds. Nine Democrats, eight 
 Johnson-Bepublicans and four ultra radicals made up 
 the twenty-two noes.* 
 
 The Civil Eights bill, which passed the Senate on 
 the heels of the Freedmen's Bureau bill, provoked in 
 the House dissensions of a different character. Many 
 Republican members entertained doubts of the consti- 
 tutionality of the first section making negroes citizens. 
 Many feared its provisions would furnish a pretext for 
 
 * Fessenden in Globe, 1st sess. 39th Cong., p. 1278. Sumner's speech, 
 id., p. 1224. 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 61 
 
 forcing negro suffrage on the Northern states— a policy 
 their constituents would not stand as yet. It was not 
 until the thirteenth of March, after postponement and 
 amendment after amendment, that the majority made 
 up its mind and passed the bill. 
 
 Under such stringent circumstances, the leaders were 
 not slow in recognizing the imperative necessity of ac- 
 tion. Go back they would not. They dared not stand 
 still. Move forward they must. A majority in both 
 Houses they had; but, with only a majority, they could 
 neither do even so much as propose a constitutional 
 amendment, nor, in the face of a disapproving execu- 
 tive, make a single law. They must pull themselves 
 together, formulate a coherent and complete plan of 
 reconstruction which would command the united sup- 
 port of the party; and, as an essential preliminary, 
 they must capture the machinery by which their plan, 
 once formulated and backed by disciplined unanimity, 
 could be made the law of the land. In a word, a steady 
 reliable two-thirds majority in each House— this was 
 the need of needs, without which all else was useless 
 and their eventual overthrow certain. 
 
 "With the House, there would be little difficulty, the 
 normal majority there being much more than two- 
 thirds, and, though somewhat fluctuating on such tender 
 questions as negro suffrage and the admission of Ten- 
 nessee, safe enough for any measure the party could 
 unite upon in caucus. In consequence of the veto and 
 the speech of the 22d, all minor divisions were for- 
 gotten in bitter animosity to Andrew Johnson, and the 
 majority was content to follow Stevens to any length 
 
62 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 in abusing the President. It was at this period that 
 the habit, persisted in to the last, of studied disrespect 
 and open insult to the Chief Magistrate of the nation 
 was contracted: e. g., putting his messages aside with- 
 out deigning to read them, jeering at every mention of 
 his name, insisting that he was but a Vice-President 
 acting as President because of the assassination of the 
 rightful owner of the title; and allowing any ribaldry 
 the press might heap upon him to be read from the 
 clerk's desk amid the mocking laughter and applause 
 of both floor and galleries. On a Saturday (March 
 10th) when the House met for debate only, "Old 
 Thad, " as Stevens was affectionately called, being 
 interrupted in an ironical eulogy of the President's 
 "integrity, patriotism, courage and good intentions," 
 by an inquiry whether it was possible he was the Thad- 
 deus Stevens mentioned in the President's speech, in- 
 formed the laughing House as a confidential communi- 
 cation that that speech never was delivered; it was a 
 myth, one of the grandest hoaxes ever perpetrated, 
 more successful than the moon hoax. "I am glad to 
 have at this time the opportunity (although I do not 
 wish the matter to go before the public, for they might 
 misunderstand my motives) to exonerate the President 
 from ever having made that speech. It is a part of 
 the cunning contrivance of the copperhead party, who 
 have been persecuting our President since the 4th of 
 March last. Why, sir, taking advantage of an unfor- 
 tunate incident which happened on that occasion, they 
 have been constantly denouncing him as addicted to 
 low and degrading vices." Sending it to the clerk's 
 
STKUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 63 
 
 desk, lie had read an extract from the New York World 
 of March 7, 1865, in. which Andrew Johnson is de- 
 scribed as "an insolent drunken brute, in comparison 
 with whom even Caligula's horse was respectable"; 
 and then denounced the report as "a vile slander" got 
 up by ''the copperheads";— the Eepublicans never 
 believed it, but "if these slanderers can make the 
 people believe the President ever made that speech 
 then they have made out their case."'* 
 
 So much to show the temper of the House. But it 
 was otherwise in the Senate. In that body lay the 
 real nodus of the situation. It was the Senate that 
 shelved the bill granting suffrage to the freedmen of 
 the District of Columbia. It was the Senate that killed 
 the amendment which the Joint Committee elaborated 
 and two-thirds of the House adopted. It was in the 
 Senate that the presence of a minority of more than 
 one-third made the veto of the Freedmen 's Bureau 
 bill final. Of the fifty senators, eleven were Demo- 
 crats, four (Cowan, Dixon, Doolittle and Norton) 
 were out-and-out supporters of the President, three 
 (Lane of Kansas, Stewart and Morgan) were more or 
 less inclined to favor the administration, while the two 
 "West Virginia senators could be relied on by neither 
 side; making a total of twenty and leaving but thirty 
 steady Republicans— four short of two-thirds. As it 
 happened one senator from each side was absent at 
 this crisis. Foot of Vermont— the father of the Senate 
 —had not been in his seat since the sixteenth of Febru- 
 ary, and was lying hopelessly ill at his residence in the 
 
 * Glole, id., pp. 1307-8. 
 
64 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 capital. "Wright of New Jersey had gone to his home 
 in that state as long ago as February the eighth, as 
 announced by his colleague, "exceedingly ill." So 
 that the senators present numbered forty-eight— one- 
 third being sixteen, two-thirds thirty-two. Two cer- 
 tain votes were absolutely indispensable; thr-ee would 
 be felicitous to guard against the possibility of the 
 return of Wright before the lingering death of Foot 
 gave the legislature of Vermont the opportunity for 
 which it sat ready to send on a reliable successor ; four 
 would make everything safe and sound. 
 
 Two methods of recruiting the majority in the Senate 
 were available; one by the admission of new states, 
 the other by turning out minority senators to make 
 place for others more agreeable. The first method was 
 inconvenient because it required the passage of a law; 
 and the passage of a law required the assent of the 
 President or the presence of the two-thirds to obtain 
 which was the final cause of the manoeuvre. The second 
 method was encumbered with no such troublesome 
 formality, requiring only the presence of a majority 
 sufficiently unscrupulous and unflinching. Despite the 
 greater facility of the latter, the party managers in the 
 first instance resorted to the more difficult method, for 
 one of two reasons; either they had not yet been able 
 to ferret out what they considered a sufficiently plaus- 
 ible case for the application of the turning-out process, 
 or— which is the more probable reason— they felt that 
 on the question of the admission of a petitioning ter- 
 ritory of the West they could rely on the support of 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 65 
 
 ■western senators hitherto favorable to the President. 
 As a matter of fact, two territories at the moment were 
 applying for admission— Colorado and Nebraska. In the 
 case of Colorado, her people in the summer of the year 
 1864 rejected the constitution framed and submitted in 
 pursuance of her enabling act by a majority of three 
 to one out of a total vote of 6,192. A portion of her 
 inhabitants, however, without obtaining any additional 
 authority from Congress, held a convention of their own 
 in the summer of the following year, adopted a consti- 
 tution, submitted it to the people and secured its ratifi- 
 cation by a majority of 155 out of a vote of 5,895. A 
 legislature, having been chosen, sent two senators to 
 Washington at the beginning of the present session, 
 but the President declined to proclaim the territory a 
 state and submitted the whole matter to the Congress. 
 A bill was pending before the Senate for her admission 
 introduced by Stewart and advocated by him and Lane 
 of Kansas, but hitherto it had been set aside for more 
 important measures. Discerning the advantage given 
 them by the committal of these two erring senators, 
 the leaders in the movement now brought the bill to 
 the front. Once again, however, the opposition of 
 Sumner, aroused by the presence of the word "white" 
 in the constitution of the proposed state, spoiled his 
 party's scheme. He laid bare every weak point in 
 the case— the illegality of the second convention and the 
 second election; the paucity of the population, not ex- 
 ceeding 25,000, whereas the existing ratio for a repre- 
 sentative was 127,000 ; and although, as was anticipated, 
 5 
 
66 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Stewart and Lane voted for the bill, it got but fourteen 
 votes in its favour.* 
 
 Dropping for tbe present their abortive experiment 
 to recruit the Senate by the first method, the managers, 
 turning to the second, lit upon a rare chance of deplet- 
 ing still further the already scant forces of their ad- 
 versaries. At the opening of the session the credentials 
 of John P. Stockton as senator from New Jersey 
 were presented by his colleague and he was sworn in. 
 No question was made as to his right to his seat; but 
 senator Cowan, by request, presented a protest of 
 several members of the legislature of New Jersey, 
 which, without being read, was laid on the table whence 
 it found its way to the judiciary committee. Apparently 
 no importance whatever was attached to the protest 
 and it attracted no public notice. On the thirtieth of 
 January, Trumbull laid before the Senate a report of 
 the committee recommending the adoption of a resolu- 
 tion declaring Stockton entitled to his seat. The report 
 carried the signature of- every member of the committee 
 except Clark who manifested his dissent in no other 
 way. The resolution was read but not acted on, and 
 the matter passed off without comment. Nothing 
 more was heard of it until the failure to pass the Freed- 
 men's Bureau bill over the veto, when Clark began to 
 press his political associates on the committee to bring 
 up the resolution. Accordingly, after the House 
 amendments to the Civil Rights bill had been concurred 
 in and that measure sent to meet an inevitable veto, on 
 
 * Sumner, Globe, id., p. 1327 et seq. Population, id., 1353. 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 67 
 
 Thursday (March 22), the report and protest were read 
 at length, and, thereupon, Clark moved to substitute 
 for the resolution reported another declaring that Stock- 
 ton was not entitled to his seat ; and upon this negative 
 proposition opened the debate. 
 
 By great good fortune, the facts lying at the bottom 
 of the almost incredible piece of injustice about to be 
 narrated are matters of record and down to the minutest 
 detail never for a moment the subject of dispute.* 
 
 On the fifteenth day of February, 1865, the legisla- 
 ture of the State of New Jersey, as by the law it was 
 required to do, met in joint-meeting to elect a successor 
 to John C. TenEyck, whose term as senator of the 
 United States expired on the ensuing fourth day of 
 March. The constitution of the state in the clauses 
 empowering the legislature to appoint certain state 
 officers designated the two branches when meeting 
 together for such purposes, ' ' The Legislature in Joint- 
 meeting ' ' ; and from time immemorial ' ' the Legislature 
 in Joint-meeting" had prescribed rules for the govern- 
 ment of its proceedings. The legislature was composed 
 of a senate of twenty-one and an assembly of sixty 
 members numbering on joint ballot eighty-one. There 
 being a vacancy caused by death, the joint-meeting of 
 the fifteenth of February, after changing a rule as 
 hereafter stated, adjourned to the first of March, and 
 then to the fifteenth, by which day, the vacancy having 
 been filled, its numbers were complete. In the Senate 
 
 * For facts in Stockton case, see Globe, id., p. 1564 et seq. Journal 
 of N. J. Leg., id., p. 1669. Vote, id., p. 1677-9. 
 
68 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 were thirteen Democrats and eight Republicans ; in the 
 Assembly there was a tie: 30 to 30; so that on a joint 
 ballot the legislature was Democratic by five. There 
 would have been no hitch in the election of a Democrat 
 had it not been for the fact that nine Democratic mem- 
 bers, having refused to go into the caucus which chose 
 John P. Stockton as the party's candidate, refused to 
 vote for him after he was so chosen. At its first session 
 —February 15— probably because of the closeness of 
 the contest, the joint-meeting changed the existing rule 
 which required only a majority of the votes cast to 
 elect, to the more stringent rule requiring a majority 
 of all the members elected to the legislature ; and, under 
 this change, it became impossible for any candidate 
 to be elected as long as the bolting Democrats held out 
 and scattered their votes. Stockton could muster, ap- 
 parently, but thirty-four out of the forty-three Demo- 
 crats. TenEyck, the choice of the Republicans, could 
 get but thirty-eight if he got the full Republican 
 strength. The certainty of the dead-lock being per- 
 ceived, the first business of the adjourned session of 
 the fifteenth of March was a motion to rescind the rule 
 adopted at the first meeting requiring a majority of all 
 the members elected, and to adopt in its stead an 
 entirely new rule: "That any candidate receiving a 
 plurality of the votes of the members present should 
 be declared duly elected." This movement, if not 
 indeed initiated, was supported by the Republican 
 members who anticipated that the proposed change 
 would result in the election of their own candidate- 
 he apparently being sure of a larger number of votes 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 69 
 
 than his strongest competitor could get. When, how- 
 ever, they saw six of the bolting Democrats voting in 
 the affirmative, the eight or ten Republicans who had 
 already voted hastened to change their votes to the 
 negative— all but one, who remained steadfast. The 
 new rule, consequently, was adopted by a majority of 
 one of all the members elected— eleven senators and 
 thirty assemblymen in the affirmative, ten senators and 
 thirty assemblymen in the negative, three Democrats 
 voting against it and one Eepublican for it— the Re- 
 publican, therefore, casting the decisive vote. The 
 joint-meeting thereupon proceeded to ballot for United 
 States senator; and upon the first ballot John P. 
 Stockton received forty votes, James W. Wall one, 
 Peter D. Vroom one, and Henry S. Little one— making 
 up the forty-three Democratic members; John C. Ten- 
 Eyck received thirty-seven and F. T. Frelinghuysen 
 one— making up the thirty-eight Republicans. And, in 
 pursuance of the rule just adopted by a majority of the 
 legislature in joint -meeting, the presiding officer rising 
 in his place declared the Hon. John P. Stockton duly 
 elected United States senator for the term of six years 
 from the fourth of March, instant, with the unanimous 
 acquiescence of the assemblage— not a single protest, 
 objection or even a dissenting murmur being heard. 
 And, then, after appointing several state officers, the 
 legislature in joint -meeting adjourned without day. 
 The legislature sitting in senate and assembly con- 
 tinued in session for fifteen days longer and no note 
 of dissatisfaction was sounded. The protest, there- 
 fore, must have been an after-thought. The document 
 
70 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 itself was nominally dated as early as the twentieth of 
 March, it is true, and bore the signature of every Re- 
 publican member of the legislature, including even his 
 whose single vote carried the plurality rule ; but it was 
 not presented to the legislature, Stockton heard noth- 
 ing of it until months afterwards, and some, at least, 
 of the signatures were not put to it until within a month 
 of the meeting of Congress, and by that time it was 
 known that the next legislature would be Eepublican on 
 joint ballot. 
 
 The report of the judiciary committee upon the 
 facts as above stated reached the conclusion: "That 
 in the absence of any law either of Congress or the 
 State on the subject, a joint-meeting of the two Houses 
 of a Legislature, duly assembled and vested with au- 
 thority to elect a United States Senator, has a right to 
 prescribe that a plurality may elect; on the principle 
 that the adoption of such a rule by a majority vote in 
 the first instance makes the act subsequently done in 
 pursuance of such majority vote its own." 
 
 Clark, in opening the debate, maintained that, in 
 the absence of a statute, by what he called parlia- 
 mentary law, a majority was necessary to a valid 
 election, and that the joint-meeting of the legislature 
 had no power by a mere rule to abrogate the parlia- 
 mentary law; that, to accomplish such a modification, 
 an act passed by both Houses acting separately and 
 signed by the governor was indispensable. The whole 
 contention of the impugners of Stockton's title rested 
 upon the validity of this one argument, which Hend- 
 ricks went far towards demolishing by quoting from 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 71 
 
 Cushing's "Law and Practice of Legislative Assem- 
 blies ' ' the following : 
 
 "The law of the majority is universally admitted in all 
 legislative assemblies, unless ... a different rule is pre- 
 scribed by some paramount authority, or is agreed upon 
 beforehand by the assembly itself, by which a smaller num- 
 ber is permitted ... to do a particular act. But even in 
 these cases it is the will of the majority that governs, be- 
 cause it is by the major vote, in the first instance, that the 
 rule itself is established." 
 
 He cited also the cases of elections of Speaker of the 
 House, where, after a vain struggle for a choice by 
 majority, that body first adopted a plurality rule and 
 then elected under it, as in the cases of Howell Cobb 
 and Nathaniel P. Banks. Hendricks also laid great 
 stress upon one consideration: 
 
 "The joint-meeting agreed to elect by a plurality. They 
 did so elect. The presiding officer announced the result, 
 and there was no objection to it. The convention pro- 
 ceeded to other business on the result being announced, 
 and by silence acquiesced. I say that is conclusive upon 
 the question." 
 
 And so it seems to us. 
 
 Sumner urged if the case was doubtful the doubt 
 should be given— not, it seemed, to fairness or justice 
 —but to "the law of the majority." "If there ever 
 was an occasion where every doubt was to be counted 
 against the assumption of power, it is the present. I 
 know very little of cards, but I remember a rule of 
 Hoyle: 'If you are in doubt take the trick' "—a quota- 
 
72 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion, the accuracy of which senator McDougall instantly 
 questioned, insisting that the proper reading was, 
 "When you are in doubt play trumps," a direction 
 which, whether in Hoyle or not, the radicals, in this 
 instance, were predetermined to follow. When a vote 
 came to be taken at the close of Friday (23d of March) 
 there were forty-four senators present; the absentees 
 being Dixon, who had fallen ill and had not paired, 
 Foot dying at his residence in the capital, Howard, 
 paired with Van Winkle, Doolittle and Williams paired 
 with each other, and. Wright, who before going home 
 had been careful to secure a pair with Morrill of Maine 
 upon this particular question, so vital to his colleague 
 and his state. The Senate had been thoroughly can- 
 vassed and great pressure brought upon Morrill to 
 terminate his agreement, so much so that on the evening 
 of the preceding Wednesday he had yielded so far as 
 to write a note to Stockton stating that "the question 
 was not expected to run on ... so long," and "upon 
 reflection he thought it not unreasonable so to regard 
 it," and "to avoid embarrassment" he suggested this 
 "so that he (Stockton) might advise his colleague." 
 The next morning (Thursday), the first day of the 
 debate, Stockton having prepared a telegram informing 
 his colleague that, "after allowing you (him) a reason- 
 able time to get to Washington," Morrill would "con- 
 sider himself at liberty to vote in my (Stockton's) 
 case " ; he read it over to Morrill, obtained his approval 
 of its contents, and sent it to Newark, New Jersey. On 
 this Friday, a telegram from Wright was received 
 by his colleague to the effect that he was still confined 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 73 
 
 to his room and could not be in Washington until the 
 middle of the next week ; that he was uncertain whether 
 the telegram of yesterday meant that the pair was off ; 
 that he had heard nothing direct from Morrill and 
 trusted he would adhere to his agreement; and this 
 telegram was immediately communicated to the senator 
 from Maine. 
 
 Such was the condition of the opposing forces when 
 the secretary began to call the names of senators on 
 Clark's amendment. The intensest excitement pre- 
 vailed, as though all were conscious that the issue of 
 the battle between the President and the Congress hung 
 on the decision of the moment. The vote, as announced, 
 stood yeas 19, nays 21; VanWinkle, Morrill, Stockton 
 and Wilson were present but did not vote, VanWinkle 
 being paired with Howard, Morrill still true to his pair 
 with Wright, Stockton for an obvious reason, and 
 Wilson. Among the nays were every Eepublican 
 member of the judiciary committee except Clark (i. e., 
 Trumbull, Harris, Poland and Stewart), and such 
 Eepublican senators as Anthony, Foster, Henderson 
 and Morgan. The Clark resolution being lost by 
 a majority of two, the question recurred on the 
 adoption of the resolution, reported by the com- 
 mittee, affirming Stockton's right to his seat. The 
 white-heat still continued. The matter evidently was 
 not yet considered closed. Some new development was 
 evidently at hand. When the roll-call ceased, the 
 vote stood yeas 21, nays 20— the only change being that 
 Wilson, who did not vote before, now voted with the 
 radicals where he belonged. Then took place a scene 
 
74 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 brief but deeply disgraceful to the American Senate. 
 A dead set was made upon Morrill, senator after sen- 
 ator calling out to him to vote. Even his stately col- 
 league urged him to vote. The boisterous Nye rudely 
 pressed him to vote. High above all, the hoarse voice 
 of Sumner was heard ejaculating, Vote ! Vote ! Vote ! 
 The distressed senator, driven hither and thither by 
 conflicting claims, came at length to a decision. Ad- 
 dressing the secretary, he said : ' ' Call my name. ' ' The 
 secretary called "Mr. Morrill," and Mr. Morrill voted 
 nay. There was a tie, and the resolution was, at least, 
 not carried. But Stockton is upon his feet. He 
 tells of the pair with his colleague, of the telegram of 
 the day before, of the telegram of that day, and states 
 that his colleague still holds the senator from Maine 
 to his agreement without which he would not have 
 gone home at all. He then directs the secretary to 
 call his own name and votes in the affirmative. The 
 result is announced, Yeas 22, Nays 21. The New 
 Jersey senator is safe. With blank faces and in 
 ominous silence the contrivers of ihe scheme look on 
 while the Senate adjourns over Sunday. 
 
 But the struggle was not yet abandoned. The more 
 thorough-going partisans of the House joined those of 
 the Senate in holding conclaves during Saturday and 
 Sunday, so that by Monday a programme had been 
 mapped out by which it was hoped to retrieve the 
 situation. To Charles Sumner was confided the task 
 of redeeming what with unconscious irony he called 
 "The Honor of the American Senate." At the open- 
 ing of Monday's session, he moved to strike out Stock- 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 75 
 
 ton's vote as "null and void," first, because "accord- 
 ing to the principles of natural law, or in other words, 
 the principles of universal law," "no man can be a 
 judge in his own case ' ' and, second, because ' ' according 
 to the principles of parliamentary law" (embodied in 
 a rule in the House but not in the Senate) "no mem- 
 ber shall vote on anything in the event of which he is 
 immediately interested." The right of a senator to 
 vote in defence of his own seat was ably expounded 
 by the minority. Stockton detailed the circumstances 
 connected with the broken pair, reading a letter from 
 a son of his sick colleague in which it was stated that, 
 "not a single word" had the senator from Maine 
 communicated to the writer's father of his intention 
 to disregard his pledge. Fessenden and Sumner both 
 admitted that they had urged the paired senator to 
 vote, justifying their action by the twofold plea (1) 
 "that a pair for so long a period was not originally con- 
 templated by the parties," and (2) that a man even so 
 ill as Wright had ample time to arrive between the 
 receipt of Thursday's telegram and Friday's vote. On 
 this delicate and rather unpleasant subject, it will 
 suffice to quote Hendricks' answer on the first point, 
 which seems conclusive— the second needing no answer. 
 
 "There is force in that suggestion where there is a gen- 
 eral pair. If I pair with the Senator from Maine upon 
 questions of a class, for instance upon all questions in rela- 
 tion to the rebel States, ... of course if I remain absent 
 for a protracted time, he has the right to terminate the 
 pair. . . . 
 
76 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "But if I pair with him in regard to any particular 
 question, what difference does it make to him whether the 
 vote upon that question is taken to-morrow or a month 
 hence ? If the seat of his colleague is to be contested and I 
 am to be absent, . . . and he and I agree to pair off, not 
 generally upon a class of subjects, but upon that particular 
 question, how is it of interest to him whether that particular 
 vote comes up to-morrow or next month ? ' ' 
 
 It being ascertained, however, that Trumbull and his 
 Eepublican colleagues on the judiciary committee 
 were a unit against his right to vote, Stockton, in 
 deference to the opinion of these friends of his title, 
 expressed his willingness to withdraw his vote ; and in 
 consequence of this offer, the Senate reconsidered the 
 resolution carried on Friday, and, on Sumner's motion, 
 declared that on the pending question Stockton's vote 
 should not be received. An effort made by the minority 
 to postpone the matter until Thursday was vehemently 
 opposed by Sumner, Clark and Nye. Because Friday's 
 vote was presumed to have settled the question, 
 Wright's coming had been thought unnecessary; and, 
 since Friday, Morgan by an extraordinary fatality had 
 been added to the sick list. The managers of the plot, 
 therefore, had good reasons to object to any delay. 
 They meant to make the most of the time before the 
 recovery of Morgan and the possible arrival of Wright. 
 And this motive was blurted out by Nye : . 
 
 "We have reached a point in the consideration of this 
 case where the Senate should act promptly upon it. It 
 is due to the State of New Jersey. It is a thing perfectly 
 well known that the Legislature of the State of New Jersey 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 77 
 
 are holding on now for no other purpose than, if the vote 
 in this body is such as to relieve Mr. Stockton from further 
 duty here, that they may elect a man in his place. . . . 
 They are now adjourning from day to day for no other 
 purpose. ' ' 
 
 The Senate adjourned until the morrow with the 
 understanding that the subject should come up im- 
 mediately in the morning. The next day— Tuesday, 
 March 27th— the Senate Chamber was crowded. It 
 was whispered that a veto of the Civil Rights bill was 
 on the way. Every senator was at his post except 
 Dixon, Foot and Wright, Morgan having convalesced. 
 A telegram was read from Wright begging the Senate, 
 if it had not already done so, to defer the case until 
 Thursday, when he either would be present or ask no 
 further delay. In answer to Clark's objection that 
 there was not a shadow of reason why the absent 
 senator, if able to be there on Thursday, could not 
 have been there to-day, another telegram was read 
 stating that his physician had warned him not to start 
 last night or this morning, nor before to-morrow, when 
 the journey might be risked. But the radicals were 
 inexorable. The reception of the veto at this moment 
 made them doubly so; they would not grant even a 
 day 's delay. Sumner solemnly reminded his associates : 
 ' ' There is a Reaper whose name is Death ; he, too, may 
 come among us. Disease has made a pair between the 
 absent Senator from New Jersey and the absent Senator 
 from Vermont. Let that pair continue"— losing sight 
 of the absent senator from Connecticut. He and his 
 followers sneered at the possibility of Wright's coming 
 
78 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 —the man was sick unto death and would never come, 
 and they scouted the suggestion that this grave question 
 should be put off for a single day on such a chance. 
 On the heels of this cruel decision, Clark moved to 
 amend the pending resolution affirming Stockton's 
 title by inserting the word "not" ; and in this form the 
 test vote was taken. Stockton, knowing he was about 
 to be sacrificed, made a last speech, recounting the 
 whole history of his election, reading the journal of 
 "the Joint-meeting of the Legislature" of his state, 
 so as to preserve for the eyes of an impartial posterity 
 the full extent of the approaching iniquity. Then, 
 after further ineffectual efforts to amend and to post- 
 pone until the next day, the roll-call began. 
 
 The veto of the Civil Rights bill lay on the secre- 
 tary's desk as he rose to call. Morrill, as if he found 
 it unendurable to face dishonour a second time, had 
 arranged another pair with Foster and fled the chamber. 
 Stewart, present in the morning, had suddenly dis- 
 appeared. Every other senator was present except 
 the three disabled by illness (Dixon, Foot and Wright). 
 Every senator voting voted the same way as on Friday, 
 and every senator present voted, but two— Stockton, 
 denied the right to vote, and Foster paired with Morrill. 
 The yeas were 22, the nays 21. The resolution as 
 amended was immediately adopted by the same vote, 
 except that senator Riddle went with the majority so 
 as to move a reconsideration and thus keep the matter 
 alive until Wright should arrive. This last effort 
 was defeated by Clark, who, forestalling Riddle, moved 
 a reconsideration himself and called upon his forces to 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 79 
 
 make "the trial now." At this critical juncture, a 
 messenger arrived from Newark, with the intelligence 
 that every arrangement was made to convey Wright 
 to Washington in time to vote to-morrow. But the 
 plot was too near accomplishment to run any risk of 
 failure now. The day's delay was denied without 
 compunction, and Clark's motion to reconsider lost 
 "by the same vote as before— Stewart still in hiding. 
 The struggle was at an end. The senator from New 
 Jersey was ejected by a majority of one. Without 
 Morrill's broken pair the outrage could not have been 
 consummated; and Morrill's broken pair would not 
 have sufficed had it not been for Stewart's defection. 
 
 It must not escape notice, however, that by a most 
 humorous twist of Fortune's finger this hard- won but 
 shameful victory was rendered half-barren for the 
 moment. Stockton had gone, but his successor did not 
 come. The legislature of New Jersey, holding on from 
 day to day, patiently awaiting the triumph of what was 
 called "loyalty" in the United States Senate, was not 
 permitted to complete the great work after all. One 
 James M. Scovel chanced this year to hold the casting 
 vote in the upper House over which he presided, and 
 having been won over by the Johnsonites with the bait 
 of the federal patronage of the state, he stubbornly re- 
 fused to allow the senate to go into joint-meeting. In 
 vain did "Old Thad" belabour him from Washington 
 with telegram after telegranL He would not budge. 
 And, so, after many days of arrested mobility, the two 
 houses were at last forced to adjourn, leaving Stock- 
 ton's chair still standing vacant, a silent reminder of 
 
80 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 what Charles Sumner called, "The Honor of the. 
 American Senate."* 
 
 Immediately after the ejection of Stockton, came the 
 reading of the veto of the Civil Eights bill. Brief, 
 calm, courteous and dignified in its tone, cogent in its 
 logic and invulnerable in the points it made — in these 
 particulars the message furnished a refreshing contrast 
 to the unseemly struggle which had just ended in the 
 Senate, as well as to the indecorous exhibition in the 
 House seventeen days before. The unconstitutionality 
 of the main provision— so plain that even the strictest 
 radicals could not blind themselves to it — was ex- 
 pounded with a master's stroke. The death of the 
 venerable and much-loved senator from Vermont, oc- 
 curring the next day, prevented consideration of the 
 veto until April the fourth. Just before the debate 
 opened Stewart made an attempt to smooth over his 
 defection by airing his own particular project of recon- 
 struction. But this was his last effort to retrieve his 
 independence, and he soon sank into the ranks of those 
 steady supporters of party measures upon whom the 
 leaders count as a matter of course. The second day 
 of the debate was signalized by the appearance of 
 George F. Edmunds, appointed to the vacancy occas- 
 ioned by the death of Foot ; the celerity of the governor 
 of Vermont giving poignant emphasis to the paralyzed 
 condition of the legislature of New Jersey. The 
 presence of the new recruit sharpened the impatience 
 of the majority to dispose of the veto. In the evening 
 the minority proposed that a time should be fixed for 
 
 * Scovel's testimony, Imp. Ihv., p. 619 et seq. 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 81 
 
 taking the vote on the morrow so that the two senators 
 who were ill in the capital might attend. It was known 
 that Dixon had suffered a relapse, and, if brought to 
 the Senate at all, could remain but a short time, and 
 that Wright had arrived in the care of his son, but in 
 a like feeble condition. At this moment the suspense 
 was so heavy that business was interrupted— senators 
 gathering in buzzing groups or moving to and fro with 
 hurried mien. The value of the ill-gotten gain of the 
 struggle for the two-ithirds was about to be tested, and 
 the uncertainty was too great for comfort. The acces- 
 sion of Edmunds was a cheering stroke of good fortune. 
 But the unexpected return of Wright, the probable 
 presence of Dixon, the doubtful attitude of Willey and 
 Morgan, once again, put the result in jeopardy. Wade 
 sprang to his feet and burst forth into a thundering 
 protest against any further delay : 
 
 ' ' I will not yield to these appeals to comity on a question 
 like this; but I will tell the President and everybody else, 
 that if God Almighty has stricken one member so that he 
 cannot be here to uphold the dictation of a despot, I thank 
 Him for His interposition and I will take advantage of it 
 if lean." 
 
 Nothing but the prospect of an all-night's session 
 forced the majority to consent to an adjournment. 
 
 The next day (April 6) at the opening hour, every 
 chair was filled but two. Dixon was kept away by the 
 rain which was falling, but it was whispered that should 
 his presence at any moment become necessary he would 
 be carried into the chamber. Stockton's chair stood 
 conspicuous by its emptiness ; but, like the stool of the 
 6 
 
82 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 murdered Banquo, Wright's was "full." When, near 
 the close of the day, the debate had run itself out and 
 the question was about to be put, the excitement of the 
 critical moments of the Stockton episode was renewed 
 in an intensified form. Failure to override the veto 
 meant nothing less than progressive disintegration 
 ending in final defeat of the party, or submission to 
 Andrew Johnson. Tremendous must have been the 
 pressure brought to bear on Morgan whose fidelity to 
 Seward had hitherto held him to the President's side. 
 As the names of the senators were called in alphabetical 
 order, the first change noticed was the prompt response 
 of the recruit from Vermont. When the name of 
 Morgan was pronounced there was a painful pause for 
 a moment; but when his yea was heard, the galleries 
 broke loose in an uproar and the leaders on the floor 
 heaved a great sigh of relief. There was a last moment 
 of suspense when Willey's name was reached, but his 
 separation from his colleague who had just voted nay 
 settled the question beyond a peradventure. The death- 
 stricken senator from New Jersey was the last but one 
 to vote. He could not save the veto as he might have 
 done had he been permitted to save his colleague. What 
 compunctious visitings troubled the radicals as they 
 gazed at his pale face and reclining form, it were idle 
 to conjecture. But his presence served to bring to 
 shame the prophecies that death would not let him 
 come, which, in excuse for their refusal of even a day's 
 delay, they had so heartlessly thrown about the Senate. 
 The yeas were thirty-three, the nays fifteen, absent one 
 (Dixon). Two-thirds having voted in the affirmative, 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 83 
 
 the bill was passed, the objections of the President to 
 the contrary notwithstanding.* 
 
 It was a cardinal triumph— but missing defeat only 
 by a hair. The majority could not have spared a single 
 vote. Had either Morgan or Willey or even Stewart 
 stood firm, Dixon lay ready to be carried into the 
 chamber and the veto would have been sustained. 
 Moreover, close as it was, the victory was soiled by a 
 breach of plighted faith. Had not Stockton been 
 turned out, the defection of Stewart and Willey and 
 Morgan would not have averted defeat, and Stockton 
 could not have been turned out had not Morrill broken 
 his word. On the following Monday, the House of 
 Eepresentatives, which during the ordeal in the Senate 
 had been attending strictly to non-political legislation, 
 took up the Cjvil Rights bill, and choking off all 
 debate, passed it over the veto with a rush. At the con- 
 clusion of the roll-call, the speaker, although the result 
 could be in no way affected by his vote, ostentatiously 
 directed the clerk to call his name and responded in 
 the affirmative with great gusto and to the delight of 
 the majority. His exultant declaration, made, as he 
 said, by authority vested in him by the Constitution, 
 that the bill "has become a law, ' ' was hailed with shouts 
 and with clapping of hands and stamping of feet, both 
 on the floor and in the galleries ; the scene of disorder, 
 which no attempt was made to check, continuing for 
 several minutes.f 
 
 * Globe, id., 1809. 
 f Id., 1861. 
 
84 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The Congressional majority might well rejoice; for 
 this was the pivotal point of the contest. The failure 
 to override the veto of the Freedmen's Bureau bill 
 showed that the President still held the initiative. The 
 passage of the Civil Rights bill over the veto showed 
 that the scale had shifted, and the initiative was now 
 in the hands of the Congress. Viewed from another 
 and higher standpoint, the enactment of the Civil 
 Eights law marks an epoch in our constitutional history. 
 Since the foundation of the federal government, the 
 veto power had been exercised with relative frequency, 
 and, up to the present time, its exercise had been 
 effectual, except in two minor instances which serve 
 only to emphasize the rule. From the inauguration of 
 Washington, for fifty-six years every bill vetoed by a 
 President failed to become a law. In the last days of 
 the administration of Tyler a bill was passed over the 
 veto of the President for the first time in our history; 
 but it was a bill simply forbidding payment for certain 
 vessels the President had ordered built, and was 
 of no national significance whatever. Beside this 
 single instance, during the first session of the thirty- 
 fourth Congress a series of special bills was passed 
 over the vetoes of President Pierce; but they were 
 ordinary appropriations for river and harbor improve- 
 ments, involved no important principle, and provoked 
 but little comment. Never until now had a public 
 measure of importance been made a law in defiance 
 of the objections of the President.* Furthermore, 
 
 * Schouler's Hist, of U. S., Vol. IV, p. 491 ; Vol. V, p. 364. 
 
STRUGGLE FOR THE TWO-THIRDS 85 
 
 every previous exercise of the veto power on measures 
 of importance had heen grounded on the objection, 
 sometimes accompanied by others, that the measure was 
 unconstitutional. And every one of these vetoes had 
 stopped the passage of the proposed enactment and so 
 far preserved the Constitution from what in the judg- 
 ment of the executive was a violation of its provisions. 
 But, in the present instance, for the first time in the 
 history of the country, a measure of wide-reaching 
 scope and primary significance had been made into a 
 law notwithstanding the disapproval of the executive 
 not only, but also in the face of the protest of the Presi- 
 dent that the Constitution contained no grant of power 
 to pass it and that many of its provisions violated the 
 constitutional rights of the states and the people. Such 
 an exigency being without precedent gave birth to 
 startling questions. What would the executive do 
 with an act which in his judgment contravened the 
 Constitution and was, therefore, void? Jackson laid 
 down the rule that the interpretation put upon the Con- 
 stitution by one department was not binding on any 
 other, that every department of the government had 
 the right to construe the Constitution for itself; and, 
 to this doctrine, since the Dred Scott decision, the 
 Republican party, in practice if not in theory, had 
 subscribed. An act of Congress in accordance with 
 that decision, passed over a veto, would have had scant 
 respect from that party, and a refusal by the President 
 to execute such a law would have been hailed with accla- 
 mation by its leaders. And these leaders appear now 
 to have anticipated, and perhaps hoped, that President 
 
86 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Johnson would refuse, or at least neglect, to enforce a 
 measure he had denounced as unconstitutional, though 
 passed over his objections. So that the question had 
 arisen: What was to be done in case their carefully 
 contrived legislation should become a dead letter in the 
 hostile hand that penned the veto 1 When the country 
 came to comprehend the drift of such considerations 
 as these, suspicion began to filter into the minds of the 
 masses that the struggle for the two-thirds carried a 
 deeper significance than the taking off a senator or two 
 so as to pass a law. All at once it was recalled that, 
 though a majority of the House of Eepresentatives 
 might impeach the President, the Constitution required 
 two-thirds of the Senate to effect his conviction and 
 removal from office. This popular suspicion, there 
 can be no doubt, embodied an element of truth. The 
 impeachment and removal from office of their indom- 
 itable adversary already hovered in the minds of the 
 most active and zealous among the leaders of the party. 
 For so revolutionary a movement, however, the margin 
 they had won in the Senate was too narrow and un- 
 stable. Something further remained to be done. 
 
SECTION V 
 
 Colorado, Fourteenth Amendment and Tennessee 
 
 It is not likely that the victors in the recent engage- 
 ment indulged in any expectation that the menace of 
 impeachment and of packing the court to pass judg- 
 ment would cow Andrew Johnson. In 1861, when he 
 was made the target of all sorts of threats on account 
 of hia solitary stand against secession in the Senate,, 
 he quietly let fall this characteristic utterance: "I 
 want to say, not boastingly, with no anger in my 
 bosom, that these two eyes of mine never looked upon 
 anything in the shape of mortal man that this heart 
 feared."* His one idea of a fight was to return with 
 arithmetical precision blow for blow. On the Monday 
 succeeding the turning out of Stockton (April 2), he 
 issued a proclamation of peace throughout all the late 
 insurgent states, except Texas, formally withdrawing 
 the proclamations of war of his predecessor and de- 
 claring the restoration of civil rights and the cessation 
 of martial law.f On the eighteenth of the same month, 
 to a delegation of soldiers and sailors he announced his 
 unalterable determination ' ' to stick to his position, ' ' and 
 against his traducers he blew a blast of defiance: 
 ''Men who, when he was battling in the Senate and in 
 his own State for the Union, were lolling in ease and 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 36th Cong., p. 1350. 
 t McPh. Recon., p. 15. 
 
 87 
 
88 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 comfort"; he heeded them not. "The whole pack, 
 Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, little dogs and all 
 coming along snapping at my heels." And he did 
 not stop with proclamations and speeches. He began 
 to act on the offensive, to make reprisals. A harvest 
 of spoils such as the politicians of the Jackson epoch 
 never dreamed of was being reaped by the dominant 
 party and constituted one of the chief elements of its 
 strength. The dispensation of a multitude of offices 
 had come to be, through immemorial custom, almost 
 exclusively an executive function. This function, it 
 now appeared, Johnson meant to exercise with the 
 purpose of rewarding the supporters of his policy, 
 whether Eepublicans or Democrats, and thus to build 
 up a party of his own ; or, failing that, to reinvigorate 
 the party of his youth and earlier manhood. This 
 was the one course of conduct which even the apologists 
 of the President still left among the Republican leaders, 
 such as John Sherman, declared they could not for- 
 give. Difference of opinion on such capital questions 
 of state as negro suffrage, rebel disfranchisement, re- 
 construction, they could tolerate for the time being. 
 But the offices were consecrated to the party. Any 
 interference with their enjoyment by "loyal" party 
 men, especially in the interest of an unholy alliance 
 with the Northern Democrats, would be looked upon 
 as treachery so perfidious as to banish any lingering 
 scruples over the character of the means by which it 
 might be forestalled. 
 
 Upon no prominent politician could this threatening 
 aspect of affairs have had a more powerful influence 
 
COLORADO 89 
 
 than upon Henry Wilson, who, at the time of the defeat 
 of the bill for the admission of Colorado, had entered 
 a motion to reconsider.* At that date, the admission 
 of a territory, the population of which did not equal one- 
 fourth of the number required by law for one repre- 
 sentative in Congress, the voters of which had rejected 
 the constitution submitted to them at the only election 
 held under the enabling act and, according to the best 
 attainable evidence, were averse to state-hood; for no 
 other purpose than to increase the majority on the floor 
 of the Senate, was an enormity too scandalous for even 
 the men who turned out Stockton to perpetrate. The 
 bill got but fourteen votes, Wilson himself voting 
 against it. But, in view of the increasing aggressive- 
 ness of the President, the project grew more and more 
 tempting, and, on the seventeenth of April, Wilson 
 revived his motion. In the present emergency, he said 
 in effect, he would waive his hostility to the word 
 il white" in the constitution of the proposed state;- we 
 need her two votes in the Senate. But he counted 
 without his colleague who would abate no jot of his 
 former opposition. On the contrary, Sumner, in addi- 
 tion to his former arguments, now showed that the 
 population, being a mining population, was diminishing 
 instead of increasing, impugned the credibility of one 
 of the senators-elect, and denounced the second election 
 as illegal, fraudulent and marked with violence against 
 the negro. In short, he stripped the measure of every 
 semblance of merit. At the close of his remarks, he 
 startled the Senate from its propriety by exclaiming: 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 30th Cong., p. 1386. See Section IV, supra, p. 65. 
 
90 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "It is whispered that we need two more votes on this 
 floor. Sir, there is something that you need more 
 than two votes. ' ' Again : ' ' Tell me not it is expedient 
 to create two more votes in this Chamber. ' ' This time,, 
 however, his opposition was unsuccessful. The bill 
 passed the Senate by the vote of 19 yeas and 13 nays ; 
 not voting 17, all but five of whom were paired. Nine 
 Republican senators, who either voted against the bill 
 before or were absent or did not vote at all, now voted 
 for it, and one was paired in its favor. Of the Repub- 
 licans who opposed the measure before, Foster, Fes- 
 senden, Grimes, Harris, Morgan, Poland and Sumner 
 stood firm. Edmunds voted nay from antipathy to 
 the word "white." The real division of the Senate 
 was 25 yeas and 19 nays.* 
 
 The bill did not pass the House without a struggle 
 over the obnoxious word, and, then (May 3d), by a 
 vote of but 81 yeas to 57 nays. An atmosphere of dis- 
 trust hung around the senators-elect. Both sides 
 seemed to count upon their support. The suspicions 
 concerning their attitude, entertained by certain radical 
 senators, which there is reason to believe seriously con- 
 tributed to the first defeat of the bill, must by some 
 means have been allayed; yet their unconditional com- 
 mittal against the President's policy could not have 
 been publicly known, for close friends of Johnson con- 
 tinued to favor the admission of the state:— among 
 them Edward Cooper, one of the representatives-in- 
 Congress-elect from Tennessee, who, in the interval he 
 was denied his seat, acted as the private secretary of 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 1982, 2135-44, 2180. 
 
COLORADO 91 
 
 the President. To him in that capacity, as late as 
 Saturday, the twelfth of May, the Colorado senators 
 addressed a joint letter in which they pronounced the 
 prevailing rumor that "they had sold out to the 
 radicals" "entirely untrue," and protested that they 
 had "pledged themselves to support no man or meas- 
 ures. ' ' On the evening of Monday, the tenth day after 
 the passage of the bill, they had an interview first with 
 Cooper and afterwards with the President. Cooper 
 wanted them to strengthen his own arguments with 
 his chief, by avowing their adherence to the policy of 
 the immediate admission of all the unrepresented 
 states whose members could take the test oath; and 
 there is reason to believe that they did make an avowal 
 of this kind, more or less unequivocal. The inter- 
 view with the President was inconclusive, except that 
 Johnson let his visitors know that he did not think it 
 in consonance with the future welfare of the Union to 
 admit two more men into the Senate to carry out the 
 schemes of the radicals.* The veto message must have 
 been written at this very moment, as it was sent in 
 that evening. The message was laid upon the table as 
 in view of the vote on the passage of the bill there was 
 no hope of overcoming the veto. The second trial of 
 this indefensible scheme, like the first, had ended in 
 failure. A third was still to come. 
 
 But all other subjects of legislation were swept aside 
 by the plan of reconstruction reported by the joint-com- 
 mittee on the thirtieth day of April and taken up by the 
 House on the eighth of May. The plan was in two 
 
 * Testimony of Cooper, " Impeachment Investigation," pp. 23-7. 
 
92 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 parts: (I.) A proposed amendment to the Constitution. 
 (II.) Two bills supplementary to the amendment. The 
 amendment, unlike the one first reported and killed 
 in the Senate, contained five sections instead of one. 
 The first section was a repetition of the main provision 
 of the civil rights Taw. "The second was the single sec- 
 tion of the amendment first reported (modified as to 
 its phraseology to suit Sumner's fastidious philan- 
 thropy) basing representation on population and pro- 
 viding proportionate reduction on account of the denial 
 (or abridgment) of the elective franchise to male adult 
 citizens for any cause except for participation in re- 
 bellion or other crime. The third section excluded 
 from the right to vote for representatives in Congress 
 and presidential electors until the 4th day of July, 
 1870, all persons who had voluntarily adhered to the 
 late insurrection. The fourth inhibited the payment 
 of the rebel debt and the fifth simply gave Congress 
 the power to enforce the foregoing four. Of the ac- 
 companying bills, the first provided that when the 
 proposed amendment shall have become part of the 
 Constitution, and any state lately in insurrection shall 
 have ratified the same, the senators and representatives 
 from such state, if found duly elected and qualified, 
 may, after having taken the "iron-clad" oath, be ad- 
 mitted to Congress; the second rendered ineligible to 
 office under the United States five classes of the late 
 Confederates.* 
 
 The plan bore evidence on its face that it was a com- 
 promise of conflicting views among the members of the 
 
 * McPh. Eecon., pp. 103-4. 
 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 93 
 
 committee. Eadicals of the Stevens type were dissat- 
 isfied because the state governments organized under 
 the President's plan were recognized. Eadicals of the 
 Sumner type were dissatisfied because negro suffrage 
 was not made a condition precedent to admission. But 
 radicals of all types, for the most part, dissembled 
 their dissatisfaction because they perceived that, by 
 incorporating into the proposed amendment a section 
 disfranchising the leaders of the late Confederacy and 
 then exacting the ratification of the amendment as a 
 whole, the plan was rendered impracticable; and they 
 had but to bide their time. As senator Dixon pointed 
 out, the project, instead of being "a practical scheme for 
 hastening the reestablishment of all the states in their 
 full constitutional relations," will inevitably postpone 
 this desired end. "It is hardly worth while to discuss 
 the merits of measures which to be valid must be ac- 
 cepted by communities sure to reject them."* 
 
 The country had not long to wait to learn the atti- 
 tude of the Executive Department towards this counter- 
 plan of the Congress. The day after its submission 
 there was a meeting of the Cabinet, and an apparently 
 authoritative statement of the opinion of the President 
 and his confidential advisers came out in the press. 
 As might have been anticipated, the President was 
 "against all conditions precedent to the admission of 
 loyal representatives from the Southern states, in the 
 shape of amendments to the Constitution or the pas- 
 sage of laws"; and, according to the report, in this 
 position he was sustained by secretaries Seward, Mc- 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 39th Cong., p. 2332. 
 
94 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Culloch, Stanton and Welles ; Dennison, the Postmaster- 
 General, expressing some doubts as to the precise time 
 representatives should be admitted, Harlan being re- 
 ticent, and Speed, the Attorney-General, absent.* The 
 administration presented the same external appearance 
 of harmony as did the joint committee; but it was 
 known that internal dissensions were beginning to dis- 
 turb the peace of the one, as they had all along dis- 
 turbed the peace of the other. 
 
 The debate continued in the House for two days, the 
 chief contention being over the disfranchising section 
 which was allowed to remain by a majority of but five, 
 and then the amendment was passed by more than the 
 necessary two-thirds. It encountered stormy weather 
 in the Senate. The debate opened on the twenty-third, 
 when the third section was virtually thrown overboard 
 as of no practical benefit and another suggested similar 
 to the one finally inserted. After another day's dis- 
 cussion, there was an interval of some days during 
 which a caucus was held and a series of modifications 
 agreed to, so that when the subject was resumed on the 
 twenty-ninth there was but little difficulty in carving 
 the amendment into the shape it now bears as the 
 Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Instead 
 of disfranchising the leaders of the late Confederacy 
 until July 4, 1870, as the third section originally pro- 
 vided, the substitute inserted by the Senate provided 
 for the ineligibility to office— state as well as federal— 
 of any person who, having held any office requiring the 
 
 * Quoted from National Intelligencer of May 2, 1866, by senator 
 Grimes, Globe, id., p. 2333. 
 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 95 
 
 taking of the constitutional oath before the war, should 
 have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the 
 United States; Congress being given power by a two- 
 thirds vote to remove the disability:— the clause em- 
 bracing, as Reverdy Johnson said, "perhaps nine- 
 tenths of the gentlemen of the South."* On Monday, 
 June fourth, the discussion was resumed and lasted 
 until Friday night, when the whole measure having 
 been subjected to a minute revision was adopted by 
 the necessary two-thirds. Before the vote was taken, 
 a proposition was made by the minority to submit to 
 the states the several sections as so many separate 
 articles, any one or more of which might be ratified or 
 rejected; an expedient adopted by the first Congress in 
 submitting the first twelve amendments, only ten of 
 which were ratified; but, although several Republicans 
 during the course of the debate avowed the belief that 
 the Southern people would accept the penal section as 
 well as the rest, the proposition found no favour.f 
 Indeed, that the radicals not only did not expect, but, 
 also, did not desire, the South to ratify this amendment 
 is shown by the fate of the first of the two supple- 
 mentary bills reported by the joint committee. The 
 second bill was rendered useless by the alteration 
 which the third section of the amendment underwent 
 in the Senate. But the first was a constituent part of 
 the proposed plan of reconstruction, if that plan was 
 to be reconstructive in anything more than a contingent 
 sense; providing as it did for the restoration of the 
 
 * Glole, id., p. 2898. 
 t Id., pp. 3040-2. 
 
96 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Southern states on the ratification of the amendment. 
 That Sumner meant that this bill should never become a 
 law is shown by an amendment he introduced adding, 
 as a further condition to the readmission of any state, 
 that she should have stripped her constitution of every 
 trace of negro disfranchisement.* But the bill itself 
 never reappeared in the Senate. It was taken up and 
 considered in a desultory manner while the House was 
 waiting for the close of the long debate in the Senate 
 on the amendment; the radicals making it plain that 
 they did not mean to admit any of the eleven states 
 without the establishment of "an equal and just sys- 
 tem of suffrage for all male citizens, ' ' and the conserva- 
 tives giving the measure but a lagging and grumbling 
 support. Debate on it was renewed from time to time 
 but no serious effort was made to bring it to a vote. 
 The passage of a second Freedmen's Bureau bill pro- 
 longing that institution two years furnishes one more 
 piece of evidence that there was no expectation on the 
 part of the majority of the acceptance by the South of 
 their mutilated plan. One section of this last bill em- 
 bodying the provisions of the Civil Bights act gave the 
 President in his veto message the opportunity to set at 
 rest all apprehensions of a refusal to enforce a measure 
 that he had condemned as unconstitutional and at the 
 same time to blight the anticipations of the advocates 
 of impeachment in this direction: " 'the civil rights 
 bill,' " he said, "now the law of the land," "will be 
 faithfully executed as long as it shall remain unrepealed 
 
 * Id., p. 28(50. 
 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 97 
 
 and may not be declared unconstitutional by courts of 
 competent jurisdiction. ' '* 
 
 In the meantime the Fourteenth Article as it came 
 from the Senate having been concurred in by the 
 House (June 13), sped on its way north, south, east 
 and west. Connecticut ratified on the twenty-ninth 
 day of June, New Hampshire followed on the sixth 
 of July. But these instances had little significance. 
 All eyes were turned on Tennessee. Her remodeled 
 government, on the whole, was the most acceptable to 
 the Eepublicans of the Congress of all those of the 
 reconstructed states. The franchise was not as yet 
 granted to the negroes but her constitution gave the 
 legislature power to grant it at any time. She had 
 disfranchised every white man in the state who had 
 participated to any extent in the insurrection. The 
 election of Andrew Johnson Vice-President had given 
 place to another leader of the whites of East Tennessee 
 who now ruled the state. William G. Brownlow, called 
 the ' ' Fighting Parson, ' ' prided himself on having been 
 a rival of Johnson's in the affections of the people. 
 His life had been a running fight with the power of 
 slavery, and the fiery passions burning constantly in 
 his heart and finding voice in a reckless tongue and a 
 still more reckless and remorseless pen, combined, with 
 untold suffering undergone in the course of the long 
 combat, to fasten upon his attenuated frame a palsy 
 which shook him in every limb. But no disease how- 
 ever terrible could shake his untamable soul. He was 
 elected governor on the same day that Andrew Johnson 
 
 * McPh. Recon., pp. 147-8. 
 
98 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 congratulated the Senate upon that event in his famous 
 speech on his own inauguration as Vice-President. 
 From the moment Johnson's accession to the presidency- 
 removed him from the field of state politics, the Parson- 
 Governor let loose the animosity which no doubt had 
 long been slumbering in his bosom against his too suc- 
 cessful competitor. The breach between the President 
 and the Congress gave him his opportunity and he 
 threw himself into the embrace of the radicals, prepared 
 to follow them to any length short of negro suffrage. 
 
 On the twenty-eighth day of May the legislature of 
 the state, after passing an act disqualifying for office all 
 persons who had held conspicuous positions in the Con- 
 federacy, adjourned until the next fall. No sooner, 
 however, had the joint resolution proposing the Four- 
 teenth Amendment passed both Houses of Congress, 
 than Brownlow made haste to call the legislature back so 
 that the President's own state might be, if possible, the 
 first to ratify a constitutional amendment which the 
 President opposed. But the governor might call, yet 
 in the unsettled condition of the state the legislators 
 would not come. There seems to have been no diffi- 
 culty with the Senate. But, to make a quorum of the 
 House, fifty-six members or two-thirds of the whole 
 number must be got together, and fifty-six would not 
 or did not come. Some sent in their resignations ; the 
 governor refused to accept them; others refused to 
 attend at all until the proposed amendment was sub- 
 mitted to their constituents. Others attended but at 
 the critical moment absented themselves and broke the 
 quorum. The governor applied to General Thomas, 
 
FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 99 
 
 who commanded the United States troops still in the 
 state, for military assistance, which under instructions 
 from Washington Thomas refused. The fighting 
 parson thus driven to the wall proved equal to the 
 emergency. On the nineteenth day of July, he man- 
 aged to get together fifty-four members— two short of 
 a quorum. Two more were in the capital but being 
 friendly to the President they persisted in absenting 
 themselves from the House. They were taken into 
 custody by the sergeant-at-arms, dragged into the room 
 of that officer adjoining the Hall of the House, held 
 there by main force while the voting was going on, and 
 counted as present by the Speaker. The amendment 
 was declared ratified by the House by a vote of forty- 
 three yeas to eleven nays— not voting two. 
 
 During these days the majority in Congress were 
 differing among themselves over a mode of adjourning 
 so as still to keep a check upon the President's power 
 of removal and his general disposition to thwart their 
 measures. The weather was hot. The members 
 wanted to go home. But they were afraid to leave 
 the President alone. A call for a convention of Union 
 men without distinction of party to meet in Philadel- 
 phia, the public adhesion of prominent members of the 
 Cabinet to the movement, the resignation of the Post- 
 master-General on the eleventh of July and of the 
 Attorney-General on the sixteenth and the appointment 
 of Alexander W. Randall and Henry Stanbery as 
 their respective successors, an address to the country 
 by the Democratic members of Congress:— all added 
 to the solicitudes of the hour. Into this arena buz- 
 
100 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 zing with party anxieties, party perplexities, party 
 passions and suppressed party quarrels, the tidings of 
 Parson Brownlow's latest achievement dropped like 
 a spell. On the day of its date, the secretary of the 
 Senate read to the grave and reverend signiors gath- 
 ered around his desk the following telegram sent him 
 by the jubilating governor of Tennessee : 
 
 "Nashville, July 19, 1866. 
 Hon. J. W. Forney, 
 
 Secretary United States Senate, Washington. 
 We have fought the battle and won it. We have ratified 
 the constitutional amendment in the House— 43 voting for 
 it, 11 against it, two of Andrew Johnson's tools not voting. 
 Give my respects to the dead dog of the White House. 
 
 W. G. Brownlow." 
 
 As was remarked next day by senator Cowan: "This 
 is the first time in the history of the Senate, unques- 
 tionably, that such a dropping as this has fallen from 
 so foul a bird into this chamber, and it is the first time, 
 I think, in the history of this chamber, where members 
 of this body would sit patiently by and not vindicate 
 themselves from the charges of being accessories to 
 such vituperation. And this is published with joyful 
 acclaim by an officer of this body, published in the very 
 sanctuary of American decency."* 
 
 The immediate consequence of the news conveyed 
 by this scurrilous missive was the passage by the House 
 of a joint-resolution declaring that Tennessee was 
 "restored to her proper practical relations to the 
 
 * Globe, id., p. 3957. 
 
TENNESSEE. 101 
 
 Union and again entitled to be represented by senators 
 and representatives in Congress, duly elected and quali- 
 fied, upon their taking the oath of office"; though not 
 without a struggle by the radicals, headed by Stevens, 
 to postpone the matter, and a protest and speech 
 by Mr. Boutwell against it. When reported to the 
 Senate the resolution had undergone a metamorphosis 
 which gave rise to a lengthy debate highly illustrative 
 of the diversity of opinion among the majority. Prom 
 a simple declaration of the admission of Tennessee it 
 had become an elaborate document. The preamble 
 might be described as a synopsis of the history of the 
 state during her insurrection and reconstruction, made 
 up to exhibit the exceptional circumstances which justi- 
 fied her admission, together with the assertion of the 
 doctrine that none of the seceding states can "be re- 
 stored to its former political relations in the Union 
 without the consent of the law-making power of the 
 United States." The resolution proper was also en- 
 tirely remodeled so as to declare "that the United States 
 do hereby recognize the government of the state of 
 Tennessee ... as the legitimate government of said 
 State, entitled to all the rights of a State government 
 under the Constitution of the United States," and 
 there end. The Senate preamble, after being once 
 stricken out, was finally adopted after being amended 
 to placate Sumner and Brown (to no purpose), but the 
 House form of the resolution prevailed over that of the 
 Senate. In this shape the joint resolution passed both 
 Houses, protests being made in the course of the debate 
 by many members that the proceeding should not be 
 
102 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 considered a pledge or precedent for the admission of 
 the other excluded states. The affirmation of the Con- 
 gressional dogma of reconstruction, explicit in the pre- 
 amble and implicit in the resolution, it was thought, 
 would place the President in a most embarrassing posi- 
 tion. Either he must veto the resolution and thus 
 defeat one of his most cherished objects, viz: the ad- 
 mission of his state, or he must approve a doctrine he 
 was known by frequent utterances wholly to condemn. 
 He met the occasion like a statesman. The resolution 
 reached him in the evening. He did not keep it ten 
 days. He did not veto it. He signed it the very next 
 morning; and he accompanied his signature with a 
 message to the House expressing his dissent on matters 
 of form, of which this is the opening paragraph : 
 
 "The preamble simply consists of statements, some of 
 which are assumed, while the resolution is merely a declara- 
 tion of opinion. It comprises no legislation nor does it 
 confer any power which is binding upon the respective 
 Houses, the Executive, or the States. It does not admit to 
 their seats in Congress the Senators and Representatives 
 from the State of Tennessee; for, notwithstanding the 
 passage of the resolution, each House, in the exercise of the 
 constitutional right to judge for itself of the election, re- 
 turns and qualifications of its members, may, in its discretion, 
 admit, them or continue to exclude them. If a joint resolu- 
 tion of this kind were necessary and binding as a condition- 
 precedent to the admission of members of Congress, it 
 would happen, in the event of a veto by the Executive, that 
 senators and representatives could only be admitted to the 
 halls of legislation by a two-thirds vote of the two Houses. ' ' 
 
TENNESSEE. 103 
 
 "Notwithstanding the anomalous character of this 
 proceeding," the President approved the resolution, 
 with the proviso, however, that such approval was not 
 to be considered "as an acknowledgment of the right 
 of Congress to pass laws preliminary to the admission 
 of the duly qualified representatives from any of the 
 States ' ' ; nor as committing him to all the statements in 
 the preamble, some of which, he remarks, are contrary 
 to fact, especially the assertion that the state of Ten- 
 nessee has ratified the proposed constitutional amend- 
 ment, no official information of which has been filed in 
 the Department of State; on the contrary, "unofficial 
 information from the most reliable sources induces the 
 belief that the amendment has not yet been constitu- 
 tionally sanctioned by the Legislature."* After the 
 reading of the message, the eight representatives 
 elected as long ago as August, 1865— four Johnson 
 and four radical Republicans— were declared entitled 
 to their seats, and those present were sworn in. In 
 the Senate matters did not move so smoothly. Joseph 
 S. Fowler, one of the senators-elect, whose opinions 
 on the burning issues were well known, was sworn and 
 took his seat without a word ; but when the credentials 
 of his colleague were presented, there was trouble. ' The 
 fidelity of David T. Patterson to the Union had been 
 shown, not at a distance and in safety, but in the very 
 midst of the battle. He had suffered arrests and im- 
 prisonments, had been driven into the woods and 
 banished from his home. But he was a son-in-law of 
 
 * For admission of Tennessee see Glole, id., pp. 3987, 4008, Sen. ; 
 Pres. Mess. 4102; p. 4056, House. 
 
104 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Andrew Johnson and known as a supporter of his 
 policy. It was gall and wormwood to those of the 
 leaders who had turned out Stockton, to witness the 
 reinforcement of the scanty ranks of the minority by 
 so close an ally of the President. Scanning his record 
 with hostile eye they discovered one weak spot. A 
 judge of the Circuit Court of his state since 1854, he 
 was reelected by his Unionist neighbors over an open 
 secessionist in 1862 by four thousand majority; but 
 that section of the state being overrun after this time by 
 Confederate soldiers he could not serve unless he took 
 the oath to the Confederate States. He yielded to the 
 entreaties of the struggling Union men who had elected 
 him, and was sworn in ; at the same time declaring that 
 he owed no allegiance to the Confederate States and did 
 not consider that part of the oath binding. He held 
 a few terms of court where he could find grand juries 
 of Union men until September, 1863, when the federal 
 troops reaching Knoxville he succeeded in escaping, 
 not to return to his own district until the close of 
 the war. Upon this one delinquency in an other- 
 wise heroic career, Sumner laid his cold finger and 
 moved a reference of the credentials. The senator- 
 elect stood ready to take the test oath, not doubting in 
 his heart and conscience that he could lawfully and 
 honorably do so ; but such senators as Sumner thought 
 they had the right. to judge for him in this respect; and 
 by his own solicitation the reference was conceded so 
 that he might give a full explanation to the committee. 
 During the interval that elapsed before the com- 
 mittee's report, Wade, as if to countervail this imminent 
 
TENNESSEE. 105 
 
 accession to the ranks of the minority, called up a bill 
 for the admission of the territory of Nebraska as a 
 state, which he had introduced a few days before. Why 
 he took this course, instead of bringing up for consid- 
 eration his bill for the admission of Colorado which 
 lay on the table under a veto, it is difficult to explain. 
 If he could not override the veto of the one, how could 
 he expect to override the veto of the other ? The same 
 obnoxious word "white" disfigured the constitution of 
 Nebraska; and, although the number of negroes in the 
 territory was but fifty, that word was certain in the 
 one case as in the other to arouse the antagonism of 
 Sumner. In fact, upon that senator the effect would 
 have been the same were there no negroes in the ter- 
 ritory at all. If Wade cherished any expectations of 
 placating the Massachusetts senator he was cruelly 
 awakened. Sumner went at him with his favorite 
 argument that the constitution was not republican in 
 form, to the height of which he wished that his friend 
 "could lift himself." Wade deserved his punishment. 
 On the merits the Nebraska case was no better than the 
 case of Colorado. The territory was a vast wilderness 
 inhabited by a scattered population of not more than 
 forty thousand— or less than one-third of the number 
 required under the ratio for one representative. At 
 an election held, not under the enabling act of Congress 
 but under an act of the territorial legislature, to ratify 
 the constitution of the future state, less than eight thou- 
 sand votes were cast and the majority in favor of the 
 constitution was only one hundred, though many frauds 
 and much intimidation were charged. But, notwith- 
 
106 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 standing the opposition of Sumner, the Ohio senator 
 did succeed in getting his bill through the Senate, but 
 by the disheartening vote of 24 to 18. The House 
 passed it the same day. The President failing to sign 
 it, the adjournment of Congress prevented it from be- 
 coming a law.* 
 
 In the middle of the contest over this territory, the 
 committee made its report on the case of the senator 
 from Tennessee. After giving the facts as we have 
 given them already, it presented a resolution declaring 
 that David T. Patterson was duly qualified and entitled 
 to his seat; stating also "that in accepting the office of 
 judge and taking the official oath he did not intend to 
 acknowledge any allegiance to or any friendship for the 
 Confederate government," but acted throughout "with 
 a sincere desire to benefit and preserve the Union." 
 Even so ultra a radical as Clark confessed: "That there 
 was not a shadow of doubt in the mind of any person 
 who heard him (Patterson) before the committee that 
 he had been throughout a Union man; and not only a 
 Union man but such a Union man as would put some of 
 us to shame that we should be admitted into the Senate 
 because we were Union men and he should be put out. ' ' 
 After an effort to solve the question by modifying the 
 test-oath to suit the particular case, to which the House 
 with much heat refused its consent, the Senate in the 
 last hours of the session adopted the resolution de- 
 claring the senator entitled to his seat by a vote of 
 twenty-one yeas to eleven nays. After a brief interval, 
 
 * For Nebraska see Globe, id., pp. 4204-4213, 4219-4222, 4276. 
 
TENNESSEE. 107 
 
 Reverdy Johnson moved that lie be permitted to qualify. 
 There was no dissent. Amid an impressive silence, 
 David T. Patterson advanced to the desk and, with- 
 out the slightest hesitation or a single apparent tremour, 
 took the full "iron-clad" oath, which so many of his 
 colleagues, now looking on, affected to believe he could 
 riot take without manifest perjury.* 
 
 The closing scene of the absorbing drama of the ses- 
 sion placed the rebel-judge, as he was called, upon the 
 bench of the High Court of Impeachment. 
 
 * For Patterson, Globe, id., pp. 4162-4169, 4213-4219, 4293. 
 
SECTION VI 
 
 The Appeal to the Country 
 
 The contest was now transferred to the country. 
 Another House of Representatives was to be chosen, 
 and, if the administration by a coalition of its Republi- 
 can supporters with the Democrats could manage to 
 capture more than one-third, the veto would become 
 once more effective to guard the reconstruction plan 
 of the President while it grew in favor with disinter- 
 ested lovers of the Union. A political revolution in 
 the North could hardly be expected, but the states of 
 Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 
 Ohio and Indiana, as shown by recent local elections, 
 furnished' fair fighting-grounds. The dispersal of the 
 Congress left the President with a free hand to weed 
 out the opponents of his policy from the crowded ranks 
 of office-holders, and the President was now resolved 
 to use his power. Twelve hundred and eighty-three 
 postmasters, for example, were removed during 'the 
 campaign, and the same process went on in the 
 Treasury Department with its custom-houses and in- 
 ternal revenue districts. The Cabinet was recon- 
 structed; such doubtful or lukewarm supporters as 
 Dennison, Speed and Harlan giving place to such 
 staunch followers as Randall, Stanbery and Orville H. 
 Browning, once a bosom friend of Lincoln 's. The real 
 choice before the people, it should be borne in mind, 
 
 (108 ) 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 109 
 
 was not between the reconstruction plan of the Presi- 
 dent and the reconstruction plan of the Congress, be- 
 cause the Congress proffered no plan. A constitutional 
 amendment was before the legislatures of the several 
 states for ratification or rejection, but the bill which 
 opened the door of the Union to the excluded states 
 as a reward for ratification had failed to become a law. 
 The admission of Tennessee, as we have seen, was due 
 to exceptional circumstances and accompanied with 
 loud protests that it was to be no pledge or precedent. 
 The real issue of the campaign, as made by the atti- 
 tude and course of action of the Congressional majority, 
 was : Shall the excluded states be admitted into the 
 Union with constitutions denying suffrage to the freed- 
 men? There can be no doubt that at this period the 
 most influential leaders of the Eepublican party had 
 come to the conclusion that any restoration of the 
 Union unaccompanied by some measure of white dis- 
 franchisement, on the one hand, and of negro en- 
 franchisement, on the other, would be fatal to the con- 
 tinued supremacy of that party in the councils of the 
 nation. The powerful radical wing openly avowed 
 its determination to permit no restoration of the Union 
 without negro suffrage; and, judging from its success 
 in the Congress in striking the keynote of the opposi- 
 tion to the President, it was bound to drive the party 
 for the sake of its self-preservation if for nothing else 
 into the embrace of its creed. The majority in the 
 northern states, however, was not ready yet for negro 
 suffrage either at home or in the South; and the bold 
 presentation of the real issue might eventuate in the 
 
110 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 overthrow of the party. That issue, therefore, the 
 politicians set to work to ohscure or falsify. They 
 insisted that the only question was whether the states 
 reconstructed under the President's plan should he 
 admitted into the Union without ratification of the 
 proposed amendment, or, as in the case of Tennessee, 
 after its ratification. Knowing that the amendment 
 had heen carefully constructed so as to make it certain 
 of rejection hy the South, they promised the people 
 of the North an immediate restoration of the Union 
 if only the people of the still excluded states, by adopt- 
 ing an amendment of the federal Constitution, would 
 make such fair and moderate concessions as the reduc- 
 tion of their representation because of the multitude 
 of freedmen they would not permit to vote, the guaran- 
 tee of the Union, and repudiation of the rebel, debt. 
 And, under this false issue, the campaign was fought 
 and won. 
 
 Two days after the adjournment of Congress, an 
 event occurred which, by rekindling the exasperation 
 of northern Republicans against the Southern people, 
 struck a serious blow against the cause of the President 
 at the very opening of the battle. A massacre was per- 
 petrated in New Orleans over an unlawful attempt to 
 revive and pack the convention of 1864, which framed 
 the constitution under which the present government 
 of Louisiana was acting, "for the purpose of grafting 
 upon the constitution a provision granting suffrage to 
 the negroes; notwithstanding that the convention had 
 been extinct two years and the constitution ratified by 
 the people. The police made an attack upon the hall 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 111 
 
 where the members of the convention and a crowd of 
 colored people were gathered together, and numbers 
 of them were shot down or stabbed, and mutilated 
 after they were down and appealing for mercy. 
 After the slaughter was over, the United States troops 
 reached the scene and that same night the city was 
 placed under martial law. The President was as- 
 sailed in one breath for not having protected the con- 
 vention, and in the next for not having instructed the 
 commander of the troops what to do, although a tele- 
 gram from the commanding officer to the Secretary 
 of War asking instructions was not communicated to 
 the President, and was suffered to remain unanswered 
 by Stanton. Prominent members of Congress were 
 in complicity with the convention-plot, and the Presi- 
 dent on his side openly charged that the riot was 
 "substantially planned by the radical Congress."* 
 
 On the fourteenth of August, 1866, the convention 
 of the National Unionists met in Philadelphia. 
 Extra effort had been put forth by the Republican 
 supporters of the administration to make it a success 
 significant of the strength of their peculiar position. 
 The President and every member of the Cabinet but the 
 silent Secretary of War had been conspicuously active 
 in the promotion of the same object. A notice had 
 gone forth to all the office-holders that they were ex- 
 pected by the administration to support the movement 
 by their presence at the convention if convenient, but 
 at all events by their open advocacy of the principles 
 
 * Report of Board of Investigation, Imp. Inv., p. 1075. St. Louis 
 Speech, id., 531. 
 
112 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the convention was called to advance. The assemblage 
 was called to order by Eandall, the War-Governor of 
 Wisconsin and now Postmaster-General. General 
 John A. Dix was temporary president. Major-Gen- 
 era.1 Couch, the head of the delegation from Massachu- 
 setts, walked up the aisle arm-in-arm with James L. 
 Orr, the head of the delegation from South Carolina. 
 Every one of the thirty-six states was represented by 
 a delegation of respectable, intelligent, well-known 
 and influential citizens. Officers of renown in the 
 armies so recently victorious shook hands under the 
 old flag with officers of renown in the armies so recently 
 vanquished. .Doolittle was made permanent chairman, 
 Cowan reported the resolutions, Henry J. Raymond 
 read the address to the people. The friends of the 
 convention thought it a great success, while, to the 
 leading politicians of the dominant party, the presence 
 of the statesmen and heroes of the councils and battle- 
 fields of secession, which alone gave the gathering 
 any historical significance, furnished a cry which 
 served to keep their following in line, and, in the end, 
 rendered the movement detrimental to the cause of 
 the administration. They denounced it as a hobnob- 
 bing with "redhanded rebels." They ridiculed it 
 under the name of the "Arm-in-arm Convention." A 
 committee of two members from every state was ap- 
 pointed to present to the President a copy of the pro- 
 ceedings, and, on Saturday, the eighteenth, this body 
 of over seventy men gathered in the east room of the 
 White House, where Reverdy Johnson, the chairman, 
 in a courtly speech discharged the duty of the com- 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 113 
 
 mittee. The President, with General Grant standing 
 at his right hand, in a quiet conversational tone uttered 
 these sentences, little dreaming that he was committing 
 what the House of Eepresentatives by and by was to 
 pronounce "a high misdemeanor in office." 
 
 "We have witnessed in one department of the government 
 every endeavor to prevent the restoration of peace, harmony 
 and union. We have seen hanging upon the verge of the 
 government, as it were, a body called, or which assumes to 
 be the Congress of the United States, while, in fact, it is a 
 Congress of only a part of the states. We have seen this 
 Congress pretend to be for the Union, when its very step 
 and act tended to perpetuate disunion and make a disrup- 
 tion of the states inevitable. . . . We have seen Congress 
 gradually encroach step by step, upon constitutional rights, 
 and violate, day after day and month after month, funda- 
 mental principles of the government. We have seen a Con- 
 gress that seemed to forget that there was a limit to the 
 sphere and scope of legislation. We have seen a Congress 
 in a minority assume to exercise power which, allowed to 
 be consummated, would result in despotism or monarchy 
 itself."* 
 
 Having sounded this note of defiance, the President 
 made his preparations for a tour through the North. 
 The cornerstone of a monument to the memory of 
 Stephen A. Douglas was to be laid in Chicago on the 
 sixth of September, and the President, having been 
 invited to be present at the ceremony, purposed to avail 
 himself of the opportunity to visit the principal cities 
 
 * Version used in Article X. For whole speech see Pres. Trial, Vol. 
 1, p. 301. 
 
 8 
 
114 IMPEACHMENT OF PBESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 along his route and address himself in person directly 
 to the people. He had an unbounded faith in their 
 sense of justice and their, collective wisdom, and a 
 confidence no less unbounded in the efficacy of his 
 homely methods of appealing to the masses face to face. 
 On the twenty-eighth of August he started on this un- 
 lucky journey. In his remarks to the Virginia delega- 
 tion the February before, he made use of the expres- 
 sion, "As we swing round the circle of the Union";* 
 and the present progress was called by all the wits "a 
 swinging round the circle." He was accompanied by 
 Welles and Randall of his Cabinet (Seward joining 
 the party in New York), by General Grant and Admiral 
 Farragut. The municipal authorities of Philadelphia, 
 in fear of committing themselves to the side of the 
 administration, scattered to the surrounding summer 
 resorts at the approach of the distinguished party and 
 there was no official welcome; but the citizens headed 
 by General Meade turned out in goodly numbers. New 
 York, the next day, by an ovation, both official and 
 spontaneous, made up for the coldness of the Quaker 
 City. The crowds were uproarious for "Andy," for 
 Grant and for Farragut, as these three were driven 
 in procession to the City Hall. There, in the historic 
 Governor's Room, they were welcomed by Mayor John 
 T. Hoffman. While Johnson, in a low conversational 
 tone, barely audible throughout the Chamber, was ad- 
 dressing the mayor who stood directly in front of him, 
 Seward sat almost immediately beneath his own 
 portrait as governor of the state that hung on the 
 
 * McPh. Recon., p. 58. 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 115 
 
 wall. The contrast was striking and in some respects 
 mournful. The picture was a full-length representa- 
 tion of a tall, slender, agile, clean-looking figure, in 
 the prime of manhood, which seemed about to spring 
 out of the canvas. The figure below, huddled together 
 in its seat, wrinkled, untidy, the face swollen and red, 
 the cheek and drooping jaw deformed by a jagged 
 scar, looked like the broken relic of the young Apollo 
 that stared at it from the frame. That night, at a 
 gorgeous banquet, the President made one of his char- 
 acteristic speeches which the radical press misprinted 
 and made fun of the next day. Up the Hudson the 
 presidential cortege went to the capital, where Gov- 
 ernor Fenton accorded the President a reception so 
 chilling as to draw subsequently from the Secretary 
 of State a severe animadversion. Thence across the 
 state, stopping one night at Auburn, the home of 
 Seward, they were welcomed at Buffalo by Ex-Presi- 
 dent Fillmore in a speech remarkable for its unquali- 
 fied condemnation of the Republican party's present 
 course. Thence to Cleveland, where they arrived on 
 the evening of the third of September. Going out on 
 the balcony of the hotel where he stopped, the Presi- 
 dent was formally welcomed by the mayor, and, then, 
 in obedience to the clamours of a large crowd in the 
 streets, he was introduced. Greeted by repeated calls 
 for Grant, he excused the general's failure to appear 
 by the plea of illness. In the course of his remarks, 
 alluding to the saying that he was an alien and could 
 not be President, he said: "All that is necessary, there- 
 fore, is to declare the office vacant or on the pretext to 
 
116 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 prefer articles of impeachment" and drive him from 
 power; when a reference to his being on the same 
 ticket with Lincoln was met by the exclamation : ' ' Un- 
 fortunate, ' ' uttered by some one in the audience. John- 
 son retorted: "Yes, I know there are some who say 
 'unfortunate.' Yes, unfortunate for some that God 
 rules on high and deals in justice. Yes, unfortunate. 
 The ways of providence are mysterious and incompre- 
 hensible, controlling all those who exclaim 'unfortun- 
 ate.' If my predecessor had lived, the vials of wrath 
 from a mendacious press and subsidized gang of hire- 
 lings would have been poured out upon him, as upon 
 me." Another cried: "Hang Jeff Davis." His 
 answer was ready: "Why don't you hang him? 
 Haven't you got the Court? Haven't you got the At- 
 torney General? Who is your Chief Justice who re- 
 fused to sit on his trial? I am not the Attorney Gen- 
 eral. I am no jury." "I called upon your Congress 
 that is trying to break up the government." "Did 
 your Congress order any of them to be tried?" An- 
 other shouted : ' ' Traitor, traitor. ' ' He inquired for the 
 man who could place his finger upon one pledge Andrew 
 Johnson had violated: "Who is he? What language 
 does he speak? What religion does he profess? 
 Traitor! my countrymen: Will you hear me? ... If 
 I were disposed to play the orator and deal in declama- 
 tion ... I would take Mr. Seward and bring him before 
 you and point to the hacks and scars upon his person. 
 I would ask you when he turned traitor?" A voice 
 shouting ' ' Hang Thad. Stevens and Wendell Phillips, ' ' 
 he burst out: "Why not hang them? I have been 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 117 
 
 fighting traitors South. They have been whipped and 
 crushed and acknowledge their defeat and now as I go 
 round the circle I am prepared to fight them at the 
 North." " I understand the discordant notes in this 
 crowd to-night." "Some of you talk about traitors 
 in the South who have not the courage to go away 
 from your homes and fight them." The brave men 
 were in the field "while you remained cowardly at 
 home," "speculating and committing frauds on the 
 government." Some protesting: "Is this dignified?" 
 — he exclaimed: "I understand you. You may talk 
 about the dignity of the President. I have been upon 
 the battlefields of this country." "I care not for my 
 dignity. There is a certain portion of our country- 
 men who will respect a citizen whenever he is entitled 
 to respect. There is another class who have no respect 
 for themselves, and consequently they cannot respect 
 any one else. I know a man and a gentleman when- 
 ever I see him. I have only to look in his face; and 
 (pointing at one of the noisiest in the crowd) if I were 
 to see yours by the light of day I do not doubt but 
 t^at I should see cowardice upon it. Come out here 
 where I can see you. If ever you shoot a man you 
 will do it in the dark, and pull the trigger when no one 
 is by." Having silenced his would-be tormentors at 
 last, he proceeded to commit without rebuke his second 
 "high misdemeanor in office" (according to the sub- 
 sequent charge of the House) : 
 
 "In bidding you farewell I would ask you, with all the 
 pains this Congress has taken to poison the minds of their 
 
118 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 constituents against me— what has this Congress done? 
 Have they done anything to restore the Union of these 
 States? No; on the contrary, they have done everything 
 to prevent it ; and because I stand now where I did when the 
 rebellion commenced, I have been denounced as a traitor. 
 Who has suffered more, who has run greater risks than I? 
 But this factious domineering party in .Congress has under- 
 taken to poison the minds of the American people." 
 
 He closed quite triumphantly; replying to one or 
 two belated cries about "New Orleans," "Louisiana." 
 "You let the negroes vote in Ohio before you talk about 
 negroes voting in Louisiana. Take the beam out of 
 your own eye before you see the mote that is in your 
 neighbor's. You are very much disturbed about New 
 Orleans but you won't let the negro go to the ballot 
 box in Ohio. We understand these questions."* 
 
 The next morning, the presidential party sped on 
 across the states of Ohio and Indiana to Chicago. The 
 exercises there were conducted with comparative de- 
 corum, and the illustrious visitors then started for St. 
 Louis, reaching that city on the eighth. In the even- 
 ing the President attended a banquet at the Southern 
 Hotel. A great crowd assembled outside and clamoured 
 for a speech. The President, at last but with manifest 
 reluctance, yielded to repeated calls and came out on 
 the balcony, intending to make a short address of 
 thanks. Hardly had he uttered a word, however, when 
 interruptions, evidently preconcerted, began. The 
 New Orleans riot being now thrown in his teeth he 
 
 * McPh. Recon., pp. 134 et seq., and Trial, Vol. 1, p. 328 et seq. 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 119 
 
 ■was provoked to commit a third "high misdemeanor in 
 office, ' ' as defined by the House of Representatives : 
 
 "Perhaps if you had a word or two on the subject of 
 New Orleans you might understand more about it than you 
 do. . . . If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and 
 trac*e it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the 
 riot at New Orleans was substantially planned. If you 
 will take up their proceedings in their caucuses you will 
 understand that they knew that a Convention was to be 
 called which was extinct by its power having expired; that 
 it was said that the intention was that a new government 
 was to be organized and on the organization of that gov- 
 ernment the intention was to enfranchise one portion of the 
 population, called the colored population, who had just 
 been emancipated, and at the same time to disfranchise 
 white men. "When you design to talk about New Orleans 
 you ought to understand what you are talking about. 
 When you read the speeches that were made and take up 
 the facts on the Friday and Saturday before that Conven- 
 tion sat, you will there find that speeches were there made 
 incendiary in their character, exciting that portion of the 
 population, the black population, to arm themselves and 
 prepare for the shedding of blood. You will also find that 
 that Convention did assemble in violation of the law, and 
 the intention of that Convention was to supersede the reor- 
 ganized authorities of the state government of Louisiana, 
 which had been reorganized by the government of the 
 United States ; and every man engaged in that Convention 
 with the intention of superseding and upturning the civil 
 government which had been recognized by the Government 
 of the United States, I say, that he was a traitor to the Con- 
 stitution of the United States, and hence you find that 
 another rebellion was commenced having its origin in the 
 
120 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 radical Congress. ... So much for the New Orleans riot. 
 And there was the cause and origin of the blood that was 
 shed; and every drop of blood that was shed is upon their 
 skirts and they are responsible for it. ' ' 
 
 After this he appears to have cut loose from all 
 restraint : 
 
 ' ' I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been 
 maligned, I have been called Judas Iscariot and all that. 
 Now, my countrymen, here, to-night, it is very easy to in- 
 dulge in epithets, it is easy to call a man Judas, and cry out 
 traitor; but when he is called upon to give arguments and 
 facts he is very often wanting. Judas Iscariot! Judas! 
 There was a Judas and he was one of the twelve apostles. 
 Oh, yes the twelve apostles had a Christ. (A voice "And 
 a Moses too"; laughter.) The twelve apostles had a Christ 
 and he never could have had a Judas unless he had had 
 twelve apostles. If I have played the Judas who has been 
 my Christ that I have played the Judas with? Was it 
 Thad. Stevens ? Was it Wendell Phillips ? Was it Charles 
 Sumner? These are the men that stop and compare them- 
 selves with the Saviour; and everybody that differs with 
 them in opinion and try to stay and arrest their diabolical 
 and nefarious policy, is to be denounced as a Judas. ' ' 
 
 Again: 
 
 "But a short time since I heard some one say in the 
 crowd that we had a Moses. Yes, there is a Moses ; and I 
 know sometimes it has been said that I would be the Moses 
 of the colored man. ... I have tried to do as much and 
 have done as much— and when they talk about Moses, and 
 the colored man being led into the promised land, where is 
 the land which this clan proposes to lead them into? . . . 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 121 
 
 "Why, it is to give us a Freedmen's Bureau. . . . The 
 Freedmen's Bureau was a simple proposition to transfer 
 four millions of slaves in the United States from their 
 original to a new set of taskmasters. I have been laboring 
 for years to emancipate them; and then I was opposed to 
 seeing them transferred to a new set of taskmasters to be 
 worked with more rigor than they had been worked before. 
 Yes, under this new system they would work the slaves, and 
 call on the government to bear all the expenses and if there 
 were any profits left why they would pocket them. Thus, 
 you the people must pay the expenses of running the ma- 
 chine out of your own pockets while they get the profits 
 of it." 
 
 Again : 
 
 "Because the President chose to exercise the veto power, 
 he committed a high offense and therefore ought to be im- 
 peached. Yes, yes, they are ready to impeach him. And 
 if they were satisfied they had the next Congress by a 
 decided majority as this, upon some pretext or other — 
 violating the Constitution, neglect of duty, or omitting to 
 enforce some act of law — upon some pretext or other, they 
 would vacate the executive department of the United 
 States." 
 
 With reference to the pardoning power he said: 
 
 "I reckon I have pardoned more men, turned more men 
 loose, and set them at liberty that were imprisoned, I 
 imagine, than any other living man on God 's habitable globe. 
 I turned forty-seven thousand of our men loose who were 
 engaged in the struggle, with the arms we captured with 
 them, and who were then in prison. I turned them loose. 
 Large numbers have applied for pardon and I have granted 
 
122 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 them pardon; yet there are some who condemn and hold 
 me responsible for doing wrong. Yes, there are some who 
 staid at home, who didn't go into the field, that can talk 
 about others being traitorous and being treacherous. 
 There are some who can talk about blood and vengeance 
 and crime and everything to make treason odious, and all 
 that, who never smelt gunpowder on either side. Yes, they 
 can condemn others, and recommend hanging and torture 
 and all that. If I have erred, I have erred on the side of 
 mercy. Some of these croakers have dared to assume that 
 they are better than the Saviour of men himself —a kind of 
 over-religious— better than anybody else; and all wanting 
 to do Deity 's work, thinking He cannot do it as well as they 
 can. ' ' 
 
 As to office-holders lie said : 
 
 "Don't you see, my countrymen, it is a question of power ; 
 and being in power, as they are, their object is to perpetuate 
 their power, since, when you talk about turning them out, 
 oh, they talk about bread and butter. Yes, these men are 
 the most perfect and complete bread and butter party that 
 has ever appeared in this Government. When you make 
 an effort or struggle to take the nipple out of their mouths, 
 how they clamor. They have stayed at home here five or 
 six years, held the offices, grown fat, and enjoyed all the 
 emoluments of position ; and now, when you talk of turning 
 one of them out, oh, it is proscription ; hence they come for- 
 ward and propose, in Congress, to do what? To pass laws 
 to prevent the Executive from turning anybody out. . . . 
 How are these men to be got out? (Voice, "Kick 'em out") 
 —unless your executive can put them out, unless you can 
 touch them through the President ? Congress says he shall 
 not turn them out, and they are trying to pass laws to pre- 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 123 
 
 vent it being done. Well, let me say, to you if you will 
 stand by me in this action, if you will stand by me in trying 
 to give the people a fair chance — soldiers and citizens — to 
 participate in these offices, God being willing, I will kick 
 them out. I will kick them out just as fast as I can. Let me 
 say to you, in concluding, that what I have said I intended 
 to say. I was provoked into this, and I care not for. their 
 menaces, the taunts and the jeers. I care not for threats. 
 I do not intend to be bullied by my enemies nor overawed 
 by my friends. But, God willing, with your help, I will 
 veto their measures whenever any of them come to me."* 
 
 Turning homeward from St. Louis, the President, on 
 reaching Indianapolis and attempting to address the 
 citizens, was silenced hy the mob. They yelled at him : 
 " No ; no ; we want nothing to do with traitors. " " Shut 
 up." " We want to hear from Grant." The Presi- 
 dent held on, repeatedly requesting the privilege 
 of heing heard. But the crowd waxed more and 
 more infuriated. They absolutely refused to hear a 
 word. Guns were flourished. The President retired 
 discomfited for once. A fight ensued in the streets. 
 Pistol shots were fired and two men were wounded. 
 
 Thus ended the "swing around the circle." When 
 Johnson reentered the White House, he was followed 
 by a storm of hisses, hootings, guffaws and jeers from 
 the hosts of Republican party partisans throughout 
 the whole North. Had this been all, he might have 
 bidden defiance to their rage and their ridicule. But 
 his want of dignity, as he was made to appear, his in- 
 sensibility to the decorum due to his high office, his 
 
 *McPh. Reeon., pp. 136-140. 
 
124 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 eagerness to exchange repartee with any opponent no 
 matter how low, his slovenly modes of speech and his 
 offences against good taste, unfairly blazoned as they 
 were before the country, disgusted many persons who 
 were half -inclined to his policy; made many of the 
 judicious among his supporters hesitate and grow luke- 
 warm; forced his warmest supporters to hang their 
 heads for lack of apology ; scattered abroad the ugliest 
 scandals about his personal habits and irretrievably 
 hurt his cause. Even the Democrats, while they had 
 no alternative but to support his policy, came to rec- 
 ognize that he was not the man to lead their party, and 
 the Southern whites, while they regarded with wonder 
 their unexpected champion, gradually lost the fond 
 hopes that his championship would mitigate their woes. 
 Indeed, perhaps it is not too much to say, that if Andrew 
 Johnson had kept himself within the doors of the Ex- 
 ecutive Mansion during this critical campaign, the re- 
 sult of the elections would have been the beginning of 
 the triumph of his policy, General Grant would not 
 have turned to the radicals, and he himself would have 
 been elected President in 1868. And yet there was 
 no small amount of injustice involved in this fatality. 
 In the first place, as we have already intimated, the 
 scenes, so derogatory to the personal dignity of the 
 chief magistrate of the republic, were made to appear 
 much grosser than they really were. There was always 
 something imposing in the mere presence of Johnson 
 which to some extent counter-balanced the undue 
 familiarity, the lapses from good taste and decorum 
 disfiguring his interviews with the populace. And his 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 125 
 
 encounters with the multitude cannot correctly be 
 called speeches; they were essentially colloquies, mere 
 talks, conversations in undress. Nevertheless, they were 
 mercilessly exposed in the columns of a hostile press 
 with all their deformities intensified, as monstrous 
 travesties of the stately, measured addresses of the 
 great statesmen of the past; the strong, quiet, resolute 
 personality of the speaker being transformed in the 
 imagination of the reader into a loud, blaring, wildly- 
 gesticulating figure of some frenzied, illiterate dema- 
 gogue. Now, whatever may have been the faults of 
 Johnson as a speaker, he was never noisy and gesticu- 
 lated but seldom. Even that supreme threat so awful 
 to the office-seeking population, that he would "kick the 
 radicals out, ' ' was uttered, doubtless, in a low voice with 
 no violent gesture. In the next place, these unlucky 
 utterances, whatever else they show, show the sincerity 
 of the man — his devotion to his cause and his indomi- 
 table determination to stand by it to the last. There 
 seems to be something mean in sniffing about the want 
 of dignity, the lack of drawing-room manners, even the 
 grammar of a leader in a just cause. Andrew Johnson 
 at Cleveland and St. Louis was the same man he was 
 in Tennessee, where he won in old times many a triumph 
 by just such colloquies with the crowd; the same man 
 he was when, assailed by the Southern senators for his 
 faithfulness to the Union, he gained such universal 
 glorification in the North by modes of retort essentially 
 of the same kind. If he had swung round the circle in 
 the company of Jack Hamilton of Texas and "Parson" 
 Brownlow, preaching the orthodox radical doctrine, his 
 
126 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 lack of dignity would have been attributed to his ab- 
 sorption in a great mission, his slips into bad taste to 
 the refreshing earnestness of a primitive nature, and 
 his want of grammar to a quaint American mode of 
 speech. He might even have dropped into drink, as 
 he was falsely accused of doing, and escaped censure, 
 had his availability as a candidate been sufficiently con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 The truth of this remark could find no clearer illus- 
 tration than in the convention of the "loyal Unionists" 
 or the South:— otherwise called ''The Jack Hamilton 
 Convention" — which met at Philadelphia on the third 
 of September in the historic hall that witnessed the 
 signing of the Declaration of Independence. The 
 municipal functionaries, who fled the approach of the 
 President the week before, were now on hand with 
 smiles of welcome. "Parson" Brownlow was the hero 
 of the hour, and was received by the city with a perfect 
 ovation. The border states— Missouri, Kentucky, 
 Maryland, Delaware— together with West Virginia and 
 the newly admitted Tennessee, were represented by 
 delegations comparatively respectable and all op- 
 posed to negro suffrage. In these states the rebel 
 whites, as they were called, were disfranchised, and 
 as the men in power did not need the negro vote 
 to maintain their supremacy, their instinctive antip- 
 athy to the race held full sway. On the other 
 hand, the representatives from the excluded states, 
 if representatives in any sense they can be called, 
 whose constituents, outside of a small number of 
 colored men capable of understanding the crisis, were 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 127 
 
 really in the North, composed a motley band. Rene- 
 gades from their states, their section, and their race; 
 sojourners from the North; attaches of the army; 
 petty federal office-holders expecting removal — miti- 
 gated here and there by a full-blown over-earnest 
 fanatic and a few honest colored men kept in the back- 
 ground—their very existence as a party rested entirely 
 on the hope of a grant of suffrage to the negro and of 
 its withdrawal from the vast majority of the whites. 
 Many of the most prominent and influential men of the 
 Republican party attended as delegates from the North, 
 but they took the singular course of separating them- 
 selves at the outset from the Southern delegates, so, 
 as they said, to leave them "perfectly free m their 
 proceedings," and held a convention by themselves 
 The Southern wing, presided over by Speed and guided 
 by Hamilton and Brownlow, adopted a series of resolu- 
 tions that stopped short of negro suffrage and thereby 
 necessitated a third convention, held after the adjourn- 
 ment of the other two by the delegates of the excluded 
 states, which appealed to Congress for the only boon 
 that could keep them politically alive. 
 
 This September month was signalized by two more 
 conventions. On the seventeenth there met at Cleve- 
 land a convention of soldiers and sailors who had 
 served in the army and navy in the late War and were 
 in favor of the resolutions adopted by the National 
 Philadelphia Convention of the fourteenth of August, 
 endorsing the administration. The call was signed 
 by a formidable array of illustrious names — forty-eight 
 major generals and fifty-six brigadier generals, it was 
 
128 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 counted, officers of renown such as Custer, McCook, 
 Ewing, Dix, Steedman, Blair, Slocum, Sickles, Granger, 
 McClernand, Couch, Averill, Franklin, Crittenden and 
 Patrick. In addition to these, the administration or- 
 gans openly claimed that the movement was approved 
 by Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, without eliciting 
 a denial from any of these heroes. Henry Ward 
 Beecher wrote a strong letter in its favor. This con- 
 vention of soldiers and sailors on the one side provoked 
 the calling of a convention of soldiers and sailors on 
 the other consisting mainly of men who had served 
 as privates or non-commissioned officers, which met 
 on the twenty-sixth. It was to be a demonstration that 
 the rank and file were not represented in the officers' 
 convention. Its leading spirit was the man who had 
 originated the movement— Benjamin F. Butler. He 
 called out the privates, marshalled them in caucuses, 
 guided them in the selection of representatives, wel- 
 comed them at the place of meeting, wrote, reported 
 and read their resolutions, and sent them home with his 
 benediction. His present purpose, in which his whole 
 nature was absorbed for the time being, was the im- 
 peachment and removal of the President, and, accord- 
 ingly, the resolutions of his convention exhibited the 
 utmost hostility to the whole course of the administra- 
 tion. 
 
 Even while these rival conventions were being held, 
 the result of the campaign was distinctly foreshadowed 
 by the elections in Vermont and Maine ; and, in October, 
 Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana settled the verdict be- 
 forehand. 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 129 
 
 In the interval between these state elections and 
 the presidential, an incident took place of no great 
 importance in itself and bearing a most innocent aspect, 
 but subsequently magnified into sinister proportions. 
 On the seventeenth of October, the President sent for 
 General Grant and told him that, at the President's own 
 suggestion, in order to give prestige to the mission to 
 Mexico, the Cabinet had decided that the General of the 
 army should accompany the United States minister, 
 Lewis D. Campbell, about to depart in a war vessel to 
 the country to which he was accredited. The situation 
 there was a critical one. According to an arrange- 
 ment entered into by the Emperor of the French with 
 the United States in May, the French troops were to 
 evacuate Mexico in three instalments — the first in No- 
 vember, 1866— leaving the Mexicans themselves to de- 
 cide between the government of Maximilian and the 
 government of Juarez. Our own government naturally 
 sympathized with the Juarez Republic, to which in 
 fact our minister was accredited, but it was feared 
 that on the departure of the French troops serious dis- 
 turbances would break out, necessitating the utmost 
 caution and tact on the part of the envoys of the United 
 States, and rendering it highly desirable that our gov- 
 ernment should assume as imposing an attitude as 
 possible. Grant, though at first (so at least it seemed 
 to the President) evincing satisfaction with the pro- 
 posed arrangement, a few days afterwards declined 
 peremptorily to receive the instructions the Secretary 
 of State had drafted for his guidance, and with great 
 urgency excused himself to the President from accept- 
 
130 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ing a duty he claimed was "entirely out of his sphere," 
 "for which he was not fitted," and "one, too, which 
 can be much better performed by others. ' ' "When the 
 President found that the General was unalterable in his 
 determination, he quietly acquiesced and appointed 
 General Sherman on that officer's own suggestion. The 
 mission amounted to little on account of the fact that 
 the French troops, in partial breach of the Emperor's 
 promise, did not depart until the spring; minister 
 Campbell not being able to find Juarez at all. On this 
 slight foundation was built up the story that the 
 President conspired with the Secretary of State to 
 banish Grant from the country and then to supersede 
 him by the appointment of Sherman in his place or as 
 Secretary of War in place of Stanton. At the date of 
 this incident, as subsequent events clearly showed, the 
 President had no more reason to distrust Grant than 
 to distrust Sherman.* 
 
 Connected with this imaginary conspiracy was the 
 affair of the Baltimore police commissioners — with 
 which the President had but little to do and that little 
 of the simplest and most inoffensive character. Un- 
 
 * Diary of William G. Moore, private secretary of President John- 
 son, among the papers of Andrew Johnson left with his daughter, 
 Martha Patterson, recently deceased; extracts concerning the Mexico 
 mission printed in The Memphis Daily Appeal of November 1, 1885. 
 Gen. Grant's letter in McPh. Recon., p. 296. Gen. Sherman's Memoirs 
 (4th ed., two vols, in one), Vol. 2, pp. 414 et seq. Sherman is "sure 
 this whole movement was got up for the purpose of getting Grant away 
 from Washington . . . because he was looming up as a candidate for 
 President, and nobody understood the animus and purpose better than 
 did Mr. Stanton.'' Cf. Mr. Boutwell's Article in North Amer. Rev. of 
 December, 1885. 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 131 
 
 der the constitution of Maryland, adopted in 1864, dis- 
 franchising all citizens who participated in the rebellion, 
 the political complexion of the registrars or inspectors 
 at the polls in the city of Baltimore had a most decisive 
 influence on the result of the election in both city and 
 state— those officers having the power to determine 
 what constituted participation in the rebellion, and 
 what evidence established such participation. The 
 police commissioners, who superintended the elections 
 and possessed the power of selecting the election officers 
 and binding them by instructions— at this period strong 
 radicals— issued instructions to the election officers on 
 the interpretation to be put on the proscriptive clauses 
 of the constitution; and certain citizens preferred 
 charges against them of misconduct in office, for which 
 the law provided they could be removed by the legisla- 
 ture, or by the governor when the legislature was not 
 in session. Governor Swann (the legislature not being 
 in session) heard the defendants on the point of his 
 want of power to act in this case (the only point they 
 consented to present), and shortly before the election 
 decreed their removal and appointed their successors. 
 The incumbents refusing to surrender and the newly 
 appointed officers calling upon the sheriff to put them 
 in possession, these latter were arrested on the charge 
 of conspiracy in pursuance of a warrant of a United 
 States judge. On the first of November the President 
 directed the Secretary of War to take measures for the 
 protection of the capital and to call General Grant's 
 attention to the state of affairs in Baltimore. Recruits 
 under way from New York to Texas were detained at 
 
132 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Fort McHenry; and this is all that appears to have 
 been done in the premises. The election passed off 
 quietly under the auspices of the radical inspectors. 
 The action of Governor Swann was afterwards sus- 
 tained by the courts and the militant commissioners 
 were ejected without trouble. This small tempest, also, 
 was subsequently magnified into an attempt of the 
 President to usurp control of the capital in the absence 
 of the General of the army.* 
 
 At the November elections the regular Eepublicans 
 carried every Northern state by largely increased 
 majorities over the year before. The majority in the 
 House of Representatives, however, remained nearly 
 the same— the Eepublicans numbering one hundred 
 and forty-three to the Democrats forty-nine in a House 
 of one hundred and ninety-two members. The result in 
 the Southern states wore a different aspect. Those 
 border states in which the whites were not disfranchised 
 — Delaware and Kentucky — were Democratic by large 
 majorities, while the result in Maryland clearly fore- 
 shadowed what must happen in West Virginia and Mis- 
 souri—states like Maryland where the so-called rebels 
 were not allowed to vote— as soon as the normal condi- 
 tion of the constituencies was restored. In those of the 
 still excluded Southern states where elections were held 
 at all— North Carolina, Arkansas and Texas— the ma- 
 jorities for the President's policy were overwhelming. 
 
 * Col. Moore's Diary, extract in Memphis Appeal as in last note. 
 McPh. Recon., p. 297. See letter of Grant to H. R. on removal of 
 Stanton, pub. as Ex. Doc., No. 57, 40th Cong., 2d Sess., at p. 63 et seq. 
 Grant's Testimony, Imp. Inv., p. 838 et seq. 
 
THE APPEAL TO THE COUNTRY 133 
 
 And this was the very quarter of the political horizon 
 where the Republican pilots descried portents of peril. 
 No matter how thorough the victory in the North, an 
 irrepressible and most formidable minority would still 
 remain. Once allow the incorrigible white men of the 
 South to swing their states at one and the same instant 
 into the Union and into the Democratic party, and the 
 defeat of a political organization having no substantial 
 following in the South could not be far off. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT AND TRIAL 
 
 OF 
 
 PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Preparations for Impeachment 
 
 The Congressional majority came back to their seats 
 for the short session flushed with triumph and bent on 
 vengeance. They meant to strip the President of the 
 prerogatives and functions of his office, as far as they 
 could do so by statute, and, if he struggled against the 
 process of emasculation, as they had every reason to 
 believe he would, to impeach and remove him out of 
 the way. No other department of the government 
 should be suffered to interfere with the execution of 
 the plan of reconstructing the South with the negro 
 on top and the white man on the bottom, which the 
 legislative had at length determined to adopt. Should 
 the judicial stand in the way, as it seemed it might do 
 from the decisions just handed down by the Supreme 
 Court in the Milligan, Cummings and Garland cases, 
 then so much the worse for the judicial department. 
 They would block up the path to its sanctuary by 
 denying to all parties aggrieved the right of appeal. 
 
 ( 135 ) 
 
136 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 They would minimize,' if not altogether destroy, its 
 tutelary function over the Constitution by exacting a 
 two-third vote or even unanimity of the judges in every 
 decision involving the validity of an act of Congress.* 
 Should the President, disregarding the recent popular 
 rebuke, persist in his obstructive course, they would 
 admit the territories of Colorado and Nebraska, add 
 four judges to the High Court of Impeachment, and 
 proceed to his official decapitation. 
 
 The first bill passed by the House on the first day of 
 the session repealed a section of the act of 1862 which 
 authorized the President to proclaim amnesty to per- 
 sons who had participated in the rebellion; with the 
 avowed object of trenching upon the prerogative of 
 pardon and the unavowed intent of depriving the Presi- 
 dent of a plausible answer to one of the grounds of 
 impeachment ; his abuse of the pardoning power. The 
 bill became a law without the signature of the President, 
 who entirely ignored it when he issued his proclamation 
 of universal amnesty. Indeed, Andrew Johnson's ex- 
 traordinary clemency, in view of his threatenings at 
 the time of his accession; his failure to make treason 
 odious, as he promised so often to do, by the punish- 
 ment of even a single traitor; had caused a growing 
 dissatisfaction among the more bloodthirsty radicals 
 for a year past, filling their minds with all sorts of 
 sinister suspicions; and was now at last denounced as 
 a crime. There was Jefferson Davis, captured as far 
 
 * For exacting unanimity, see Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 616. 
 Debate, Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 478 et seq. Bill requiring two- 
 thirds passed House, p. 489. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 137 
 
 back as May eleventh, 1865, and imprisoned in Fort 
 Monroe. He was under indictment for treason. Why 
 was he not tried? He was charged with complicity 
 in the assassination of Lincoln, and $100,000 reward 
 had been offered and paid for his capture on that charge. 
 The military commission that condemned the accused 
 assassins actually before it, found him guilty as a co- 
 conspirator, in his absence. Why was he not hung? 
 As to the indictment, the real causes of delay were the 
 refusal of the Chief Justice to hold court in Virginia 
 while the military held even partial control of the 
 state, mistrust of a Virginia jury, and the desire to 
 avoid the opening of embarrassing constitutional ques- 
 tions which the defendant's counsel were sure to raise 
 on the trial. The President was in no way responsible 
 for the tardiness of the prosecution; on the contrary, 
 he, probably, was the only member of the administra- 
 tion having nt> misgivings as to its success. As to the 
 charge of complicity, the real cause of delay in pressing 
 it was that the testimony on which it was based— taken 
 in secret before the military commission— in its subject- 
 matter was of the most flimsy and inconclusive char- 
 acter, was incompetent under the most elementary rules 
 of evidence and came from the mouths of professional 
 witnesses testifying under pay.* But these reasons 
 were unknown or unsatisfactory to those radicals who 
 were careless how or on what charge Davis was tried 
 or by what testimony he was proved guilty, so long as 
 he was convicted; and chief among these was George 
 
 •Testimony in Imp. Inv., Seward, pp. 379, 380, 381; Stanton, 397; 
 Speed, 798-802. 
 
138 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. At the last session 
 (April 9, 1866) he it was who offered (and the House 
 adopted) a resolution instructing the judiciary com- 
 mittee of which he was a member, to inquire whether 
 there was probable cause to believe in the guilt of the 
 persons charged in the proclamation with inciting the 
 murder of Lincoln and the attempted assassination of 
 Seward ; and, during the remainder of the session, from 
 time to time he, with one or two kindred spirits on the 
 committee, employed himself in examining the captured . 
 rebel archives and the records of the Bureau of Mili- 
 tary Justice and in listening to the stories of the pro- 
 fessional witnesses of the military commission and 
 others of the like kidney, in the hope to connect the 
 distinguished prisoner of war by some semblance of a 
 link with the murder of his great antagonist. Joseph 
 Holt— the Judge-Advocate-General of the army — the 
 employer and patron of Sanford Conover, that head- 
 centre of professional witnesses— was his main reliance 
 in this work. He furnished the committee, first, with 
 the copy of his spy's testimony given before the mili- 
 tary commission, and, second, the depositions of seven 
 persons brought by Conover to Holt's office in the fall 
 of 1865 and sworn to statements involving the com- 
 plicity of Davis, Thompson, Clay and others in the 
 assassination; among the rest two men calling them- 
 selves Campbell and Snevel who testified that they were 
 present, with John H. Surratt, at an interview with 
 Davis and Benjamin, in the early spring of 1865, at 
 Bichmond, when the plot to assassinate Lincoln was 
 discussed and approved. The committee despatched an 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 139 
 
 officer to New York to find Conover and his affiants, who 
 succeeded in seeing Conover, Campbell and Snevel and 
 in bringing Campbell back with him. He reported to 
 the committee that Campbell confessed to him that his 
 deposition was fabricated by Conover, and the com- 
 mittee thereupon telegraphed for Conover to come to 
 Washington. Conover suspecting nothing came; and 
 on the eighth day of May, 1866, the master and his tool 
 were confronted with each other in the rooms of the 
 committee. Campbell was sworn and testified that his 
 deposition was false in every particular; that his real 
 name was Joseph A. Hoare; that the deposition was 
 written out for him by Conover and he committed it to 
 memory; and that the other deponents had given false 
 names and were likewise the creatures of Conover. In 
 his turn, Conover swore that Campbell's present testi- 
 mony was false and that he himself had no reason to 
 doubt the truth of the depositions. He was allowed to 
 go to New York with the sergeant-at-arms to find the 
 other witnesses, but on his arrival in that city he es- 
 caped from the custody of the officer and vanished. 
 Snevel was found and, appearing before the committee 
 (May 24), testified that his real name was Roberts and 
 that, like Campbell 's, his deposition also was fabricated 
 by Conover. These self-confessed scoundrels were 
 both paid by the Bureau of Military Justice— Campbell 
 receiving $625, and Snevel $475. 
 
 Even such astounding revelations as these failed to 
 convince Mr. Boutwell of the hopelessness of his quest ; 
 and, a rumour circulating about this time that Jefferson 
 Davis was to be admitted to bail, he hurried a resolution 
 
140 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 through the House (June 11) to the effect that Davis, 
 being notoriously guilty of treason and also charged 
 with complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lin- 
 coln, should be held in custody until tried ; and, in con- 
 . sequence, Davis was still kept in prison. On the eight- 
 eenth of June, Holt reappeared before the committee 
 affecting great astonishment at the break-down of his 
 witnesses. He gave a full account of his intercourse 
 with Conover and protested his implicit trust in the 
 latter "s statements. He remarked of the witnesses that 
 he "conferred freely with them before and while ex- 
 amining them ; that they appeared to possess ordinary 
 intelligence and certainly assumed perfect self-posses- 
 sion and frankness of manner and seemed to be, so far 
 as I could judge, under no improper influence; and 
 there was nothing either in the testimony they gave 
 ... or in their manner while deposing calculated in 
 any degree to excite doubt as to their truthfulness." 
 Nevertheless, the Judge- Advocate condescended to con- 
 fess that the retractions of Campbell and Snevel, fol- 
 lowed by Conover 's escape, disappearance and subse- 
 quent non-communication with Holt himself, "left on 
 my (Holt's) mind a strong impression that Conover 
 had been guilty of a most atrocious crime, committed 
 under what promptings I am wholly unable to deter- 
 mine." At this stage of the proceedings, the com- 
 mittee, having accumulated a voluminous mass of docu- 
 ments on which after all it could come to no conclusion, 
 turned all the papers over to Mr. Boutwell for him to 
 prepare a report, which, on the last day but one of the 
 session, he presented to the House, together with two 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 141 
 
 resolutions which were adopted; the first declaring 
 that there was "no defect or insufficiency in the law to 
 prevent or interfere with the trial of Jefferson Davis 
 for the crime of treason or any other crime ' ' ; the sec- 
 ond, "that it is the duty of the executive department 
 of the Government to proceed with the investigation 
 of the facts connected with the assassination of the late 
 President, Abraham Lincoln, without unnecessary de- 
 lay, that Jefferson Davis and others named in the 
 proclamation of President Johnson of May 2, 1865, 
 may be put upon trial and properly punished, if guilty, 
 or relieved from the charges against them if found to 
 be innocent." 
 
 The evidence chiefly relied on by the report to sus- 
 tain the charge of complicity with Booth consisted of 
 certain wild projects to blow up the capitol at Wash- 
 ington and to dispose of leading officers of the United 
 States, sent at various times to the President of the 
 Confederacy and referred by him in the usual course 
 of business to the appropriate department; together 
 with testimony of inhumanity to prisoners and of ex- 
 peditions sent against the North of a character forbid- 
 den by the laws of war ; this evidence, wholly irrelevant 
 on its face, being adduced, as the report states, to "bar 
 the plea, which otherwise, perhaps, might with force 
 and reason be tendered, that Davis and his associates 
 named were incapable of the great crime of assassina- 
 tion." The depositions, furnishing as they did the 
 only direct evidence of the crime under investigation 
 yet so fatally discredited, Mr. Boutwell still clung to 
 with desperate clutch. Speaking of the two villains 
 
142 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 who swore before the committee that their depositions 
 were fabricated, he writes: "They failed, however, to 
 state to the committee any inducement or consideration 
 which seemed a reasonable explanation for the course 
 they had pursued. And the committee are not at this 
 time able to say . . . whether the original statements 
 of these witnesses are true or false." The report was 
 printed, as well as one by the minority of the com- 
 mittee (A. J. Eogers) ; and the publicity thus given to 
 the investigation, besides calling out Judge Holt in a 
 ' ' Vindication ' ' with exculpatory letters from Mr. Bout- 
 well and Stanton, had one beneficial result. On an 
 affidavit of Hoare, alias Campbell, a warrant was issued 
 for Conover, and in November, he was arrested and 
 brought to Washington, confessing on the way to the 
 officer that he had suborned the witnesses produced 
 before the bureau and the committee, actuated solely 
 by " a desire to avenge himself on Jeff. Davis by whose 
 order he had been confined in Castle Thunder" and 
 who had "also insulted his wife." In the following 
 February (1867), he was tried for perjury committed 
 in his testimony contradicting Campbell, was convicted 
 and, in April, sentenced to imprisonment in the Albany 
 Penitentiary for ten years. For the present we leave 
 him in the jail of the District of Columbia awaiting 
 transportation to that institution.* 
 
 Still, though the committee could come to no conclu- 
 sion on the complicity of Davis, Mr. Boutwell found 
 
 * Boutwell's and Roger's Reports (No. 104, 39th Cong., 1st Sess.), 
 Imp. Inv., Greeley's testimony, p. 779. Holt's "Vindication" in public 
 prints. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 143 
 
 enough to feed a suspicion of the complicity of Johnson. 
 Among the discoveries he made was the unaccountable 
 neglect of the proper authorities to procure the arrest 
 and extradition of John H. Surratt, the son of the 
 woman who was condemned to death by the military 
 commission that tried the alleged assassins of Lincoln. 
 The young man was an associate of Booth's, and it was 
 the still prevalent belief that he was present in Wash- 
 ington on the night of the tragedy, had taken some 
 active though as yet unidentified part in the conspiracy 
 and had escaped in the early morning by a train mov- 
 ing North. Detectives sent on the instant tracked 
 him through St. Albans in Vermont to Canada, where 
 they lost trace. Nothing was heard from the fugitive 
 until the October following (1865) when tidings came 
 from the American consul at Liverpool that Surratt, 
 having crossed the ocean in a steamer from Quebec, was 
 at that moment in Liverpool ;— tidings shortly after cor- 
 roborated by the American consul in Canada. From 
 both these quarters came the written statement of the 
 man who had betrayed the fugitive that Surratt had 
 confessed to him that he was implicated in the assassin- 
 ation. The only notice taken by the administration of 
 these communications was (October 13) to notify the 
 consul at Liverpool that upon consultation with the 
 Secretary of War and Judge- Advocate-General it was 
 thought advisable that no action be taken in regard to 
 the arrest; to request the Attorney-General (November 
 13) to procure an indictment against Surratt with a 
 view to his surrender; and the issuance of an order 
 from the War Department (November 24) revoking the 
 
144 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 reward of $50,000 offered (April 20, 1865) for his 
 arrest. Meanwhile, Surratt traveled unmolested from 
 Liverpool to London, and from London to Paris, and 
 from Paris to Rome, reaching this last city some time 
 in November ; and, although the Secretary of State was 
 informed by the authorities that announced his pres- 
 ence in Liverpool that it was to Rome he was bound, 
 no notice was sent to our minister there to look out for 
 him. It was not until the latter part of the following- 
 April (1866) that the apparent apathy of the heads of 
 the administration on this delicate matter was disturbed 
 by another communication from abroad. An old ac- 
 quaintance of Surratt 's betrayed the latter 's presence 
 as a soldier in the Papal Zouaves at a place about fifty 
 miles from Rome, to Rufus King, the American min- 
 ister at the capital; accompanying the information, in 
 this instance also, with the statement that the confiding 
 murderer had acknowledged his own guilt, and, going 
 still further this time, had declared the guilt of his own 
 mother and the complicity of Jefferson Davis. King 
 made haste to send this startling news to the State De- 
 partment at "Washington ; and, here again, appeared the 
 same indifference— the only result being the expression 
 of an ardent desire on the part of Judge- Advocate Holt 
 to secure from King's informant a full, verified state- 
 ment of the particulars of Surratt 's confession. This 
 was at last obtained, but, although the man was very 
 anxious to return home and affected to be in fear of 
 his life because of his revelations, the verified statement 
 turned out to be vague and indefinite at the most critical 
 points. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 145 
 
 Such was the situation of affairs at the end of the 
 session. Mr. Boutwell went home to Massachusetts 
 troubled with dark surmisings— perplexed, however, 
 that the evidence, in so far as it made against the Presi- 
 dent, should implicate the victim of Payne and the 
 masterful Secretary of War. He kept a watchful eye 
 on the mystery; and, before the beginning of the next 
 session, his vigilance was rewarded. Cardinal An- 
 tonelli, the prime minister of the Pope, signified to min- 
 ister King on the seventh of August, that, on a request 
 from the United States in so extraordinary a case, he had 
 no doubt Surratt would be delivered up ; and this intima- 
 tion was instantly despatched to Seward. Yet nothing 
 was done— Seward was away "swinging round the 
 circle ' ' with the President and, on the return of the dis- 
 comfited train, fell ill. The sole advantage taken of the 
 cardinal's friendly overture was to send a photograph 
 of Surratt to Italy, which, as Mr. Boutwell discovered, 
 was one taken years before and, so far from leading 
 to identification, more likely to contribute to the dis- 
 charge of the accused. Finally, just before the meet- 
 ing of Congress, the news came that the Papal gov- 
 ernment, in its zeal to oblige the United States not even 
 waiting for the long-delayed request, had ordered the 
 arrest of Surratt (November 8) ; then, that Surratt 
 had broken from his captors, plunged down a precipit- 
 ous declivity, effected his escape into the territory of 
 Naples and thence taken ship to Alexandria by way of 
 Malta. 
 
 Such culpable negligence on the part of the executive, 
 followed by so unlucky a slip in the diligent efforts of 
 10 
 
146 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 others upon whom no such imperious obligation rested, 
 filled the cup of Mr. Boutwell's indignation to the 
 brim ; at the Saturday-night caucus preceding the open- 
 ing of the second session, he gave vent to his suspicions ; 
 and, on the Monday following, submitted a resolution 
 to the House calling for the correspondence, which was 
 adopted. News arriving at the War Department (Sun- 
 day night) that Surratt had been caught after all at 
 Alexandria and would be forwarded to the United 
 States in a government vessel, the President was able 
 to send to the House the news of the capture of the 
 fugitive. On the twenty-first of December, Surratt 
 was lodged on board the "Swatara, " well-loaded with 
 irons. The vessel bore her burden across the ocean 
 and in February the administration had a white 
 elephant on its hands. Mr. Boutwell, apparently not 
 at all disconcerted, pursued his investigations: sum- 
 moned the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War 
 and the Judge-Advocate-General before the judiciary 
 committee, and, in the last hours of the session, made 
 a report coming to the rather feeble conclusion: That 
 the testimony of these distinguished officials did not 
 "excuse the great delay in even attempting to arrest 
 a person charged with complicity in the assassination 
 of the late President ; and, while the Committee do not 
 charge improper motives upon the officers of the govern- 
 ment, they are constrained to report that, in their opin- 
 ion, due diligence in the arrest of Surratt was not exer- 
 cised by the executive department of the government."* 
 
 * Boutwell's Report with testimony and correspondence, Cong. Docs. 
 Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 5, 12, 1753-4. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 147 
 
 The object of this investigation lies on the surface. 
 Obviously, the movement could not have been directed 
 against either Seward or Stanton. Andrew Johnson 
 was the man aimed at, and the inference that it was 
 designed should be drawn from the negligence of the 
 executive department was, that Johnson not only did 
 not desire but actually feared the arrest of Surratt; 
 because in some mysterious way Surratt was an accom- 
 plice of Johnson as well as of Booth. Such a suspicion 
 seems too monstrous for any sane man to entertain. 
 The military commission found as a fact that Vice- 
 President Johnson was an intended victim of the wide- 
 branched plot, and condemned a poor wretch for lying 
 in wait to murder him. Nevertheless, General Butler 
 convinced himself, or allowed others to believe that he 
 was convinced, that Johnson was privy to the assassina- 
 tion of Lincoln. Ashley, at this very time, openly pro- 
 claimed his belief in the truth of the incredible accusa- 
 tion. And Mr. Boutwell, brooding over trunks-full of 
 rebel archives, wild stories of double spies, cipher corre- 
 spondences, traitors' pardons, revocations of rewards, 
 winkings at escapes, Jefferson Davis's long impunity, 
 even if he did not entertain the suspicion himself, fur- 
 nished the material which clothed the shapeless spectre 
 in. flesh and blood. And the curious part of the matter 
 is that in the first steps he took he was on the right 
 track. The truth was that the President was not 
 anxious for Surratt 's apprehension; not anxious for 
 the same intelligible reason that Seward and Stanton 
 were not— Stanton least of all. The days of military 
 commissions were over, at least in the capital ; and, with 
 
148 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the evidence that sufficed to condemn the mother before 
 such a tribunal, they shrank from facing a jury on the 
 trial of the son. 
 
 The foregoing recital derives its historical interest 
 only from the fact that the investigation was designed 
 as a make-weight to the projected impeachment. In- 
 deed, it is manifest that the early proceedings of both 
 Houses were regulated and marshalled with an eye to 
 this ultimate remedy. The annual message showed 
 no sign of yielding to what the majority thought the 
 logic of events nor the slightest indication that the 
 President, however much disappointed, felt the result of 
 the elections as a condemnation of his policy or a per- 
 sonal rebuke. He wrote : 
 
 "If the admission of loyal members to seats in the re- 
 spective Houses of Congress was wise and expedient a year 
 ago, it is no less wise and expedient now. If this anomalous 
 condition is right now — if, in the exact condition of these 
 States at the present time, it is lawful to exclude them from 
 representation, I do not see that the question will be 
 changed by the efflux of time. Ten years hence, if these 
 States remain as they are, the right of representation will 
 be no stronger, the right of exclusion will be no weaker. . . . 
 
 "I know of no measure more imperatively demanded by 
 every consideration of national interest, sound policy and 
 equal justice, than the admission of loyal members from 
 the now unrepresented States. This would consummate the 
 work of restoration, and exert a most salutary influence in 
 the re-establishment of peace, harmony and fraternal 
 feeling. ... "* 
 
 * Message in McPherson, p. 143. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 149 
 
 These words, although they may be considered words 
 of wisdom at the present day, fell upon deaf ears ; serv- 
 ing only to sharpen the animosity felt by the leaders 
 of the Congress against the President and to strengthen 
 their determination to get rid of him. Probably, a 
 majority of the Bepublican members of the House at 
 this date were in favor of his impeachment. They 
 thought the cup of his offences already full and run- 
 ning over. The bill fixing the meeting of every Con- 
 gress immediately at the close of the preceding one, 
 passed by the House as early as the tenth of December 
 and by the Senate a month later, shows that it was 
 thought necessary to have the impeaching body always 
 on the watch. Schenck of Ohio advocated its passage 
 on the ground that had it been the law on the fourth 
 day of March, 1865, there would have been no difficulty 
 over reconstruction; the South would have accepted 
 gladly any terms Congress might have offered them; 
 adding: "Nay, if one were permitted to speculate upon 
 the possibilities of the past, it is not at all certain but 
 the then Vice President, . . . considering the exhibi- 
 tion made by him on the fourth of March, would have 
 been so dealt with by Congress, after its assembling, 
 that we would not have been troubled with any consid- 
 eration of the questions now before us."* 
 
 The veto of the bill granting manhood suffrage to the 
 negroes of the District of Columbia added fuel to 
 the flame. This measure— regarded by the radicals as 
 the forerunner of the establishment of negro suffrage 
 throughout the country— passed the House at the last 
 
 * Oldbe, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., p. 31. 
 
150 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 session, but "went over" in the Senate in view of the 
 coming election, as Wilson confessed "by the assent 
 of its most earnest friends in the full conviction that 
 . . . the growth of public sentiment . . . would enable 
 us to carry a clean bill early in this session." It was 
 now revived and passed both Houses before the holi- 
 day recess. Sumner, in cl6sing the debate in the 
 Senate, said: 
 
 "If it were regarded simply in its bearings on the Dis- 
 trict it would be difficult to exaggerate its value; but when 
 it is regarded as an example to the whole country under 
 the sanction of Congress its value is infinite. It is in the 
 latter character that it becomes a pillar of fire to 
 illumine the footsteps of millions. Now, to my mind noth- 
 ing is clearer than the absolute necessity of the suffrage 
 for all colored persons in the disorganized States. It will 
 not be enough if you give it to those who read and write: 
 you will not in this way acquire the voting force which 
 you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether 
 white or black. You will not secure the new allies which 
 are essential to the national cause. As you once needed 
 the muskets of the colored men, so now you need their 
 votes; and you must act now with little reference to 
 theory. You are bound by the necessity of the case."* 
 
 To veto such a measure was regarded by the ad- 
 vocates of negro suffrage as hardly less than an act 
 of sacrilege ; and one or two statements in the message 
 were not calculated to soothe their resentment. 
 
 "It may also be urged," the President significantly wrote, 
 "that the dominant party in each House may, by the expul- 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 107. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 151 
 
 sion of a sufficient number of members, or by exclusion from 
 representation of a requisite number of States, reduce the 
 minority to less than one-third. Congress, by these means, 
 might be enabled to pass a law, the objections of the Presi- 
 dent to the contrary notwithstanding, which would render 
 impotent the other two departments of the Government, 
 and make inoperative the wholesome and restraining power 
 which it was intended by the framers of the Constitution 
 should be exerted by them. This would be a practical con- 
 centration of all power in the Congress of the United 
 States — this, in the language of the author of the Declara- 
 tion of Independence, would be precisely the definition of 
 despotic Government." 
 
 The closing paragraph, follows: 
 
 "After full deliberation upon this measure, I cannot 
 bring myself to approve it, even upon local considerations, 
 nor yet as the beginning of an experiment qn a higher 
 scale. I yield to no one in attachment to that rule of 
 general suffrage which distinguishes our. policy as a nation. 
 But there is a limit, wisely observed hitherto, which makes 
 the ballot a privilege and a trust, and which requires of 
 some classes a time, suitable for probation and preparation. 
 To give it indiscriminately to a new class, wholly unpre- 
 pared by previous habits and opportunities to perform the 
 trust which it demands, is to degrade it and finally destroy 
 its power; for it may be safely assumed that no political 
 truth is better established than that such indiscriminate 
 and all-embracing extension of popular suffrage must end 
 at last in its destruction."* 
 
 * Message in McPherson, pp. 154, 158-9. 
 
152 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The Senate listened, at least, to the reading of the 
 message, and, after a short debate in tone respectful 
 to the President, passed the bill over the veto. The 
 House, for its part, did not wait to hear it; it was 
 enough that they knew it was coming. Indeed, every 
 veto was regarded by the majority of the House as a 
 defiant insult flung in their faces; .as an act of the 
 rankest usurpation; and many of them actually came 
 to consider a veto an impeachable offence of itself. 
 Their antics over these blows from the tenant of the 
 White House recall the Jacobins of the French Rev- 
 olution breathing out curses against Monsieur Veto. 
 Before the message reached the House, Loan, a bitter 
 radical from Missouri, submitted a resolution declaring 
 it "the imperative duty of the Thirty-Ninth Congress 
 to take without delay such action as will accomplish 
 the following objects: 
 
 "1. The impeachment of the officer now exercising the 
 functions pertaining to the office of President of the United 
 States and his removal from said office upon conviction of 
 the high crimes and misdemeanors of which he is mani- 
 festly and notoriously guilty. 
 
 "2. To provide for the faithful and efficient administra- 
 tion of the executive department. ' ' 
 
 A point of order carried this resolution to the joint 
 committee, and then Ashley of Ohio knew that his hour 
 had come. Rising, as he solemnly said, "to perform 
 a painful but, nevertheless, to me an imperative duty, ' ' 
 he impeached "Andrew Johnson, Vice President and 
 acting President of the United States, of high crimes 
 and misdemeanors." 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 153 
 
 "I charge him with a usurpation of power and violation 
 of law ; 
 
 "In that he has corruptly used the appointing power; 
 
 "In that he has corruptly used the pardoning power; 
 
 ' ' In that he has corruptly used the veto power ; 
 
 "In that he has corruptly disposed of public property 
 of the United States; 
 
 "In that he has corruptly interfered in elections, and 
 committed acts which, in contemplation of the Constitu- 
 tion, are high crimes and misdemeanors." 
 
 And, therefore, lie submitted a resolution authorizing 
 the committee on the judiciary "to inquire into the 
 official conduct of Andrew Johnson, Vice President of 
 the United States, discharging the powers and duties 
 of the office of President of the United States," and 
 report whether he "has been guilty of acts which are 
 designed or calculated to overthrow, subvert or cor- 
 rupt the Government of the United States or any de- 
 partment or office thereof." This resolution was 
 adopted, and the next day the House passed the District 
 Suffrage bill over the veto without a word.* 
 
 In order to show the character of the man who now 
 posed as the Atlas of the Impeachment, we are com- 
 pelled to touch once again the notorious Conover whom 
 we left in the jail of the district, lying under a con- 
 viction of perjury .f Both before and after his trial he set 
 about obtaining a pardon on the extraordinary ground 
 that in committing his perjuries and subornations of 
 perjury he was but the tool of high-placed government 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 319-321. 
 f Supra, p. 142. 
 
154 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 officials, who, being threatened with public exposure, 
 to save themselves threw him over, set on foot his 
 prosecution and procured his conviction. Andrew J. 
 Rogers, the Democratic member of the committee in- 
 vestigating Jefferson Davis's complicity, became con- 
 vinced that this was the true view of the case, and, 
 believing, as he said, Conover "less guilty than others, 
 or at least one other" (no doubt Holt), wrote a letter 
 to the President recommending his pardon, in which 
 four leading Democratic representatives, on the faith 
 of Rogers's minority report and his statement in the 
 letter, concurred. At the very time he was burrowing 
 his way to executive clemency by betraying his em- 
 ployers and posing as their castaway accomplice, Con- 
 over was opening up another channel of approach by 
 preparing a bait for their rabid appetite for testimony 
 against the executive whose clemency he was invoking. 
 He managed by means of his wife— he was now pass- 
 ing under the name of Charles A. Dunham— to spread 
 abroad a rumour that he could furnish damnatory evi- 
 dence against Andrew Johnson. Such a rumour was 
 enough of itself to set the enemies of the President 
 wild and to secure the detention of the convict in a 
 place where he was easily within reach. Distinguished 
 visitors crowded his receptions in the jail, among whom 
 was Ashley, the self-appointed scavenger to the judi- 
 ciary committee searching high and low for material 
 to feed the delusion under which he was labouring. 
 Dunham and his wife assured this pioneer of the Im- 
 peachment that they could lay their hands on certain 
 letters written by Andrew Johnson to Jefferson Davis 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 155 
 
 and to J. Wilkes Booth implicating the President be- 
 yond peradventure in the assassination of his prede- 
 cessor. Notwithstanding the notoriety of the criminal 
 with whom he was dealing, Ashley showed no hesita- 
 tion in taking his word; and we shall soon find him 
 actively employed with Holt in attempting, from their 
 side of the line, to filch from the President a pardon 
 of the perjured witness they meant to use to prove 
 him an accomplice of assassins. In the meantime, and 
 until Conover could obtain his pardon, Ashley fell back 
 upon LaFayette C. Baker, the late chief of the Detec- 
 tive Bureau, whom the President dismissed from office 
 for his insolence in the case of Mrs. Cobb— a pardon- 
 broker who haunted the precincts of the White House 
 in the fall of 1865. He, too, was eager to rekindle his 
 declining notoriety, and Ashley bore him in triumph to 
 the committee, there to unfold his wondrous tale, as 
 follows: In the fall of 1865, a man from Nashville 
 by the name of Adamson, who was prowling around 
 Washington in search of an office or a job, showed him 
 a letter written by Andrew Johnson, while Military 
 Governor of Tennessee, to Jefferson Davis— which let- 
 ter a colored servant of a son of Parson Brownlow 
 had purloined from Johnson's desk before it was sent. 
 Baker had carried the letter to the White House and, 
 showing the signature only to the President's private 
 secretary, ascertained its genuineness, and afterwards 
 returned the letter to Adamson who, as Baker with the 
 most engaging candour admitted, wanted to sell it to 
 the best advantage. This letter Baker read several 
 times, and he now gave to the committee from mem- 
 
156 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ory a vague version of its contents. It was a reply 
 to a letter from the Confederate President or some 
 one high, in authority, and after disclosing the position 
 of the Federal forces in Tennessee, suggested a cer- 
 tain line of policy, on the adoption of which hy the 
 Confederacy, the writer "would turn the whole power 
 he possessed in Tennessee over to the rebel cause"— 
 "he was going with them." Other persons had seen 
 this letter— three members of Congress, for instance, 
 and one Matchett; and Baker was confident, if em- 
 ployed for that purpose, he could produce it as well 
 as other letters which Adamson said he had also. The 
 committee, after listening to Baker's version of the 
 Cobb case, in which he besmirched the President to 
 his heart's content, dismissed him to hunt up the let- 
 ters in the existence of which Ashley for one professed 
 to believe.* Beside this star- witness, the labours of the 
 committee consisted in hearing one or two subordinates 
 of the State Department describe the practice there in 
 making appointments and removals; in hearing a wit- 
 ness tell of a Tennessee railroad which, having been 
 taken possession of and partly built by Governor John- 
 son, was turned over to the corporation that owned it 
 before the war by order of President Johnson; and 
 in hearing the provisional governors of Alabama and 
 Mississippi reveal the qualifications of the test-oaths 
 they took, the restoration of captured cotton in their 
 states and the opposition of the President to the four- 
 teenth amendment. Up to the admission of Nebraska, 
 an event to the narration of which we are about to 
 
 * Imp. Inv., Testimony of Baker, pp. 2 et seq. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 157 
 
 turn, the investigation seemed to lag. After that date, 
 the proceedings became somewhat brisker, but the testi- 
 mony was fragmentary and taken in the most desultory 
 way. We come upon bits of evidence concerning New 
 York Custom House frauds, negotiations with the sena- 
 tors-elect of Colorado; campaign intrigues; removals 
 from office for political reasons ; the New Orleans riot ; 
 even a transaction by which it was sought to prove the 
 military governor of Tennessee contrived to make ten 
 thousand dollars ; but as yet these were mere hints and 
 led to nothing definite.* Nevertheless, the majority 
 of the committee did not scruple to report in the last 
 hours of the Congress "that sufficient testimony had 
 been brought to its notice to justify and demand the 
 further prosecution of the investigation." The soli- 
 tary Democrat on the committee, in a minority report, 
 found that "there is not one particle of evidence to 
 sustain any of the charges"; "that the case is wholly 
 without a particle of evidence upon which impeach- 
 ment could be founded"; "the case is entirely void of 
 proof"; statements in which any candid reader of the 
 testimony will now concur. The majority in the 
 House, however, were determined to keep the proceed- 
 ing on foot; and, although disappointment was ex- 
 pressed by the more fiery spirits that the removal of 
 the usurper could not have been accomplished during 
 the current session, yet, in view of the great work done 
 in the enactment of measures of pressing importance, 
 the leaders were content to pass the "crowning labor" 
 over to a Congress coming fresh from the people, 
 
 * Imp. Inv., testimony passim. 
 
158 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 whose members, they had taken care to provide, would 
 appear on the instant their predecessors dispersed.* 
 
 While the House was thus engaged in holding the 
 grand inquest, the Senate was engaged in making ready 
 for the trial. Some of the men who were to be judges 
 of the High Court resorted again to the same methods 
 of reinforcing the majority which came to naught at 
 the last session. Early in December, Wade reintro- 
 duced the bill for the admission of Nebraska which 
 failed before to become a law owing to the adjourn- 
 ment of Congress and the withholding of his signature 
 by the President, and, instead of calling up the Colo- 
 rado bill now lying on the table under a veto, intro- 
 duced a fresh bill for her admission. There was the 
 less excuse for the adoption of this transparent device 
 to add four senators to the majority, because the 
 Eepublicans were stronger than ever in the Senate. 
 Scovel, that interesting rover who at a critical moment 
 held back the New Jersey senate from joining in the 
 election of a successor to the evicted Stockton, having 
 been reconverted, as he himself pretended, by the New 
 Orleans riot, the legislature (called together by the 
 governor) elected a sound Republican to fill Stockton's 
 place, Alexander Gr. Cattell. Wright died on the first 
 day of November, 1866, and the governor immediately 
 appointed another sound Republican, Frederick T. 
 Frelinghuysen, to fill the vacancy ; so that, at the open- 
 ing of the session of Congress, New Jersey having 
 regained her equal suffrage, the twenty-six states al- 
 lowed to put in an appearance were represented by 
 
 - Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 1754-5. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 159 
 
 thirty-eight senators of the dominant party and hy 
 only fourteen supporters of the administration, of 
 whom but nine were Democrats proper. With three 
 to spare over the necessary two-thirds, it would seem 
 these honourable men might have shown the meagre 
 forces of their opponents a slight glimpse of magnan- 
 imity. But such radicals as Wade who had charge of 
 these measures could put no trust in that cautious type 
 of statesmen who cherished an old-fashioned regard 
 for the superior sanctity of constitutional limitations 
 as against the passionate desires of the current re- 
 former. They could not forget how such eminent 
 Republican senators as Fessenden and Trumbull and 
 Grimes had failed them before, and they feared that 
 in the last desperate wrench they might fail them 
 again. On the fourteenth of December, when Wade 
 moved his new Nebraska bill, Hendricks inquired why 
 the Colorado bill which had passed both Houses and 
 been vetoed by the President was not first taken up 
 and disposed of. Wade explained that at the last 
 session he did not think he had the numbers to pass it 
 over the veto; but, at this session, he did not intend 
 "to take up the veto message at all because new light 
 has come before our eyes showing the propriety of the 
 admission of Colorado, so that the President on the 
 presentation of a new bill will be glad to let it pass 
 without his veto. I have no doubt of it."* This 
 strange and, viewed in the light of subsequent events, 
 incredible statement was accepted in silence; but the 
 hardy senator from Ohio had more trouble with Sumner 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 122, 124. 
 
160 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 who prided himself on the minute precision of his 
 consistency. It is to his tireless hostility to the word 
 "white" in the franchise provision of the constitutions 
 of the proposed states that we owe the exposure of the 
 utter lack of merits of both measures from the lips of one 
 of the radicals themselves ; and he now renewed his an- 
 tagonism with redoubled vigour. Wade, who was as anx- 
 ious for negro suffrage as the senator from Massachu- 
 setts, was greatly annoyed, and pointed to Sumner's 
 vote in favour of the fourteenth amendment and the ad- 
 mission of Tennessee, ' ' that now has her representation 
 on the floor equally divided between rebellion and loy- 
 alty" (as the senator expressed it, with little regard for 
 the feelings of Patterson). He wanted Nebraska in for 
 a certain purpose, and he regarded an objection that the 
 Constitution denied suffrage to the fifty negroes of the 
 population as trivial and captious. "I hope," he said, 
 ' ' that we shall not on this mere technicality coldly turn 
 away a territory comprised of patriotic men. . . . These 
 men, let me tell gentlemen around me, believe just as you 
 do ; they are ready to aid and assist you in carrying out 
 your great principles. . . . On their admission they will 
 add power to your arm to enforce them."* But the 
 appeal was useless. Sumner, after showing by the 
 journal of the Senate that he voted not for but against 
 the admission of Tennessee, loftily exclaimed : " In other 
 days we all united in saying ' No more slave States ! ' I 
 now insist upon another cry : ' No more States with the 
 word white in their constitutions ! ' "f Brown of Mis- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., 127. 
 fid., p. 124. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 161" 
 
 souri— a radical of the Sumner type— offered a proviso 
 that the act should not take effect except upon the funda- 
 mental condition that there should be no denial of the 
 elective franchise on account of race or colour ; a condi- 
 tion to which the people of the territory should declare 
 their assent at an election. An identical proviso offered 
 by Sumner last July got but five votes, and, offered 
 again by him in the case of Tennessee, got but four (in- 
 cluding, however, Wade's own) ; so insuperable was the 
 objection then thought to be that Congress could not 
 make a constitution for the people of a state. But Wade 
 cared for nothing now but to avoid delay. He not only 
 wanted the senators in but he wanted them in instantly. 
 As he said: 
 
 "The respectable, truth-loving gentlemen who have been 
 sent here to represent that Territory as Senators on this 
 floor . . . announce the fact that this Territory is up to 
 the high-water mark on the subject of human rights. I 
 want them here because I want this body strengthened 
 immensely by the reinforcement that these gentlemen will 
 bring to bear upon every question you can get up; and 
 you stand cavilling here over a mere technicality."* 
 
 For some reason he was in great haste. He begrudged 
 the time spent in eulogies upon the deceased senator, 
 Wright. He tried to rescind the Resolution providing 
 for the usual holiday recess. Wilson proposed that the 
 assent to the fundamental condition should be given by 
 the legislature instead of the people, thus cutting off 
 much of the delay so dreaded by Wade ; and, in doing so, 
 he gave notice that, although he had voted for both the 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39ih Cong., pp. 147-103. 
 11 
 
162 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Nebraska and Colorado bills last session, he must now 
 revert to the central principle he had violated to meet an 
 emergency. 
 
 "But, sir," he said, "by the course of events our power 
 in the Senate is now assured, and after the fourth of March 
 next will be quite as strong as it is now. I need not state, 
 for we all know how our members have increased until now 
 we have a clear, undoubted two-thirds vote here upon all 
 the leading questions that may arise. . . . Satisfied to admit 
 Colorado and Nebraska, always excepting that word 'white' 
 that stained their constitutions, I gave voice and vote to 
 their admission to secure for the holy cause for which we 
 were struggling the control of the Senate. That control 
 has been otherwise secured. The commanding necessity 
 under which I then acted exists no longer. Then the ad- 
 mission of these young States in spite of the word 'white' 
 . seemed to me to be demanded by the needs of the periled 
 country; now their admission with the word 'white,' it 
 seems to me, is not demanded by the needs of the country. ' '* 
 
 Wade tried to force a vote but Sumner, for the first 
 time since he defeated the admission of Louisiana in Lin- 
 coln 's time, resorted to filibustering, and the measure 
 went over until after the holidays, when, Wilson's sug- 
 gestion being rejected, the debate centred on the Brown 
 proviso which Wade implored the Senate to vote down 
 for the reason that it would kill the bill. 
 
 "Now, Mr. President, why is it that I stand here the 
 advocate of the admission of this State . . . when I have 
 . . . been generally the advocate of equal rights, . . . 1 
 
 * Glole, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 191. 
 
PEEPAEATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 163 
 
 It is because, when I consider the condition in which the 
 country is, and when I look to the terrible struggle which 
 is right ahead of us, I feel disposed to arm myself and be 
 equipped with all the forces that are legitimately within 
 my power. The Senator from "Wisconsin said yesterday 
 that he once voted for the admission of this State because 
 he thought we wanted to be reinforced. . . . Sir, it was 
 a good idea. Now, he says, however, that the clouds have 
 passed by- and all is fair weather, and there will be in the 
 future no necessity for reinforcements." 
 
 Howe — "I said that we had got votes enough now." 
 
 Wade continuing : 
 
 "But how he could come to the conclusion that we shall 
 not want any reinforcements I am unable to say. When 
 he gave the vote to which he referred, had the Supreme 
 Court of the United States made a decision which lets 
 loose upon all the Union men of the South the bloodhounds 
 of those rebellious unrestricted States, and denies the 
 right of the military power to protect them? Did he 
 know then that two of the departments of the Government 
 . . . had turned in with the adversary and were ready 
 now to abet his course? 
 
 "Suppose . . . there are enough in numbers; but yet 
 you are in default. I want to reinforce you with some 
 that will make no default; I want to bring you soldiers 
 who will not shirk from any responsibility; and such are 
 knocking at your door to-day. They are not of the limping 
 sort who will leave your friends in peril. . . . 
 
 ' ' Although I believe that, by a bold, determined perform- 
 ance of our duty, we have the remedy in our hands still; 
 I want to make sure that, if the remedy must be here, we 
 shall have force enough to look down all opposition. . . . 
 
164 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON- 
 
 I will leave nothing to doubt that I can make certain in 
 the emergency." 
 
 "I will not sacrifice this republic to the ghost of a 
 technicality. ' '* 
 
 This, certainly, was explicit enough in regard to the 
 "true inwardness" of the measure. Nohody could 
 doubt, after this, the exact position on the question of 
 impeachment of the senator from Ohio. In the midst of 
 his perplexities, Edmunds furnished him a way out. 
 The senator from Vermont contended that the assent of 
 the people of the coming state was not necessary to give 
 validity to any fundamental condition Congress might 
 exact, and the amendment he offered simply appended 
 to the act of admission a "fundamental and perpetual 
 condition that there shall be no denial of suffrage by 
 reason of race or color in the state of Nebraska"; in- 
 volving, therefore, no delay in the seating of the two sen- 
 ators, while preserving intact the consistency of the 
 negro-suffragists. It was true that many of the best 
 lawyers in the Senate were of the opinion that the sec- 
 tion amounted to nothing more than the expression of 
 the wish of Congress and had not the binding force of a 
 law. "Wade undoubtedly thought so; but, seeing that 
 without some such placebo the bill could not pass, at 
 least over a veto, he snatched at the timely aid, and the 
 amendment being adopted the bill passed by a vote of 
 twenty-four yeas to fifteen nays. Instantly on its pas- 
 sage, Wade moved the consideration of his fresh Colo- 
 rado bill. Edmunds moved the application of his 
 specific, the motion was agreed to and the Senate passed 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 335-6. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 165 
 
 the bill by virtually the same vote. For neither bill did 
 Fessenden or Trumbull vote, and among the nays in 
 both cases were such Eepublicans as Foster, Grimes and 
 Morgan. What in the case of any other man would have 
 provoked great surprise, Sumner voted for both bills. 
 If any single senator had demonstrated the gross prac- 
 tical demerits of these measures it was, as we have seen, 
 the senator from Massachusetts. But these objections 
 upon which he had rung the changes both in the last and 
 the present session, it now appeared, were mere ciphers, 
 employed only to increase the value of the one fixed 
 aversion absorbing the senator's mind. The word 
 "white" once nullified; this "ghost of a technicality," 
 as Wade truly called it, once laid ; such objections as the 
 glaring insufficiency of the population, the rejection of 
 the constitution at the regular election, and the violence, 
 fraud and illegality of the second election, became 
 immaterial, and Sumner could welcome the four votes 
 from Nebraska and Colorado with all the alacrity of 
 Wade. 
 
 At the close of the debate Doolittle remarked : 
 
 "The Senator from Ohio in the beginning of the discus- 
 sion, and before the political necessities had pressed upon 
 him as they have been pressing upon him of late, in an argu- 
 ment which he has not answered and which has not been 
 and cannot be answered, showed conclusively that this 
 Territory of Colorado was in no condition to be admitted 
 as a State into the Union. But, sir, there are other rea- 
 sons, pressing reasons, reasons of political necessity, he 
 would have us understand. It is necessary to reinforce 
 a majority of three-fourths in this body by the admission 
 
166 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of new members from the new State of Colorado, and that 
 is the reason why this is to be pressed."* 
 
 But what must have been "Wade's mortification when 
 the House refused to adopt the Edmunds specific ! And 
 what the sardonic astonishment of Sumner, when the 
 body that had once approved the constitution which he 
 denounced as not republican in form, turned upon him 
 and denounced the condition, which induced him to vote 
 for the bills, as a loophole through which all the ex- 
 cluded states might creep back into the Union with the 
 word ' ' white ' ' still defiling their constitutions ! Garfield 
 sounded the alarm : ' ' Suppose a bill offered to-morrow 
 to let South Carolina in on the same condition!"! 
 Dawes wanted to know whether a violation of the ' ' con- 
 dition-subsequent" would make Nebraska no longer a 
 state, t Washburne sought to lay the bill on the table, 
 remarking : "I want to kill it and to kill all such bills. ' ' 
 Blaine struck the ' ' condition" a fatal blow : 
 
 "If gentlemen wish to admit Nebraska here without any 
 condition at all, just as States have been admitted hereto- 
 fore, leaving the question of suffrage to be settled by that 
 State in its own legislature or constitutional convention, 
 I can understand it. That is a fair, square and manly 
 proposition. If, on the other hand, you mean to say that 
 Nebraska shall be admitted on this condition, only, I can 
 understand it. But to dodge between the two propositions, 
 to say, upon one side, that this position effects the object, 
 and then turn round and say to the other side that it does 
 
 * Glole, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 362. 
 
 t Id., p. 399. 
 
 %Id. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 167 
 
 no harm because it is a mere placebo to certain prejudices 
 here, I confess I think it disgraceful legislation."* 
 
 The truth is, a reaction had begun in the House 
 against impeachment ; and the high-handed proceedings 
 of "Wade, rendering it clear that he was packing the Sen- 
 ate for the trial, disgusted many members not lost to a 
 saving sense of public decorum. These men seized the 
 advantage which the ineffectuality of the Edmunds pro- 
 viso gave them to out-Sumner Sumner in sedulity for the 
 negro and so ' ' kill the bills. ' ' But the tactics of the im- 
 peachers were too skillful. As a harmonizer of all differ- 
 ences between them and the negro-suffragists, Mr. Bout- 
 well proposed to add "the further fundamental condi- 
 tion that the Legislature of said State, by a solemn public 
 act, shall declare the assent of said State to said funda- 
 mental condition"; on receipt of a copy of which, the 
 President shall forthwith announce the fact; "where- 
 upon said fundamental condition shall be held as a part 
 of .the organic law of the State": and "the admission 
 of the said State into the Union shall be considered as 
 complete ' ' : the state legislature to be convened within 
 thirty days. This proposition was accepted, the amend- 
 ment was made, the bill was passed, and the same pro- 
 cess was applied to the Colorado case.f The opponents 
 of impeachment among the Republicans in the House 
 were forced to content themselves with the trivial advan- 
 tage of having postponed the admission of the senators 
 until the next Congress. It should be noted that not a 
 single Bepublican member took any thought, apparently, 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 449. 
 fid., pp. 480-2. 
 
168 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of the practical demerits of these two measures, flagrant 
 on their face. Raymond alone called attention "to the 
 many other questions entering into the decision heside 
 the question of suffrage. ' ' 
 
 "There is a great question, a question of paramount in- 
 terest to me and to the State I in part represent, which I 
 cannot help considering ; the question whether it is just, and 
 wise, and politic to allow the great States of the Union, such 
 as New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the old, populous and 
 powerful States, to be overborne, year after year, in one 
 branch of the Legislature by States whose population is 
 not sufficient to entitle them to a single member on this 
 floor."* 
 
 And he likened "the creation of new States" to the 
 English expedient of creating more peers. Even as it 
 was, the two bills came near shipwreck in the Senate. 
 Edmunds opposed concurrence with the House amend- 
 ment in an argument unanswerable: 
 
 "Either Congress has the power in setting up this Ter- 
 ritory into a State to declare what shall be the practical 
 exercise of equal rights there, or else it must be left to the 
 people in the act of forming their constitution to decide. 
 There is no middle ground. "We might as well leave it to 
 the common council of the city of Washington to decide 
 how that shall be in the Territory of Nebraska, as to the 
 Legislature. ' ' 
 
 The Brown proviso submitting the question to the 
 people came within three votes of being adopted ; when 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 478. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 169 
 
 Wade and his more immediate allies by a united effort 
 succeeded in obtaining a concurrence with the House.* 
 It will have been noticed that, of these twin measures, 
 the Nebraska bill, at this session, was given the right of 
 way, the debate centred exclusively upon it, and, after 
 it was disposed of, Colorado followed in silence and very 
 much as a matter of course. But the President, with the 
 tact of an expert combatant, in sending both vetoes to 
 the Senate, put the Colorado case, with its more flagrant 
 vices, in the front; and, when his short but unanswer- 
 able message was read, "new light" had come, not in- 
 deed "showing the propriety of the admission of Colo- 
 rado," but of sufficient power to discover the cause of 
 Wade's mysterious timidity over this particular meas- 
 ure, though not to penetrate the secret recess where 
 lurked his more mysterious hope of Presidential ap- 
 proval. 
 
 After alluding to his former veto still awaiting the 
 consideration of the Senate, and remarking that he was 
 ' ' unable to perceive any reason for changing his opinion 
 already communicated," the President declared that, 
 on the contrary, he found many objections of which he 
 had been before unaware, and that "while several of 
 those he then assigned had gained in strength, yet others 
 have been created by the altered character of the measure 
 now submitted." These new objections he now pro- 
 ceeded to enumerate: 
 
 1. ' ' The constitution under which this State govern- 
 ment is proposed to be formed very properly contains a 
 provision that all laws in force at the time of its adop- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39tn Cong., pp. 484, 487. 
 
170 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion and of the admission of the State into the Union 
 shall continue as if the constitution had not been 
 adopted. Among those laws is one absolutely prohibit- 
 ing negroes and mulattoes from voting. . . . Yet in the 
 bill now before me, by which it is proposed to admit the 
 Territory as a State, it is provided that 'there shall be 
 no denial of the elective franchise or any rights to any 
 person by reason of race or color, excepting Indians not 
 taxed.'" 
 
 2. The President incorporated in his message a copy 
 of the protest of the House of Eepresentatives of the 
 territory against the passage of the law admitting the 
 state, "without first having the question submitted to a 
 vote of the people ' ' ; made, as it set forth, for the rea- 
 sons : ' ' first, that we have a right to a voice in the selec- 
 tion of the character of our government; second, that 
 we have not a sufficient population to support the ex- 
 penses of a State government." 
 
 3. A census of the population of the territory was 
 being taken, and the returns already received from 
 fifteen out of eighteen counties, showed a population of 
 24,909; which, with the three remaining counties esti- 
 mated to contain 3,000, would make the total popula- 
 tion 27,909 : or not one fourth of the number required 
 for a single congressional district in the states (127,000). 
 
 4. The fourth objection brought to the attention of 
 the Congress a most suspicious variation in the wording 
 of the "further fundamental condition" affixed to the 
 Colorado bill from the wording of the corresponding 
 condition affixed to the Nebraska bill. As proposed by 
 Mr. Boutwell and added to the Nebraska bill, this condi- 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 171 
 
 tion required that the assent of the state to the guarantee 
 of negro suffrage should be given by ' ' the Legislature of 
 said State," and directed "said State Legislature" to 
 be convened by "the Territorial Governor" within 
 ' ' thirty days. ' ' In passing the Colorado bill, which fol- 
 lowed immediately, the House and the Senate after- 
 wards evidently presumed that the condition added in 
 the one case was identical with that in the other. But it 
 now appeared that the condition affixed to the Colorado 
 bill had been surreptitiously altered, so that the assent 
 of the state must be given by "the Legislature elected 
 under said State Constitution," "the said State Legisla- 
 ture " to be convened within ' ' sixty ' ' days by the ' ' Gov- 
 ernor-elect. " The President, speaking solely with 
 reference to the text of the bill before him without com- 
 paring it with the text of the Nebraska bill, pointed out 
 that these very alterations rendered the execution of the 
 bill "almost impossible." The "governor-elect," to 
 whom was given authority to convene the legislature, 
 had "no more authority than a private citizen" until 
 after the admission of the state, which could not take 
 place until after the session of the legislature it was at- 
 tempted to authorize him to call together. Furthermore, 
 what constituted "the Legislature elected under said 
 State Constitution," as contradistinguished from "the 
 Legislature of said State"— the phrase used in the 
 Nebraska bill ? Was it the legislature elected at the time 
 the constitution was claimed to have been adopted, or 
 was it the new legislature to be elected? If the former, 
 the terms of all the members of the lower House, and of 
 one half of the members of the upper House, had already 
 
172 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 expired ; and that body was in no condition to give the 
 assent of the state to any fundamental condition. If the 
 latter, sixty days was a time entirely inadequate, con- 
 sidering the unsettled and isolated condition of large 
 portions of the territory especially from November to 
 May, to hold an election and then convene the represen- 
 tatives of the people.* 
 
 Before such an array of objections well might even 
 the lion-hearted Wade quail. He called for an imme- 
 diate vote; but it was evident he had lost heart. Hen- 
 dricks badgered him for an explanation of the variation 
 in the phraseology of the proviso : 
 
 "The fact is communicated to the Senate by the veto 
 message that one branch of the Legislature of Colorado 
 has expressed views . . . hostile to this proceeding. I want 
 to know if the vote upon this question is taken away from 
 that Legislature because ... it is hostile to this particular 
 measure ; and I think the Senator when the subject was up 
 before should have called the attention of the Senate to the 
 difference in the two bills. I know that when we voted I 
 supposed the third section of each bill was in precisely the 
 same language. Now, I ask the Senator from Ohio ... to 
 explain the difference and to give the Senate to understand 
 why there is a difference in the two bills in this section." 
 
 Wade sat silent. He simply would not explain. After 
 a pause Hendricks continued: 
 
 "As the Senator from Ohio declines to make any explana- 
 tion we have a right to assume that there was some purpose 
 in the matter, . . . that if this were submitted to the Legis- 
 
 * Message in Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 818. McPh. Recon., p. 160. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 173 
 
 lature of Colorado in the same terms in which it was sub- 
 mitted to the Legislature of Nebraska it would probably 
 be rejected. Then we have the spectacle before Congress 
 of one bill submitted to one Legislature to secure a partic- 
 ular result and a similar bill under exactly the same cir- 
 cumstances submitted to another and a different Legislature 
 in another Territory, for the purpose of securing a result 
 which could not be secured if the submission was in the 
 same language as in the other bill. I do not think, that 
 being properly understood, the Senate of the United States 
 would be a party to business of this sort." 
 
 The exposure of the trick was complete; and the re- 
 consideration of the bill was quietly dropped.* 
 
 The veto message on the Nebraska bill was not taken 
 up until the next morning. Wade did not want it read 
 at all. "I do not know that anybody wants it to be 
 read," he grumbled. "It takes up time and nobody 
 listens to it." After it was read, he did not press its 
 consideration. His hurry to push the matter appeared 
 to be gone. For more than a week of the rapidly flying 
 session, nothing was heard of it.f On the seventh of 
 February, 1867, a telegram, read by Fowler announcing 
 that "the battle was won" in Tennessee— the bill grant- 
 ing negro suffrage having passed the day before— 
 seemed to arouse him from his apathy ; for, at the close 
 of the next day's session, by an arrangement with the 
 minority he was able to crowd the bill through over the 
 veto. He then made a tentative effort to call up the 
 Colorado bill, but, on the Democrats protesting that such 
 a move was not in the bond, he acquiesced without a 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 820. 
 t/rf., pp. 851-2. 
 
174 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 word, and Colorado once more receded into the back- 
 ground.* It is hardly necessary to add that, the next 
 day, the Nebraska bill passed the House over the veto 
 amid applause from the floor and galleries, the Speaker 
 ostentatiously directing the clerk to call his name ; and, 
 in less than the thirty days allowed by the statute for 
 the assembling of the legislature, the full design of the 
 act was accomplished; Nebraska ratified the funda- 
 mental condition; Nebraska was admitted into the 
 Union ; and, on the first day of the next Congress, the two 
 senators from Nebraska— John M. Thayer and Thomas 
 W. Tipton— men of approved and superabundant loy- 
 alty—were numbered among the already overwhelming 
 majority;— thenceforth, ex officio, judges of the Court 
 for the trial of Impeachments— sure to find the Presi- 
 dent guilty upon any charge the House might present. 
 
 Another move in anticipation of the impeachment, 
 made at this juncture, deserves a passing notice. 
 LaFayette S. Foster, the President pro tempore of the 
 Senate, would cease to be a member of that body on the 
 fourth day of the coming March. An excellent presiding 
 officer and a man of conservative instincts, on certain 
 critical occasions he had not come up to the standard of 
 party loyalty, recoiling for instance from such bare- 
 faced maneuvres as the turning out of Stockton and the 
 dragging in of Nebraska. His occupation of the place 
 next in the line of succession was a source of uneasiness 
 to those radicals who, looking forward to the removal 
 of the President as a stern necessity, felt that a man of 
 Foster's mildness and regard for the proprieties would 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 1096. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 175 
 
 be no match for Johnson defending the crown of his 
 ambition ; and who were resolved that, once they accom- 
 plished a revolution in the palace, no second apostate 
 should arise to balk their aims. From the beginning 
 of the session, the question: Who was to be the next 
 President of the Senate? had been agitating the minds 
 of the Eepublican members of both Houses. Those radi- 
 cals who favoured impeachment, as time went on and 
 they witnessed his bold and unscrupulous conduct of the 
 measures to reinforce the Senate, gradually united upon 
 Benjamin F. Wade as the man for the crisis. Probably, 
 no man less fitted for the duties of a presiding officer 
 could be found in the Senate. He himself confessed: 
 ' ' You all know I am no parliamentarian. ' '* But he was 
 chosen for a purpose in comparison with which such 
 duties were trivial. He was known to be brave and un- 
 flinching; and, if Andrew Johnson whom in the stub- 
 bornness of his pugnacity he resembled, should resist 
 removal by -force, they wanted a leader of undaunted 
 mettle. Yet it was because of the very traits which 
 endeared him to the revolutionist— his reckless boldness, 
 his predisposition to violent methods, his tendency to 
 dash headlong to his object over every impediment— 
 that his accession to the chief magistracy was dreaded 
 by the conservative statesmen and politicians of the 
 party. Men of such temperament and troubled by such 
 apprehensions turned to William Pitt Fessenden. The 
 senator from Maine was a statesman rather than a poli- 
 tician. He was called a perfectly safe man. Dignified 
 in bearing, cautious. in judgment, experienced in public 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 2003. 
 
176 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 affairs, familiar with the finances, he was a figure that 
 would cut no grotesque capers in the seat of Lincoln. A 
 strict party man, ready to go great lengths .with his 
 political associates; yet, as he had repeatedly shown, 
 there were limits he would not transgress. He would not 
 knowingly put by the restraints of the Constitution, no 
 matter how obstructive they were to the success of some- 
 favourite party project. If the emergency of the re- 
 moval from office of the President proved unavoidable, 
 then the succession of so fair-minded a man and so safe 
 a statesman would reduce the inevitable shock to the 
 whole framework of the government to a minimum. But 
 these timid friends of order and law were now to learn 
 that summary methods of reaching party ends, short- 
 cuts across the open instead of plodding along the beaten 
 roads of administrative government— remedies cutting 
 asunder at one stroke the knot, in fumbling to untie 
 which formal statesmanship lets the supreme hour go 
 by— were to be the order of the day. To Stevens and 
 Boutwell and Howard, the presence of the punctilious 
 Fessenden on the joint committee on reconstruction dur- 
 ing the last session had been a source of constant irri- 
 tation. His conservatism, they believed, leavened the 
 whole body and tainted the constitutional amendment. 
 Sumner thought he was not sound on the negro suffrage 
 question, because he favoured an educational qualifica- 
 tion. He even insisted on treating the President with 
 respect. If the foundations of the executive department 
 were to be broken up, at all risks no such martinet should 
 emerge as the futile birth of the cataclysm ; but a leader 
 rejoicing in the hurricane and at home in the storm. As 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 177 
 
 the end of the session drew near it becoming evident 
 that none but a radical of the ultra type could succeed, 
 the friends of Fessenden abandoned the field ; and at the 
 senatorial caucus Wade was selected without opposition. 
 
 Bearing this state of affairs in mind, the reader will 
 be prepared to appreciate to what lengths this chosen 
 champion of the impeachers was now ready to venture. 
 The fourth of March of this year came on Monday; 
 and the last week of the session was unusually crowded 
 with business. The two Houses were waiting for the 
 vetoes of the Tenure-of-office and Reconstruction bills, 
 and employed the anxious interval in bringing up the 
 arrears of indispensable legislation which the import- 
 ance of these two measures had forced them to neglect. 
 At a little before midnight, on Thursday the twenty- 
 eighth of February, the Senate being engaged by ex- 
 press arrangement on the Internal Revenue bill— Wade, 
 suddenly and without a word of previous notice, moved 
 to postpone all other business and take up the Colorado 
 bill with the veto message. Fessenden protested on ac- 
 count of the pressing nature of the bill under discussion. 
 Hendricks suggested that Wade's object must be merely 
 to set a future day for a vote. But Wade bluntly in- 
 formed him he expected to get a vote that night. " I do 
 not know that I can succeed ; but I shall try it. ' ' Hen- 
 dricks proposed that, without debate, a vote be taken 
 at half past twelve to-morrow; senator Riddle was ill 
 with rheumatism, he said, and could not come out at 
 night; senator Grimes was ill also. But Wade refused 
 to assent; and when asked why? responded: 
 
 12 
 
178 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "It is because I think I am better prepared to-night than 
 I shall be to-morrow to decide this question. I want to 
 be frank and plain about it. I think that that is the case. " 
 
 The fact was a caucus had been held on this measure* 
 and it was ascertained that Fessenden, Harris and Mor- 
 gan would not submit, and, therefore, in a full Senate, 
 Wade despaired of overriding the veto. Now, at mid- 
 night, was his final opportunity. With Grimes and 
 Harris and Riddle absent, he might succeed. He meant 
 to take full advantage, as he said on another occasion, 
 of the dispensations of Almighty God. But, at this 
 point, Doolittle arose and uttered a few words of ex- 
 postulation : 
 
 "Mr. President. I think the proposition which has been 
 made ... is a proposition which has never before been 
 declined in the Senate of the United States, never. . . . 
 Now, here, at half past eleven o'clock— almost midnight- 
 right in the midst of the business of the Senate upon an 
 important measure, ... to ha,ve pressed upon us by sur- 
 prise a motion to postpone a bill like this, and take up 
 Colorado for a vote to-night, is beyond anything I could 
 ever have anticipated. Sir, we are not without being ob- 
 served. The world stands looking on. The people of the 
 United States know what is transpiring in this body; and 
 there are peculiar reasons which connect themselves with 
 the Senator from Ohio, which will draw some attention to 
 him, and to the course he is pursuing on this occasion. We 
 all know, time and again, that Senator, in pressing this 
 matter of Colorado, has said over and over that his purpose 
 was to reinforce a majority in this body, already more than 
 two thirds. And for what, sir?" 
 
 * See Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., p. 497. 
 
PREPARATIONS FOR IMPEACHMENT 179 
 
 Wade hastily interrupted, remarking that "many of 
 his friends here" did not agree with him, bnt thought 
 the proposition of the other side reasonable and he there- 
 fore acquiesced. He had thrown his last die and lost. 
 The next morning (March first), the question was put 
 whether this bill shall pass, the objections of the Presi- 
 dent notwithstanding. There were yeas 29, nays 19, 
 not voting 4; Edmunds, Fessenden, Foster, Grimes, 
 Harris and Morgan, all strict Republicans, voting no.* 
 The two-thirds majority was broken. The bill was 
 lost. The high-water mark of impeachment had been 
 reached. At half past ten o'clock on the morning of 
 Monday, March the fourth, 1867, Foster arose and bade 
 farewell to the Senate ; and Wade was thereupon elected 
 President pro tern. It is a bitter commentary on the 
 vaunted disinterestedness of the advanced patriots of 
 this period, that, had they had their way ; had their own 
 selecjted leader succeeded in forcing a vote at that mid- 
 night hour, letting in the two senators from Colorado, 
 as he had let in the two senators from Nebraska;— then 
 in all human probability, Andrew Johnson would have 
 been convicted and removed from office, and Benjamin 
 F. Wade made President in his stead. 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 1922, 1928. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 The Tentjre-of-Oefice and Reconstruction Acts 
 
 While these preparations for impeachment were 
 going on, the two-fold task the majority had imposed 
 upon themselves at the beginning of the session— the 
 stripping the executive of its prerogatives and the sub- 
 jugation of the South to the Republican party — was not 
 lost sight of. The Tenure-of-offi.ce bill and the Recon- 
 struction bill — the two main measures necessary to its 
 accomplishment— proceeded steadily step by step and 
 side by side. About nothing were the Republicans so 
 sensitive as the security of their office-holders. The 
 host of offices that had sprung up during the war were 
 considered the inalienable assets of the party, to disturb 
 the tenure of which was nothing less than a violation of 
 vested rights. Of all the sins of the President, none was 
 so unpardonable as his removal from office of tried 
 Republican politicians to give place to supporters of his 
 policy. What exasperated the radicals more than any- 
 thing else in the late campaign was the increasing fre- 
 quency of such removals ; and the threat of Johnson on 
 his western tour "to kick them out" rankled in their 
 breasts more deeply than all his other utterances. At 
 the last session, an amendment to the Post Office appro- 
 priation bill cutting off the pay of appointees not event- 
 ually confirmed by the Senate was agreed to, then re- 
 considered and disagreed to. The amendment was 
 
 180 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 181 
 
 directed against what was a real abuse, the practice of 
 holding back appointments to the last moment and, 
 after adjournment, reappointing officers not confirmed, 
 or even rejected, by the Senate. At the stage of the 
 combat we have now reached, such timid methods were 
 worse than useless. The attack must be made in front 
 and along the whole line. Upon other questions— im- 
 peachment, reconstruction, negro suffrage— there may 
 have been at times a lack of unanimity, but upon the 
 rigourous necessity of depriving the President of the 
 power to turn their partisans out of office the Republi- 
 cans were a unit. 
 
 That the powers of appointment and removal belong 
 to the executive department of a government main- 
 taining the three-fold division is clear enough as a theo- 
 retical proposition. But the Constitution of the United 
 States does, in fact, expressly qualify the power of ap- 
 pointment by requiring the advice and consent of the 
 Senate to the filling of the higher offices, and, also, by 
 granting to the Congress the power to vest by law the 
 power of appointment to the inferior offices in the heads 
 of the departments and the courts of law as well as in 
 the President alone. These provisions may be regarded 
 as infringements on the theoretical scope of the power 
 by itself, but they leave the power of removal wholly 
 intact. No word is expressed tending to curtail this 
 branch of the prerogative ; and the only point on which 
 to hang an argument is that, the power of removal being 
 correlative with the power of appointment, the restric- 
 tions expressly put upon the one must by implication 
 be put upon the other. And, in fact, it was this argu- 
 
182 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ment that constituted the entire stock of the advocates 
 of the Tenure-of-office bill. Formidable embarrass- 
 ments, it is true, hung about its employment. The pre- 
 cise question arose in the very first Congress, was thor- 
 oughly discussed, and was decided adversely to the 
 views of the assailants of the prerogative ; and that de- 
 cision had been recognized by the judicial department 
 of the government as an authoritative construction of 
 the constitutional provisions involved, and, although 
 sometimes questioned, had been followed by every Pres- 
 ident of the United States. Indeed, the power of re- 
 moval by the President alone for no other reason than 
 difference of political opinion was asserted by President 
 Lincoln by a more sweeping change in the persons of 
 office-holders than had ever taken place before in the 
 history of the country. Embarrassments such as these, 
 however, could not check the leaders of the dominant 
 party, believing as they did that its very existence was 
 involved in overcoming them. 
 
 As Williams of Pennsylvania put it in the House : 
 
 "If you would impeach successfully, you must strip him 
 of his power over the fortunes of the citizen. No glittering 
 bauble must be allowed to dazzle the vision, or tempt the 
 cupidity of or ambition of either the prosecutor or the 
 judge. No army of stipendiaries must be allowed to sur- 
 round his person and depend upon his will. Invested with 
 all these imperial prerogatives and backed by the power of 
 the sword, another President, with more discretion and 
 wiser counselors, may threaten the public peace, and 
 threaten it more successfully, by flinging himself into the 
 arena, with an array more formidable than either the 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 18S 
 
 Household Swiss- or the incipient Praetorian guard who 
 lately mustered on the royal summons, and disputing with 
 you the mastery of the empire."* 
 
 The joint committee on retrenchment, having been 
 directed at the last session to inquire into the whole 
 matter, in December of the present session reported a 
 bill, the first section of which required the consent of the 
 Senate to the removal of all officers to whose appoint- 
 ment the Constitution required the consent of the Sen- 
 ate, excepting officers of the Cabinet. This exception, 
 it is worth while to notice, was sustained by the House 
 at this early date (by a slim vote, however) and a sub- 
 stitute that Cabinet officers should hold ' ' for and during 
 the term of the President appointing them" unless 
 sooner removed with the consent of the Senate, was de- 
 feated by the close vote of yeas 77 to nays 81 ; showing 
 that the leaders of the House had not yet united upon 
 the necessity of protecting any particular member of 
 the present Cabinet, f The second section gave the Pres- 
 ident power during the recess of the Senate to suspend 
 any civil officer within the purview of the first section 
 for misconduct or because of disqualification or in- 
 capacity, and to designate some person to perform the 
 duties of the office; but, within twenty days after the 
 meeting of the Senate, the President must report such 
 suspension and the reasons therefor to the Senate ; if the 
 Senate concur, the President may remove such officer 
 and with the consent of the Senate appoint another; if 
 the Senate refuse to concur, the suspended officer shall 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 22. 
 t Id., pp. 73, 94. 
 
184 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 forthwith resume his office. The third section provided 
 that the President may fill vacancies happening during 
 the recess "by reason of death, resignation, expiration 
 of term or other lawful cause ' ' by granting commissions 
 to expire at the end of the next session ; if no complete 
 appointment was made by the end of the session then 
 the office shall remain in abeyance. 
 
 This bill was not taken up for consideration by the 
 Senate until the tenth day of January, 1867 ; when, the 
 reason why Cabinet officers were excepted from the 
 operation of the first section being demanded, Edmunds, 
 who had charge of the bill, answered : 
 
 "It did seem to the Committee, after a great deal of con- 
 sultation and reflection, that it was right and just that the 
 Chief Executive of the nation" should have "persons per- 
 sonally agreeable to him" as his "confidential advisers"; 
 "in whom he could place entire confidence and reliance"; 
 "and that whenever it should seem to him that the state of 
 relations between him and any of them had become so as to 
 render this relation of confidence and trust and personal 
 esteem inharmonious," "he should in such case be allowed 
 to dispense with the services of that officer." 
 
 This explanation was unsatisfactory to Howe of Wis- 
 consin, who went so far as to deny that the heads of the 
 departments were the confidential advisers of the Pres- 
 ident. "The Cabinet was not the President's Cabinet; 
 it is the Cabinet of the people, ' ' he said. Disagreement 
 with the President on political questions, this future 
 member of the Cabinet of President Arthur thought a 
 virtue in a cabinet-minister and a reason why he should 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 185 
 
 be kept in office. The senator was profuse in assevera- 
 tions that he had ' ' not the slightest reference to the per- 
 son of the present incumbent" of the Presidential office; 
 that this measure was no piece of occasional legislation 
 but for all time. Not a senator came forward to sus- 
 tain him, and his motion to strike out the exception was 
 negatived without a division.* 
 
 In considering the third section, the practice of mak- 
 ing appointments during recess to fill vacancies created 
 by removals and, then, either not sending the name of 
 the appointees to the Senate at all, or, if sent and the 
 appointees not confirmed, reappointing the same men 
 after the close of the session, was condemned on all 
 sides, and, though supported by the examples of suc- 
 cessive Presidents and the opinions of successive Attor- 
 ney-Generals, acknowledged to be at war with the spirit 
 of the Constitution. But the opposition senators claimed 
 that the section in providing that where an appointment 
 during recess was not made complete by confirmation 
 during the session, the office must remain unfilled, went 
 too far and trenched upon the power of the President 
 to fill "all vacancies that may happen during the re- 
 cess." The advocates of the bill replie'd that the 
 "vacancies" mentioned in this clause of the Constitu- 
 tion were only those happening in that sense of the word 
 "implying contingency, chance, uncertainty," and not 
 brought about by the arbitrary act of the President; 
 further, in no sense could a vacancy be said to "hap- 
 pen" during recess which already existed during the 
 previous session. Their opponents, however, showed 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 382-9. 
 
186 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 that this construction was contrary to the uniform 
 usage of the government; the clause having heen held 
 by the law officers to mean "happen to exist" and not 
 "happen to occur." 
 
 The contest over the constitutionality of the provis- 
 ion of the first section requiring the concurrence of the 
 Senate to removals by the President was not begun until 
 the fourteenth, when "Williams of Oregon assumed the 
 burden of the affirmative. That a legislative construc- 
 tion adverse to the bill was put upon the Constitution 
 in this respect by the first Congress, he did not dispute 
 but strove to belittle its effect. He cited from the Fed- 
 eralist the opinion of Hamilton: "The consent of that 
 body (the Senate) would be necessary to displace as well 
 as to appoint ' ' ; and, not denying that Madison was the 
 sponsor of the contrary opinion, he asserted that Madi- 
 son was by no means infallible— instancing the Virginia 
 Eesolutions of 1798 and the United States Bank. He 
 claimed, also, that while the Supreme Court had made 
 no direct decision, still its deliverances so far as they 
 went tended to sustain the provision; citing the case of 
 Ex parte Hennen (13 Peters), the celebrated case of 
 Marbury vs. Madison, and the opinion of Justice Mc- 
 Lean in U. S. vs. Guthrie (17 How.). It was a danger- 
 ous experiment, however, to cite authorities loosely when 
 Eeverdy Johnson was to reply. The senator from Mary- 
 land proved that Hamilton, too, was not infallible by 
 showing that, after having been Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury, he changed the opinion expressed in the Federalist. 
 He showed that Marbury vs. Madison had no reference 
 to the higher offices of the government, but to "inferior" 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 187 
 
 offices over which Congress was given control and had 
 exercised it. He showed that in both Ex parte Hennen 
 and U. S. vs. Guthrie, the opinions cited not only did 
 not bear out Williams 's contention, but really militated 
 against it; in the former case, Justice Thompson say- 
 ing: "It was very early adopted as the practical con- 
 struction of the Constitution that this power was vested 
 in the President alone," and in the latter, Justice Mc- 
 Lean saying : ' ' this power of removal has been perhaps 
 too long established to be now questioned. ' ' 
 
 But the most logical and exhaustive argument was 
 delivered by Buckalew of Pennsylvania. He began by 
 laying down the following fundamental proposition : 
 
 "There are but two possible locations in this Government 
 for the power of removal under the Constitution of the 
 United States. ... It must be vested in the President 
 . . . alone who is the head of the executive department and 
 charged with the execution of the laws, or it must be vested 
 in the President by and with the advice and consent of the 
 Senate upon the ground of implication from the Senate's 
 association in the appointing power. ... If the power be 
 not vested in the President alone or in the President and 
 Senate, it is located nowhere; it exists nowhere; and the 
 argument in favor of the enactment of a law proposing to 
 vest it anywhere else must be upon the ground that it is an 
 ideal or latent power which may be created or called into 
 active existence by virtue of those general powers of legis- 
 lation which are vested in the Congress of the United States. 
 But inasmuch as this is a government of granted and vested 
 powers and inasmuch as the grants to Congress are specific, 
 upon the very statement of the point itself the conclusion 
 must be against it." 
 
188 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 If the power, of removal be in the President and Senate 
 jointly neither can exercise it alone; and the bill is con- 
 demned in that ' ' it proposes to allow the President a power 
 of suspension to be exercised alone, and a separate power 
 of removal of the officers of the Cabinet. ' ' 
 The senator gives a detailed history of the debate of 
 the first Congress, with copious citations showing that 
 the precise question involved in the present bill was 
 thoroughly ventilated in every respect; and that the 
 question was decided at the most auspicious moment iu 
 the life of the government, when no private or party 
 questions could by any possibility have been affected. 
 Mr. Madison is quoted as saying in the debate :• 
 
 "In another point of view it is proper that this interpre- 
 tation should now take place rather, than at a time when the 
 exigency of the case may require the exercise of the power 
 of removal. At present the disposition of every gentleman 
 is to seek the truth and abide by its guidance when it is dis- 
 covered. I have reason to believe the same disposition pre- 
 vails in the Senate. But will this be the case when some 
 individual officer of high rank draws into question the 
 capacity of the President, without the Senate, to effect his 
 removal? If we leave the Constitution to take this course 
 it can never be expounded until the President shall think 
 it expedient to exercise the right of removal, if he supposes 
 he has it; then the Senate may be induced to set up their 
 pretensions. And will they decide so calmly as at this time, 
 when no important officer in any of the great departments 
 is appointed to influence their judgment? The imagination 
 of no member here or of the Senate or of the President him- 
 self is heated or disturbed by faction. If ever a proper 
 moment for decision should offer, it must be like the 
 present." (Annals of Congress, vol. 1, p. 547.) 
 
THE TENUKE-OF-OFFICE ACT 189 
 
 ' ' These words of wisdom, ' ' remarked Buckalew, ' ' ex- 
 hibit in contrast the superior competency and fitness of 
 the Congress of 1789, before parties were formed and 
 personal interests in the tenure of office had come into 
 existence, over the present Congress filled with heated 
 partisans and subject to the influence of thousands of 
 officers deeply interested in the subject of our debates." 
 The senator read extracts from letters of Madison, 
 written at the time the question was again agitated 
 under Jackson, wherein Madison reiterated his old opin- 
 ions. In one to John M. Patton (March, 1834), he said, 
 with prophetic vision: "If the right of the Senate be, 
 or be made, a constitutional one, it will enable that 
 branch of the government to force on the executive de- 
 partment a continuance in office even of the Cabinet 
 officers, notwithstanding a change from a personal and 
 political harmony with the President, to a state of open 
 hostility toward him."* 
 
 For some reason the debate languished. The advo- 
 cates of the bill were greatly overmatched in argument 
 by its opponents. The ablest debaters among the Re- 
 publicans were silent. Sumner enlivened the discussion 
 by offering an additional section providing that all offi- 
 cers now appointed by the President or by the head of 
 any Department, whose compensation exceeds $1,000 
 per annum, shall be appointed by the President and the 
 Senate; and that the terms of all officers appointed by 
 the President or the heads of departments since July, 
 1866, shall expire on the last day of February, 1867. 
 This was, indeed, what Edmunds called it, "a sweeping 
 
 *For debates see Olole, id., pp. 407 et seq., 438-40, 461-3. 
 
190 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 proposition" ; bringing under the protecting wing of the 
 Senate a host of office-holders, not only, but retroacting 
 on deserters from the party by snatching away the 
 rewards of their treachery. Edmunds, nevertheless, 
 opposed it, with great earnestness, as "loading an im- 
 portant bill meant to settle a high principle with a mere 
 matter of detail," and "subjecting the friends of the 
 measure to the imputation of their opponents that the 
 purpose of the bill was merely temporary, directed 
 against Andrew Johnson," "to undo something the 
 President had done." Treating the protests of Ed- 
 munds as though unuttered or uttered only in a dip- 
 lomatic sense, Sumner out with the naked truth: This 
 " is a proposition which grows out of the exigency of the 
 hour. The bill, on a larger scale, is just such a proposi- 
 tion ; it grows out of the exigency of the hour ; and that 
 is its strength and merit. We shall pass it ... in order 
 to meet a crisis. We all feel its necessity. ..." 
 
 ' ' The President, for the time being at least, ought to 
 be deprived of the extraordinary function which he has 
 exercised. He has announced openly in a speech that 
 he meant to ' kick out of office ' the present incumbents. ' ' 
 Therefore we owe them our protection. ' ' It belongs to 
 the duty of the hour."* The day but one after, he re- 
 curred to the subject: "This, Sir, is the duty of the 
 hour. . . . There was no such duty on our fathers ; there 
 was no such duty on our recent predecessors '. . . ; be- 
 cause there was no President of the United States who 
 had become an enemy to his country, "f Being called to 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 468-9. 
 t Id., p. 525. 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 191 
 
 order, he was sustained by the Chair and on appeal the 
 Chair was sustained by the Senate. The next day, in 
 vindication of freedom of speech in the Senate, he said : 
 
 "Andrew Johnson . . . has become the successor of Jef- 
 ferson Davis in the spirit by which he is governed and in 
 the mischief he is inflicting on his country. ..." 
 
 "In holding up Andrew Johnson to judgment, I do not 
 dwell on his open exposure of himself in a condition of 
 beastly intoxication while he was taking his oath of office ; 
 uor do I dwell on the maudlin speeches by which he has 
 degraded the country as it was never degraded before ; nor 
 do I hearken to any reports of pardons sold, or of personal 
 corruption. . . . Those things are bad; very bad; but they 
 might not, in the opinion of some senators, justify us on the 
 present occasion." 
 
 But "the President has usurped the powers of Congress 
 on a colossal scale, and he has employed these usurped 
 powers in fomenting the rebel spirit and awakening anew 
 the dying fires of rebellion." "He has become a terror, to 
 the good and a support to the wicked. " " This is his great 
 and unpardonable offense. . . . He is an usurper, who, 
 promising to be a Moses, has become a Pharaoh. ' ' 
 
 "I shall not be led aside to consider the full remedy for 
 this usurpation." 
 
 Reverdy Johnson gravely rebuked the indulgence in 
 such epithets against the President by a senator at that 
 particular juncture, when impeachment proceedings 
 were pending in the House. "What sort of a trial, as 
 far as that particular senator is concerned, would the 
 President of the United States have should he be im- 
 peached for being an enemy to his country, for being a 
 usurper . . . ! Suppose we all went on following the 
 
192 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 authority of the honorable member from Massachusetts, 
 and expressed the same opinion ; what would the world 
 say?"* 
 
 Sumner's section being voted down, Howe renewed 
 his motion to strike out the exception of Cabinet officers ; 
 and he supported it by a consideration now for the first 
 time openly broached. Quoting from the New York 
 Herald a rumour that senator Cowan, to whom the Presi- 
 dent had tendered the appointment of minister to Aus- 
 tria, had been offered the portfolio of Secretary of War, 
 he said : "If my amendment be adopted, then this port- 
 folio will not operate at all to dissuade the gentleman 
 alluded to from going to Austria. " "I should prefer to 
 see the present incumbent retained in the custody of that 
 portfolio; and therefore I am not willing to leave the 
 power in the hands of the President to take it from him 
 without the consent of the Senate. ' ' Cowan denied the 
 report with emphasis, and Conness of California, on 
 behalf of the Secretary of War, rather resented the idea 
 conveyed by Howe that that distinguished citizen needed 
 any protection which might be afforded by the amend- 
 ment. "I take it," he said, "that it is scarcely neces- 
 sary to be said here, or necessary to be said anywhere, 
 to those who know him or know his character, that he 
 would be the last man to seek or wish protection to him- 
 self in that or in any other place." Howe, protesting 
 that the Secretary of War "had no idea the amendment 
 was to be off ered, " added : "I should think the Congress 
 of the United States assumed a grave responsibility if, 
 knowing that there was a probability of his being re- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 542-4. 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICB ACT 193 
 
 moved, they allowed it to be done when they could pre- 
 vent it. ' '* When the Senate came to a vote upon Howe 's 
 motion Stanton was left to the tender mercies of the 
 President by a vote of yeas 13 (all regular Eepublicans) 
 to nays 27 (of whom 16 were regular Republicans). 
 During the course of the debate there had been added 
 certain penal sections — making appointments and re- 
 movals in violation of the act, the acceptance of any 
 such appointments, and the disbursement of any money 
 from the treasury to any person so appointed, "high 
 misdemeanors ' ' punishable by a fine not exceeding $10,- 
 000 or imprisonment not exceeding five years or both: 
 evidently with an eye to the impeachment clause of the 
 Constitution. With this addition, the bill now passed 
 the Senate substantially in the shape it came from the 
 committee, f 
 
 The House labouring at this time desperately over the 
 reconstruction measures, the Senate bill could not be 
 taken up until the first of February. By that day a 
 change had come over the minds of many of the major- 
 ity leaders upon the question of the tenure of Cabinet 
 officers. Since the twelfth of December, when the prop- 
 osition to make his confidential advisers independent of 
 the President was defeated in the House, many things 
 had happened. The negro suffrage bill for the District 
 had been vetoed. Rumours were abroad that since that 
 veto trouble had arisen in the Cabinet where Stanton at 
 last was showing his hand. Military rule over the unre- 
 constructed South was seen to be coming and the great 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 547-8. 
 t Id., pp. 405, 550. 
 
 13 
 
194 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 War-Minister must be fixed in his place. Accordingly, 
 a motion was made to strike out the questionable excep- 
 tion, and a member who had voted against the motion 
 before now openly supported it on the floor. On the first 
 trial, indeed, the motion was lost by almost the same vote 
 (76 to 78) ; but the leading Republicans were all now in 
 the affirmative. The next day the motion was recon- 
 sidered, the exception was stricken out by a vote of 82 
 to 63; and with this single amendment the bill was 
 passed.* 
 
 The new stand taken by the House forced a renewal 
 of the contest in the Senate, where Edmunds moved to 
 disagree and request a conference. Howe came forward 
 as the champion of the House amendment, contending 
 that the power of removal was not vested in the Presi- 
 dent at all but in the Court of Impeachment; and ar- 
 raigning the first Congress for passing what he did not 
 hesitate to call "a dishonest statute," "a cow,ardly and 
 skulking statute." Eeverdy Johnson predicted that, if 
 the amendment passed, the first Congress after the next 
 presidential election, if it contain a majority in each 
 branch friendly to the President elected, will repeal it— 
 a prophecy substantially fulfilled. But Sherman it was 
 who opposed the amendment with the greatest vigour: 
 
 "It is a question with me," he said, "not of constitu- 
 tional law but a question of propriety." "Suppose that 
 some Cabinet minister under the old Administration should 
 hang on to his office. If is hardly a probable supposition, 
 I admit, because I do not see how any gentleman could do it, 
 or how any man could hold an office of that kind against 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong,, pp. 937, 943-4, 970. 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 195 
 
 the will of his chief; yet if we adopt the amendment . . . 
 we compel the President to retain in office . . . any man 
 who has not courtesy enough to retire." 
 
 "I would as soon think of imposing upon the President 
 a Private Secretary with whom he had no kindly relations, 
 personal and political, as to impose upon him a Cabinet 
 minister with whom his relations were not kind. ' ' 
 
 "Any gentleman fit to be a Cabinet minister, who receives 
 an intimation from his chief that his longer continuance in 
 that office is unpleasant to him, would necessarily resign. 
 If he did not resign it would show he was unfit to be there. 
 I cannot imagine a case where a Cabinet officer, would hold 
 on to his place in defiance and against the wishes of his 
 chief; and if such a case should occur I certainly would 
 not by any extraordinary or ordinary legislation protect 
 him in that office."* 
 
 The Senate remained firm, refusing to concur by a 
 vote of yeas 17, nays 28. The House, insisting upon its 
 amendment, appointed its committee of conference 
 (Schenck, Williams and Wilson) : to which the Senate 
 responded by the appointment of Williams, Sherman 
 and Buckalew. On the evening of the eighteenth a re- 
 port was made, signed by Williams and Sherman on the 
 part of the Senate and all the conferees on the part of 
 the House, by which the exception was stricken out, 
 and a proviso substituted that Cabinet officers "shall 
 hold their offices respectively for and during the term of 
 the President by whom they may have been appointed, 
 and for one month thereafter, subject to removal by and 
 with the advice and consent of the Senate." The 
 majority of the House in adopting the report evidently 
 
 * Glole, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 1039-40. 1043, 1046. 
 
196 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 considered that they had gained a victory and congratu- 
 lated themselves that their favourite minister was safe. 
 Schenck, after stating the terms of the proviso, ex- 
 plained : "It is, in fact, an acceptance by the Senate of 
 the position taken by the House."* Its language was 
 scanned with no particular scrutiny and its precise sig- 
 nificance passed unperceived. It was not so in the Sen- 
 ate. When first read, the report was considered an 
 abandonment of the position of the Senate by its con- 
 ferees whose concurrence aroused much indignation. 
 Their explanation, however, cleared up the matter. Wil- 
 liams stated that the proviso left an incoming President 
 free to select his own Cabinet and gave him a month to 
 do it in, adding that he thought the question immaterial, 
 for: 
 
 "I have no doubt that any Cabinet minister who has a 
 particle of self respect — and we can hardly suppose that 
 any man would occupy so responsible a position without 
 having that feeling — would decline to remain in the Cabinet 
 after the President had signified to him that his presence 
 was no longer needed. As a matter of course, the effect of 
 the provision will amount to very little one way or the 
 other; for I presume that whenever the President sees 
 proper to rid himself of an offensive or disagreeable Cabinet 
 minister, he will only have to signify that desire and the 
 minister will retire." 
 
 Hendricks, on the other hand, took a different view : 
 
 "A mean man getting into the Cabinet would say, if the 
 President desired him to leave, 'Congress has said I may- 
 stay ; therefore I will stay. ' The very person who ought to 
 be turned out is the very person who will stay in. A gen- 
 tleman, of course, would not." 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., p. 1340 House, p. 1514 Sen. 
 
THE TENURE-OF-OFFICE ACT 197 
 
 Sherman's remarks are especially noteworthy. He 
 apologized to the Senate for agreeing to the report, 
 saying that he had done so "with a good deal of re- 
 luctance," but, he plead, the House conferees were 
 "very tenacious" and "the general purpose of the bill 
 is so very important" that he thought "it ought not to 
 be endangered by a dispute on a collateral question." 
 He proceeded : "I think that no gentleman, no man with 
 any sense of honor, would hold a position of Cabinet 
 officer after his chief desired his removal, and therefore 
 the slightest intimation on the part of the President 
 would always secure the resignation of a Cabinet of- 
 ficer. ' ' 
 
 Doolittle struck the heart of the matter : 
 
 "I desire to look into this most marvelous production of 
 this committee of conference, which has utterly failed to 
 accomplish the very thing which they design by the terms 
 of the bill and the language which they use. I suppose it 
 is aimed at the present head of the Executive Department, 
 to bind him to keep certain members of his Cabinet, for it 
 was openly avowed in the discussion of this bill when it was 
 up before that it would be intolerable to allow the present 
 Executive Magistrate to have the power of removal over 
 certain members of the Cabinet mentioned by name. Now, 
 this project does not reach those members at all. ' ' 
 
 He then read the proviso, and continued : 
 
 "Now, let us look at the facts. The Secretary of "War 
 was appointed by Mr. Lincoln during his first term; he 
 never has been appointed since. . . . Mr. Lincoln gave him 
 no appointment during his second term, and he held over. 
 Mr. Johnson has given him no appointment, but he has 
 
198 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 held over. So of the Secretary of the Navy, and so of the 
 Secretary of State. The Secretary of the Interior, to be 
 sure, and the Postmaster-General and the Attorney-General 
 have been appointed by Mr. Johnson since the presidential 
 office devolved on him ; and by the terms of this law the Sec- 
 retary of the Interior, the Postmaster-General and the 
 Attorney-General must remain during Mr. Johnson's term; 
 but the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the 
 Secretary of the Navy, according to the terms of this pro- 
 vision, may be removed by him to-morrow." 
 
 Not a single senator questioned the correctness of this 
 construction. Sherman denied with much heat that the 
 conference committee had any such purpose as that 
 attributed to it by Doolittle : 
 
 ' ' I say that the Senate have not legislated with a view 
 to any persons or to any President, and therefore he 
 (Doolittle) commences by saying what is not true. We 
 do not legislate in order to keep in the Secretary of "War, 
 the Secretary of the Navy or the Secretary of State. ' ' 
 
 Doolittle here interrupted, saying he heard in the de- 
 bate "that it was not to be tolerated that the present 
 Chief Magistrate should have the power to remove the 
 Secretary of War, by name. ' ' 
 
 Sherman thereupon admitted that ' ' some Senator may 
 have had that purpose. ' ' But, he continued : 
 
 "That the Senate had no such purpose is shown by its 
 vote twice to make the exception. That this provision does 
 not apply to the present case is shown by the fact that its 
 language is so framed as not to apply to the present Presi- 
 dent. The Senator shows that himself, and argues truly 
 that it would not prevent the present President from 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 199 
 
 removing the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy 
 and the Secretary of State. And if I supposed that either 
 of these gentlemen was so wanting in manhood, in honor, 
 as to hold his place after the politest intimation by the 
 President of the United States that his services were no 
 longer needed, I certainly, as a Senator, would consent to 
 his removal at any time, and so would we all." 
 
 With this construction so unanimously put upon the 
 proviso, the conference report was adopted (Monday, 
 February 18), and the bill sent to the President.* 
 
 Two days afterwards followed in the same direction 
 the other of the two main measures thought necessary, as 
 we have said, to the accomplishment of the task under- 
 taken by the majority. Not so intimately connected with 
 the subject of this work as the Tenure-of -office act, the 
 Reconstruction act, its provisions and the history of its 
 passage call for but a brief exposition. On the sixth of 
 February, the joint committee reported a bill which, 
 after wiping out "the pretended state governments" of 
 the ten still excluded states, divided these "so-called 
 states" into five military districts— Virginia, the first; 
 North and South Carolina, the second; Georgia, Ala- 
 bama and Florida, the third ; Mississippi and Arkansas, 
 the fourth ; and Louisiana and Texas, the fifth^each to 
 be commanded by an officer of the Army, not below the 
 rank of brigadier-general, with unlimited powers, and 
 each to be assigned by the General of the Army. This 
 bill, but not without a serious struggle, passed the House 
 on the thirteenth. A substitute was adopted by the Sen- 
 ate differing from the original in these respects : I. The 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., 1515-18. 
 
200 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 governments of the ten states were styled "not legal" 
 instead of ' ' pretended. ' ' II. The President was to desig- 
 nate the military commanders, not the General of the 
 Army. III. A section was added enumerating the suc- 
 cessive steps required to be taken before any of the ten 
 states could escape the yoke of military rule and regain 
 their place in the Union, as follows : 1. The fourteenth 
 amendment must have become a part of the Constitution 
 of the United States. 2. A constitution for the state 
 must be framed by a convention of delegates chosen by 
 all the adult male citizens without distinction of colour, 
 excepting those disfranchised for rebellion or felony; 
 and this constitution must guarantee manhood suffrage 
 to the negro but might disfranchise the white man for 
 participation in rebellion. 3. The constitution must be 
 submitted to the same class of voters for ratification. 
 4. If ratified by a majority it must be submitted to Con- 
 gress for examination. 5. If approved by Congress, the 
 state must then assent to the fourteenth amendment, 
 with its section, in effect, making ineligible to all omces, 
 state or federal, the leaders of the Southern people. 6. 
 The senators and representatives from these states must 
 be competent to take the "iron-clad" oath. 
 
 The majority being in favor of military rule, pure and 
 simple, and opposed to pointing out as yet to "the pre- 
 tended states ' ' any way of escape, the House refused to 
 concur; the Senate insisted upon its substitute and de- 
 clined a conference. The whole measure being put in 
 jeopardy by this disagreement, the House reluctantly 
 accepted the mitigating section, adding two amend- 
 ments, however, that made its conditions still more 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION x\CT 201 
 
 stringent, viz: 1. A proviso that "no person excluded 
 from the privilege of holding office by the proposed 
 fourteenth amendment shall be eligible as a member of 
 the convention to frame a constitution for any of the 
 rebel States, nor shall any such person vote for members 
 of such convention." 2. An amendment declaring that 
 any civil governments existing in the ten states until 
 they are admitted into the Congress are provisional only, 
 and liable to abolition, supersession or revision at any 
 moment by the United States ; but that, in the meantime, 
 in all elections carried on under these governments no 
 person should vote and no person should hold office ex- 
 cept as provided in the present bill. The Senate finally 
 agreed to the House amendments, thereby passing the 
 bill.* 
 
 The House might not have concurred in the Senate 
 amendment giving the President, instead of the General 
 of the Army, power to designate the military com- 
 manders, had not that body incorporated into the army 
 appropriation bill a section fixing the headquarters of 
 the General of the Army at Washington and providing 
 that all orders issued by the President relating to mili- 
 tary operations must be issued through that officer ; fur- 
 ther, that "the General of the Army shall not be re- 
 moved, suspended or relieved from command or assigned 
 to duty elsewhere, without the previous approval of the 
 Senate " ; all orders contrary to this section were made 
 void, the officer issuing them declared guilty of a misde- 
 meanour, and any officer of the army transmitting them 
 made subject to imprisonment. A more palpable viola- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., pp. 1037, 1215, 1459, 1469, 1340, 1570, 
 1399-1400, 1645. 
 
202 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion of the Constitution could not be imagined. It was 
 an attempt to make a subordinate independent of his 
 superior officer, to circumscribe the powers of the officer 
 expressly made commander-in-chief of the army by the 
 Constitution, and actually to associate the Senate with 
 that officer in the command of the army. And yet the 
 section received the vote of every Republican senator 
 present, Henderson excepted. The bill containing this 
 attack on his prerogative reached the President at so late 
 a date that he might have prevented its becoming a law 
 by withholding his signature. But, rather than defeat 
 the appropriations for the pay of the soldiers, he felt 
 constrained to sign it, accompanying his signature, how- 
 ever, with a protest against the section "as depriving 
 the President of his constitutional functions as Com- 
 mander-in-Chief of the Army," and "out of place in 
 an appropriation bill. ' ' * 
 
 When the Tenure-of -office bill reached the President, 
 he laid it before his Cabinet, every member of which 
 pronounced it unconstitutional; and none with more 
 emphasis than the Secretary of War. The point being 
 mooted, it was taken for granted, without dissent, that 
 neither Stanton, nor any other member appointed by 
 Lincoln, was within the bill. The President was so 
 much struck by the full mastery of the constitutional 
 
 * Mr. Boutwell takes pride in claiming the honour of having drafted 
 this section under the dictation of Stanton, as far back as the first of 
 December, 1866, to circumvent some black design of the President 
 which was troubling their patriotic imaginations. Art. by Boutwell in 
 North Amer. Rev., December, 1885 ; repeated in art. in McClure's Mag., 
 December, 1899. For history of section see Globe, 2d Sess. 39th Cong., 
 pp. 1013, 1351-2, 1353-6, 1404 Bouse, pp. 1851-5 Senate. Message in 
 McPh. Recon., p. 178. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 203 
 
 question displayed by Stanton that he requested the 
 Secretary of War to prepare the veto message. That 
 officer, pleading physical disability, declined to undergo 
 the labour of writing, but declared his readiness to aid in 
 the preparation of the paper. The message was in fact 
 composed by Seward with the assistance of Stanton. It 
 was a calm and thorough review of the proceedings and 
 decision of the first Congress and of the series of pre- 
 cedents in all the departments of the government follow- 
 ing that decision ever since; but it did not delay for a 
 moment the passage of the bill over the veto.* 
 
 The Reconstruction bill, the President might have de- 
 feated by simply putting it in his pocket, but, contrary 
 to the expectations of his enemies, he took no advantage 
 of the opportunity, but sent his veto to the House at 
 the same time he sent his veto of the Tenure bill to the 
 Senate. On hearing the message read the House was in 
 no humour to appreciate this magnanimous forbearance 
 of its author. To the majority, in premises, in argu- 
 ment, in conclusion and in tone, it was nothing less than 
 an impeachable offence. Every paragraph constituted a 
 high misdemeanour. We owe to the Impeachment Trial 
 the information that the veto message on the Tenure 
 bill was written by Seward aided by Stanton. We owe 
 to the Impeachment committee that extorted the item 
 from the lips of the writer, the information that the 
 veto message on the Reconstruction bill was first written 
 by Jeremiah S. Black and then thoroughly revised by 
 Andrew Johnson. Black was one of the profoundest 
 
 * President's Message to Senate on Stantonjs suspension in Trial, Vol. 
 1, pp. 148, 150-1. Offer of testimony, id., p. 676. 
 
204 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and at the same time one of the acntest lawyers of his 
 generation ; and, besides, he was one of the most brilliant 
 advocates— brilliant before a jury and brilliant before 
 the full bench. He had been a great judge as well as a 
 great lawyer, and at a perilous crisis he showed his 
 mettle as a statesman when Attorney-General and Secre- 
 tary of State under President Buchanan. But, great as 
 he was as a lawyer, judge and statesman, as a con- 
 troversial writer he was greatest. In this field, his habit 
 of driving home a proposition, ill-conceived and half- 
 comprehended by the average man, by a seeming audac- 
 ity in its statement became of marvellous service. The 
 ease with which the clear-cut sentences grow out of each 
 other and, finally, with an epigrammatic clinch culmi- 
 nate in what one rejoices over as an absolutely demon- 
 strated truth, has the effect of humour. The complete- 
 ness of his refutation of an opposing argument by a 
 single wave of his pen has the effect of wit. Compassion 
 over the decapitation of an adversary is swallowed up 
 in admiration at the deftness of the stroke. His epithets 
 are photographic. His sarcasms are syllogistic. His 
 invectives carry with them the force of the intuitive 
 reason. His logic is so severely perfect that it becomes 
 rhetoric raised to the highest power. The Reconstruc- 
 tion bill, which could not but be regarded by Black as 
 a double-headed monstrosity holding the unsheathed 
 sword over the prostrate South with one hand and 
 offering her the two-fold curse of negro enfranchise- 
 ment and white disfranchisement with the other, was 
 an object well-fitted to call out to the utmost the power 
 of his unrivaled pen. But, as he testified before the com- 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 205 
 
 mittee, if the President had signed what he wrote, the 
 message "would have been a much more objectionable 
 document to the majority in Congress than it is" ; "it is 
 all toned down from much stronger expressions in the 
 same direction into something considerably tamer."* 
 So that we have not before us the pure product of that 
 "most miraculous organ." We confess we should like 
 to have seen the document before the toning down proc- 
 ess began. 
 
 But the actual message is not what the reader would 
 call tame. Here are one or two specimens: 
 
 "The power thus given to the commanding officer over all 
 the people of each district is that of an absolute monarch. 
 His mere will is to take the place of law. ..." "Being 
 bound by no State law, and there being no other law to reg- 
 ulate the subject, he may make a criminal code of his own ; 
 he can make it as bloody as any recorded in History, or he 
 can reserve the privilege of acting upon the impulse of his 
 private passions in each case that arises. He is bound by 
 no rules of evidence ; there is indeed no provision by which 
 he is authorized or required to take any evidence at all. 
 Everything is a crime which he chooses to call so, and all 
 persons are condemned whom he pronounces to be guilty. 
 He is not bound to keep any record or make any report of his 
 proceedings. He may arrest his victims wherever, he finds ■ 
 them, without warrant, accusation, or proof of probable 
 cause. If he gives them a trial before he inflicts the pun- 
 ishment, he gives it of his grace and mercy, not because he 
 is commanded so to do." 
 
 "Such a power has not been wielded by any monarch in 
 England for more than five hundred years. In all that 
 
 * Imp. Inv., p. 271. 
 
206 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 time no people who speak the English language have borne 
 such servitude. It reduces the whole population of the ten 
 States— all persons of every color, sex, and condition, and 
 every stranger within their limits— to the most abject and 
 degrading slavery. No master ever had a control so abso- 
 lute over his slave as this bill gives to the military officers 
 over both white and colored persons." "The head of a. 
 great empire has sometimes governed it with a mild . and 
 paternal sway ; but the kindness of an irresponsible deputy 
 never yields what the law does not extort from him. 
 Between such a master, and the people subjected to his 
 domination there can be nothing but enmity; he punishes 
 them if they resist his authority; and if they submit to it 
 he hates them for their servility." 
 
 "Here is a bill of attainder against nine millions people 
 at once. It is based upon an accusation so vague as to be 
 scarcely intelligible, and found to be true upon no credible 
 evidence. Not one of the nine millions was heard in his own 
 defence. The representatives of the doomed parties were 
 excluded from all participation in the trial. The conviction 
 is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever 
 inflicted on large masses of men. It disfranchises them by 
 hundreds of thousands, and degrades them all — even those 
 who are admitted to be guiltless— from the rank of freemen 
 to the condition of slaves." 
 
 "The bill says to them, take martial law first, then delib- 
 erate. And when they have done all that this measure 
 requires them to do, other conditions and contingencies, 
 over which they have no control, yet remain to be fulfilled 
 before they can be relieved from martial law. Another 
 Congress must first approve the constitutions made in con- 
 formity with the will of this Congress, and must declare 
 these States entitled to representation in both Houses. The 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 207 
 
 "whole question thus remains open and unsettled, and must 
 again occupy the attention of Congress, and in the mean- 
 time the agitation which now prevails will continue to 
 disturb all portions of the people. ' '* 
 
 The House lost not a moment in passing the bill over 
 the veto, and the Senate followed its example. 
 
 With the passage of this act the work of the Thirty- 
 ninth Congress was done. Yet it seemed loth to die. It 
 kept its eye on the President up to the moment when the 
 eye of its successor took in the object of its watch. Its 
 hand relaxed not from the reins until another hand 
 caught them up. As minute by minute it faded from 
 view, minute by minute the Fortieth Congress more and 
 more distinctly appeared. The stroke of the gavel 
 knelling the expiration of the one was echoed by the 
 stroke of the gavel calling the other to order. 
 
 "The King is dead! Long live the King!" 
 
 Every change in the personnel of the new Congress 
 was favourable to the radical wing. In the Senate, 
 Cowan gave place to Cameron, thereby reducing the 
 Johnson Republicans to four; the Democrats lost two 
 senators (McDougall and Nesmith) reducing their num- 
 ber to seven, of whom but two came from states north 
 of Mason's and Dixon's line (Buckalew and Hendricks). 
 As for the regular Republicans, Conkling displaced the 
 too cautious Harris ; Ferry, the too conservative Foster ; 
 Drake, one of Missouri's fiercest radicals, Brown; Har- 
 
 * Message in McPh. Recon., p. 166 et seq. 
 
208 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Ian, late of the Cabinet, came back; Morrill (of Ver- 
 mont), who was in the last House, changed places with 
 Poland, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana succeeded 
 Lane. The two senators of the new state of Nebraska— 
 "men of the right sort" as Wade certified them to be— 
 swelled the numbers of the majority to forty-two ; there 
 being one vacancy caused by the retirement of Cresswell 
 of Maryland, this figure exceeded three-fourths of the 
 present membership. In the House the changes were 
 not so conspicuous. The same Eepublican leaders were 
 there, but the Johnson tertium quid was about elimi- 
 nated. One new face there was— a face, once seen, not 
 to be forgotten. The broad forehead shelving up to the 
 top of the bald crown, the fringe of thin hair encircling 
 the lower head, the eyes asquint and half-hidden by 
 pointed lids, the sharp nose with its nervous sniff, the 
 spasmodic puffing out of the cheeks, the turned-down 
 collar exposing the wide throat, and the right hand 
 uplifted in the attitude of affirming without book; — 
 these striking peculiarities betokened the presence of 
 Benjamin F. Butler. His appearance on the floor meant 
 business. Advocate, party-leader, warrior, apostle of 
 an idea, representative; whatever part he essayed, he 
 was at all times and above all the politician ; and, though 
 resembling the Mansf eldts of the Thirty Years ' War in 
 the number and suddenness of his changes of flag, for 
 the time being he was the most devoted of partisans. 
 Nothing gave him pause. He was radical by nature, 
 in the etymological sense of the term. Radical in his 
 Democracy, he supported Jefferson Davis rather than 
 Douglas. Radical as a military commander, he solved 
 
THE EECONSTRUCTION ACT 209 
 
 the fugitive-slave problem by the word "contraband." 
 Radical in his new-born Republicanism, he demanded 
 the summary impeachment of Andrew Johnson, his sus- 
 pension during trial and his speedy removal. For this 
 cause alone, it may be said, he had joined the impeach- 
 ing body ; and, in the earnestness with which he pushed 
 forward the prosecution, he was to contest the palm of 
 leadership with Stevens, to oust Ashley from his self- 
 chosen perch, and in the culminating scene become the 
 protagonist of the drama. The people at large were 
 growing sick of this threatened removal of their chief 
 magistrate so long hanging over them. The finances of 
 the country were being seriously affected ; industry was 
 partially paralyzed ; there was a constant uneasiness in 
 commercial circles as though revolution were imminent. 
 The lame conclusion to which the committee of the last 
 House had come strengthened the spreading belief that 
 the whole movement was fatuous as well as futile. This 
 state of feeling more or less influenced the new House, 
 and many a member of the majority would have secretly 
 rejoiced to hear that the wild scheme beginning to play 
 havoc with the party had been dropped. Such men, 
 however, were silent, for the most part, while the leaders 
 of the movement were loud in their assertion of the 
 necessity of getting rid of the renegade of the White 
 House. 
 
 On the third day of the session, a resolution was in- 
 troduced to continue the investigation during the session 
 and the recess. Ashley, feeling the growing luke-warm- 
 ness towards his cherished hobby, in his speech in sup- 
 port of the motion, more than insinuated that Johnson 
 
 14 
 
210 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 was privy to the assassination of his predecessor. ' ' He 
 came into the Presidency through the door of assassi- 
 nation," he said. He alluded to "the dark suspicion 
 which crept over the minds of men as to his complicity 
 in the assassination plot, ' ' and ' ' the mysterious connec- 
 tion between death and treachery which this case pre- 
 sents. ' ' He called upon the people ' ' to declare that no 
 man hereafter elected President or Vice President shall 
 present himself at his inauguration drunk ; that no Pres- 
 ident shall be permitted to turn the White House into a 
 den of thieves and pardon-brokers ; nor shall he be per- 
 mitted to address in vulgar, seditious language a 
 drunken, howling mob from the steps of the Executive 
 Mansion"; to protest against "another drunken elec- 
 tioneering tour, such as last year. " " The Nation cried 
 out in its agony to Congress to deliver them from the 
 shame and disgrace the acting President has brought 
 upon them. They demand that the loathing* incubus 
 which has blotted our country 's history with the foulest 
 blot shall be removed." And he concluded by giving 
 public notice to "citizens and foreigners" having any 
 "documents or facts tending to show technically the 
 guilt of this man" to bring them to the committee, warn- 
 ing such persons that by withholding their testimony 
 they became "an accessory in the crime of this man," 
 and "a co-partner in his guilt." He transcended the 
 bounds of propriety so far as to elicit rebukes from his 
 political associates on the floor and, finally, from the 
 Speaker himself. So disgusted was one of his Republi- 
 can colleagues that he denounced "the whole scheme of 
 impeachment as one of consummate folly," asserting 
 
 * Sic. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 211 
 
 that ' ' not one act amounting to a crime or misdemeanor 
 has as yet heen proved against the Executive" and 
 challenging any one to "reply to that averment." He 
 said more. He charged that "it was not expected hy 
 some that proof will be obtained" ; it is enough that the 
 President is an "obstruction" and it is the duty of the 
 party to remove him from office. This challenge, Butler 
 instantly accepted, declaring that "an absolute majority 
 of the whole House," when the final report is made, 
 "will be in favor of the impeachment of Andrew John- 
 son"; that "common fame," "common report of mis- 
 conduct, ' ' was sufficient proof in cases of impeachment ; 
 that "if any man stands in the way of the great march 
 of this country to honor, glory, peace, unity, happiness, 
 liberty and law," it was enough, "he must be taken out 
 of the way. ' ' On a test vote to lay the resolution on the 
 table, every Republican member voted in the negative 
 but five, and they did not vote at all. And so the investi- 
 gation was continued.* 
 
 The first session of the fortieth Congress lasted until 
 the thirtieth of March, and its chief business was to sup- 
 ply an omission in that section of the reconstruction act 
 which prescribed the process by which the excluded 
 states could escape from military rule and regain their 
 places in the Union. The process was prescribed, but 
 how the process should be set in motion was nowhere 
 indicated. Delegates to a constitutional convention were 
 to be chosen by certain constituencies, but, as to what 
 authority should call the convention and conduct the 
 election, the section was silent. This omission, there is 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 18-25. 
 
212 IMPEACHMENT OF PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 no doubt, was intentional. It was the design of the 
 framers of the section that the process outlined by its 
 terms should not be forced on unwilling communities 
 but held out to them as a boon to be accepted or not as 
 they chose, and, in the absence of any statutory direc- 
 tion, the presumption would prevail that the machinery 
 provided was to be started by the existing state authori- 
 ties rather than by the military commanders. Moreover, 
 many radicals in the last Congress, anticipating that the 
 South would prefer even martial law to white dis- 
 franchisement and negro enfranchisement, favoured the 
 omission because they were not yet ready for reconstruc- 
 tion on any basis. With Sumner, they wanted time. The 
 majority in the new Congress, however, were resolved 
 that something must be done towards the restoration of 
 the Union without delay; and the greater part of the 
 session was spent in concocting a supplementary bill 
 directing the military commanders, before the first of 
 September, 1867, to cause a registration to be made in 
 each county of the states of their respective districts of 
 persons qualified to vote under the act; after registra- 
 tion, to fix a day for the election of delegates to a con- 
 stitutional convention ; to appoint inspectors of election 
 competent to take the test oath; and, after the constitu- 
 tion was framed, to hold an election for its ratification ; 
 and, if ratified, to send it to the Congress. The bill was 
 passed (Tuesday, March 19) with a proviso that occa- 
 sioned more discussion than the bill itself and was to 
 the effect that, notwithstanding a majority of the votes 
 cast were in favour of holding a convention, no conven- 
 tion should be held unless the majority of the registered 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 213 
 
 voters voted at the election, either for or against; and 
 that no constitution should be deemed ratified unless at 
 least one-half of all the registered voters should have 
 voted on the question.* 
 
 The interval of waiting for the inevitable veto was 
 enlivened by an episode which has a distinct bearing on 
 the impeachment proceedings. The House was in debate 
 over a bill to aid destitute persons in the South without 
 regard to their loyalty or disloyalty, which John A. 
 Bingham was supporting with his customary enthusi- 
 asm; and, in so doing, inadvertently wandered over to 
 the Democratic side of the Chamber, when Butler, who 
 was opposed to the bill, made the remark that the gentle- 
 man from Ohio had ' ' got over on the other side not only 
 in body but in spirit." This pardonable hit stung 
 Bingham (who, it should be borne in mind, had distin- 
 guished himself as the special assistant judge-advocate 
 on the trial of the alleged assassins of President Lin- 
 coln) to the quick, and he charged rough-shod upon the 
 General who, it will be remembered, had not taken Fort 
 Fisher: 
 
 "I desire to say that it does not become a gentleman who 
 recorded his vote fifty times for Jefferson Davis, the arch- 
 traitor in this rebellion, as his candidate for President of 
 the United States, to undertake to damage this cause by 
 attempting to cast an imputation either upon my integrity 
 or my honor. I repel with scorn and contempt any utter- 
 ance of that sort from any man, whether he be the hero of 
 Fort Fisher not taken or of Fort Fisher taken. ' ' 
 
 * McPh. Recon., p. 192. 
 
214 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Butler's retort was admirable in tone and crushing 
 in effect : 
 
 "I have never concealed, Mr. Speaker, the fact which is 
 now so offensively put forward, that before the war, I, in 
 the convention of my party, voted fifty-seven times for Jef- 
 ferson Davis for President. I thought him the representa- 
 tive man of the South, and I hoped by his nomination to 
 prevent threatened disunion. I was foiled and disunion 
 came. The difference between me and the honorable gen- 
 tleman from Ohio is this : while Jefferson Davis was in the 
 Union, a Senator, of the United States, and claiming to be 
 a friend of the Union, I supported him; but he now sup- 
 ports him when he is a traitor. I left him as soon as he left 
 the Union." 
 
 "The gentleman has had the bad taste to attack me for 
 the reason that I could not do any more injury to the 
 enemies of my country. I agree to that. I did all I could, 
 the best I could. Other men of more ability could do 
 more; and no man is more ready to give them the highest 
 plaudits for valor and discretion and conduct than I. And 
 because I could not do more I feel exceedingly chagrined; 
 but if during the war the gentleman from Ohio did as much 
 as I did in that direction I shall be glad to recognize that 
 much done. But the only victim of that gentleman's prowess 
 that I know of was an innocent woman hung upon the 
 scaffold, one Mrs. Surratt. And I can sustain the memory 
 of Fort Fisher if he and his present associates can sustain 
 him in shedding the blood of a woman tried by a military 
 commission and convicted without sufficient evidence in my 
 judgment. ' ' 
 
 The suddenness of this blow stunned Bingham for a 
 moment. He lost his self-possession; his habitual flu- 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 215 
 
 ency deserted him so far that he found it necessary 
 afterwards to revise, his remarks for the record ; an in- 
 dulgence which gave Butler the opportunity, a few days 
 later, to dilate upon the grounds of his charge. The 
 diary written by Booth during the days of his flight, 
 which the judge-advocates kept out of sight before the 
 military commission and which had lain concealed ever 
 since, the judiciary committee in conducting the im- 
 peachment investigation had at length unearthed. Sev- 
 eral leaves, the remains of which bore evidence that the 
 missing pages had been written on, were cut out;— giv- 
 ing rise to the suspicion that the same hand that sup- 
 pressed the book might have mutilated it in fear of the 
 full disclosure of its contents. Butler now urged that 
 this diary, being moral if not legal evidence, ought to 
 have been produced on the trial for two reasons : 1. It 
 proved that there had been a plot to abduct the Presi- 
 dent, changed only at the last moment to a plot to mur- 
 der; and "if Mrs. Surratt did not know of the change 
 of purpose, there is no evidence that she knew in any 
 way of the assassination. ' ' 2. The country was entitled 
 to every particle of evidence throwing light on the great 
 crime, in order to be able "to find who were all the 
 accomplices of Booth; to find who it was that changed 
 Booth's purpose from capture to assassination; who it 
 was that could profit by assassination who could not 
 profit by capture and abduction of the President; who 
 it was expected by Booth would succeed to Lincoln if 
 the knife made a vacancy." "Who spoliated that 
 book?" he demanded with pointed significance. "Who 
 suppressed that evidence? Who caused an innocent. 
 
216 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 woman to be hung when he had in his pocket the diary 
 that states at least what was the idea and purpose of the 
 main conspirator in the case ? ' ' Quoting what he called 
 ' ' this most remarkable sentence written apparently but 
 a few hours before Booth died," "I have endeavored to 
 cross the Potomac five times and failed. I propose to 
 return to Washington and give myself up, and clear my- 
 self from this great crime" ; he continued: "How clear 
 himself! By disclosing his accomplices? Who were 
 they? Who spoliated this book after it got into the 
 hands of the Government, if it was not spoliated be- 
 fore?"* These questions Butler would have answered 
 by charging that the book was mutilated to shield An- 
 drew Johnson, whom he believed to have been an accom- 
 plice of Booth 's. ' ' Such a charge, ' ' said Bingham, em- 
 ploying a contemptuous remark General Grant was re- 
 ported to have applied to General Butler, ' ' is only fit to 
 come from a man who lives in a bottle and is fed with 
 a spoon." 
 
 The President did not keep the Houses waiting long. 
 Four days after the passage of the supplementary bill 
 the veto arrived. One extract from the message will 
 suffice: 
 
 "When I contemplate the millions of our fellow citizens 
 of the South, with no alternative left but to impose upon 
 themselves this fearful and untried experiment of com- 
 plete negro enfranchisement and white disfranchisement, 
 it may be, almost as complete, or submit indefinitely to the 
 rigor of martial law, without a single attribute of freemen, 
 deprived of all the sacred guarantees of our Federal Con- 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 262-3, 363, 364. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 217 
 
 stitution, and threatened with even worse wrongs, if any 
 worse are possible, it seems to me their condition is the most 
 deplorable to which any people can be reduced."* 
 
 Senator Nye pronounced this "one of the strangest 
 messages ever written. ' 'f The two Houses paid no at- 
 tention to it and passed the bill over the veto without 
 remark. 
 
 The business of the session being concluded, an angry 
 quarrel broke out among the majority over the question 
 of adjournment. It began in the House, when Blaine 
 offered a resolution to adjourn on Tuesday the twenty- 
 sixth, to meet again on Monday, November the eleventh. 
 Butler objected that "the Thirty-ninth Congress by 
 ordering this special session said . . . that Andrew 
 Johnson was a bad man, and that this House and the 
 Senate should sit here to take care of his acts"; and 
 that, above all, the question of the impeachment should 
 not be put off for eight months longer, but should be 
 settled at once one way or the other. Blaine replied that 
 there was no popular demand for impeachment and that 
 in the public mind of the country the question was al- 
 ready settled. Stevens reproached him for the ' ' grow- 
 ing inclination in some quarters" on this subject, since 
 the election of the president of the Senate, repeating a 
 declaration he remembered to have heard Blaine make 
 in the House that ' ' there will be no impeachment by this 
 Congress ; we would rather have the President than the 
 shallywags of Ben Wade. ' ' Hot words were exchanged 
 between the two members, Blaine insisting that his re- 
 
 * McPh. Recon., pp. 178, 180. 
 t Globe, id., p. 353. 
 
218 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 mark was made in private conversation and only to the 
 effect that Fessenden was the safer man for President 
 of the United States, and conveyed no slur upon "Wade ; 
 and Stevens reiterating, with acerbity, that the name of 
 Fessenden was not mentioned, that the declaration was 
 in the very words he had used, was made after the elec- 
 tion of the president pro tempore, and addressed gener- 
 ally to the members of the House.* 
 
 The fight was just as bitter in the Senate. Trumbull 
 offered the customary resolution to adjourn the next 
 Tuesday to the first Monday in December— the time 
 fixed by the Constitution. Drake moved to amend by 
 making the day of meeting Tuesday, the fifteenth of 
 October, and was voted down. Sumner, then, moved 
 that the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the 
 House, on Thursday next, adjourn their respective 
 Houses until the first Monday in June, "and on that 
 day, unless it is otherwise ordered, they further adjourn 
 their respective Houses until the first Monday of Decem- 
 ber " ; and got but fourteen votes for his motion. Yates 
 was most bitter against a long adjournment. It was the 
 duty of Congress to watch the President. "He is not 
 to be trusted. He is opposed to our laws. " "Whoever 
 that man be," he declared, "whether President of the 
 United States or any other person, who stands in the 
 path of this country for union, to honor and to glory, 
 should be taken out of the way. I am not saying how. ' ' 
 Nye warned the Senate that the Supreme Court of the 
 United States might, next month, decide the reconstruc- 
 tion measures unconstitutional, and where would the 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 315-7. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 219 
 
 Congress be then, unable to assemble until December? 
 "Williams shrewdly remarked that Congress could not 
 control the President by remaining in session. "We 
 know by experience that the President will do as he sees 
 proper whether Congress is or is not in session. ' ' But, 
 in this high contention, it was Sumner who bore away 
 the palm. With cool candour and with judicial preci- 
 sion, he arrayed his arguments against adjournment. 
 There were "two controlling facts staring him in the 
 face." First. "Our President is a bad man" — "the 
 author of incalculable woe to his country." "Search 
 history, ' ' this future judge of the President went on, 
 
 "and I am sure that you will find no ruler, who dur- 
 ing the same short space of time has done so much mis- 
 chief to his country. He stands alone in bad eminence. 
 Nobody in ancient or modern times can be his parallel. 
 Alone in the evil he has done, he is also alone in the 
 maudlin and frantic manner which he has adopted." 
 
 "... And now I ask can Congress quietly vote to go 
 home and leave this bad man without hindrance of any 
 kind?" 
 
 Second. The other "fact" he illustrated by an en- 
 graving in Harper's Weekly where, as he described it: 
 
 "President Johnson is represented as a Roman emperor 
 presiding in the amphitheater with imperatorial pomp, and 
 surrounded by his trusty counselors, among whom it is easy 
 to distinguish the Secretary of State and the Secretary of 
 the Navy, all of whom look with complacency at the 
 butchery below. The victims are black, and their sacrifice, 
 as gladiators, makes a 'Roman holiday.' Beneath this 
 
220 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 picture is written ' Amphitheaifum Johnsonianum, Mas- 
 sacre of the Innocents at New Orleans, July, 1866.' This 
 inscription tells a terrible story. The massacre proceeds 
 under the patronage of the President. His presidential 
 rod is the law. At his will blood spirts and men bite the 
 dust. . . . This whole country is an Amphitheatrum John- 
 sonianum." 
 
 But Sumner, notwithstanding his renown as an orator 
 and as one of the great men of his generation, had very 
 little influence over the Senate ; and Trumbull 's resolu- 
 tion passed by a vote of 29 to 16.* 
 
 This was not the end of the matter, however. Wilson 
 moved a reconsideration and, the House having adopted 
 a resolution ' ' to assemble again on the first Wednesdays 
 of May, June, September and November unless the 
 President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House 
 shall by joint proclamation issued ten days before the 
 time fixed declare there is no occasion for a meeting," 
 the judiciary committee was instructed to inquire 
 whether Congress had the right to vest such a power in 
 the presiding officers ; but the committee shirked the con- 
 stitutional question, reporting a simple resolution to 
 adjourn without day. Two amendments were offered— 
 one by Howe to adjourn until June and then unless 
 otherwise ordered until December, one by Drake to ad- 
 journ until June and then if no quorum be present until 
 September and then there being no quorum until De- 
 cember; but both were rejected. Sumner offered a 
 proviso that the President of the Senate and the Speaker 
 of the House at any time before December might by 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 303-8. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 221 
 
 proclamation convene the two Houses, and it received 
 but fifteen votes. Once again, the resolution adjourning 
 sine die was adopted by the Senate. The House sent it 
 back amended so as to provide for two intermediate 
 meetings unless the presiding officers proclaim there is 
 no occasion. Sherman was of the opinion that Congress 
 could delegate to the presiding officers "the right to 
 designate the time when we shall meet." But Bucka- 
 lew in a few words demonstrated that the power was 
 exclusive in the President, and Edmunds did so like- 
 wise, in an argument so neat as to convince every sena- 
 tor except Sumner whose forensic habit was silently to 
 ignore an unanswerable argument and restate the dis- 
 proved proposition with increased emphasis. At 
 length, on Friday, the two Houses came to an agreement 
 to adjourn until the first Wednesday in July "when the 
 roll shall be called and the presiding officer of each 
 House shall inform the presiding officer of the other 
 whether or not a quorum is present, and if a quorum of 
 the two Houses shall not have appeared, they shall ad- 
 journ the two Houses without day."* 
 
 During this long struggle, the subject of the impeach- 
 ment was continually obtruding itself, the members who 
 favoured the movement, opposing, the members, who op- 
 posed, favouring, adjournment without day. The inves- 
 tigation was dragging along, an occasional witness ap- 
 pearing before the judiciary committee during the ses- 
 sion. The President's bank account was overhauled; 
 newspaper men were examined about interviews with 
 the President; the New Orleans riot was touched on; 
 
 * Id., pp. 352-60, 401-2-8, 438-41. 
 
222 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and General Butler exulted in the discovery of what he 
 believed to be a damning offence in the pardoning of 
 about two hundred deserters in order to render them 
 available as voters for the President's policy. But it 
 was becoming daily more and more manifest that the 
 selection of Wade as the heir-apparent had given im- 
 peachment its death-blow. Unless some event occurred 
 to rekindle the fire, it must eventually die out. Butler's 
 startling interrogations about Booth's diary revived for 
 a moment the dwindling excitement. The committee 
 called Stanton and Holt before it to explain the mutila- 
 tion of the leaves.* It was rumoured that some of its 
 members sought the cell where John H. Surratt was con- 
 fined to ascertain whether the prisoner might be induced 
 to implicate the President. But these spasmodic efforts 
 availed but little. It was true, as Blaine said, the con- 
 servative element among the Republicans preferred to 
 bear the ills they had with Andrew Johnson than fly to 
 others that they knew not of with Wade. The day be- 
 fore the adjournment a final effort was made to show 
 that the movement had some life in it still. Clarke of 
 Kansas submitted to the House a long preamble reciting 
 what had been done by the committee and declaring it 
 dangerous for Congress to adjourn with the impeach- 
 ment of the President hanging over the people, and a 
 resolution that Congress adjourn until the first Monday 
 in June for the purpose of acting upon the report of the 
 committee on the charges against the President. A 
 member of the committee stated that it had resolved to 
 separate until the first of May when it purposed to con- 
 
 * Imp. Inv., passim; id., pp. 285, 408. 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 223 
 
 tinue its labours. Butler made the most of his newly- 
 discovered pardoned deserters. Stevens made the stag- 
 gering remark: 
 
 "For the last three or four months I have been satisfied 
 that the Committee are making but a mere pretence of 
 prosecuting impeachment by way of throwing it out of 
 doors. I do not- believe they ever intended it, and I do 
 not believe they intend it now. ' ' 
 
 The House substituted the Edmunds resolution for 
 Clarke's and laid the preamble on the table.* 
 
 Sumner, who opposed all adjournments, had predicted 
 that there would be a July session and a session for 
 il business"; and his prediction was fulfilled. The 
 President, with a promptness which disappointed his 
 enemies, named the military commanders under the 
 main reconstruction act as early as the eleventh day of 
 March ; General Schofield remained in the first district ; 
 General Sickles in the second; General Thomas was as- 
 signed to the third but declined and General Pope was 
 substituted ; General Ord took charge of the fourth ; and 
 General Sheridan was continued in command of Louis- 
 iana and Texas, these two states, Florida being trans- 
 ferred to the third, now constituting the fifth. Serious 
 questions arose concerning the power of the military 
 commanders, in connection with the civil governments 
 still allowed to exist, and the duties of the registrars, 
 both under the main and the supplementary acts; and 
 they came pouring in upon the President and by him 
 were referred to the Attorney-General. In the latter 
 
 * Olobe, id., pp. 446-50. 
 
224 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 part of May, that officer wrote an opinion holding that, 
 under the supplementary act, the boards of registration 
 had no right to examine an applicant and investigate the 
 question of his competency, provided he was ready to 
 take the oath required by law ; an interpretation charac- 
 terized by Sheridan in a letter to Grant as "opening 
 a broad macadamized road for perjury and fraud to 
 travel on." On the twelfth of June, the Attorney- 
 General delivered another opinion on a more far-reach- 
 ing and important question. His general conclusion 
 was that, until the process of reconstruction was com- 
 plete, the two acts contemplated the coexistence of two 
 forms of government ; one, the civil governments of the 
 states included in the district, which were to be regarded, 
 as heretofore, the ordinary organs of the sovereign au- 
 thority ; the other, the military governments, which were 
 to be auxiliary, suppletory to the others upon adequate 
 occasion. As corollaries of this main conclusion the 
 Attorney-General held: 1. That, in the absence of any 
 express grant in the acts in question, the military com- 
 manders had no power to remove or suspend any civil 
 officer of the governments of these states, much less to 
 appoint civilians in their place, and that all attempts to 
 exercise such power were null and void. 2. That the 
 military commanders possessed no powers of legislation 
 whatever— i. e., to promulgate decrees and give them 
 the force of laws. The President having embodied the 
 substance of both opinions in a series of instructions 
 which were sent to the military commanders, the cry 
 went forth over the North that the reconstruction plan 
 so carefully contrived by the Congress was being emas- 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 225 
 
 culated by a perfidious President and his wily Attorney- 
 General. Messengers darted forth east, west, north 
 and south to summon the members ; and in the blazing 
 days of July they came flocking to the capital to make 
 the presence of a quorum in each House certain. It 
 took them just one week to reverse the Attorney-General 
 by passing a second supplementary act declaring the 
 true intent and meaning of the other two acts to be 
 that the civil governments allowed to exist provisionally 
 in the ten states were subordinate in all respects to the 
 military commanders ; granting the military command- 
 ers power to suspend or remove every officer of these 
 states, from governor or legislator down to a justice of 
 the peace or an alderman and to appoint some person in 
 his place; and making valid acts of this character al- 
 ready done. It further provided that the oath of the 
 applicant for registration was not conclusive on the 
 board, and that the board was not bound to register un- 
 less satisfied the applicant possessed the qualifications 
 of an elector under the acts of Congress ; and that these 
 boards had the right to revise the lists, and to strike off 
 or add any names they might determine were, on the 
 one hand, not rightfully there, or, on the other, ought 
 to be there; and that the military commanders and the 
 boards of registration should pay no regard to the opin- 
 ions of any civil officer of the United States.* 
 
 The veto message on this measure stirred up an angry 
 agitation. In the many previous messages of this char- 
 acter, while the objections of the President were set forth 
 with firmness, there was nothing like a declaration of 
 
 * McPh. Recon., p. 335. 
 15 
 
226 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 resistance to the ultimate action of the Congress. But, 
 now, when the triumph of the reconstruction policy of 
 that body appeared to be assured and the President's 
 power of restraint at its lowest ebb, Johnson for the first 
 time struck a clear note of defiance, giving notice that 
 there was a limit to the submission of the executive. 
 
 "Within a period less than a year,'.' so ran the message, 
 "the legislation of Congress has attempted to strip the 
 executive department of the Government of some of its 
 essential powers. The Constitution and the oath provided 
 in it devolve upon the President the power and duty to 
 see that the laws are faithfully executed. The Constitu- 
 tion, in order to carry out this power, gives him the choice 
 of the agents, and makes them subject to his control and 
 supervision. But, in the execution of these laws the consti- 
 tutional obligation upon the President remains, but the 
 power to exercise that constitutional duty is effectually 
 taken away. 
 
 ' ' The military commander is, as to the power of appoint- 
 ment, made to take the place of the President, and the Gen- 
 eral of the Army the place of the Senate ; and any attempt 
 on the part of the President to assert his own constitutional 
 power may, under pretense of law, be met by official insub- 
 ordination. It is to be feared that these military officers, 
 looking to the authority given by these laws rather than to 
 the letter of the Constitution, will recognize no authority 
 but the commander of the district and the General of the 
 Army. 
 
 "If there were no other objection than this to this pro- 
 posed legislation it would be sufficient. While I hold the 
 chief executive authority of the United States, while the 
 obligation rests upon me to see that all the laws are faith- 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 227 
 
 fully executed, I can never willingly surrender that trust 
 or the powers given for its execution. I can never give 
 my assent to be made responsible for the faithful execution 
 of laws and at the same time surrender that trust and the 
 powers which accompany it to any other executive officer, 
 high or low, or to any number of executive officers. If this 
 executive trust, vested by the Constitution in the President, 
 is to be taken from him and vested in a subordinate officer, 
 the responsibility will be with Congress in clothing the sub- 
 ordinate with unconstitutional power and with the officer 
 who assumes its exercise. ' '* 
 
 Stevens contemptuously recommended that the House 
 better pass the bill and then go home ' ' so that the com- 
 mittee so diligently engaged in providing for the im- 
 peachment of the President may complete their work in 
 the shortest possible time"; but Mr. Boutwell could not 
 allow such treasonable declarations to go to the country 
 without a word : 
 
 "The language of this document convinces me of that of 
 which indeed I had but little doubt before, that from the op- 
 pression which through the instrumentality of this man, has 
 rested upon twelve millions of people, and which has only 
 been temporarily removed by the measures against which 
 the President in this document vainly protests, there is no 
 relief except in the assertion of that great power which 
 resides in this House alone, and for the neglect to exercise 
 that power the people of the country will hold us to a 
 strict account. Posterity, not intimidated by the fears 
 which seem to control us, will render its stern verdict 
 against us if we hesitate to arraign the President for the 
 
 * Message in Globe, id., pp. 741-3. 
 
228 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 crimes and misdemeanors of which he is guilty before the 
 country and the world." 
 
 Eandall rose to tell "the Massachusetts Impeacher" 
 that he had no faith in the bluster about impeachment. 
 "You do not mean impeachment, gentlemen, for you do 
 not dare do it." Butler admitted the charge: "We 
 dare not do our duty in this respect. With shame and 
 confusion of face I for one confess the truth and 
 justice of that accusation to the country." Williams, 
 a member of the committee, exclaimed: "There is a 
 time when timid counsels, which betray like treason, 
 must cease to govern the Legislative Assembly of this 
 nation. I think that this time has now arrived. For 
 the first time in our history the Chief Executive Magis- 
 trate of this nation strides into its great council chamber 
 and flings his mace, in the way of defiance, at our very 
 feet. ' ' Schenck joined in the chorus : ' ' There is spread 
 upon the public journals of this country in shape of 
 documents to which the name of the President is at- 
 tached, enough of history to satisfy me that he has as- 
 sumed a position of hostility to a coordinate branch of 
 the Government and to the proper rule in this country, 
 which amounts to a great political crime, for which he 
 might be, and if we are true to our duty ought to be 
 degraded from the office he holds." Stevens, in his 
 original way, put an end to the furor : "I agree with my 
 amiable colleague (Eandall) that you cannot impeach 
 the President of the United States. . . . There are un- 
 seen agencies at work, invisible powers operating every- 
 where in this country which when called upon can and 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 229 
 
 will protect a man of that kind from all danger. I have 
 taken some pains to look into the position of this House 
 and of the Senate and am quite sure that there is power 
 enough, first to prevent the voting of impeachment here, 
 and secondly, if impeachment were voted to prevent con- 
 viction elsewhere. ' ' The House then overrode the veto 
 by the usual overwhelming majority.* 
 
 The reading of the message in the Senate provoked 
 no such explosion; but, when the question of adjourn- 
 ment was taken up, the pent-up bitterness of certain sen- 
 ators broke loose. The House having sent to the Senate 
 a resolution fixing the thirteenth of November as the 
 day to which Congress should adjourn, Sherman moved 
 to amend it by providing for an adjournment without 
 day ; and upon this motion Sumner opened the fight : 
 
 "How Congress, after listening to the message of to-day, 
 . . . can quietly vote to go home and leave this post of duty 
 until next winter, passes my understanding. . . . The mes- 
 sage from the beginning to end was of defiance. ... As I 
 listened to this appeal, which was calculated to revive the 
 dying rebellion, I felt that one of two things must be done ; 
 its author must be removed from the executive chair, or 
 Congress must continue in permanent session to watch and 
 counteract him. Such is the alternative. One failing, 
 the other must be done. . . . Unquestionably it belongs to 
 the other House to initiate the proceedings which shall set 
 the President at your bar. But until then it is the right 
 and the duty of every senator to express himself freely with 
 regard to his conduct; nor can there be any limit to this 
 latitude. It is as broad as human thought. No future 
 
 * Globe, id., pp. 743-7. 
 
230 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 duty can be a straight- jacket now. Because the President 
 may be impeached the Senate is not obliged to be silent 
 with regard to him. Our Constitution is guilty of no such 
 absurdity. ... If I had powers of persuasion I would use 
 them all to induce you to remain as a guard to the Con- 
 stitution and a constabulary force for the rebel States. . . . 
 Sitting in your seats here, you are a mighty police, at the 
 call of general or citizen, and you are also a terror to that 
 evil-doer, the President. ' ' 
 
 Sherman failed to appreciate this distinction between 
 the denouncing senator and the impartial judge em- 
 bodied in the same man. "It does seem to me," he 
 said, ' ' a very strange thing that a judge by whose vote 
 alone the President can be removed should declare he 
 must be removed. . . . Shall we, the judges . . . decide 
 beforehand that the President ought to be removed?" 
 Buckalew's rebuke was more direct: "In my opinion 
 the Senator from Massachusetts forgets his audience 
 and forgets the place where he speaks, in the remarks 
 which he now submits to us, . . . and that out of respect 
 to our political institutions and the Constitution of the 
 country under which we assemble, and to the reasonable 
 and just opinions of the American people, we should 
 withhold ourselves from the expression of judgment 
 upon a question which is not here and which cannot 
 come here unless it be brought here by the House of Rep- 
 resentatives, over whose action we have no control." 
 To such an admonition the senator from Massachusetts 
 was absolutely impervious. He replied : ' ' The Senator 
 says the question is not here ; in other words, that this 
 is not the time to discuss the President. ... If he is 
 
THE RECONSTRUCTION ACT 231 
 
 President, we must remain at our posts, precisely as 
 Grant remained before Richmond. . . . Because we 
 have the successor of Jefferson Davis in the presidential 
 chair therefore Congress must stay. That is my argu- 
 ment in a nutshell."* 
 
 The two Houses having come to an agreement by con- 
 ference committees to adjourn until the twenty-first day 
 of November, this second meeting closed on the 
 twentieth day of July. 
 
 * aiobe, id., pp. 732-4. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Edwin M. Stanton 
 
 On the thirteenth day of May, 1867, Jefferson Davis 
 sat in the United States court-room at Richmond accom- 
 panied by his counsel, Charles O 'Conor and George 
 Shea. After two years ' captivity as a prisoner of war, 
 he had been brought from Fort Monroe in obedience to 
 a writ of habeas corpus and surrendered to the civil 
 authorities for trial on an indictment for treason. The 
 United States district judge (Underwood) was on the 
 bench, but Chief Justice Chase, not being able to leave 
 Washington until the following week, was absent. The 
 radicals, for the most part, would have given the illus- 
 trious captive short shrift. Mr. Boutwell would have 
 had him condemned to death by a military commission 
 as the chief instigator of the assassination of Lincoln. 
 Stevens, as he declared, "would have organized a mili- 
 tary tribunal and . . . have put him and all the mem- 
 bers of his Cabinet on trial for the murders of Ander- 
 sonville and of Salisbury. ' ' Logan said in the House : 
 "Had I captured Jefferson Davis and his disposal had 
 been committed to my hands I would have organized an 
 able court-martial and have given him a fair trial, a 
 just sentence and prompt execution. ' ' Nye said in the 
 Senate: "If I had my way I would have hung Jeff. 
 Davis, no matter how I tried him. When the two great 
 
 232 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 233 
 
 armies, that of General Sherman and the army of the 
 Potomac, were mustered out in this city, I would have 
 had them formed in a hollow square and hung him there, 
 and the world would have said amen."* But not a 
 whisper of these horrid charges or of these blood-thirsty 
 methods is heard in the court. 'Conor announces that 
 the defendant is ready for trial on the indictment, Wil- 
 liam M. Evarts announces that the United States are 
 not. A postponement until November is agreed to. 
 The amount of bail is fixed at $100,000. Gerritt Smith, 
 Horace Greeley, Horace F. Clark, the son-in-law of Cor- 
 nelius Vanderbilt, step forward and sign the bond, and 
 the late president of the Confederate states steps out into 
 the streets of the city that was so recently their capital 
 a free man. 
 
 This incident served to quicken the flagging movement 
 for impeachment. The committee were in session, hav- 
 ing reassembled on the sixth of May, and were groping 
 along in the dark to find food for the suspicion that 
 Andrew Johnson was somehow a co-conspirator of Jef- 
 ferson Davis, when this discharge of the arch-traitor 
 with the consent of the government flashed a sudden light 
 upon the track they were following. Members of the 
 Cabinet were summoned— Seward, Stanton and Stan- 
 bery; and, afterwards, Chief Justice Chase, Evarts, 
 Judge Underwood and the district attorney, and Horace 
 Greeley. But their testimony was a grievous disap- 
 pointment. So far from implicating the President par- 
 ticularly, it appeared, rather, that he was the only offi- 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., p. 546. Id., App., p. 16. Id., 1st Seas. 
 39th Cong., p. 2527. 
 
234 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 cial anxious to prosecute ; the postponement and bailing 
 having been managed without his interposition. Sew- 
 ard, whose scars were visible proof that he at least was 
 free from plotting the assassination, told the committee 
 that the infamy into which such professional witnesses 
 as Conover had fallen rendered impossible the prosecu- 
 tion of Davis as an accomplice of Booth and Payne. 
 Stanton, the author of the proclamation offering $100,- 
 000 reward for the capture of Davis as such accomplice, 
 testified that he himself advised the return to the writ 
 of habeas corpus. Stanbery swore that there was no 
 evidence in his department to warrant any charge but 
 that of treason ; and that, in his opinion, after the sup- 
 pression of the rebellion, prosecutions for treason ought 
 to stop.* Ashley came to the committee's relief with his 
 champion witness, LaFayette C. Baker, who, since his 
 last appearance on the stand, had been searching for the 
 man Adamson— the pretended possessor of Andrew 
 Johnson's letters to Jefferson Davis. He cheered the 
 committee with the information that, though he had not 
 been able to find Adamson, he had lit upon one Mrs. 
 Harris, who knew about the letters and whom he thought 
 the committee might induce to appear for a valuable con- 
 sideration. He testified also that when Booth's diary 
 was delivered up to the Secretary of War, no leaves 
 were missing, there were no stubs ; the book was intact, t 
 He was sent on his rollicking way in search of his Mrs. 
 Harris who eventually proved to be as mythical a per- 
 sonage as the corresponding familiar of Mrs. Gamp. 
 
 *Imp. Inv., pp. 644 et seq., 554 et seq., 397, 371, 544, 578, 778. 
 t Id., pp. 449 et seq., 458. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 235 
 
 The committee, also, examined the agent of the asso- 
 ciated press in Washington, who followed the President 
 as he "swung round the circle" and reported his 
 speeches; and, while its members listened to the re- 
 hearsal of his flings at the Congress and his threats 
 against faithful office-holders, they heard with less grati- 
 fication that the President was "not drunk" or "excited 
 with liquor" on that memorable tour.* 
 
 On Saturday, the first of June, the committee ceased 
 to take testimony, and on Monday came to a vote. It 
 was decided by a majority of one "that from the testi- 
 mony before them it did not appear that the President 
 of the United States was guilty of such high crimes and 
 misdemeanors as called for the exercise of the impeach- 
 ing power of the House." The five in the affirmative 
 were Wilson (the chairman), Woodbridge and Church- 
 ill, Republicans, and Marshall and Eldridge, Democrats. 
 The four in the negative were Boutwell, Thomas, Wil- 
 liams and Lawrence, all Republicans.! The members 
 then separated, but the sudden summons to the July ses- 
 sion brought them together in a hurry to prepare their 
 report to be laid before the House. The minority of the 
 committee, exasperated more than ever against the Presi- 
 dent because of his recent interference with reconstruc- 
 tion and more thoroughly convinced than ever of the 
 necessity for his removal, protested against reporting a 
 conclusion favourable to the enemy at the moment of a 
 fresh onset, and demanded a reopening of the case;— 
 
 * Imp. Im\, pp. 525-28. 
 
 ■(■Rep. Minority report on Imp. See also Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., 
 p. 811. 
 
236 IMPEACHMENT OP PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 which was conceded. The first of the additional wit- 
 nesses they called was Anna Surratt, the daughter who 
 once begged on her knees for access to the President to 
 implore a respite of a few hours for her condemned 
 mother, and begged in vain. In the city where the com- 
 mittee sat, her brother was undergoing trial on the 
 charge of complicity with his mother in the assassina- 
 tion, and, at the very hour the daughter was testifying 
 before the committee, the government witness, Weich- 
 man, was trying his best in the court-room to do for the 
 son what he had been so successful in doing for the 
 mother. The papers of Mrs. Surratt, seized by the gov- 
 ernment at the time of her arrest, had been delivered to 
 the daughter, and Mr. Boutwell asked her whether there 
 were any letters of Booth's amongst them; thus reveal- 
 ing the motive of the return of the papers which to his 
 prepossessed understanding looked highly suspicious. 
 The papers turned out to be purely of a business charac- 
 ter. The witness testified she never saw a letter written 
 by J. Wilkes Booth ; she never went to the President to 
 apply for the papers— never went to the President's 
 house but once, she said with pathetic significance. She 
 never saw the President to have any conversation with 
 him. " I do not want to see him either, ' ' she added.* 
 
 The persevering minority went on calling witnesses 
 until the beginning of the July session, and from time to 
 time during its progress. On the first of July a piece 
 of evidence came out which, to Mr. Boutwell 's mind at 
 least, filled up the measure of Johnson's wickedness. 
 Stanley Matthews (afterwards a senator of the United 
 
 * Imp. Inv., pp. 777-8. Gf. Trial of Surratt, Vol. 1, p. 391. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 237 
 
 States and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of 
 the United States) testified that, as long ago as February, 
 1865, at Cincinnati, Andrew Johnson, then Vice Presi- 
 dent-elect, on his way to his inauguration, made this 
 prophecy: "I will tell you what it is, if the country is 
 ever to be saved, it is to be done through the old Demo- 
 cratic party."* James Speed was summoned from his 
 retirement in the expectation that he might implicate the 
 chief from whom he had parted ; "but, from aught that 
 appeared, he too had invariably sustained the President. 
 The committee found the actor, to whom Booth handed 
 his vindicatory letter on the afternoon before the assas- 
 sination, but who in his terror destroyed it that night. 
 The oral version he gave of its contents made no men- 
 tion of Andrew Johnson, and impliedly exculpated the 
 Surratts.f Notwithstanding the ill-success attending 
 the committee's efforts in this direction, Butler intro- 
 duced in the House, on the eighth of July, resolutions 
 providing for a special committee to investigate ' ' all the 
 facts and circumstances connected with the assassina- 
 tion of the late lamented President, ' ' and recommending 
 an act of grace and amnesty to all persons giving evi- 
 dence throwing light on the great conspiracy. The 
 House suspended the rules to adopt the resolutions and 
 directed that the testimony taken by the judiciary com- 
 mittee germane to this subject be turned over to this 
 select body, fitly called "the Assassination Committee." 
 Butler, who was appointed chairman, kept his creature 
 alive for some time. It was heard of now and then wan- 
 
 * Imp. Inv., pp. 780-1. 
 ■fid., pp. 782-8. 
 
238 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 dering about the corridors of the capitol, but it never 
 made a report and the Impeachment Trial blew it out 
 of existence.* Among the last witnesses sworn before 
 the judiciary committee was General Grant, summoned, 
 it would seem, by the Democratic members. He testi- 
 fied to the harmonious action of the President, his Cab- 
 inet and himself on the question of reconstruction. Mr. 
 Boutwell attempted to elicit from the witness some evi- 
 dence that the President, plotting the recognition of a 
 Congress made up of members-elect from the South and 
 Northern Democrats, had made overtures to him to use 
 the army to effect this object ; but he failed of his pur- 
 posed 
 
 When the members dispersed for the summer, the en- 
 tire course and every act of the President had been gone 
 over with Argus-eyes that allowed not the slightest pec- 
 cadillo to escape. Nothing remained to be done but to 
 print the testimony and report the conclusion. One 
 small gap, it is true, remained. LaFayette C. Baker 
 failed at the last moment to appear either with or with- 
 out his Mrs. Harris. The chairman of the committee 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 515-7, 522. 
 
 I Imp. Inv., pp. 825-836. Mr. Boutwell in his article in the North 
 American Review of December, 1885, gives a statement which he says 
 President Grant made to him, that " in the summer or early autumn of 
 1866 Johnson said to him (Grant), ' If I should have trouble with Con- 
 gress, which side would you support ?' to which Grant said, ' that would 
 depend upon which side the law was.' " 
 
 In view of this statement, it is interesting to note that on July 18, 
 1867, Mr. Boutwell put the following question to General Grant on the 
 witness-stand : " Did you at any time hear him ( Johnson ) make any 
 remark looking to any controversy between Congress and the Executive?" 
 and that Grant answered : " I think not." Id., p. 834. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 239 
 
 obtained a warrant from the House for his apprehen- 
 sion. A messenger, who had been sent to Nashville in 
 search of Adamson and returned with the information 
 that he could find no trace of such a man, was despatched 
 after Mrs. Harris, whose personal appearance had been 
 minutely described to him by Baker. He returned dis- 
 gusted, believing himself duped, and bluntly swore to 
 his impression that ' ' she is a myth and there is no such 
 woman. ' ' With this gap to be filled up when Baker was 
 caught, the investigation which began with such loud- 
 sounding menace may be said to have ended.* 
 
 Considering how pugnacious and unyielding Andrew 
 Johnson was, it is remarkable with what wariness and 
 tact he had hitherto steered his difficult course so as to 
 lend no handle to his numerous adversaries, all on the 
 alert to unhorse him. The bills he pronounced uncon- 
 stitutional with such vigour and pertinacity, when once 
 passed over his veto, he put into execution, notwith- 
 standing the Congress blocked the way to the Supreme 
 Court to which tribunal he was anxious to submit all the 
 matters in dispute. One point there was, however, as 
 he intimated in his recent message, at which submission 
 would cease. On no account whatever would he suffer 
 the duty "to see that the laws were faithfully executed" 
 to be snatched away from him by legislative violence 
 and confided to some officer inferior to himself. The 
 constitution expressly made him commander-in-chief of 
 
 * Imp. inv., pp. 858-9. Glole, id., p. 757. 
 
240 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the army, and commander-in-chief, as long as he held on 
 to his office, he was determined to be. By three consecu- 
 tive acts, the Congress had made it certain that the ten 
 Southern states were to be placed under the absolute con- 
 trol of the army. On behalf of the civil governments of 
 those states, the President had made one effort to miti- 
 gate the infliction, and the Congress, in retaliation, only 
 riveted the bonds of military rule the tighter. Since, then, 
 absolute government by the army was inevitable, he 
 now resolved that that government should be by 
 the army with him as its commander-in-chief. If his 
 official oath bound him to execute three odious acts and, 
 in executing them, to preside over the inauguration of a 
 military domination he abhorred ; then that domination, 
 at all hazards, should be tempered as much as possible 
 in practice by instructions emanating from its constitu- 
 tional head, to be interfered with by no inferior author- 
 ity and to be carried out in letter and spirit by every 
 subordinate officer. The enforcement of this momentous 
 determination involved, in the first place, the alterna- 
 tive of the cessation of disobedience on the part of 
 the military commanders of the five districts or the 
 transportation of the protesting, recalcitrant, or insub- 
 ordinate commander to another sphere of labour, and 
 the assignment of a more docile officer in his stead. It 
 involved, in the second place, something of much more 
 far-reaching importance. It meant the assumption, at 
 length, by the President, in fact, of that which belonged 
 to him in law ; the full control of the department of war. 
 At the head of that department was a personage whose 
 protracted presence in the Cabinet was an enigma alike 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 241 
 
 to his friends and his foes. Indeed, the character and 
 career of Edwin M. Stanton are so enveloped in enigma 
 that we are compelled to pause in our narrative, where 
 for the future he is to play so prominent a part, to gain, 
 if possible, some adequate conception of the man. To 
 do this is made exceedingly difficult because of the curi- 
 ous phenomenon that, alternately appearing and disap- 
 pearing before the eye of the inquirer, now blending, 
 now separating, there are two Stantons— one the direct 
 contradictory of the other. Listening to the chorus of 
 his panegyrists, we see a war-minister greater than the 
 elder Pitt; an organizer of victory more skilful than 
 Carnot ; a life-long abhorrer of African slavery ; a pion- 
 eer-advocate of negro suffrage; an orthodox champion 
 continuing to sit in the secret councils of the schismatics 
 that he may, with secret thwartings at first, and with 
 open defiance at last, bring to naught the machinations 
 of the Arch- Apostate ; until in the end he sinks beneath 
 the weight of his unparalleled labours— a self-sacrifice to 
 his country and a martyr to his party. Listening to the 
 voice of his detractors, we see an indefatigable, bustling 
 secretary, making up for the timidity of his conceptions 
 by the ruffianism of his demeanour and the tyranny of 
 his rule ; a lifelong dissembler, taking on the colour of 
 the political atmosphere he happens for the time being to 
 be breathing ; a recipient of the prizes of one party while 
 maligning its policy to the other, currying favour in the 
 meanwhile with the leaders of both by fulsome profes- 
 sions of gratitude on the one hand and pretended reve- 
 lations of valuable secrets on the other ; a Cabinet officer 
 obsequious to his superiors or his equals in authority to 
 
 16 
 
242 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the point of servility, and insolent and overbearing to 
 his inferiors to the point of outrage; governed by no 
 loftier motive than the lust for office and the power that 
 office gives ; an official parasite battening upon the life- 
 blood of his chief and letting go his hold only with the 
 breaking of his last claw; until, at length, his early 
 friends having discarded the discovered renegade and 
 his new friends having no further use for the detected 
 spy, he is flung up on a barren shore, and left to die of 
 infinite disappointment and, it may be, by his own 
 hand. 
 
 If we wipe out both these portraits as the creations of 
 disordered fancy or a diseased optic nerve, and resort 
 to the rigid historical point of view, a similar double 
 image still affects the sight. Up to the date we have 
 now reached, there appear in the history of the time two 
 different Stantons, likewise— the exoteric Stanton or the 
 Stanton of the public records, and the esoteric Stanton 
 or the Stanton of the private coterie. The attitudes he 
 assumes before the world, his open political associates, 
 the various official positions he holds, proclaim one Stan- 
 ton, the disciple of one political creed, the supporter of 
 one political policy. The unanimous voice of a sect of 
 extremists, with whom he seems to have worshipped in 
 secret, proclaim another Stanton, wholly one of them- 
 selves. And, what renders a choice between these two 
 images still more difficult, there is not upon record, prior 
 to the breach with President Johnson, a single authentic 
 public utterance of the man himself incompatible with 
 his ostensible position or corroboratory of the claim of 
 his cryptic brethren; while there do survive, here and 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 243 
 
 there, sentences inconsistent with any such secret con- 
 fabulation. Indeed, the fact of the communion of Stan- 
 ton with the extreme radicals receives support from no 
 authentic testimony coming from himself at first hand, 
 but, apart from external circumstances, rests entirely 
 upon the testimony of the extreme radicals themselves. 
 With these formidable hindrances to any summary por- 
 traiture of the man, we can better fulfil our purpose and 
 avoid the censure of the friends of his memory by letting 
 the witnesses on the one side and on the other speak for 
 themselves, the man himself speak for himself, and the 
 reader draw his own conclusion. 
 
 Edwin M. Stanton first rose into national notoriety on 
 account of the bellicose demeanour and aggressive elo- 
 quence with which, as the associate of those eminent 
 criminal lawyers, James T. Brady and John Gra- 
 ham who were the warm personal friends of the pris- 
 oner, he defended Daniel E. Sickles on his trial for the 
 murder of Philip Barton Key. The homicide was com- 
 mitted in the streets of the capital of the nation; the 
 victim was the district attorney of the District of Colum- 
 bia; the perpetrator was a conspicuous member of the 
 House of Bepresentatives, having been secretary of the 
 legation when James Buchanan, now President of the 
 United States, was the American minister at London; 
 the provocation was the seduction of the slayer's wife. 
 The trial, which owing to these circumstances attracted 
 the attention of the whole country, began on the fourth 
 day of April, 1859, and ended on the twenty-sixth of the 
 same month with the acquittal of the accused. Stanton 
 is depicted in the newspapers of the day, rushing in the 
 
244 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 heat of his argument from the prisoner's dock towards 
 the bench like a maddened lion. In one of his addresses 
 to the court it was that, in explanation of a previous 
 remark of his which the opposite counsel construed as 
 reprehensive of the institution of slavery, he judged it 
 prudent to proclaim : ' ' He had the blood of slave-hold- 
 ing parents in his veins; his father had been a North 
 Carolinian and his mother a Virginian. ' ' At this date, 
 he was a practicing lawyer in Washington, having re- 
 moved thither from Pittsburg two years before with his 
 patron and friend, Jeremiah S. Black, who resigned a 
 seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court of Pennsyl- 
 vania to become Attorney-General in the Cabinet of 
 President Buchanan. Black gave him important and 
 lucrative employment in defending the government 
 against the exorbitant claims of the California miners, 
 and he passed the winter of 1857-58 in that state en- 
 gaged on behalf of the government in what were desig- 
 nated as the California land cases. According to the 
 testimony of his distinguished friend and employer, at 
 this time, "he made himself appear a Democrat of the 
 most ultra class. " " In all the conflicts of the Buchanan 
 Administration with the abolitionists and their allies he 
 was an open-mouthed opponent of the latter. He was 
 always sound on the Kansas question, and faithful 
 among the faithless on the Lecompton Constitution." 
 ' ' To Mr. Buchanan himself, and to the members of his 
 Cabinet, he paid the most assiduous court, and showed 
 his devotion in ways which sometimes went rather too 
 close to the verge of obsequiousness." Again: "We 
 were close and intimate friends and I thought I knew 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 245 
 
 him as well as one man could be known to another. 
 ... I advanced him in his profession and thereby im- 
 proved his fortune, but he got nothing in that way for 
 which he did not render equivalent services." In the 
 month before the Sickles trial, the Postmaster-General, 
 Aaron V. Brown, died, and Black "recommended him 
 pressingly" for the vacant place, which was filled, how- 
 ever, by Joseph Holt. 
 
 Such was the Stanton of the years 1857-59 when he 
 emerged into the public eye, in the prime of his life and 
 in the fullness of his powers. For this short period, the 
 testimony is concordant. Respecting his previous ca- 
 reer, the testimony is discordant to a most wonderful 
 degree. Born on the nineteenth day of December, 1814, 
 at Steubenville, on the right bank of the Ohio just below 
 where the river bends round the apex of that wedge of 
 territory, called ' ' The Pan Handle, ' ' which Virginia in- 
 terposes between Ohio and Pennsylvania, Stanton was 
 destined to reap benefits from every one of the three con- 
 tiguous states. Ohio gave him office; Virginia the 
 Wheeling Bridge case ; Pennsylvania employment which 
 raised him to eminence in his profession. The first sin- 
 ister bit of information we have concerns his early 
 youth. Henry Wilson and that veteran abolitionist, 
 Samuel May, relate that he told them in after days, as a 
 reminiscence of his childhood, that Benjamin Lundy, the 
 early pioneer of abolitionism, the forerunner of Garri- 
 son, was a frequent visitor at his father 's house and held 
 long talks with the former North Carolinian while the 
 boy sat upon Lundy 's knee and drank in his inspired 
 words. The impression produced by these early teach- 
 
246 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ings must have worn away with time, for, according to 
 the testimony of another veteran abolitionist, Theodore 
 D. Weld, when he came to Steubenville "in the early 
 spring of 1835" to give "a course of lectures on 
 slavery," he was told that "a young lawyer was to re- 
 ply" to him. The young lawyer attended the first and 
 second lectures and took notes, but, although at the close 
 of each lecture objections were called for, he failed to 
 respond. The third morning found the young cham- 
 pion of the dominant party of the town seeking the vet- 
 eran missionary at his lodgings, confessing that "he 
 meant to fight" but that "his guns were spiked," and 
 acknowledging himself a convert. In the words of 
 Weld written thirty-five years after : " a conversation of 
 half an hour followed, during which he greatly im- 
 pressed me with his hearty frankness, independence, 
 moral insight and keen mental force. ' ' So ignominious 
 a defection may have had something to do with the 
 young man's removal in the following year to Cadiz in 
 the adjoining county ; but his conversion to the abolition- 
 ists must have remained a profound secret, as the next 
 year he was elected by the Democrats prosecuting attor- 
 ney of Harrison County; and after serving a term of 
 two years in that office he returned to his native place. 
 His open adhesion to the Democratic party was still 
 maintained in the year 1842, when the legislature "by 
 a strict party vote" elected him to the post of law re- 
 porter,, in which he served three years ; yet Chief Justice 
 Chase testifies that, on the eve of his election, when 
 Chase was actively engaged in the organization of the 
 "Liberty party," "Mr. Stanton accosted him in the 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 247 
 
 streets" of Columbus "and said that tie was in entire 
 accord with, the anti-slavery sentiments he had just put 
 forth," "and hoped he should soon be able to take his 
 place by his side." "Though he never did so," as 
 Henry Wilson, says, "and continued to act with the 
 Democratic party," "yet he always maintained his in- 
 timacy with Mr. Chase. ' ' After his term of service as 
 law reporter, he became engaged in the celebrated 
 Wheeling Bridge case, on behalf of the state of Penn- 
 sylvania then under Democratic control; and this ad- 
 vance necessitated his admission as an attorney of the 
 Supreme Court of the United States, which took place 
 in 1849 and was followed by his removal to Pittsburg 
 and his frequent appearance at Washington before the 
 highest tribunal in the land. Now began his close in- 
 timacy with Judge Black, whose ardent admirer, faith- 
 ful follower and able coadjutor he became, and with 
 whom, as we have said, he finally removed to Washing- 
 ton. Speaking of him during this second period, Judge 
 Black says : 
 
 "Among us, his political principles were thought to be 
 as well known as his name and occupation. He never 
 allowed his fidelity to be doubted for a moment. . . . His 
 condemnation of the abolitionists was unsparing for their 
 hypocrisy, their corruption, their enmity to the Constitu- 
 tion, and their lawless disregard for the rights of States 
 and individuals. Thus he won the confidence of the Demo- 
 crats. On the faith of such professions we promoted him 
 in his business, and gave him office, honor, and fortune." 
 He "seemed to be a sound and sincere friend, political and 
 personal, of the men who showered their favors on his 
 head." 
 
248 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 On the other hand, Charles Sumner testifies that in 
 the year 1851 he was introduced to Mr. Stanton by Mr. 
 Chase .as a friend of the latter who would be glad to 
 know him; that, though they met but seldom, "when- 
 ever they met, it was as friends ' ' ; that in June, 1854, 
 Stanton became "excited" over the set made upon Sum- 
 ner "by the slave-masters of the Senate" in the debate 
 over the surrender of Burns, the fugitive slave, and 
 "afterwards spoke of the incident with much sympa- 
 thy"; and at the same evening was present at a gather- 
 ing at the house of the veteran abolitionist, Dr. Gamaliel 
 Bailey, the editor of the anti-slavery organ called The 
 National Era at the capital, "when he dwelt on the con- 
 duct of certain senators, ' ' and where, as Wilson records, 
 he was a frequent visitor, and ' ' often met and associated 
 with anti-slavery men. ' ' 
 
 "We now advance to a crisis in public affairs when, it 
 would seem, the political principles of every public man 
 could not be a matter of doubt. The presidential elec- 
 tion of 1860 was at hand. The Republican party was 
 united and triumphant throughout the whole North. 
 The Democratic party was split in twain and despond- 
 ent. The Union was visibly in danger. Stanton, 
 through 1859 and 1860, was constantly associated with 
 Attorney-General Black in the conduct of cases before 
 the Supreme Court. According to that officer, "he was 
 out and out for Breckenridge in 1860, and regarded the 
 salvation of the country as hanging on the forlorn hope 
 of his election." After the campaign was over (on the 
 twentieth of November) the Attorney-General furnished 
 to President Buchanan the opinion that, while the gov- 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 249 
 
 ernment of the United States had the right to enforce 
 the federal laws against individuals everywhere and in 
 every state, to hold or retake federal property and to 
 collect the revenue, it had no right to make war on a 
 state to coerce it to remain in the Union— an opinion 
 concurred in by every member of the Cabinet and the 
 substance of which was incorporated in the message of 
 the President which aroused such widespread animad- 
 version throughout the North. The author of the opin- 
 ion says that Mr. Stanton indorsed it ' ' with extravagant 
 and undeserved laudation; he gave his adhesion to the 
 annual message in many ways ; and the special message 
 of the eighth of January, 1861, which expressed the 
 same principles with added emphasis, was carefully 
 read over to him before it was sent to Congress, and it 
 received his unqualified assent. ' ' He adds that the evi- 
 dence of this is "direct as well as circumstantial, oral 
 as well as documentary, and some of it is in the hand- 
 writing of Mr. Stanton himself." And yet, Henry L. 
 Dawes writes that Stanton, after becoming Secretary of 
 War under Lincoln, told him and Mr. Washburne that 
 President Buchanan, before writing his annual message, 
 sent for him "to answer the question 'Can a State be 
 coerced!' that for two hours he battled, and finally scat- 
 tered for the time being the heresies with which seces- 
 sion had filled the head of that old broken-down man" ; 
 furthermore, at the President's request he prepared an 
 argument in support of the power to be inserted in the 
 forthcoming message ; that it was so inserted, but that in 
 his absence "two days before the meeting of Congress" 
 "the traitors frightened" the President into expunging 
 
250 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 it and ' ' to insert in its place the contrary doctrine. ' ' It 
 is hardly necessary to say that of such a paper or of the 
 draft of a message with such an argument in it, Black, 
 then Attorney-General, according to his own state- 
 ment, never heard, and he scouts the idea of any such 
 occurrence as absolutely incredible, considering the per- 
 sonal character and official habits of the President and 
 under the known circumstances of the time. ' ' In all the 
 discussions on the subject," he says, Stanton "did not 
 once intimate that there was, or ever had been, the slight- 
 est difference between him and the members of the Ad- 
 ministration. ' ' 
 
 Congress met on the third day of December, and the 
 next day the annual message was sent in. On the eighth, 
 Howell Qobb of Georgia, the Secretary of the Treasury, 
 resigned and Philip F. Thomas of Maryland was ap- 
 pointed in his place. On the fifteenth Lewis Cass, the 
 Secretary of State (by a letter dated on the twelfth), 
 resigned, not on account of the doctrine of the message, 
 but because the President and the rest of the Cabinet 
 did not concur with him in the expediency of sending 
 immediate reinforcements to the forts in Charleston 
 harbour. Attorney-General Black was thereupon pro- 
 moted to his place, and, on the twentieth, the very day 
 South Carolina adopted her ordinance of secession, Ed- 
 win M. Stanton was appointed Attorney-General. Re- 
 specting this appointment Judge Black says : 
 
 "I strove long, and at last successfully, to remove the 
 prejudices of Mr. Buchanan and others against him, because 
 I thought them unjust, and because it was inconvenient for 
 me that the President should not trust a man in whom I had 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 251 
 
 unlimited confidence. ... I caused him to be appointed 
 Attorney General because I knew (or thought I knew) that 
 he and I were in perfect accord on all questions, and be- 
 cause I was sure that he could handle them not only with 
 fidelity but with consummate skill. But though he was 
 not in my debt, the apparent warmth of his nature impelled 
 him to express his gratitude in most exaggerated language. 
 . . . He sometimes overwhelmed me with hyperbolical de- 
 monstrations of thankfulness and friendship." 
 
 Buchanan, in a private letter to his niece under date 
 of January 16, 1862, apropos of Stanton's appointment 
 as Secretary of War by President Lincoln, writes : 
 
 "I appointed him Attorney General when Judge Black 
 was raised to the State Department because his professional 
 business and that of the Judge's, especially in California 
 cases, were so intimately connected that he could proceed in 
 the Supreme Court without delay. He is a sound, clear- 
 headed, persevering and practical lawyer, and is quite 
 eminent, . especially in patent cases. He is not well- versed 
 in public, commercial or constitutional law, because his 
 professional duties as. a country lawyer never led him to 
 make these his study. I believe him to be a perfectly 
 
 honest man, and in that respect he differs from . 
 
 He never took much part in Cabinet councils because his 
 office did not require it. He was always on my side, and 
 flattered me ad nauseam. ' '* 
 
 The new Attorney-General was hardly warm in his 
 seat before Major Anderson's transfer of his forces 
 from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter furnished Floyd, the 
 Secretary of War, a pretext for handing in a resigna- 
 
 * Curtis' Life of Buchanan, Vol. 2, p. 522. 
 
252 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion which had already been demanded by the President 
 on other grounds ; and Joseph Holt, Postmaster-General, 
 was promoted to his place. Thompson, the Secretary 
 of the Interior, followed on the eighth of January, whose 
 place was not filled ; and Thomas, on the eleventh, who 
 was succeeded by John A. Dix. So that, for the greater 
 part of the period up to the fourth of March, during 
 which Stanton was a member of the Cabinet of Bu- 
 chanan, his associates were Black, Dix, Holt, Toucey and 
 Horatio King, the assistant Postmaster-General, acting in 
 Holt's place; all of them citizens of adhering states, and 
 every one of whom has borne witness to the masterful 
 firmness, impressive dignity, wise caution, enlightened 
 statesmanship, and fervent patriotism of his chief. 
 Black speaks of his protege's relations with the Presi- 
 dent and the members of the Cabinet as follows : 
 
 "Mr. Stanton was in perfect accord with the Administra- 
 tion, before and after be became a part of it, on every ques- 
 tion of fundamental principle. He had unlimited con- 
 fidence in the men with whom he was acting, and they 
 confided in him. For his chief and some of his colleagues 
 he professed an attachment literally boundless; for all of 
 them who stayed during the term, and for Thompson who 
 did not stay, he was warm in his friendship." "Stanton 
 was no stormer in the presence of such men as he then had 
 to deal with. His language was habitually deferential, 
 his whole bearing decent, and his behavior at the council- 
 board was entirely free from insolence." "He maintained 
 unbroken his fraternal relations with his colleagues." 
 
 Again, speaking of Stanton's entrance into the 
 Cabinet, he says: 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 253 
 
 "His language glowed with gratitude, his words spoke 
 all the fervor of personal devotion to his chief and his 
 colleagues; he gave his thorough approval to the measures 
 they thought necessary to preserve the unity of the nation 
 in the bonds of peace. 
 
 "To Mr. Toucey's face Mr. Stanton breathed no syllable 
 of censure upon his official conduct as head of the Navy 
 Department. To the President or Cabinet he expressed no 
 doubt of his wisdom, much less of his honesty. He met 
 him every day with a face of smiling friendship." 
 
 "What ought to be conclusive to every man assuming 
 to be a judge of the matter, he expressed to Mr. Seward, 
 as Seward himself states, ' ' entire confidence in the loy- 
 alty of the President and of the heads of the depart- 
 ments who remained in association with him until the 
 close of that administration." 
 
 And yet Seward writes : 
 
 "Immediately after Mr. Stanton took office he put him- 
 self into direct communication with me at my house, em- 
 ploying Mr. "Watson for that purpose. Every day thereafter 
 until the inauguration passed, I conferred either in the 
 morning or in the evening or both with Mr. Stanton through 
 the same agency, and the question what either of us could 
 or ought to do at the time for the public welfare was dis- 
 cussed and settled. Mr. "Watson often brought with him 
 suggestions in writing from Mr. Stanton and returned to 
 Mr. Stanton with mine. . . . One day as I was riding 
 through F Street from the Capitol, I met Mr. Stanton on 
 foot. "We recognized each other and a hurried explanation 
 concerning our relations . . . took place. We separated 
 quickly, from the motive on my part, and I suppose on 
 
254 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 his, of avoiding public observation. This was the only 
 occasion as I remember, on which I met Mr. Stanton until 
 after the expiration of Mr. Buchanan 's presidential term. ' ' 
 
 Sumner, also, writes that in the month of January, 
 1861, relying on the remembrance of their former friend- 
 ship, he called on the Attorney-General at his office for 
 information and counsel. 
 
 "He was in an inner room, where he received me kindly, 
 seeming glad to see me. Looking about and seeing some- 
 body in the room, he whispered that we must be alone, and 
 then passed into the anteroom, where there was also some- 
 body, and then into the next room and then into the next, 
 when, finding somebody in each room, he opened the door 
 into the corridor, where he began an earnest conversation, 
 saying that he must see me alone, that this was impossible 
 at his office, that he was watched by the traitors of the 
 South, that my visit would be made known to them at once, 
 and he concluded by proposing to call at my lodgings at one 
 o'clock that night, when he would tell me of the fearful 
 condition of affairs as he saw them. " " He came at one 
 o'clock that night, and was alone with me for an hour"; 
 describing "the plan" of "the Southern leaders" "to ob- 
 tain possession of the national capital and the national 
 archives so that they might substitute themselves for the 
 existing government." 
 
 Stanton, however, never disclosed to the President or 
 to any of his fellow-members of the Cabinet, that he was 
 in daily communication with the incoming Secretary of 
 State, or the "plan of the Southern leaders" which he 
 confided to one of the leading enemies of the aH minis- 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 255 
 
 tration, of which he was a part, in. the dead hour of the 
 night. 
 
 According to Henry Wilson, "he put himself in com- 
 munication with the Republicans in Congress, and kept 
 them well informed of what was going on in the coun- 
 cils of the administration. " "So anxious ' ' was he "to 
 baffle the conspirators, that he made an arrangement 
 with" William A. Howard and Henry L. Dawes, the 
 radical members of a special committee appointed "to 
 investigate treasonable machinations and conspiracies" 
 by which they "were informed of whatever occurred 
 tending to endanger the country and which he desired 
 should be thwarted by the friends of the incoming ad- 
 ministration. " "He believed that Mr. Toucey, Secre- 
 tary of the Navy, was false to his country, and that he 
 ought to be arrested." A committee of vigilance was 
 organized by the radicals, of which Wilson and Colfax 
 were members, and at that time Wilson became ac- 
 quainted with Stanton "and consulted with him, and 
 received from him warnings and suggestions. He was 
 in almost daily consultations, too, with members of both 
 Houses." According to Howard, it was Stanton who 
 wrote the resolutions providing for the committee intro- 
 duced by him on the ninth of January, 1861 (the com- 
 mittee being appointed the next day), which in terms 
 were directed against Cabinet ministers ; and, according 
 to Dawes, it was Stanton who inspired the resolution of 
 censure on Toucey. Howard testifies : 
 
 "I do not think that I saw Mr. Stanton any time between 
 the 1st of January and the 4th of March, 1861 ; but I think 
 I heard from him more times than there were days in those 
 
256 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 two months. . . . "We were put upon this inquiry" (as to 
 the acceptance of resignations of naval officers by the 
 Secretary of the Navy and antedating them, for which he 
 was eventually censured by the House) "by information 
 brought to us by a 'bird' which flew directly from some 
 Cabinet minister to the Committee room." "We were 
 more than once told that it would probably be necessary to 
 arrest a certain member of the Cabinet for treason. Once 
 we were told it would probably have to be within an hour, 
 but to wait until we could hear a second time. "Word 
 came to hold on. Those messages certainly came from 
 some member of the Cabinet. ' ' 
 
 According to Dawes : 
 
 "Some of the most important and secret plans of the 
 conspirators became known and were thwarted by means 
 of communication from Mr. Stanton to the Committee." 
 ' ' Once a member of that committee read by the light of the 
 street lamp these words: 'Secretary is a traitor, de- 
 pend upon it. He declared in Cabinet to-day that he did 
 not want to deliver this government intact into the hands 
 of the black Republicans. Arrest him instantly or all will 
 be lost.' The paper went back to its hiding place but the 
 Secretary, though he walked the streets unmolested, was 
 watched from that hour." 
 
 Kemembering the composition of the Cabinet after 
 the resignation of Thomas on the eleventh of January, 
 the suspected officer could have been no other than Tou- 
 cey.* 
 
 * My authorities for the foregoing statements and extracts concern- 
 ing Stanton, except where otherwise indicated, are: 1. Henry Wilson's 
 papers in the Atlantic Monthly for February and October, 1870. 2. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 257 
 
 In the light of these statements and counter-state- 
 ments of such astonishing discrepancy, the reader will 
 fully appreciate a few of the utterances of Stanton him- 
 self. After the close of Buchanan's administration, 
 every member of his Cabinet who continued with him 
 to the last, kept up a friendly and confidential corre- 
 spondence with the ex-President. Stanton continued to 
 reside in Washington, and, on the tenth of March, wrote 
 to his late chief, at "Wheatland, to give him ' ' as full in- 
 formation as I possess of the state of public affairs at 
 Washington." He states: 
 
 "At the depot, on the afternoon of your departure, I 
 parted with Mr. Holt and Mr. Toucey and I have not seen 
 them since." Mentioning that before his successor had 
 qualified, he had drawn up, at the request of Mr. Seward, 
 a nomination of Crittenden for "Judge of the United 
 States Court," he states that "the general understanding 
 is that it will not be" sent in. "The rumor is that the 
 red blacks oppose it, and also many Democrats, and that 
 Mr. Holt will be nominated. He appears now to be the 
 chief favorite with the Republicans." Mr. Seward gave 
 him "some comments of General Scott's on the report 
 of Mr. Holt in relation to Major Anderson and Fort 
 Sumter," "the remarkable character" of which induced 
 him to obtain permission to show them to General Dix and 
 to procure a copy if possible, for his correspondent. He 
 then proceeds to point out "errors" in them; among the 
 rest that Mr. Toucey was unwilling to send the Brooklyn 
 to Charleston, whereas he says : ' ' My understanding is that 
 
 Black's two letters in reply, first printed in the Galaxy for June, 1870, 
 and February, 1871, and republished in ' Black's Speeches and Essays.' 
 3. Trial of Sickles (pamphlet). 
 17 
 
258 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Mr. Toucey wanted to send the Brooklyn," "but that Gen- 
 eral Scott and Mr. Holt preferred" sending the Star of the 
 "West, "and overruled Mr. Toucey"; also, rebutting the 
 charge that "Mr. Toucey made such difficulty about fur- 
 nishing the ships, that the relief of Major Anderson was 
 abandoned." He writes further: "Mr. Seward mentioned to 
 me that Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet, when this subject 
 came up" (i. e., Scott's views) "would desire me to be 
 present, and also Mr. Holt. I told him that if all of the 
 late Cabinet were requested to be present, I would have 
 no objections, but I did not think it proper unless all were 
 present. He said of course an invitation would be ex- 
 tended to all." Taking up another topic he writes: "I 
 am perfectly satisfied that Major Anderson will be with- 
 drawn. ... I am also convinced by the general tone pre- 
 vailing here that there is not the least design to attempt 
 any coercive measures. A continuation of your policy to 
 avoid collision will be the course of the present administra- 
 tion." 
 
 Under the date of the twelfth he writes : 
 
 "It is now the universal impression in this city, that 
 Sumter and Pickens will both be surrendered. ... It would 
 not surprise me to see Virginia out in less than ninety days 
 and Maryland will be close at her heels. Lincoln and the 
 family at the White House are represented as greatly 
 elated at Douglas joining in the defence of the new admin- 
 istration. ' ' 
 
 Under the date of the fourteenth he writes from the 
 Supreme Court room: 
 
 "If the Court ever reassembles there will be a con- 
 siderable change in its organization. . . . Lincoln will 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 259 
 
 probably (if bis administration continues four years) make 
 a ebange tbat will affect the constitutional doctrines of the 
 Court." 
 
 Under the date of the sixteenth : 
 
 "Every day affords proof of the absence of any settled 
 policy or harmonious concert of action in the administra- 
 tion. Seward, Bates and Cameron form one wing; Chase, 
 Welles, Blair the opposite wing; Smith is on both sides, 
 and Lincoln sometimes on one and sometimes on the other. 
 There has been agreement in nothing. ... I do not believe 
 there will be much further effort to assail you. . . . The 
 embarrassments which surrounded you they now feel; and 
 whatever may be said against you must recoil as an argu- 
 ment against them. And in giving reasons for their action, 
 they must exhibit facts that controlled you in respect to 
 Sumter." 
 
 In another letter of the same date he writes: 
 
 "I do not think there will be any serious effort to assail 
 your administration in respect to Fort Sumter. That 
 would imply a coercive policy on their part and hostility 
 to your pacific measures. The tendency of General Scott's 
 remarks were rather to impute blame to Mr. Toucey than 
 to any one else. And as Mr. Holt and the General con- 
 curred in everything done or written, their concurrence 
 will defend you. ' ' 
 
 "I shall write to you often and apprise you of what is 
 going on." 
 
 April 3 he writes : 
 
260 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "Mr. Toucey left here last week." "There has been 
 a rumor for the last two or three days, that, notwithstand- 
 ing all that has been said, there will be an effort to rein- 
 force Fort Sumter; but I do not believe a word of it. . . . 
 The first month of the administration seems to have fur- 
 nished an ample vindication of your policy, and to have 
 rendered all occasion of other defence needless." 
 
 On the tenth : 
 
 "I send you a copy of General Scott's views, etc." 
 "Doctor Gwin has just returned from Mississippi. He 
 speaks with great confidence of the stability and power of 
 the Confederacy, and evidently sympathizes strongly with 
 them." 
 
 "Apprehensions are entertained of a hostile attack upon 
 Washington. But I think that apprehension is as ground- 
 less as the rumor that hurried Lincoln from Harrisburg to 
 Washington. ' ' 
 
 P. S. 12 o'clock: "It is certain that the administration 
 is panic stricken from some cause. ... It is now reported 
 . . . that the batteries have opened on Sumter. Soldiers 
 are being placed in the departments." 
 
 On the eleventh : 
 
 "There is great 'soldiering' in town the last two days. 
 . . . The feeling of loyalty to the Government has greatly 
 diminished in this city. Many persons who would have 
 supported the Government under your administration re- 
 fuse to be enrolled. Many who were enrolled have with- 
 drawn, and refuse to take the oath. The administration 
 has not acquired the confidence and respect of the people 
 here. Not one of the Cabinet or principal officers has 
 taken a house or brought his family here. Seward rented 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 261 
 
 a house 'while he should continue in the Cabinet' but has 
 not opened it, nor has his family come. They all act as 
 though they meant to be ready 'to cut and run' at a 
 minute's notice— their tenure is like that of a Bedouin on 
 the sands of the desert. . . . And, besides, a strong feeling 
 of distrust in the candor and sincerity of Lincoln personally, 
 and of his Cabinet has sprung up. If they had been 
 merely silent and secret, there might have been no ground 
 of complaint. But assurances are said to have been given 
 and declarations made in conflict with the facts now trans- 
 piring in the South, so that no one speaks of Lincoln or any 
 member of his Cabinet with respect or regard." 
 
 The next day: 
 
 "We have the war upon us. . . . The impression here is 
 held by many: 1st, that the effort to reinforce will be a 
 failure ; 2nd, that in less than twenty four hours from this 
 time, Anderson will have surrendered ; 3rd, that in less than 
 thirty days Davis will be in possession of Washington." 
 
 On May sixteenth, lie writes : 
 
 "The fling of Mr. F. W. Seward about 'negotiations' " 
 (a remark "that the days for such things had passed away 
 since the 4th of March")' "would merit a retort if there 
 were an independent press and the state of the times ad- 
 mitted discussion of such matters. The negotiations car- 
 ried on by Mr. Seward with the Confederate Commissioners 
 through Judge Campbell and Judge Nelson will, some day, 
 perhaps, be brought to light, and if they were as has been 
 represented to me, Mr. Seward and the Lincoln administra- 
 tion will not be in a position to make sneering observations 
 respecting any negotiations during your administration." 
 
262 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 . . . "No description could convey to you the panic that 
 prevailed here for several days after the Baltimore riot, 
 and before communications were reopened. This was in- 
 creased by the reports of the . trepidation of Lincoln that 
 were circulated through the streets. ... In the present 
 state of affairs I do not like to leave home, or I would pay 
 you a visit." 
 
 On the eighth of June he writes : 
 
 "No sooner had the appearance of imminent danger 
 passed away, and the administration recovered from its 
 panic, than a determination became manifest to give a strict 
 party direction, as far as possible, to the great national 
 movement. After a few Democratic appointments, such 
 as Butler and Dix, everything else has been exclusively 
 devoted to Black Republican interests. . . . General Dix 
 informs me that he has been so badly treated by Cameron, 
 and so disgusted by the general course of the Administra- 
 tion, that he intends immediately to resign. . . . Indeed, 
 the course of things for the last four weeks has been such as 
 to excite distrust in every Department of the Government. ' ' 
 
 On July 16, with reference to a "historical sketch" 
 of the close of his administration, which Buchanan had 
 written and sent to members of his Cabinet, Stanton 
 writes : 
 
 "Last evening Judge Black and General Dix met at my 
 house, and we consulted together with regard to it. We 
 concur in opinion that a publication at present would accom- 
 plish no good. The public mind is too much excited, ' ' etc. 
 "The narrative appears to me to be a clear and accurate 
 statement of the events of the period to which it relates 
 with one' exception of no national consequence. ..." 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 263. 
 
 "So far, however, as your administration is concerned, 
 its policy in reference to both Sumter and Pickens is fully 
 vindicated by the course of the present Administration for 
 forty days after the inauguration of Lincoln. 
 
 ' ' I think the public will be disposed to do full justice to 
 your efforts to avert the calamity of civil war. . . . General 
 Dix is still here. He has been shamefully treated by the 
 Administration. ' ' 
 
 His comments on Bull Eun, under date of July 26, 
 may close the correspondence : 
 
 "The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be men- 
 tioned. The imbecility of this Administration culminated 
 in that catastrophe ; an irretrievable misfortune and national 
 disgrace never, to be forgotten are to be added to the ruin of 
 all peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy, as the result 
 of Lincoln's 'running the machine' for five months. . . . 
 It is not unlikely that some change in the War and Navy 
 departments may take place, but none beyond those two 
 Departments until Jeff. Davis turns out the whole concern. 
 The capture of Washington seems now inevitable. . . . 
 While Lincoln, Scott and the Cabinet are disputing who are 
 to blame, the city is unguarded and the enemy at hand. 
 Gen. McClellan reached here last evening. But if he had 
 the ability of Caesar, Alexander or Napoleon, what can he 
 accomplish? Will not Scott's jealousy, Cabinet intrigues, 
 and Republican interference thwart him at every step 1 ' '* 
 
 After reading the foregoing extracts, it will he easier 
 to credit the statements of Judge Black : 
 
 * The foregoing extracts are taken from Chap. XXVII of Vol. 2 of 
 Curtis' Life of Buchanan. 
 
264 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "His (Stanton's) democracy did not cease when the War 
 opened. In the summer of 1861 when the 'anti-constitu- 
 tional principles' " (of the Republican party) "began to 
 be practically carried out by the kidnapping of innocent 
 citizens, by the suppression of free speech, and by the en- 
 slavement of the press, he imprecated the vengeance of God 
 and the law upon the guilty authors of those crimes with 
 as much energy as any Democrat in the nation. Only a 
 short time before his appointment as Secretary of War his 
 love of liberty and legal justice impelled him to curse Mr. 
 Lincoln himself with bitter curses. He called him con- 
 temptuous names, and with simian, if not with 'swinish 
 phrase, soiled his addition.' "* 
 
 The next moment we catch sight of this duplex figure 
 is on the eve of the meeting of Congress in December, 
 1861, when we find him "cordially indorsing" an "im- 
 portant passage" in Secretary Cameron's annual report 
 "recommending the freeing and arming of the slaves," 
 which that Cabinet officer, deeming it "a delicate mat- 
 ter"— too far advanced as yet— submitted in confidence 
 to ' ' several of his friends, ' ' all of whom ' ' disapproved 
 of the policy" except Stanton who, so intimate were the 
 two men according to Cameron, ' ' taking his pen, modi- 
 fied one or two sentences, remarking that he would fix 
 it so that the lawyers will not carp at it." The "im- 
 portant passage, ' ' we are informed, ' ' did not meet the 
 views of Mr. Lincoln, and he required its suppression. ' ' 
 And so it happened in the following January when 
 Cameron was gently pressed out of the Cabinet, the 
 whilom Attorney-General of Buchanan's Administra- 
 
 * June Galaxy, 1870. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 265 
 
 tion was made Secretary of War of Lincoln's at the sug- 
 gestion of his predecessor in that department, whose 
 radicalism, though too strong as yet for the President, 
 he so heartily shared. While the appointment was yet 
 in abeyance, Cameron gave a breakfast in honour of his 
 contemplated successor to which senators Chandler and 
 Wade were invited. Chandler had "never met" the 
 coming favourite before, while Wade had enjoyed a 
 "long acquaintance"; but both were "much pleased 
 with the suggestion" of the appointment which, it ap- 
 pears, if offered, their modest guest ' ' reluctantly gave ' ' 
 them "to understand he would accept." President 
 Lincoln, according to Cameron, also "hesitated; but 
 after listening to me (him) for a time, he yielded." 
 When the nomination of Edwin M. Stanton was an- 
 nounced in the Senate, Sumner rose at once and declared 
 "within my knowledge he is one of us."* 
 
 It is unnecessary for our purpose to dwell on his offi- 
 cial career during the years of actual conflict. That he 
 discharged the onerous duties of his department with 
 great ability, energy and promptitude will not be ques- 
 tioned. But to call him a great War-minister like the 
 elder Pitt is a manifest exaggeration. His position had 
 nothing in common with that of a great statesman 
 moulding and carrying out a national policy in the con- 
 duct of a great war. Nor does he rise to the same grade 
 as the French "organizer of victory" who won that title 
 more by strategic combinations with different armies, 
 than by the manipulation of regiments and the prompt 
 supply of the sinews of war. Stanton's labours were 
 
 * Wilson in Atlantic Monthly for October, 1870. 
 
266 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 confined to the routine work appertaining to his depart- 
 ment, which he drove along with a rampant energy, 
 oftentimes, in his relations with subordinates or with 
 persons unfortunate enough to come into collision with 
 him, degenerating into downright brutality. 
 
 General Grant, in his Memoirs, comparing Lincoln 
 with Stanton, says: 
 
 "They were the very opposite of each other in almost 
 every particular, except that each possessed great ability. 
 Mr. Lincoln gained influence over men by making them feel 
 that it was a pleasure to serve them. ... It distressed him 
 to disappoint others. In matters of public duty, however, 
 he had what he wished, but in the least offensive way. Mr. 
 Stanton never questioned his own authority to command 
 unless resisted. He cared nothing for the feelings of others. 
 In fact it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than 
 to gratify. He felt no hesitation in assuming the functions 
 of the Executive, or in acting without advising him. If 
 his act was not sustained he would change it — if he saw the 
 matter would be followed up until he did so." And fur- 
 ther: "The Secretary was very timid, and it was impos- 
 sible for him to avoid interfering with the armies covering 
 the capital when it was sought to defend it by an offensive 
 movement against the army guarding the Confederate 
 capital. He could see our weakness but he could not see 
 that the enemy was in danger. The enemy would not have 
 been in danger if Mr. Stanton had been in the field. ' '* 
 
 Although Stanton appears to have been very often a 
 thorn in the flesh to his great chief, still, during the 
 three years and over of his service, he kept himself safe 
 
 * Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. 2, pp. 536-7. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 267 
 
 within the circle of the President's widening popularity. 
 He did not follow Chase, his early friend and now his 
 colleague, into open disaffection. Indeed, at the time 
 of the creation of the Freedmen's Bureau, there appears 
 to have been going on a certain rivalry between the de- 
 partments of the Treasury and of War ; Sumner favour- 
 ing the giving over of the freedmen to the care of Chase, 
 while Wilson still clung to the "intense and abounding 
 patriotism" of the man who, when a boy, sat upon the 
 knee of Lundy, and, when a young man, surrendered to 
 the arguments of Weld. Whether he secretly assured 
 Wade and Henry Winter Davis of his sympathy with 
 their revolt in 1864, we have as yet no private corre- 
 spondence or memoirs to show, but, so far as his public 
 actions are concerned, he stood firmly by Lincoln's plan 
 of reconstruction. We know that he still kept up the 
 secret alliance which dated so long back; for, on the 
 Sunday night succeeding Lincoln's death, as we have 
 seen, he was holding a conclave with Sumner, Dawes, 
 Colfax, Covode and several others, reading "Cabinet 
 papers not as yet matured" relating to reconstruction, 
 and allowing Sumner and Colfax to interpolate into the 
 executive order Stanton had prepared for submission 
 to the Cabinet "a paragraph on the subject of suffrage" 
 satisfactory to them.* 
 
 Such was the protean personage who, through all the 
 vicissitudes of the bitter conflict between the Congress 
 and the President and the consequent open schism in 
 the party, had hitherto managed to keep his place at the 
 head of the department of War. There is no evidence 
 
 * Supra, Section I, p. 15. 
 
268 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 that he opposed a single step taken by the President in 
 the reconstruction of the Southern states or in the recon- 
 ciliation of the Southern people. Every measure that 
 provoked the angry censure of the radicals and, at 
 length, threats of impeachment, was apparently sup- 
 ported, by him or acquiesced in without opposition. 
 Even after the breach became open on account of the 
 President's speech on the twenty-second of February, 
 1866, there is nothing to show that he did not take his 
 stand on the side of his chief. He enshrouded himself 
 as much as possible in the official secrecy of the Cabinet, 
 but a serenade by a Johnson Club in May of the same 
 year forced him with other members of the Cabinet to 
 declare himself to some extent. The speech he made 
 was carefully prepared— written out and read, in fact. 
 At first, he said, he was inclined to the view that some 
 sort of coloured suffrage should be incorporated in the. 
 reconstruction measures, but he had yielded and given 
 a "cordial acquiescence" to the plan of the President. 
 He could not approve of the fourteenth amendment of 
 the joint committee because of the third section (at that 
 particular date disfranchising classes of southern whites 
 until 1870). He advised approval of the Freedmen's 
 Bureau bill ; but it was now dead by the veto and, there- 
 fore, had ceased to be a subject of dispute. The civil 
 rights bill, on the contrary, was now a law and, there- 
 fore, of course not subject to debate. Though he could 
 not approve the plan of the joint committee he acknowl- 
 edged that Congress was the ultimate judge.* His tes- 
 
 * Speech in Washington Newspapers. See Globe, 1st Sess. 39th 
 Cong., p. 2960. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 269 
 
 timony before the Impeachment committee revealed the 
 same state of affairs during the previous two years, viz., 
 the absence of all opposition on his part to the course of 
 the administration. It is clear that whatever may have 
 been his real feelings he must have effectually sup- 
 pressed all serious persistent objections, else he would 
 long ago have been removed from his place by the Presi- 
 dent who, up to the passage of the Tenure-of -office act, 
 possessed the unquestioned right to dispense with the 
 society of a Cabinet officer who thwarted his policy. 
 Johnson, as it appears, never liked him, for a long time 
 distrusted him, and may have suspected him of having 
 underhand dealings with his adversaries. But he was 
 loth to disturb any member of the Cabinet of Lincoln, 
 or to turn out of office a single incumbent appointed by 
 his predecessor who stopped short of publicly denounc- 
 ing his policy or reviling his person. In the summer of 
 1866, Dennison and Speed and Harlan found their want 
 of agreement with their official chief an insuperable 
 objection to their remaining any longer, and they, one 
 after another, voluntarily retired. But Stanton staid 
 on. Even down to a period as late as the passage of the 
 Tenure-of -office bill, he must have still maintained his 
 attitude of acquiescence, at least, in the course of the 
 administration, and of friendliness to the President, as 
 he was requested to write the message to accompany the 
 veto of that bill, on account of the clearness with which 
 he demonstrated its unconstitutionality. Yet, notwith- 
 standing all this, from the very beginning of his term 
 he appears to have enjoyed the confidence of the very 
 men who were assailing his chief with the bitterest epi- 
 
270 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 thets. The radicals regarded him as their trusty out- 
 post in the camp of the enemy. His ostensible agree- 
 ment with the 'Apostate' seems to have troubled them 
 not at all. They implored him to stay. They depre- 
 cated his resignation. They were in daily fear of his 
 dismissal. They must have counseled him to simulate 
 acquiescence in the policy they detested in order to re- 
 main where he was. Seward continued on, and Welles, 
 and McCulloch, of the old Cabinet of Lincoln ; but none 
 of them left room for doubt of his fidelity to his chief, 
 and each of them was the mark of radical abuse. Stan- 
 ton, alone, sitting alongside of them at the council-table 
 of the President and voting with them, continued to be 
 the object of the tenderest regard to the most implacable 
 opponents of the administration. His secret allies de- 
 vised the proviso in the first section of the Tenure bill 
 to force the President to keep their spy in the midst of 
 his official household ; and, as soon as that bill became a 
 law, his attitude of masterly passivity underwent a 
 change. The mask he had worn for two years was grad- 
 ually withdrawn. He let it be known to the President 
 and his associates that he could not go with them in 
 approving the veto of the main reconstruction act, some 
 of the most stinging paragraphs of which his early 
 friend and benefactor, Judge Black, had written. After 
 the first supplementary act was passed, he waxed louder 
 in his opposition. The surer he felt of his position the 
 more defiant in his disagreement he became and the 
 more offensive in his manner. In the Cabinet meeting 
 on the twenty-first of June, which endorsed the Attor- 
 ney-General, settled the course of the administration 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 271 
 
 and brought the members of Congress hurrying across 
 the country to the July session, he stood out the one 
 uncompromising dissentient. When the Congress sent 
 to the President the second supplementary act, he re- 
 garded the complete prostration of the South under the 
 heel of the military as an endorsement of his revolt. 
 The harmony of the Cabinet was at an end. The Presi- 
 dent began to throw out hints that the proper place of an 
 opponent of his policy was outside the inner circle of 
 the administration, that the confidential servant of the 
 radicals could not consistently with his own honour play 
 the role of confidential adviser of the President. But he 
 soon ascertained that hints, which in such a delicate rela- 
 tion had heretofore been effectual, in this instance and 
 upon this officer were thrown away. The unpleasant 
 discovery gradually dawned upon his mind that the one 
 of his confidential advisers in whom he had lost all con- 
 fidence intended with undreamt-of hardihood to repu- 
 diate his own well-known opinion of the Tenure-of -office 
 act and, taking refuge behind its provisions, to thrust 
 his offensive presence and antagonistic principles upon 
 the council-table of the administration. When their re- 
 lations had come to such a pass there could be but one 
 issue with such a man as Johnson. In his subsequent 
 communication to the Senate he quietly says: "I had 
 come to the conclusion that the time had arrived when it 
 was proper Mr. Stanton should retire from my Cabinet. 
 The mutual confidence and accord which should exist in 
 such a relation had ceased." Sheridan's course, too, 
 continued to run counter to the President's instructions, 
 and on the thirtieth of July by an imperial edict that 
 
272 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 commander decapitated Throckmorton, the governor 
 elected by the people of the reconstructed state of Texas, 
 and appointed Pease, the defeated candidate for that 
 office, in his place. On the first day of August, 1867, in 
 a personal interview, the President told General Grant 
 that he could no longer tolerate Stanton in his Cabinet 
 and was contemplating the removal of Sheridan. Grant 
 endeavoured to dissuade him, especially on behalf of his 
 favourite subordinate ; and, after the interview and on 
 the same day, in a private letter addressed to the Presi- 
 dent protested against "the removal of the very able 
 commander of the fifth military district" and expressed 
 his disapproval of the removal of Stanton in these 
 words : "His removal cannot be effected against his will 
 without the consent of the Senate. ... It certainly was 
 the intention of the legislative branch of the Government 
 to place cabinet ministers beyond the power of Execu- 
 tive removal and it is pretty well understood that" the 
 act "was intended specially to protect the Secretary of 
 War."* This letter, clothed in such positive terms and 
 signed by the most renowned name in the country, could 
 not have been without effect, and the President paused, 
 perplexed in the extreme. The first day of August — 
 the date of the letter— was Thursday. On Monday/the 
 fifth, something happened. 
 
 The trial of John H. Surratt for the murder of Abra- 
 
 * See letter in MePh. Recoil., p. 307 n. And yet Gen. Schofield states 
 that at the date of this letter Gen. Grant, in Richmond, Va., " in the 
 most emphatic terms announced his intention to demand, on his return 
 to Washington, that the President either remove Stanton or accept his 
 (General Grant's) resignation." Art. "Controversies in the War De- 
 partment," Century Magazine for August, 1897. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 273 
 
 ham Lincoln began in the city of Washington on Mon- 
 day the tenth day of June, 1867, and the testimony closed 
 on Saturday the twenty-sixth day of July. On the 
 first day of August, Mr. Merrick, one of the counsel for 
 the prisoner, was addressing the jury. Ever since the 
 execution of Mrs. Surratt, a rumour that five members of 
 the military commission that tried her had signed a 
 petition to the President recommending a commutation 
 of the death-sentence had been flying about. No such 
 document had ever been published, although an author- 
 ized report of the trial, including the several verdicts, 
 sentences and the President's approval, was printed with 
 the certificate of the proper officer to its accuracy; but 
 still the rumour lived on. In allusion to this story and to 
 a promise made by the prosecution at the opening of the 
 case to set this question at rest, Mr. Merrick, in the 
 course of his speech, pressed the query: "Where is your 
 record? Why didn't you bring it in? Did you find at 
 the end ... a recommendation to mercy . . . that the 
 President never saw?" Stirred by this taunt Edwards 
 Pierrepont, the leading counsel for the United States, 
 immediately sent to Joseph Holt, the Judge- Advocate- 
 General, for the original record ; and it was brought to 
 him in the court-room by Holt himself who related to 
 Pierrepont in the presence of "three gentlemen" its 
 history. The next day, Mr. Bradley, the senior counsel, 
 in summing up for the prisoner, recurred to the failure 
 of the government to produce the mysterious paper. 
 So that when, on Saturday (the third), Pierrepont rose 
 to make the closing argument, be felt himself bound, and 
 not only bound but able, to give a conclusive answer to 
 18 
 
274 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the sneers of his adversaries. Holding in his hand the 
 record, he made this explicit statement: 
 
 "President Johnson, when the record was presented to 
 him, laid it before his Cabinet, and every single member 
 voted to confirm the sentence and the President with his 
 own hand wrote his confirmation of it, and with his own 
 hand signed the warrant. No other one touched this paper, 
 and when it was suggested by some members of the com- 
 mission that in consequence of the age and sex of Mrs. 
 Surratt it might possibly be well to change her sentence to 
 imprisonment for life, he signed the warrant for her death 
 with the paper right before his eyes— and there it is. ' ' 
 
 That same afternoon Judge Holt came hack to the 
 court-room to reclaim the paper and repeated its history 
 as he had told it before and which Pierrepont had just 
 rehearsed to the jury.* 
 
 The Sunday morning papers carried this declaration 
 to the White House ; and, in consequence, on the morn- 
 ing of Monday, the fifth, the President sent to the Secre- 
 tary of War for "the findings and sentence of the con- 
 spiracy trial. ' ' When the message came General Grant 
 happened to be at the War Office, and Stanton in his 
 presence sent for the officer in charge of the Bureau of 
 Military Justice (Judge Holt being temporarily absent) 
 and ordered him to take the record to the President. On 
 its arrival at the White House it was subjected to a 
 "careful scrutiny" and the President discovered that, 
 underneath the signature of the presiding officer of the 
 
 *Trial of John H. Surratt (official), Vol. 1, p. 27; Vol. 2, pp. 
 1207, 1237, 1249. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 275 
 
 commission formally countersigning the record, Judge 
 Holt had written on the death-warrant in such a place 
 that, when handed to the President for signature, any 
 paper coming after it would be likely to escape his ob- 
 servation ; and that, there hanging as a superfluous leaf 
 to the record proper, was, in very truth, a petition signed 
 by five members of the commission praying the Presi- 
 dent, in consideration of the sex and age of Mary E. 
 Surratt, "if he can find it consistent with his sense of 
 duty to the country, ' ' to commute the sentence of death 
 to imprisonment in the penitentiary for life. That fly- 
 ing leaf, the President instantly declared he had never 
 seen or heard of before. He was convinced that it was 
 not with the record when submitted for his approval. 
 Judge Holt, he remembered, had brought the record to 
 him in a private interview, had written out the warrant 
 in his presence, presented to him for signature and car- 
 ried the record away; so that Holt, surely, must have 
 been a party to the imposition. And, if the Judge- 
 Advocate was guilty, the Secretary of War must have 
 either contrived, or connived at, the suppression ; for who 
 can believe a subordinate would dare to perpetrate so 
 deadly a fraud without the knowledge of the head of the 
 Department 1 ? The President had been hood-winked in- 
 to signing the death-warrant of a woman whose life he 
 might otherwise have spared. As he well knew, no such 
 paper was ever laid before, much less considered by, his 
 Cabinet of that date, and a summons to Seward, Welles 
 and McCulloch (the only remaining members beside 
 Stanton) would demonstrate the falsehood of that part 
 of Holt's story. But, as it happened, the testimony of 
 
276 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 these officers was rendered unnecessary by Pierrepont 
 himself. Continuing his address all day Monday with- 
 out recurring to his statement of Saturday, on Tuesday 
 (the sixth), as though in the meantime he had been 
 warned of his error, he went out of his way to repeat 
 that statement as if word for word, and yet, in repeating 
 it, he omitted all mention of the Cabinet and of the pres- 
 ence of the paper before the Cabinet officers.* 
 
 At so critical a juncture as this, what stand Stanton 
 took, whether he threw his shield over his hard-pressed 
 subordinate, resolved to support him in his assevera- 
 tions that the "identical paper" was "right before the 
 eyes ' ' of the President, we do not positively know : But 
 this much we do know. The request for the record was 
 made by the President to Stanton as Secretary of War ; 
 Stanton as Secretary of War transmitted the record to 
 the President on the morning of the fifth; and on the 
 same day Stanton received the following missive: 
 
 ' ' Sir : Public considerations of a high character constrain 
 me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will 
 be accepted. 
 
 "Andrew Johnson 
 
 President of the United States." 
 
 * See original record in Judge- Advocate's office. Letter of Chief 
 Clerk Wright to Holt contained in Holt's " Refutation " printed in the 
 Washington Chronicle of December 1, 1873, and republished in pamphlet. 
 Also Holt's " Vindication " printed in same newspaper, August 25, 1873, 
 and republished in same pamphlet. Also Andrew Johnson's reply in 
 same newspaper of November 12, 1873. Trial of John H. Surratt, 
 Vol. 2, p. 1321. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 277 
 
 To which, he instantly replied : 
 
 ' ' Sir : Your note this day has been received, stating that 
 public considerations of a high character constrain you to 
 say that my resignation as Secretary of War will be ac- 
 cepted. 
 
 "In reply, I have the honor to say that public considera- 
 tions of a high character, which alone have induced me to 
 continue at the head of this department, constrain me not 
 to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next 
 meeting of Congress. 
 
 "Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War."* 
 
 Is it not a likely presumption that the discovery of so 
 detestable a deception concocted in the Department of 
 War was the "last straw" banishing all hesitation from 
 the President's mind and driving him to immediate 
 action? It would be a most extraordinary coincidence 
 that two such events should take place on the same day 
 without being related to each other to some extent as 
 cause and effect. One serious objection there is, it is 
 true, to the adoption of this view. In communicating 
 the reasons for Stanton's suspension to the Senate, the 
 following December, the President failed to assign the 
 suppression of the petition, although he did mention the 
 suppression of General Baird's telegram sent just before 
 the New Orleans riot. But, it should be remembered, 
 that the suppression of the telegram was the act of Stan- 
 ton, acknowledged to be so by himself, t whereas the sup- 
 
 * Given in President's Message to Senate on suspension. Trial of 
 Andrew Johnson, Vol. 1, pp. 148, 149. 
 f Imp. Inv., p. 398. 
 
278 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 pression of the petition, so far as the proof goes, was the 
 act, not of Stanton, but of Holt. The record to which 
 hung the incriminatory paper was not returned to the 
 Judge- Advocate's office until the following December,* 
 but, though the President kept it by him four months, 
 he took no steps to punish the offender. When he did 
 not suspend the Judge- Advocate he could hardly assign 
 the Judge- Advocate 's offence as a reason for the suspen- 
 sion of his superior officer. On the whole, it is probable 
 that the President omitted to mention the suppression 
 of the petition for the same reason that he did not court- 
 martial Holt, viz : an instinctive revulsion, natural to a 
 man in his situation, from entering upon a personal con- 
 troversy over so tender a subject as the measure of sever- 
 ity dealt out to the convicted assassins of the martyr in 
 whose seat he was sitting. 
 
 On this eventful fifth day of August, another startling 
 revelation was made, touching the Judge- Advocate, if 
 not the Secretary of War, just as close. John M. Binck- 
 ley, acting Attorney-General in the absence of Stanbery, 
 laid his report respecting the pardon of Charles A. Dun- 
 ham, alias Sanford Conover, before the President. This 
 document consisted of a recital of the contents of two 
 parcels left at the executive office and referred to the 
 Attorney-General. The first— left on the twenty-sev- 
 enth of July, it is not stated by whom— was composed 
 of four, or rather three, papers : 1. A letter from A. G. 
 Riddle— one of the counsel for the United States in the 
 preparation of the case against Surratt — to the Presi- 
 dent, dated the twentieth of July, eulogizing the services 
 
 * Wright's letter, ut supra. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 279 
 
 which Dunham, although in jail, had been able to render 
 before and during the trial of Surratt, in ' ' giving much 
 valuable information both as to the facts and witnesses 
 for the United States," and, also, "the history of and 
 facts concerning witnesses called for the defence," and 
 in "communicating important facts and suggestions," 
 for which, the writer states, "the Government are under 
 great obligations to him ' ' and should mark its apprecia- 
 tion of them in a way not to be mistaken. 2. On a leaf 
 of the same sheet, a communication from Judge Holt, 
 dated the twenty-fourth but unaddressed, in which, after 
 signifying his concurrence in ' ' the estimate of the value 
 and importance of the services of Charles A. Dunham ' ' 
 made by Mr. Riddle, he, likewise, recommends his par- 
 don. 3. A note from Ashley, dated July twenty-second, 
 to Holt and Riddle suggesting that a petition for the 
 pardon of "Mr. Dunham"— a draft of which was to 
 have been forwarded with the note but was wanting— 
 should be prepared and signed by them ; Ashley adding : 
 "I think he (Dunham) is clearly entitled to it, and I 
 hope you will aid him all you can. ' ' 4. The last paper 
 was a petition addressed to His Excellency, Andrew 
 Johnson, President of the United States, dated July 
 twenty-sixth and signed "Chas. A. Dunham," praying 
 for a pardon. 
 
 It appears from the records of the court that, at this 
 last-mentioned date, Dunham's final motion to suspend 
 sentence further was denied, and he was taken at last 
 to the Albany penitentiary. Abandoning all hope of 
 aid from his present friends, he suddenly resolved to 
 treat them to a dose of their own poison. The second 
 
280 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 parcel, left on the thirtieth of July by Mrs. Dunham, 
 was composed of: (1) A long letter from Dunham 
 dated the twenty-ninth, and addressed to the President, 
 in which he denounced ' ' the diabolical designs ' ' of Ash- 
 ley and the other "traitors and conspirators"; the 
 ' ' nefarious conspiracy " of " Ashley and Co., " by which, 
 in consideration of the pardon they were to- obtain for 
 him, he should procure testimony connecting Andrew 
 Johnson with Booth. His charges were most explicit. 
 Ashley, he said, "thought it would be very plausible to 
 prove" four circumstances, viz: 1. That Booth paid 
 Johnson several visits at the Kirkwood House. 2. That 
 Johnson corresponded with Booth. 3. That the placing 
 of Atzerodt with weapons at the Kirkwood was a sham 
 to make it appear that the Vice President was intended 
 as a victim and thus divert suspicion of Johnson's con- 
 nivance at Lincoln's murder. 4. That Booth stated 
 just after the fourth of March to intimate friends at 
 New York that he was acting with the knowledge of the 
 Vice President; that it was arranged to kill Lincoln on 
 the day of the inauguration, which accounted for John- 
 son 's strange conduct on that occasion. Dunham con- 
 fessed without hesitation that he assured Ashley he 
 "should have no difficulty in finding persons of good 
 standing and moral character to prove these matters, 
 and it was agreed that" he "should do so as soon as 
 released." "As an earnest" of what he could do in 
 this line, Dunham tells that, at the desire of Ashley and 
 Butler, he forwarded memoranda of the subject-matter 
 of the testimony they were in need of to a "trusty 
 friend" with "instructions for him to procure two other 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 281 
 
 friends to commit to memory the statements enclosed to 
 him, and, when sent for, to come here (to Washington) 
 and repeat them." And these two persons, he stated, 
 actually did come, "were inspected by Ashley and But- 
 ler, and were found to possess the requisite qualifica- 
 tions as to intelligence and personal appearance ' ' ; were 
 "passed" and "introduced to several Eadical members 
 of the House." "Butler desired to have taken the dep- 
 ositions of these men at the time," but Dunham "would 
 not consent to its being done" before his release. Ac- 
 companying this letter were (2) a specimen of the mem- 
 oranda used to coach the false witnesses (which will be 
 given hereafter at the date it was produced before the 
 Impeachment committee), (3) four notes of Ashley on 
 the business in hand, and (4) one of the Bev. Mr. Match- 
 ett. The last note of Ashley bears date July 8, 1867, 
 and in it he writes : "If you can put the originals (i. e., 
 letters of A. J. to Davis and Booth) in my hands, I will 
 say that no one shall take or destroy them without your 
 express order in writing except you are released. ' ' 
 
 The foregoing report appeared in the public press on 
 the morning of the tenth of August ;* on the afternoon 
 of which last-mentioned day, it may be stated in pass- 
 ing, the jury in the Surratt ease, after three days' and 
 three nights' deliberation, was discharged because of 
 inability to agree.f 
 
 But (to return from this digression) be the undis- 
 closed reasons for the suspension of Stanton, if any 
 
 * See Washington newspapers of that date. Dunham was pardoned, 
 in February, 1869, by the President on the ground of ill-health. 
 t Surratt's Trial, Vol. 2, p. 1379. 
 
282 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 undisclosed reasons there were, what they may, the de- 
 fiant response of the Secretary to the President's request 
 for his resignation was of itself a sufficient reason with- 
 out seeking farther. As Johnson states: "One thing 
 is certain, whatever cogency in such considerations, . . . 
 it was official misconduct, to say the least of it, to parade 
 them before his superior officer. . . . Necessarily it must 
 end our most important official relations, for I cannot 
 imagine a degree of effrontery which would embolden 
 the head of a Department to take his seat at the council 
 table in the Executive Mansion after such an act. Nor 
 can I imagine a President so forgetful of the proper 
 respect and dignity belonging to his office as to submit 
 to such an intrusion."* In fact, even Stanton's phe- 
 nomenal sense of official duty did not go so far as to 
 force him to pose any longer as one of the constitutional 
 advisers of the President. He clung to his office in the 
 War department, but his chair at the Cabinet-table 
 stood significantly empty. For his part, the President 
 delayed the complete ejectment of this self-confessed 
 ally of his enemies only long enough to determine upon 
 the modus operandi and to find a successor. Aware that, 
 according to the construction put upon the proviso of 
 the first section of the Tenure act by its authors and now 
 apparently accepted by the Eepublican party at large, 
 the summary removal of Stanton would be denounced as 
 an impeachable offence, he sought to avoid such an accu- 
 sation by availing himself of the power of suspension 
 granted to him by the Tenure act with a restriction ; but 
 which, he believed, being included under the power of 
 
 * Message ut supra. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 283 
 
 removal vested in him by the Constitution, the Congress 
 had no right to restrict. Moreover, he was greatly em- 
 barrassed to find a successor able and willing to displace 
 the renowned War-minister with the Republican party 
 at his back; and he seems to have thought it indispen- 
 sable to secure the cooperation of Grant. In frequent 
 interviews with the General, he strove to persuade him 
 to take the place, assuring him that in any event Stanton 
 should remain no longer. Grant finally consented, pro- 
 vided the displacement took the form of the suspension 
 of the incumbent and a letter of authority to himself to 
 discharge the duties of the office ad interim. An under- 
 standing having thus been effected, on the twelfth of 
 August the President issued an order addressed to Ed- 
 win M. Stanton, Secretary of War, suspending him from 
 office "by virtife of the power and authority invested" 
 in the President "by the Constitution and laws of the 
 United States"; and a letter addressed to Ulysses S. 
 Grant authorizing him to act as" Secretary of War ad 
 interim. On the same day, Grant notified Stanton of 
 his acceptance, softening the blow by expressing his 
 "appreciation of the zeal, patriotism, firmness and abil- 
 ity" with which the officer he superseded had "ever dis- 
 charged the duties Of Secretary of War." On receipt 
 of these two notes, Stanton penned a communication to 
 the President as follows: 
 
 "Under a sense of public duty I am compelled to deny 
 your right, under the Constitution and laws of the United 
 States, without the advice and consent of the Senate, and 
 without legal cause, to suspend me from office as Secretary 
 of War. . . . But inasmuch as the General commanding the 
 
284 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 armies of the United States has been appointed ad interim, 
 and has notified me that he has accepted the appointment, 
 I have no alternative but to submit to superior force. ' '* 
 
 Stanton was out at last but, although the General of 
 the army was in, he was in only ad interim. The Ten- 
 ure act provided in cases of suspension under it, that if 
 the Senate refused to concur the suspended officer forth- 
 with resumed the functions of his office. Now, if there 
 was any one thing on which Johnson was resolved, it 
 was that the man whom he had suspended in this case 
 should never reenter his Cabinet or recommence his 
 counter-mining in the department of War. To make 
 himself sure that he held full control of the situation, 
 a few days after the change was made he stepped over 
 to the "War-Office for an interchange of views with the 
 new secretary concerning the course to be pursued in 
 the too probable event of the non-concurrence of the 
 Senate. Over certain particulars of this interview the 
 President and General Grant subsequently fell out, but 
 upon the more important features they substantially 
 agree. Johnson first made clear his determination to 
 prevent at all hazards the resumption of office by Stan- 
 ton; and, then, he inquired whether Grant intended to 
 stand by him in case the Senate voted to restore his 
 enemy. Would he hold on to the office and drive Stan- 
 ton to the courts, or, preferring to avoid the unpleasant- 
 ness of legal controversy, resign in time for the Presi- 
 dent to fill the office with a person who would be troubled 
 with no such reluctance? Grant replied, according to 
 
 * See. letters in MePh. Recon., p. 261. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 285 
 
 his own statement, that "in case the Senate should not 
 concur in his suspension, ' ' Mr. Stanton, ' ' to obtain pos- 
 session of his office," "would have to appeal to the 
 courts to reinstate him" ; adding, however, that this was 
 a "general principle," and, if on further examination 
 of the Tenure-of-office act, he should ' ' change his mind 
 in this particular case, he would inform the President 
 of the fact."* 
 
 Owing to the habit of strict military obedience to 
 which Grant was enured, the constitutional commander- 
 in-chief, for the next three months, held once more un- 
 checked control over the department of War. One week 
 after the new secretary seated himself in the seat of 
 Stanton, the President sent him an order assigning Gen- 
 eral Thomas to the command of the fifth military dis- 
 trict in the place of General Sheridan, who was trans- 
 ferred to the department of the Missouri, and directing 
 him to give the necessary instructions to carry the order 
 into effect. He condescended, however, so far as to 
 send along with the order a note inviting any "sugges- 
 tions" the secretary might "deem necessary respecting 
 these assignments." Grant embraced the opportunity 
 thus afforded him to "urge in the name of a patriotic 
 people" that "the order be not insisted on," that "the 
 expressed wish of the country is that General Sheridan 
 should not be removed," and "the will of the people is. 
 the law of the land." "His removal will only be re- 
 garded as an effort to defeat the laws of Congress." 
 "It will be interpreted by the unreconstructed element 
 in the South ... as a triumph. It will embolden them 
 
 * See Grant's letter, McPh. Kecon., p. 283. 
 
286 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to renewed opposition to the loyal masses believing that 
 they have- the Executive with them. ' ' General Thomas, 
 too, had always protested against being assigned to any 
 of these military districts. This plain-spoken remon- 
 strance produced no effect. The secretary might have 
 the benefit of his ' ' suggestions " if he only obeyed orders. 
 There was a delay of a few days ; the ill-health of Gen- 
 eral Thomas rendering necessary a modification of the 
 original assignment. But, on the twenty-sixth of Au- 
 gust, an order assigning General "Winfield S. Hancock to 
 the command of the fifth district and transferring Gen- 
 eral Sheridan to the department of the Missouri was 
 issued by the President and promulgated by Secretary 
 Grant. On the receipt of this order Sheridan turned 
 over his command to his next in rank and departed. On 
 the same day, a similar order was issued relieving Gen- 
 eral Sickles from the command of the second district 
 and assigning General Canby to his place; the latter 
 officer assuming command on the fifth of September. 
 The remaining changes in the military commanders 
 were not made until the twenty-eighth of December, 
 when Meade relieved Pope in the third, and McDowell, 
 Ord, in the fourth district.* 
 
 Hancock was summoned to Washington on his way 
 to his new department and was made a lion of by the 
 administration, its supporters and the Democrats. 
 When, on assuming command he issued his first general 
 order declaring as an unalterable principle the suprem- 
 acy of the civil over the military power, a shout went up 
 from the conservative portion of the people as though 
 
 * MePh. Recon., pp. 306-7-8, 345-6. 
 
EDWIN M. STANTON 287 
 
 the republic had been reborn ; and the glory of this sin- 
 gle act in civil affairs surpassed, for a time, the glory 
 of all his achievements in the field.* 
 
 * Order of November 29, 1867, McPh. Recon., p. 324. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Defeat of the Fikst Impeachment, and the 
 Reinstatement of Stanton 
 
 The elections in the Northern states in the fall of 1867 
 indicated that the tide of popular opinion was running 
 strongly against the reconstruction policy of the domi- 
 nant party. In September, Maine at the extreme east 
 reduced the Republican majority of 28,000 of the year 
 before to 1,100; California at the extreme west elected 
 (in the spring, however) a Democratic governor and two 
 out of the three representatives in Congress. In Octo- 
 ber, Pennsylvania was carried by the opposition, and 
 Ohio, though the Republican candidate for governor was 
 successful by a narrow majority, elected a Democratic 
 legislature which, the following year, revoked the rati- 
 fication of the fourteenth amendment and elected a Dem- 
 ocrat to succeed Wade. What was still more signifi- 
 cant, the voters rejected a proposed amendment to the 
 state constitution granting suffrage to the comparatively 
 few negroes within her borders by a constitutional ma- 
 jority of fifty thousand. In November, New York went 
 over to the Democrats by a majority nearly as large. 
 New Jersey went the same way, electing a legislature 
 which revoked the ratification of the fourteenth amend- 
 ment and sent back to the Senate the ejected Stockton. 
 The people of Kansas and Minnesota— sure Republican 
 
 288 
 
DEFEAT OP THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 289 
 
 states — cast a verdict against negro suffrage on a direct 
 submission to them of that issue. Though it was an 
 odd year in politics and the result could have no effect 
 upon the composition of the Congress, in every state 
 where elections were held, even in Massachusetts, the 
 trend was in the same direction. All idea of selecting 
 as a candidate for President a true expositor of the pol- 
 icy of the party was abandoned, and every eye was 
 turned to the soldier who, though a member of the ad- 
 ministration, bore the charmed title of the Conqueror of 
 the Rebellion.* On the other hand, the President re- 
 garded the result as but another justification of his 
 habitual confidence in the people, to which he alluded in 
 a speech which he read to a crowd that gathered before 
 the White House on the night of the thirteenth of No- 
 vember to congratulate him on the recent victories. 
 ' ' The remedy for the present unhappy condition of the 
 country must come from the people themselves," he 
 said. 
 
 "At the present time they cannot, according to the forms 
 of the Constitution, repeal obnoxious laws; they cannot 
 remove or control this military despotism. The remedy 
 is nevertheless in their hands, and is a sure one, if not con- 
 trolled by fraud, overawed by arbitrary power, or from 
 apathy on their part too long delayed. With abiding con- 
 fidence in their patriotism, wisdom and integrity, I am 
 still hopeful that in the end the rod of despotism will be 
 broken, the armed heel of power lifted from the necks of 
 the people, and the principles of a violated Constitution 
 preserved."! 
 
 * For the elections, see McPh. Recon., pp. 372, 353-4. 
 t Speech, Imp. Inv., p. 1175. 
 
 19 
 
290 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 To the advocates of impeachment on the judiciary 
 committee which met two days after, the speech was but 
 another high misdemeanour, and a printed copy was put 
 in evidence. "The echo of his last speech," they say 
 in their report, ' ' is still lingering in our ears ' ' ; and on 
 the twentieth the committee once more came to a vote. 
 It will be remembered that last June they decided 
 against impeachment by a vote of five to four. Not- 
 withstanding the fact that, after the investigation was 
 reopened at the solicitation of the minority, no testimony 
 of any importance was taken except General Grant's 
 which was not unfavourable to the President, the com- 
 mittee now reversed its decision ; one of the Republicans, 
 who had voted in the majority before, joining his radical 
 colleagues. The convert was John C. Churchill from 
 Oswego, New York, who never publicly accounted for 
 his change of mind. The adjourned session of Con- 
 gress opening the next day, the committee was given 
 time until the next Monday to make a report ; and dur- 
 ing the two working days intervening, a fitting close 
 was put to the investigation by the reexamination of 
 Baker and the examination of Ashley. The fugitive 
 witness having returned of his own accord was called 
 on to disclose the whereabouts of his mysterious Mrs. 
 Harris. He had seen her, he swore, but he could name 
 no person who had seen her in his company, or who had 
 seen her enter the hotels where he professed to have met 
 her, or who had seen her while there. He had pointed 
 her out to Matchett who subpoenaed her to come before 
 the committee, but she would not come without money, 
 he said. "How much was wanted?" inquired a mem- 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 291 
 
 ber of the committee. "$25,000," answered Baker. 
 "Who made that proposition?" "This woman made 
 it"; and with this prompt reply Baker was dismissed.* 
 Ashley was the last witness, called seemingly by the 
 Democratic members of the committee. He admitted 
 that from the beginning of the impeachment movement 
 he entertained the belief that Andrew Johnson was im- 
 plicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln ; that 
 he had stated to members of the House of Representa- 
 tives that he had evidence which satisfied him of that 
 fact ; that he believed that letters were in existence from 
 Andrew Johnson to Jefferson Davis and to Booth estab- 
 lishing that fact; that he had been engaged ever since 
 the investigation began in an effort to unearth these 
 letters and to obtain legal evidence to bring before the 
 committee ; that he had employed Matchett ; that he had 
 held repeated interviews with Conover-Dunham in jail 
 by day and by night; that after the conviction he had 
 importuned the judges to stay the execution of the sen- 
 tence until an application might be made for pardon; 
 that he backed the convict's application to President 
 Johnson for a pardon so that the convict might be used 
 as a witness to accuse the man who pardoned him of 
 complicity in the murder of his predecessor. The mem- 
 orandum enclosed by Dunham in his petition of last 
 July and which appeared in the report of the acting 
 Attorney-General was produced and put in evidence.f 
 It begins : 
 
 * Imp. Inv., p. 1193. 
 
 t See Ch. Ill, p. 281, supra. 
 
292 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "Shortly before the inauguration of Lincoln and John- 
 son, the latter, through or in connection with Booth, sent 
 several letters to the Confederacy, one of which was in- 
 tended for Jefferson Davis." These letters, it goes on, 
 were taken to Richmond by one Allen who returned "bear- 
 ing several letters from J. P. Benjamin" "enclosed to 
 Booth. ' ' Allen delivered the package to Booth who taking 
 one letter out "addressed to 'Andrew Johnson, Vice-Presi- 
 dent elect of the United States' " asked Allen to deliver it 
 which he did in company with a friend whom Allen took 
 along ; both Allen and friend can be produced. There were 
 two ex-rebel soldiers, one named Dawson, who would testify 
 that they met Booth the second day before his death ' ' near 
 Garrett's" and he told them he had "killed Lincoln and 
 thereby made a good southern man President." Dawson 
 replied that on the contrary " if he meant that he had made 
 Andy Johnson President, he had done the worse possible 
 thing for the South, as he was more extreme in his views and 
 a greater enemy to the South than Lincoln." "Booth 
 replied that it was a mistake; that Johnson as a candidate 
 and office-seeker had to say a great many things, but that 
 as President he could do as he pleased ; that he was bound 
 to be a friend of the South; and that if he went back on 
 him (Booth) he would have him hung higher than Hainan." 
 
 Ashley explained what he called his "theory about 
 this matter": 
 
 "I have always believed that President Harrison and 
 President Taylor and President Buchanan were poisoned, 
 and were poisoned for the express purpose of putting the 
 Vice Presidents in the presidential office. In the first two 
 instances it was successful. It was attempted with Mr. 
 Buchanan and failed. It succeeded with Mr. Taylor and 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 293 
 
 Mr. Harrison. Then Mr. Lincoln was assassinated, and 
 from my stand-point I could come to a conclusion which 
 impartial men, holding different views, could not come. 
 It would not amount to legal evidence. 
 
 "Q. Do you mean to say that you formed an opinion and 
 expressed it to members of Congress that there was evidence 
 to implicate Mr. Johnson which was not legal evidence? 
 
 "A. Yes, sir; it satisfied me. 
 
 "Q. State to the committee any evidence or fact that 
 you know, tending in any degree to fasten the assassination 
 on Mr. Johnson. 
 
 "A.I never withheld anything from the committee which 
 I regarded as evidence. 
 
 "Q. Then you state now, as you did before, that you 
 know of no other evidence tending to show that fact? 
 
 "A. I know none at present which I could bring to the 
 knowledge of the committee, or I should bring it. ' '* 
 
 On Monday, the voluminous farrago of testimony the 
 committee had raked together was laid before the House 
 accompanied by three reports. There was a majority 
 report recommending the passage of a resolution that 
 Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be 
 impeached of high crimes and misdemeanours. There 
 was a report of the two Republicans in the minority 
 recommending the passage of a resolution that the com- 
 mittee be discharged from the further consideration of 
 the impeachment and that the subject be laid upon the 
 table. There was a report of the Democratic members 
 concurring with their associates of the minority respect- 
 ing the law and the facts but dissenting from the censure 
 of the political conduct of the President which the Ee- 
 
 *Imp. Inv., pp. 1204, 1194 et seq.; 1198-9. 
 
294 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 publican minority saw fit to pronounce.* As to the 
 thoroughness of the investigation there was no dispute. 
 The majority report says: the committee "have spared 
 no pains to make their investigations as complete as 
 possible, not only in the exploration of the public ar- 
 chives, but in following every indication that seemed to 
 promise any additional light upon the great subjects of 
 inquiry. ' ' The report of the Democrats in the minority 
 declares : 
 
 "A drag-net has been put out to catch every malicious 
 whisper throughout the land, and all the vile vermin who 
 had gossip or slander to detail, hearsay or otherwise, have 
 been permitted to appear and place it upon record for the 
 delectation of mankind. Spies have been sent all over the 
 land to find something that might blacken the name and 
 character of the Chief Magistrate of our country. Un- 
 whipped knaves have given information of fabulous letters 
 and documents. . . . That most notorious character, Gen- 
 eral L. C. Baker, chief of the detective police, even had the 
 effrontery to insult the American people by placing spies 
 within the very walls of the Executive Mansion; the 
 privacy of the President's home, his private life and habits 
 and most secret thoughts have not been deemed sacred or 
 exempt from invasion; the members of his household have 
 been examined; and the chief prosecutor has not hesitated 
 to dive into loathsome dungeons and consort with con- 
 victed felons, for the purpose of accomplishing his object 
 of arraigning the President on a charge of infamous 
 crimes. ' ' 
 
 There were ninety-nine witnesses sworn on a variety 
 of topics. But, as the report of the two Republicans in 
 
 * The reports are prefixed to the testimony in Imp. Inv. 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 295 
 
 the minority states : " a great deal of the matter ... is 
 of no value whatever. Much of it is mere hearsay, opin- 
 ions of witnesses, and no little amount of it is utterly 
 irrelevant to the case. Comparatively a small amount 
 of it could be used on a trial of this case before the Sen- 
 ate." 
 
 On the law of the case there was a wide difference of 
 opinion between the Republicans in the majority and the 
 Republicans in the minority. The leading proposition 
 of law upheld by the majority was that, under the sec- 
 tion of the Constitution of the United States providing 
 that "the President . . . shall be removed from office 
 on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery 
 and other high crimes and misdemeanors, ' ' a course of 
 maladministration "involving usurpation of power and 
 repeated violations of law" was impeachable although 
 no offence indictable under the statutes of the United 
 States was committed. The leading proposition of law 
 maintained by the Republicans in the minority was that 
 no offence, except the two specified in the Constitution 
 itself, was impeachable unless at the same time indicta- 
 ble as a crime or misdemeanour, not merely at common 
 law but under some existing statute of the United 
 States. This latter proposition, after the flood of light 
 thrown upon the subject on the trial of the President, 
 will now be considered as altogether too narrow. At 
 the time the words in question were used, the United 
 States statute-maker not having yet come into being, 
 there was no United States statute against treason or 
 bribery and none, of course, defining any other crime 
 or misdemeanour. Nevertheless, the framers of the 
 
296 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Constitution presupposed treason to be a high crime, 
 and bribery, if not originally a high crime, a high mis- 
 demeanour ; and they did so because of their familiarity 
 with the common law and the statutes of the several 
 states. So, also, when they used the phrase "high 
 crimes and misdemeanors" it was not with any pro- 
 phetic vision of what might be made high crimes and 
 misdemeanours by some federal statute to come, but with 
 the knowledge of what at that very moment were high 
 crimes and misdemeanours by reason of the common law 
 and the statutes of the several states. Besides, this 
 position of the minority leads necessarily to a most 
 dangerous conclusion. Mr. Boutwell, in the speech he 
 made in defence of the majority report, pointed this out 
 in words memorable for what was to come : 
 
 "Assume that it is not possible to impeach the President 
 or any civil officer for any offense of which he may be guilty, 
 unless such offense shall have been declared previously 
 by a law of the United States to be an indictable high 
 crime or misdemeanor. But will it be assumed further on 
 the one hand that Congress may by law declare an act to 
 be a misdemeanor which, according to the principles of the 
 common law, contains no one element or quality of a crime, 
 and upon the doing of the thing inhibited proceed to im- 
 peach and remove the President of the United States from 
 his office?"* 
 
 But, while the legal proposition of the minority is too 
 narrow, the legal proposition of the majority, emascu- 
 lating, as it does, the words "high crimes and misde- 
 
 * Appendix to Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 57. 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 297 
 
 meanors ' ' of all precise and definitive meaning, making 
 offences impeachable that are not indictable at all, 
 either by common law or statute, is a world too wide. 
 The same line of argument they followed to refute the 
 extreme conclusion of their opponents applies with equal 
 force to their own. The history of the words in the 
 convention that framed the Constitution, as narrated by 
 Madison, seems decisive of the controversy. The orig- 
 inal proposition submitted was to make the President 
 removable on impeachment and conviction "for mal or 
 corrupt conduct," or "for malpractice or neglect of 
 duty." Afterwards, the clause was modified so as to 
 read "for treason, bribery, or corruption," and finally 
 confined to "treason and bribery" alone. When, after 
 being so amended, it was taken up once more for con- 
 sideration, Colonel Mason moved to add "mal-adminis- 
 tration." Madison objecting that so vague a term 
 would be equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of 
 the Senate, Mason withdrew the word and substituted 
 "other high crimes and misdemeanors against the 
 state, ' ' which was agreed to, and on the general revision 
 the last three words were deleted as superfluous.* So 
 that, if any construction of a constitutional provision by 
 resorting to its origin and gestation was ever valid, the 
 phrase "other high crimes and misdemeanors" used in 
 the Constitution must be held to mean only such mal- 
 feasance in office as constituted at common law a high 
 crime or a high misdemeanour of a kindred grade, re- 
 spectively, with treason or bribery. 
 
 * See Supplement to Elliot's Debates (1876, Lippincott), pp. 340, 
 507, 528. Cf. Groesbeck's argument, Trial, Vol. 2, p. 190. 
 
298 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Enough, at present, on the question of law. Coming 
 to the facts, "the great salient point of accusation," 
 according to the majority report (written by Williams) 
 was "usurpation of power" with "the one great over- 
 shadowing purpose of reconstructing the shattered gov- 
 ernments of the rebel states in accordance with his (the 
 President's) own will, in the interests of the great crim- 
 inals who carried them into rebellion, ... by pardon- 
 ing their offences, restoring their lands and hurrying 
 them back— their hearts unrepentant, and their hands 
 yet red with the blood of our people— into a condition 
 where they could once more embarrass and defy, if not 
 absolutely rule the Government which they had vainly 
 endeavored to destroy. It is around this point and as 
 auxiliary to this central idea that all the special acts of 
 mal-administration . . . will be found to gravitate." 
 Then follow the specifications : First, the President sur- 
 rendered to the rebels the "system of railroads" "with 
 their costly apparatus, ' ' existing in their states, and re- 
 stored to the rebels large amounts of captured and aban- 
 doned property; in violation of the confiscation acts. 
 Second, the President abused the pardoning power ; in- 
 stancing (1) telegrams of the President and Secretary 
 of State promising pardons to delegates of the constitu- 
 tional conventions, held in obedience to the President's 
 proclamation, so as to qualify them to sit, and (2) the 
 case of the West Virginia deserters, reference to which 
 has already been made.* Third, the failure of the Pres- 
 ident to execute the laws by bringing the rebels to pun- 
 ishment. "In regard to the case of the leader of the 
 
 * Supra, Chap. II, p. 222. 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 299 
 
 rebellion himself the Committee are not agreed upon the 
 propriety or necessity of indulging in any special com- 
 mentary. ' ' But the pardon of Clement C. Clay, charged 
 equally with Davis with the crime of complicity in 
 the assassination, is mentioned with disapprobation. 
 Fourth, the President abused the appointing power and 
 with it the power of removal from office. How such an 
 "abuse" which, the report admits, had been practiced 
 "for the last thirty years of our history" could on a 
 sudden become an impeachable misdemeanour, it is at- 
 tempted to explain by the circumstance, that the ' ' pres- 
 ent incumbent without a party to represent his opinions, 
 except it may be in the rebel States, . . . has felt no 
 hesitation in declaring in a public speech: 'If you will 
 stand by me I will kick them (the friends of the Con- 
 gress in office) out as fast as I can, ' ' ' and has been doing 
 it ever since. He also has refused to send nominations 
 to the Senate for vacancies filled during recess, and has 
 reappointed persons rejected by the Senate, on its ad- 
 journment. And he violated an act of Congress in 
 permitting his provisional governors and revenue officers 
 in the South to discharge their duties without taking the 
 test oath. Fifth, the President abused the veto power. 
 The exercise of a power expressly granted the President 
 is transmuted into a high crime or misdemeanour by 
 the allegation: "This power has been systematically 
 employed to defeat the will of the people, and accom- 
 plish the criminal designs of the Executive." The 
 negotiations with the Colorado senators-elect are cited 
 as evidence.* Sixth, the President corruptly interfered 
 
 * Supra, p. 91. 
 
300 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 in elections. Under this head are specified the efforts 
 of office-holders at the Philadelphia convention and else- 
 where, to uphold the policy of the President and ' ' defeat 
 the will of Congress"; the speeches of the President 
 from that of the twenty-second of February, 1866, down 
 to the speech of the thirteenth of November just past; 
 his dissuasions of the Southern people from adopting 
 the fourteenth amendment; and the riots at Memphis 
 and New Orleans for which, without a single circum- 
 stance of proof, it is alleged the President is responsible. 
 In reviewing the facts as marshalled in the report, it 
 is only necessary to remark that the main offence charged 
 and all the subsidiary offences on which the greatest 
 stress was laid— restoration of property, wholesale par- 
 dons, dispensations with the test oath— were committed 
 before the meeting of the thirty-ninth Congress in De- 
 cember, 1865, and a year before the impeachment move- 
 ment was begun, nay, before there was any open breach 
 between the President and the Congress. Very little 
 stress was laid on the speeches made during the famous 
 tour, though these were the actual exciting cause of the 
 present prosecution. And not a word was said of any 
 failure to execute the Freedmen's Bureau or Civil Rights 
 acts, and not a specific accusation made that in any one 
 instance the reconstruction acts were not carried out. 
 The President was to be punished, not for what he had 
 done in the midst of the fight, but for what he had done 
 before the fight began. There was even an aspect of 
 the case in which the entire movement became ludicrous 
 —an aspect to which the Democratic minority on the 
 committee called attention. ' ' The President is gravely 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 301 
 
 arraigned," they said, "for arraying himself against 
 the loyal people of the country" by pursuing a recon- 
 struction policy which Congress antagonizes, "when 
 Congress itself for pursuing a reconstructing policy 
 which the President antagonizes has just received the 
 most withering and indignant condemnation and rebuke 
 of the entire people from Maine to California." In- 
 deed, one of the "particular offences" which haunted 
 the mind of Mr. Boutwell was committed before Johnson 
 was even Vice President. As he described it : " Jefferson 
 Davis was still at Richmond. The armies of Lee men- 
 aced the capital of his country. Andrew Johnson was 
 approaching that capital for the purpose of taking the 
 oath of office. That capital was merely a fortified gar- 
 rison. He then declares that the country cannot be 
 saved except by the old Democratic party." "That 
 casual expression discloses his mysterious course from 
 that day to this." Even before he was President and 
 when he had no reason to believe he would ever be Presi- 
 dent unless he had already foreseen the assassination of 
 his predecessor, he had conceived the deep-laid scheme 
 of turning the country over to the rebels and "the old 
 Democratic party"!* Mr. Boutwell never forgot it. 
 Nearly twenty years after he quotes it as the key to the 
 whole of Johnson's subsequent career, f "Wilson, in his 
 reply to Mr. Boutwell, reduced the incident to its true 
 proportions when he said, that, so far from the remark 
 being a crime in Johnson, it showed that "we committed 
 
 * App. Globe, ut supra, p. 60. 
 
 t North Amer. Rev., December, 1885. 
 
302 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 a terrible blunder . . . when we selected Andrew John- 
 son as our candidate for the Vice Presidential office."* 
 No confutation could be more complete than was 
 wrought by the report of the Eepublicans in the minor- 
 ity (written by James F. Wilson) of the charges pre- 
 sented by the majority. Concerning the animus dis- 
 played by the latter it states : 
 
 "The report of the majority resolves all presumptions 
 against the President, closes the door against all doubts, 
 affirms facts as established by the testimony in support of 
 which there is not a particle of evidence before us which 
 would be received by any court in the land. We dissent 
 from all this, and from the temper and spirit of the report. ' ' 
 
 Again : 
 
 "All the testimony relating to the failure to try, and 
 admission to bail of, Jefferson Davis, the assassination of 
 President Lincoln, the diary of J. Wilkes Booth, his place 
 of burial, the practice of pardon brokerage, the alleged 
 correspondence of the President with Jefferson Davis, may 
 be interesting to a reader, but is not of the slightest im- 
 portance so far as a determination of this case is concerned. 
 Still, much of this irrelevant matter has been interwoven 
 into the report of the majority, and has served to heighten 
 its color and deepen its tone." 
 
 Coming to the central charge, Wilson sweeps it away 
 by as complete a reductio ad absurdum as was ever 
 achieved. By simply incorporating in his report copi- 
 ous citations from the testimony of Stanton, Seward, and 
 Grant, he demonstrates that in the inception of the recon- 
 
 * Wilson's Speech, Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., App. p. 64. 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 303 
 
 struction policy of the administration, in the putting it 
 in operation without calling together the Congress, the 
 executive department acted as a unit; that in the so- 
 called usurpation, every member of the Cabinet as well as 
 the general of the army was a voluntary participant, and, 
 if the President was guilty of a high crime or misdemean- 
 our in this matter, they were all as guilty as he. This 
 strong point, Mr. Boutwell, to whose imagination An- 
 drew Johnson was a monster of depravity, endeavoured 
 to meet in his speech in the House, by describing John- 
 son as also a monster in ability ; pleading that his Cabi- 
 net officers "in the beginning did not understand the 
 President's character, capacity and purposes"; further, 
 that the President's "capacity has not been compre- 
 hended by the country. Violent sometimes in language, 
 indiscreet in manner, impulsive in action, unwise often 
 in declamation, he is still animated by a persistency of 
 purpose which never yields under any circumstances, 
 but seeks by means covert and tortuous as well as open 
 and direct the accomplishment of the purpose of his 
 life."* But this plea, Wilson had already anticipated 
 by as complete an estoppel. He cites the report of the 
 joint committee on reconstruction, of which Mr. Boutwell 
 was himself a member, made long after the rupture 
 between the President and the Congress and when the 
 high crime of "usurpation" had been consummated, 
 where the twelve Republican members do not "fail to 
 consider the peculiar circumstances under which he 
 acted, ' ' and, speaking of the authority of the people to 
 frame a form of government, say: "Ordinarily this 
 
 * Globe, App., p. 60. 
 
304 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 authority emanates from Congress ; but, under the pecu- 
 liar circumstances, your Committee is not disposed to 
 criticise the President's action in assuming the power 
 exercised by him in this regard." "While we do not 
 for a moment impute to the President any such design" 
 (i. e., the very same design the majority report endeav- 
 ours to fasten on him), "but cheerfully concede to him 
 the most patriotic motives, we cannot but look with 
 alarm upon a precedent so fraught with danger to the 
 Eepublic. ' ' He then shows that, as a remedy, impeach- 
 ment was not even thought of; but that the plan of the 
 joint committee presupposed the validity of the states 
 reconstructed under the policy now pronounced a usur- 
 pation, and ' ' proposed to use the identical governments 
 organized ... in pursuance of the President's policy, 
 as a means to insure its own success. ' ' Moreover, Con- 
 gress, down to the present moment, has not set aside 
 these governments, but the "affairs of those States are 
 now administered through the machinery of the provi- 
 sional governments, under the supervision of the mili- 
 tary" by the sufferance of Congress. In short, even 
 now the impeaching body is in some sort an accomplice 
 of the President in his "colossal usurpation." 
 
 The central charge being annihilated, the subsidiary 
 charges necessarily fell with it. ' ' If the greater be not 
 a crime," as the report states, "the less cannot rise to 
 that importance. ' ' But the industrious chairman, nev- 
 ertheless, took the pains to go over them and one by one 
 give them their quietus. The first— restoration of prop- 
 erty to the rebels— was disposed of on these grounds: 
 1. If there was any crime about the matter, the Secre- 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 305 
 
 tary of War and the Quartermaster-General who, accord- 
 ing to the testimony of Stanton himself, were the princi- 
 pal actors, were the criminals and not the President who, 
 as far as appears, "did not give his personal attention 
 to the subject to any considerable extent, except as re- 
 lates to the railroads of Tennessee." 2. According to 
 the opinion of Attorney-General Speed, a corporation 
 cannot be guilty of treason and its property is not, 
 therefore, subject to the confiscation acts. 3. The con- 
 fiscation acts were war measures, and both Attorney- 
 Generals Speed and Stanbery advised the President that 
 the war being over it was not proper to continue them 
 in force. 4. The Amnesty Proclamation carried with 
 it a restoration of property to the pardoned offender; 
 and this proclamation was issued in pursuance of an act 
 of Congress. The second charge, viz : the abuse of the 
 pardoning power, being very feebly sustained, is easily 
 overthrown. ' ' That the President has used the pardon- 
 ing power in a vast number of cases is a fact of public 
 notoriety. But this fact proves but one thing, namely, 
 that a great many persons in the United States had com- 
 mitted crimes. ' ' The case of the West Virginia soldiers 
 is detailed at length; it appearing that their desertion 
 amounted to this— having got lost in the mountains they 
 were absent from roll-call, but returned to their regi- 
 ments as soon as it was possible, and served thereafter 
 throughout the war. In order to show how a bulky 
 charge may shrivel up into nothing beneath the breath 
 of investigation, it may not be considered a digression 
 to dwell for a moment on the pardon of one George W. 
 Gayle. In December, 1864, there appeared in the Selma 
 20 
 
306 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Despatch, a newspaper published in Alabama, an anony- 
 mous advertisement headed : "A million dollars wanted 
 to have peace by the first of March"; in which it was 
 offered for a million dollars furnished by the Southern 
 Confederacy "to cause the lives of Abraham Lincoln, 
 William H. Seward and Andrew Johnson to be taken" 
 by that day; $50,000 to be paid in advance, $1,000 
 whereof the advertiser promised to contribute. Before 
 the assassination of President Lincoln, no attention was 
 paid to this ridiculous card, but on the happening of 
 that tragic event it suddenly assumed a terrible signifi- 
 cance. The bloody offer figured largely before the mili- 
 tary commission that tried the accused assassins as one 
 of the connecting links between Booth and the leaders 
 of the South. It being speedily discovered that Gayle 
 was the guilty author, he was put under arrest and in- 
 dicted for conspiracy. When the impeachment investi- 
 gators lit upon the fact that this "miscreant" had been 
 pardoned by one of the men he had proposed to assas- 
 sinate, hands were raised in speechless horror and the 
 crazy suspicion that Andrew Johnson might have con- 
 nived at his own assassination flamed up afresh. The 
 cold facts, however, put a rude extinguisher upon these 
 lurid imaginings. In September, 1866, Gayle petitioned 
 for his pardon; the only reason why he was excluded 
 from the general amnesty being that he was in military 
 custody at the time that the proclamation was issued. 
 It appeared that he was by profession a lawyer, that he 
 was old and feeble, with a wife and three daughters de- 
 pendent on him for support; that he had sympathized 
 with and aided the rebellion but not in the field ; that he 
 
DEFEAT OP THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 307 
 
 was a harmless and inoffensive man utterly incapable of 
 doing a personal injury to anybody, and at the time of 
 the advertisement he could not possibly have raised one 
 hundred dollars for the purpose indicated or for any 
 other ; that the advertisement was a ' ' mere canard, ' ' in- 
 serted for amusement, and Gayle was under the influ- 
 ence of liquor when he wrote it. His pardon was recom- 
 mended by the officers and soldiers, late of the federal 
 army, stationed in Dallas county, Alabama ; by the Hart- 
 will Chapter of Free Masons at Cahaba, Alabama; by 
 the governor and every member of the Senate and House 
 of Eepresentatives of the state ; and by the judges and 
 principal members of the bar of Alabama ; was approved 
 by Stanbery on these papers, and granted by the Presi- 
 dent on the twenty-seventh day of April, 1867. So com- 
 plete was the justification, that the pardon is not even 
 alluded to in the majority report; yet this foolish piece 
 of drunken bravado is still, sometimes, gravely cited 
 even at this day as a portentous proof of the wide extent 
 of the assassination plot.* 
 
 The third charge — the non-execution of the laws for 
 the punishment of rebels— the minority report does not 
 deign to notice. The fourth— appointments and remov- 
 als for political reasons— is answered by an appeal to 
 the practice of former administrations. "Did not the 
 Republican party continue the practice? and is it now 
 first discovered to be a crime?" As to the neglect to 
 send in nominations to the Senate, the minority say: 
 "the evidence does not support the charge." As to the 
 
 * Imp. Inv., pp. 564 et seq. " The Assassination of Lincoln," by 
 Gen. T. M. Harris, a member of the commission, pp. 149, 150. 
 
308 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 appointment of persons in the South who could not take 
 the test oath, the testimony of the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury shows that none was appointed who had instigated 
 or been active in the rebellion, or who could be consid- 
 ered in any way responsible for, or favourable to, it. 
 Failing to find competent persons who could take the 
 oath literally, the administration availed itself of those 
 persons who had been substantially loyal; trusting to 
 Congress for indemnification. Fifth— as to the charge 
 of abusing the veto power, the chairman contents him- 
 self with a review of the Colorado case, pointing out that 
 that veto had not yet been overridden, and in that sense 
 may be considered approved by the Congress itself. 
 Whether the President offered to approve the bill if the 
 senators-elect would promise to support his administra- 
 tion or not is immaterial, as the bargain, even if it could 
 be called corrupt, was not made. The sixth and last 
 charge, viz : interference in elections, he remarks, is com- 
 prehended under some one or more of the foregoing and 
 needs no further notice. The Republican minority only 
 broke the force of their conclusion by swerving aside to 
 aver that, while ' ' the case fails upon the law and the tes- 
 timony, from a political stand-point it is a success" and 
 to subjoin a censure upon the President for "betraying 
 the confidence" of "those who placed him in power" 
 and joining "hands with their enemies." 
 
 The discussion of the several reports having been post- 
 poned until the third day of the regular session, the two 
 Houses had nothing important to do; but, still, they 
 would not adjourn without day for fear of a "recess"— 
 a term which was understood to signify the interval 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 309 
 
 between the end of one regular session and the begin- 
 ning of another, during which the President might fill 
 vacancies with persons whose commissions need not ex- 
 pire until the end of the next session ; and, accordingly, 
 they adjourned to the day and hour the regular session 
 commenced— Monday, the second day of December, at 
 twelve, noon. The annual message of the President 
 plainly showed that the pending impeachment had no 
 terrors for him. No former one breathed so glowing an 
 ardour for battle and so fixed a determination to per- 
 severe in the contest. In tone and manner dignified, and 
 respectful, in argument it took the exasperating form of 
 an exhortation to the Congress, in view of the disastrous 
 effects of its course hitherto, to hasten to retrace its 
 steps. " It is a source of profound regret, ' ' the President 
 remarks, "that in complying with the obligation im- 
 posed upon him by the Constitution ' to give to Congress 
 from time to time information of the state of the 
 Union, ' " he "is unable to communicate any definite 
 adjustment, satisfactory to the American people." 
 "On the contrary, candor compels me to declare that at 
 this time there is no Union, as our Fathers understood 
 the term and as they meant it to be understood by us. ' ' 
 He coolly recommends "the repeal of the acts of Con- 
 gress which place ten of the Southern States under the 
 domination of military masters." He affects to hope 
 that the majority may by "calm reflection" become sat- 
 isfied that those acts are in direct violation of the Con- 
 stitution, in which event he "does not doubt" but that 
 they "will immediately strike them from the statute 
 books." The President then warns Congress of the 
 
310 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tremendous scale of expenditure these measures necessi- 
 tate: 
 
 "It will require a strong standing army, and probably 
 more than two hundred million dollars per annum to main- 
 tain the supremacy of negro governments after they are 
 established. The sum thus thrown away would, if properly 
 used, form a sinking fund large enough to pay the whole 
 national debt in less than fifteen years. It is vain to hope 
 that negroes will maintain their ascendency themselves. 
 "Without military power they are wholly incapable of hold- 
 ing in subjection the white people of the South." 
 
 For the first time he broaches a question fraught with 
 peril: 
 
 "How far the duty of the President 'to preserve, protect, 
 and defend the Constitution * requires him to go in opposing 
 an unconstitutional act of Congress is a very serious and 
 important question. . . . Where an act has been passed 
 according to the forms of the Constitution by the supreme 
 legislative authority, . . . executive resistance to it, es- 
 pecially in times of high party excitement, would be likely 
 to produce violent collision between the respective adher- 
 ents of the two branches of the Government. This would 
 be simply civil war; and civil war must be resorted to as 
 the last remedy for the worst of evils. ' ' 
 
 "It is true that cases may occur in which the Executive 
 would be compelled to stand on his rights, and maintain 
 them, regardless of all consequences. If Congress should 
 pass an act which is not only in palpable conflict with the 
 Constitution, but will certainly, if carried out, produce 
 immediate and irreparable injury to the organic structure 
 of the Government, and if there be neither judicial remedy 
 
DEFEAT OP THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 311 
 
 for the wrong it inflicts nor power in the people to protect 
 themselves without the official aid of their elected defender ; 
 if, for instance, the legislative department should pass an 
 act even through all the forms of law to abolish a coordi- 
 nate department of the Government; in such a case the 
 President must take the high responsibilities of his office, 
 and save the life of the nation at all hazards."* 
 
 Such pungent utterances were too much for the tem- 
 per of the Senate. Drake proposed a joint resolution 
 of censure in which the rule was prescribed ' ' that when 
 any act had been passed by two-thirds of both Houses 
 over the President's objections, any subsequent official 
 denouncement of it by him as unconstitutional, in the 
 absence of any adjudication to that effect by the supreme 
 judiciary of the nation, is a departure from official 
 propriety, and a breach of official obligation, justifying 
 and calling for the distinct reprehension on the part of 
 the Senate and the House of Representatives"; and 
 made a speech upon it wherein he showed his own notion 
 of the courtesy due from one coordinate branch of the 
 government to another by calling the President "the 
 nightmare that crouches upon the heaving breast of this 
 nation, ' ' in one breath, and comparing him to a " double- 
 skinned rhinoceros," in the next. Howard denounced 
 the message as " a singular and most wanton libel upon 
 Congress and upon every member of that body who, by 
 vote or word, favoured the reconstruction acts." Sum- 
 ner, likewise, denounced it as a libel and more : "It is an 
 incendiary document, calculated to stimulate the rebel- 
 lion once more and to provoke civil war. ... It is evi- 
 
 * Message in App. to Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 1. 
 
312 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 dence of a direct coalition between the President and the 
 former rebels." And both senators opposed the cus- 
 tomary motion to print.* 
 
 In the House, the message stirred the moribund im- 
 peachment into some semblance of life. If only its de- 
 fiant tone would screw up the courage of the conserva- 
 tives to the sticking point, all might yet be well ! When 
 the matter came up in the House, Mr. Boutwell in an able 
 speech exhorted his fellow-members to adopt the only 
 expedient which he believed could make the party secure. 
 He warned them: "We have not seen the end of this 
 contest," and, referring to the message, prophecied 
 "civil war" and "fratricidal strife" if the arch-apos- 
 tate were not removed. But it was of no avail. Since 
 the selection of Wade as the heir-apparent, the move- 
 ment had flagged ; the adverse vote of the committee in 
 June and the differing reports of its Bepublican mem- 
 bers proclaimed its failure ; the elections gave it its 
 death-blow; and Wilson, in his reply to Mr. Boutwell, 
 simply announced its demise. He dismissed the latter 's 
 gloomy vaticinations in the following words: 
 
 "Are we to impeach the President for what he may do 
 in the future? Do our fears constitute in the President 
 high crimes and misdemeanors ? Are we to wander beyond 
 the record of this case and found our judgment of it on 
 the possibility of the future? This would lead us even 
 beyond the conscience of the House. 
 
 "Sir," he concluded, "we must be guided by some rule 
 in this grim proceeding— something more certain than an 
 impossibility to arraign the President for a specific crime. 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., App., pp. 101-2, 20. 
 
DEFEAT OF THE FIRST IMPEACHMENT 313 
 
 If we cannot arraign him for a specific crime, for what are 
 we to proceed against him? For the bundle of generalities 
 such as we have in. the volume of testimony reported by the 
 committee to the House? If we cannot state upon paper 
 a specific crime, how are we to carry this case to the Senate 
 for .trial?" 
 
 At the close of his speech, Wilson moved to lay the 
 whole matter on the table and he had the House with 
 him. But, after filibusterng for parts of two days, the 
 impeachers compelled the majority to consent that the 
 vote be taken directly upon the question to impeach or 
 not to impeach so as to expose backsliders ; whereupon 
 the resolution of the majority report was rejected by 
 yeas 57, nays 108, the majority against it being fifty- 
 one. Those voting yea were, of course, all Republicans. 
 Of those voting nay, forty-one were Democrats and 
 sixty-seven were Republicans, among whom were some 
 of the ablest men in the House — Banks, Bingham, 
 Blaine, Garfield, Dawes, Spalding, Washburne and Wil- 
 son.* 
 
 The primary and efficient cause of this failure, how- 
 ever, as was shown by the success of the final effort, was 
 not the indefiniteness of the accusation; not the flimsi- 
 ness of the testimony ; not any lingering sense of justice 
 or of judicial impartiality; but simply a well-founded 
 apprehension that, if the revolutionary remedy were 
 tried, it was doomed to disaster in the Senate. Garfield, 
 a few weeks later, disclosed the motive that governed 
 half, at least, of the Republican members who voted in 
 the negative, in confessing his own : 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 68. 
 
314 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "When the proposition for the impeachment of the Presi- 
 dent was before the House ... I voted against it not be- 
 cause I did not believe that his conduct deserved the severest 
 condemnation but because I did not believe the attempt 
 was likely to be successful. ... It seemed to me it would 
 be manifestly an interminable contest; that the President 
 would pass out of office by expiration of term before it 
 would be possible to conclude such a trial. And unwilling, 
 therefore, to divert the attention of Congress from its 
 legislative duties into a struggle of that sort, only to be 
 foiled at last, I thought it best to vote against them and 
 I did so."* 
 
 This state of mind of the neutrals was well-known to 
 the sturdy phalanx of Impeachers who, consequently, 
 notwithstanding their defeat, did not relinquish hope. 
 They haunted the vicinity of Stanton who sulked apart 
 in his enforced retirement. They counted it certain that, 
 should a sudden access of pugnacity overmaster the 
 President's wariness and furnish the technical occasion, 
 the timid would no longer hold back. "Give us a spe- 
 cific offence!" they cried: "no matter about its crim- 
 inality, only let it be specific ! ' ' 
 
 * 
 
 Five days after the impeachment was voted down in 
 the House, the President sent to the Senate his reasons 
 for the suspension of the Secretary of War. The paper 
 was a strong presentation of the case on his part, espe- 
 cially keen and cutting in its analysis of Stanton's two 
 insolent notes. The communication was referred to the 
 committee on Military Affairs composed of six radicals 
 
 * Qlole, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 1560. 
 
KEINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 315 
 
 and but one friend of the President (Doolittle) ; and to 
 Howard, one of the most uncompromising of the six, 
 was assigned the task of refuting the President's "rea- 
 sons ' ' and vindicating the loyalty of the suspended of- 
 ficer. The President, in the meantime, could not refrain 
 from indulging in a pleasure which he must have known 
 would exasperate his judges on the committee. In July 
 last, the House had passed votes of thanks to Sheridan, 
 Sickles and Pope — the military commanders most 
 inimical to the President. Now, the President sends in 
 an official copy of General Hancock's celebrated order, 
 and, after stating that ' ' the distinguished honor belongs 
 to him of being the first officer in high command south 
 of the Potomac since the close of the civil war who has 
 given utterance to these noble sentiments in the form of • 
 a military order," "respectfully suggests to Congress 
 that some public recognition of General Hancock's pa- 
 triotic conduct is due, if not to him, to the friends of 
 law and justice throughout the country. Of such an act 
 as his, at such a time, it is but fit that the dignity should 
 be vindicated and the virtue proclaimed, so that its value 
 as an example may not be lost to the nation."* But 
 resolutions of thanks to Hancock could get no hearing ; 
 and the Houses took the usual holiday recess in the midst 
 of the agitation caused by the call of the Republican 
 national convention to meet on the twentieth of May 
 next to nominate candidates for President and Vice 
 President. Grant was evidently the coming man; and 
 those radicals who were still disgruntled over his ap- 
 parent closeness to the administration were driven to 
 muttering among themselves the dubious name of Chase. 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 256. 
 
316 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 For some reason— it may be the alarming conduct of 
 Hancock during the recess, or the McCardle case involv- 
 ing the question of the constitutionality of the recon- 
 struction acts, over which the Supreme Court had just 
 affirmed its jurisdiction— the majority reassembled in a 
 sullen mood. The distinction between conservative and* 
 radical seemed to have been obliterated. Many mem- 
 bers openly regretted their votes against impeachment 
 and were ready to welcome any occasion to repair their 
 mistake. The House at once directed an inquiry into 
 the expediency of depriving the President of the power 
 to detail the military commanders and transferring it to 
 the General of the army, or of comprising the five dis- 
 tricts into one and subjecting the entire region to the 
 command of the General alone. A joint resolution of 
 thanks to Hancock being offered, Washburne— the early 
 friend and now thought to be the mouth-piece of Grant— 
 who all along opposed, and who voted against, impeach- 
 ment, disclosed his change of mind by offering as a sub- 
 stitute a resolution "utterly condemning the conduct of 
 Andrew Johnson acting President of the United States ' ' 
 in removing Sheridan, and thanking General Grant for 
 his letter of remonstrance against the removal and also 
 against the contemplated removal of Stanton ; the House 
 laid the one on the table and adopted the other in its 
 stead without delay.* 
 
 On Friday, the tenth day of January, 1868, the com- 
 mittee on Military Affairs (having adopted the report 
 on the suspension of the Secretary of "War as written by 
 Howard) laid it before the Senate. On every point it 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 331-332. 
 
EBINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 317 
 
 was favourable to the displaced official and adverse to his 
 chief. It inculcated the doctrine, in effect, that a Cabi- 
 net officer was no more the confidential servant of the 
 President than the confidential servant of the Congress ; 
 that the President ought not to be allowed the privilege 
 of suspending an officer so close to his person as the 
 Secretary of War merely because friendly relations or 
 even personal intercourse were no longer possible be- 
 tween them ; that insolence on the part of a subordinate 
 to his superior officer was not official misconduct; that 
 harmony in the councils of an executive who betrayed 
 his party was not at all desirable and that a loyal ally in 
 the official household of a traitorous President was an 
 ever-present help to a patriotic Congress. It defended 
 the Secretary in detail from the specific charge of sup- 
 pressing the New Orleans telegram on the eve of the riot. 
 On the other hand it expressly admitted that, at the time 
 of the veto of the Tenure-of -office bill, Stanton "thought 
 the act unconstitutional, ' ' at the same time coupling the 
 admission with words of praise that the Secretary 
 thought, also, it should be no less obeyed ; and there was 
 no express denial of the President's statement that Stan- 
 ton united with the other members of the Cabinet ap- 
 pointed by Lincoln in the presupposition that they were 
 not within the law. In fact, the report ignores the point 
 altogether, taking it for granted that the President made 
 no question upon it as if there was but one construction 
 possible. The Senate forewent the usual adjournment 
 until Monday so as to consider the subject on the mor- 
 row. Rumours that, in case of an adverse decision, the 
 President would throw the whole question into the 
 
318 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 courts were in circulation, and his adversaries were anx- 
 ious to balk him in any such purpose. His whole plan 
 of action, it should be remembered, depended upon the 
 understanding between him and Grant entered into in 
 the summer shortly after the suspension; and at this 
 critical moment, he was, no doubt, relying with implicit 
 confidence on the fulfilment of Grant's alternative prom- 
 ise—a promise which had been reiterated several times 
 since it was made and the fulfilment of which, one way 
 or the other, would leave him still master of the situa- 
 tion. General Grant, on the other hand, having in the 
 meanwhile subjected the Tenure-of-office act to a closer 
 reading, at length reached the conclusion, as he himself 
 states, that he ' ' could not without violation of law, refuse 
 to vacate the office of Secretary of War the moment Mr. 
 Stanton was reinstated by the Senate": a conclusion 
 which, if he had reached it at any time before, he had 
 not communicated to the President. As he says : 
 
 ' ' Learning on Saturday, the 11th instant that the Senate 
 had taken up the subject of Mr. Stanton's suspension, . . . 
 I went to the President for the sole purpose of making 
 this decision known and did so make it known. . . . The 
 President, however, . . . contended that he had suspended 
 Mr. Stanton under the authority given by the Constitution, 
 and that the same authority did not preclude him from 
 reporting, as an act of courtesy, his reasons for the sus- 
 pension to the Senate. That having appointed me under 
 the authority given by the Constitution, and not under any 
 act of Congress, I could not be governed by the act. I 
 stated that the law was binding upon me, constitutional or 
 not, until set aside by the proper tribunal. An hour or 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 319 
 
 more was consumed, each reiterating his views on this sub- 
 ject, until, getting late, the President said he would see 
 me again." 
 
 Having thus informed the President that he had 
 ''changed his mind," and that he could not conscien- 
 tiously participate in the plan to test the question in the 
 courts, Grant did not follow the other branch of the 
 alternative understanding and surrender his office into 
 the hands of the President. He insists there was, in fact, 
 no such alternative but, having informed the President 
 that he would not hold out against Stanton in aid of the 
 President, that he had fulfilled the whole extent of his 
 part of the understanding, even though the result left 
 him acting against the President and in aid of Stanton. 
 He denies that he ' ' promised to resign if he did not re- 
 sist the reinstatement"; but he admits, "to soften the 
 contradiction," that "the President might have under- 
 stood" him, in their first conversation, to have made 
 such a promise. That the President so understood is 
 perfectly plain, because, otherwise, he gained nothing 
 towards the accomplishment of his purpose by the con- 
 ditional understanding with his appointee, but was left 
 entirely at the mercy of that person's future caprices. 
 Even in this very interview, as appears in the version of 
 Grant himself, the President confined himself to com- 
 bating the scruples of his subordinate at fulfilling one 
 part of the understanding, not doubting, apparently, 
 that in the event of his not succeeding in this direction, 
 his conscientious appointee by discharging the other 
 part of the understanding would enable him to find a 
 more pliant instrument. 
 
320 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 A very different and, it must be owned, a much more 
 logical aspect is given to this interview by the President. 
 He states that after a free discussion of the provisions 
 of the Tenure-of -office act;— among other things the 
 General expressing his aversion to subjecting himself 
 to the penalties of fine and imprisonment, and the Presi- 
 dent replying that the act being clearly unconstitutional 
 its penalties were not to be feared and that he would 
 cheerfully assume them himself ;— Grant, as before in 
 their first conference, agreed that he "would either re- 
 turn the office to the President's possession in time to 
 enable him to appoint a successor before final action by 
 the Senate upon Mr. Stanton's suspension, or would 
 remain as its head, awaiting a decision of the question 
 by judicial proceeding"; and the interview ended with 
 the understanding that there was to be a further confer- 
 ence on Monday when Grant was to decide which course 
 he would take. Even from Grant 's own statement, it is 
 fairly inferable that the interview was indecisive, at 
 least, of any mutual conclusion, and that both parties 
 contemplated another meeting; although the General 
 denies that he specifically agreed to see the President 
 again on Monday.* 
 
 While this conversation was going on, the report of 
 the committee on the suspension was being considered 
 by the Senate in executive session. The Eepublican 
 senators, as if resolved to end the matter that day, sat 
 silent and left the discussion to the other side. But 
 Dixon 's physical weakness, evident while addressing his 
 
 * For Grant's letter see McPh. Recon., p. 283. For the President's, 
 see id., p. 284. 
 
EEINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 321 
 
 associates, forced them to consent at last to carry the 
 debate over until Monday. An ominous resolution intro- 
 duced on that day (the thirteenth) by Edmunds, before 
 going into secret session, to inquire concerning rules of 
 procedure in cases of impeachment and the suspension 
 of the officer impeached, showed that rumours were 
 abroad that the President meant to disregard an adverse 
 decision of the Senate, and suggests also the probability 
 that from some authoritative source the salient par- 
 ticulars of the Saturday interview between Grant and 1 
 the President had been communicated to the Eepublican 
 senators over Sunday. After adopting Edmunds' reso- 
 lution, the Senate hurried into executive session to finish 
 the pending business. Six hours more were spent in dis- 
 cussion, the majority, to a certain extent, abandoning 
 their policy of silence so far as to break forth into 
 eulogies of Stanton, in which it was noted Fessenden 
 was profuse. Then came the vote of non-concurrence— 
 thirty-five yeas, all Eepublicans, including Fessenden, 
 Fowler and Trumbull of the seven who subsequently 
 voted ' ' Not Guilty ' ' ; six nays, all Democrats or admin- 
 istration men. There being one vacancy out of fifty-four 
 senators (Thomas, of Maryland, kept out) there were 
 twelve votes lacking; five of the opposition and seven 
 of the majority. Of these seven, two (Henderson and 
 Van Winkle) were paired with two opposition senators 
 in favour of non-concurrence; three (Grimes, Sprague 
 and Yates) were absent; and one (Ross) did not vote. 
 The one remaining was Sherman ; and his predicament 
 must have been distressing.* The precise case he put 
 
 * Vote in McPherson Eecon., p. 262 (error as to Vickers). 
 21 * 
 
322 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 during the debate on the Tenure-of-office bill— the case 
 when a Cabinet officer attempts "to hold office a moment 
 beyond the time when he retains the entire confidence of 
 the President, "when" the personal relations of a Cabinet 
 officer and the President become unpleasant so that they 
 can have no social intercourse ' ' ; the very case, he said 
 he could not ' ' imagine, ' ' in which case, he declared, he 
 ' ' would not vote to retain him, " " would as soon think 
 of imposing upon the President a private secretary," 
 that "any gentleman fit to be a Cabinet minister who 
 receives an intimation from his chief that his longer con- 
 tinuance in that office was unpleasant to him would 
 necessarily resign" and "if he didn't would show that 
 he was unfit to be there" — this very case with un- 
 thought-of aggravation was now before him. In the face 
 of his own printed words, he could not for very shame 
 vote to disapprove the suspension and thus force Stanton 
 back upon his unwilling master; but still, it seems, he 
 could not muster up the boldness affirmatively to sustain 
 the President and, therefore, kept silent.* 
 
 On the day this vote was taken (Monday), General 
 Grant, whether he promised to or not, did not call on 
 the President to continue the unfinished conversation of 
 Saturday ; but in his stead sent General Sherman, who 
 had been engaged on Saturday evening with Reverdy 
 Johnson in devising some such adjustment of the com- 
 plication, to urge on the President the nomination of 
 Governor Cox of Ohio, as Secretary of War, "and thus 
 save all embarrassment." That night at about nine 
 o 'clock, the official notification of the action of the Senate 
 
 * Ch. II, supra, pp. 194-5. 
 
REINSTATEMENT OP STANTON 323 
 
 reached Stanton, Grant and the President. Tuesday 
 morning early (fourteenth) the Secretary of War ad 
 interim went to the "War Office building, entered his 
 room, "bolted one door on the inside, locked the other 
 on the outside, delivered the key to the Adjutant Gen- 
 eral" and walked over to his old quarters on the oppo- 
 site side of the street. Stanton must have been in the 
 building already,- for the acting Adjutant-General "then 
 went up-stairs ' ' and handed him the key, and he forth- 
 with marched into the vacant apartments, and sent a 
 curt message to the General of the Army that "he 
 wanted to see him."* Neither of these subordinates 
 showed the slightest regard for what might be the will 
 of their superior officer in this affair, or the slightest con- 
 sciousness that the President had any jurisdiction in the 
 premises. Stanton never ventured to attend a meeting 
 of the Cabinet, to enter the White House, or to show his 
 face to his offended chief. He did not think it necessary 
 even to notify the President that his assiduous counsellor 
 was at his service once more. Grant was more scrupu- 
 lous, and on the same morning sent to the President a 
 written notification that, on the receipt of the official 
 action of the Senate, his "functions as Secretary of War 
 ad interim ceased, "f The messenger who carried the 
 note returned with the verbal reply that the President 
 wanted to see his Secretary of War ad interim at the 
 regular Cabinet meeting to take place that day at noon. 
 
 * 1. Grant's letter, McPh. Recon., p. 283; cf. Johnson's, p. 285. 2. 
 Letter of O. H. Browning, Sec. Int., id., pp. 289-290; cf. Gen Sherman's 
 Mem. (4th ed., two vols, in one), Vol. 2, pp. 420-2, with Gorham's Life 
 of Stanton* Vol. 2, p. 428. 
 
 t McPh. Recon., p. 262. 
 
324 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 All were present except Stanbery when Grant entered 
 and took his accustomed seat. Andrew Johnson sat at 
 the head of the table. Beginning with the Secretary of 
 State, he proceeded with the customary call upon the 
 heads of the Departments in their order, and, reaching 
 the Department of War, inquired of Secretary Grant if 
 he had anything to present. Grant protested that he was 
 not in attendance as a Cabinet minister but in obedience 
 to the President's request; relating what he had done in 
 consequence of the Senate's action. The President 
 thereupon plied the General with the following ques- 
 tions: First, "Did you not agree shortly after your 
 appointment as Secretary of War ad interim either to 
 remain at the head of the War Department ,and abide 
 any judicial proceeding that might follow the non-con- 
 currence by the Senate in Mr. Stanton's suspension, or, 
 should you wish not to become involved in such a con- 
 troversy, to put me in the same position in respect to the 
 office as I occupied previous to your appointment, by 
 returning it to me in time to anticipate such action by the 
 Senate?" This Grant admitted. Second, "At our con- 
 ference on Saturday, when to avoid misunderstanding. I 
 requested you to state what you intended to do, did you 
 not refer to our former conversations, saying that from 
 them I understood your position and that your action 
 would be consistent with the understanding which had 
 been reached?" To this question Grant replied in the 
 affirmative. Third, "At the conclusion of our interview 
 on Saturday was it not understood that we were to have 
 another conference on Monday before final action by 
 the Senate?" To this question General Grant replied 
 
EEINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 325 
 
 that such was the understanding but that he did not sup- 
 pose the Senate would act so soon, and that on Monday 
 he had been engaged in a conference with General Sher- 
 man and many little matters and expected General Sher- 
 man to call on the President with regard to the affair of 
 the War Department, asking whether General Sherman 
 had not called that day.* The colloquy was "respectful 
 and courteous on both sides, ' 'f and the meeting seems to 
 have ended without altercation or ill-blood, the substance 
 of what was said appearing in print the next day. On 
 that day— Wednesday, the fifteenth — General Grant, in 
 company with General Sherman, had an interview with 
 the President during which Grant complained of the 
 report in the newspaper as doing him much injustice. 
 He, also, stated, either, as he himself says, that he 
 thought Stanton would resign, or, as the President says, 
 that he would urge Stanton to do so. On Saturday, the 
 eighteenth, General Sherman addressed a letter to the 
 President stating : 
 
 "At a conversation with the General (Grant) after our 
 interview, (of the 15th) wherein I offered to go with him 
 on Monday morning to Mr. Stanton and say that it was 
 our joint opinion he should resign, it was found impossible, 
 by reason of his going to Richmond and my going to An- 
 napolis. The General proposed this course. He will call 
 on you to-morrow and offer to go to Mr. Stanton to say 
 that for the good of the service of the country he ought to 
 resign — this on Sunday. On Monday I will call on you 
 and if you think it necessary I will do the same — call on 
 
 * Grant- Johnson cor., McPh. Recon., pp. 285-6. 
 t Seward's letter, id., p. 291. 
 
326 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Mr. Stanton and tell him he should resign. If he will not, 
 there will be time to contrive ulterior measures. In the 
 meantime it also happens that no necessity exists for pre- 
 cipitating matters." 
 
 On Sunday (nineteenth), accordingly, Grant did call 
 on the President and made the offer General Sherman 
 describes, and the President took this occasion to give 
 him verbal instructions to obey no order from Stanton 
 as Secretary of War unless he had information it was 
 issued by the President's directions. Grant then went 
 to Stanton to advise him he ought to resign but found 
 that ' ' any advice to him of that kind would be useless" ; 
 and on the next day he departed for Richmond. Up to 
 this date, there appears to have been no interruption of 
 the courteous relations subsisting between the President 
 and the General, notwithstanding the trickery of which 
 the President believed himself the victim, on the one 
 hand, or the "injustice" which the General complained 
 had been done him by the published colloquy in the Cabi- 
 net, on the other ;— an account which the President, find- 
 ing "substantially correct," submitted to four of the 
 five Cabinet ministers present who "concurred in its 
 general accuracy." Indeed, according to the recollec- 
 tion of General Schofield, then in command of the Vir- 
 ginia District, Grant, at the very time of this visit, said 
 to him that the conduct of Stanton had become intoler- 
 able and declared in emphatic terms his intention to de- 
 mand either the removal of Stanton or the acceptance 
 of his own resignation.* 
 
 * For interview of fifteenth, Johnson's letter in MePh. Eecon., at p. 
 286. Gen. Sherman's Mem. (ed. ut supra), Vol. 2, p. 423. For Gen. 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 327 
 
 Be this as it may, almost immediately after his return 
 from Richmond, he made the first unmistakably hostile 
 move against the President and that, too, manifestly in 
 concert with Stanton and Stanton's allies. On Friday 
 (twenty-fourth), he sent a letter, dated at Washington, 
 to the President requesting to have in writing the verbal 
 instructions to disregard the orders of Stanton, which 
 he had received the previous Sunday without objection 
 on that score; and, on the following Monday (twenty- 
 seventh), Spalding, a strong opponent of the recent im- 
 peachment, was put forward in the House to offer a 
 resolution directing the committee on reconstruction to 
 inquire "what combinations have been made or at- 
 tempted to be made to obstruct the due execution of the 
 laws"— a resolution in effect, as subsequently recognized, 
 "renewing the prosecution of the President with par- 
 ticular reference to his controversy with General Grant ' ' 
 —which was hurriedly passed under a suspension of the 
 rules.* On Tuesday (twenty-eighth) Grant addressed 
 a letter to the President that, for the first time in their 
 official intercourse, betrays an intention to affront. Re- 
 newing his request for written instructions and announc- 
 ing his purpose "till they are received" "to suspend 
 action" on the "verbal ones," he added: 
 
 Sherman's letter see id., pp. 423-4 (wrong date) ; cf. letter in Globe, 
 speech of Morgan of Ohio, p. 1555. For interview of nineteenth, see 
 Grant's request of January 24, 1868, McPh., id., p. 283, and his letter 
 in McPh. at p. 286. See Schofield's Forty-six Years in Army, p. 413. 
 See note to p. 272 supra. 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 784. Phelps of Md. speech in App., 
 p. 245. 
 
328 IMPEACHMENT OP PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 "I am compelled to ask these instructions in writing, in 
 consequence of the many and gross misrepresentations af- 
 fecting my personal honor, circulated through the press 
 for the last fortnight purporting to come from the Presi- 
 dent, of conversations which have occurred either with the 
 President privately in his office, or in Cabinet meeting. 
 What is written admits of no misunderstanding." 
 
 He then gives his version of the facts of the case as he 
 claims them to be, the differences between which and the 
 President's version we have already sufficiently indi- 
 cated. Eespecting the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday (the 
 fourteenth), he says, that "after hearing the President 
 through I stated our conversation substantially as given 
 in this letter. ... I nowise admitted the correctness of 
 the President's statement of our conversations." Of 
 this letter, the only notice the President took at the 
 moment was to return, next day, Grant 's note of the 
 twenty-fourth with the instructions called for in writing 
 indorsed in due official form on its back. In his acknowl- 
 edgement of its receipt (on the thirtieth), the General 
 bluntly declares : 
 
 "lam informed by the Secretary of War that he has not 
 received from the Executive any order or instructions 
 limiting or impairing his authority to issue orders to the 
 Army," and "while such authority is not countermanded 
 it will be satisfactory evidence to me that any orders issued 
 from the War Department are authorized by the Execu- 
 tive. ' '* 
 
 On the receipt of this notice, the President seems to 
 have given up all hope of retaining the General of the 
 
 * McPh., p. 284. 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 329 
 
 army any longer by his side. On Friday, the thirty-first, 
 he wrote out his version of the facts in reply to Grant's 
 of the Wednesday before, and sent it to that officer. 
 
 In epistolary controversy Johnson was able to unite 
 his dexterity in debate with his mastery of the pen, and 
 the combination was irresistible. The two letters which 
 constitute his share of the correspondence furnish a per- 
 fect example of the refutation of an adversary by an 
 adroit yet strictly fair exposition -of his own admissions. 
 In his first, the President makes a succinct and careful 
 statement of his own questions and Grant's answers at 
 the Cabinet meeting, which we have repeated substan- 
 tially in our account of that incident, and adds that the 
 statement had been read by the Cabinet ministers pres- 
 ent at the interview and ' ' they without exception agreed 
 to its accuracy." On the following Monday (February 
 3) the General sent in an angry rejoinder in which he 
 tells the President that his letter is "but a reiteration of 
 the many and gross misrepresentations" contained in 
 the newspapers, and reasserts the correctness of his own 
 version, "anything in yours in reply to the contrary 
 notwithstanding. ' ' In his indignation he betrayed what 
 he had come to believe was the real motive of his accept- 
 ance of office in the summer, which, if true, gave the 
 whole transaction the character of a conspiracy by Stan- 
 ton and himself to deceive the President. 
 
 "From our conversations, and my written protest of 
 August 1, 1867, against the removal of Mr. Stanton, you 
 must have known that my greatest objection to his removal 
 or suspension was the fear that some one would be ap- 
 pointed in his stead who would, by opposition to the laws 
 
330 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 relating to the restoration of the Southern States to their 
 proper relations to the government, embarrass the army in 
 the performance of duties especially imposed upon it by 
 these laws; and it was to prevent such an appointment that 
 I accepted the office of Secretary of War ad interim, and 
 not for the purpose of enabling you to get rid of Mr. Stan- 
 ton by withholding it from him in opposition to the law, or 
 not doing so myself, surrendering it to one who would, as 
 the statement and assumptions in your communication 
 plainly indicate was sought." 
 
 The close of the letter would indicate, on the contrary, 
 that the writer considered that he was the one imposed 
 upon. 
 
 "And now, Mr. President, when my honor as a soldier 
 and my integrity as a man have been so violently assailed, 
 pardon me for saying that I can but regard this whole 
 matter, from the beginning to the end, as an attempt to 
 involve me in the resistance of law, for which you hesi- 
 tated to assume the responsibility in orders, and thus to 
 destroy my character before the country." 
 
 That this letter was the subject of consultation with 
 Stanton and with Grant's more intimate political dis- 
 ciples is shown by what took place in the House while 
 it was on its way to the President. A resolution was 
 adopted requesting the Secretary of War to transmit 
 copies (1st) of all correspondence between him and the 
 Executive limiting his authority to issue orders; (2d) 
 of all correspondence between him and the General-in- 
 Chief on the same subject; and (3d) of all correspond- 
 ence which may have been furnished him between the 
 General-in-Chief and the President relating to the dis- 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 331 
 
 obeying by the General of any order of the War Depart- 
 ment; and tbe next day Stanton sent to the House the 
 correspondence between the General and the President 
 from and including Grant's note of the twenty-fourth to 
 and including the letter, extracts from which have just 
 been given, with the information that the copies trans- 
 mitted had been furnished him by General Grant ; and, 
 concerning the other correspondence called for, stating : 
 
 "I have had no correspondence with the President since 
 the 12th of August last. After the action of the Senate 
 on his alleged reasons for my suspension from the office of 
 Secretary of War, I resumed the duties of that office as 
 required by the act of Congress, and have continued to 
 discharge them without any personal or written communi- 
 cation with the President. No orders have been issued 
 from this Department in the name of the President, with 
 my knowledge, and I have received no orders from him"; 
 
 and the papers were forthwith sent to the committee on 
 reconstruction.* 
 
 In this correspondence was there not to be found a 
 specific offence expressly declared to be a high misde- 
 meanour? Did it not prove a violation of the Tenure act? 
 Did it not establish the existence of a conspiracy to pre- 
 vent the reinstatement of Stanton? And, surely, there 
 was the Conspiracy act of 1861 which made it a high 
 crime for two or more persons to conspire to obstruct the 
 execution of any law! Over these questions, the recon- 
 struction committee held high debate, and on Saturday 
 (eighth) appointed a sub-committee to take the testi- 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40tft Cong., pp. 936, 977. 
 
332 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 mony of General Grant and the newspaper reporters. 
 On Monday (tenth) Stevens applied to the House for an 
 order to have the testimony taken on the late impeach- 
 ment investigation handed over to his own committee, 
 so that some of the former charges might be woven 
 into the present proceeding. Brooks, one of the two 
 Democrats on the latter committee, apparently aware 
 that another letter from the President had gone to its 
 destination that morning, prevailed on the House to add 
 a call on the President ' ' for any further correspondence 
 he may have had with General IT. S. Grant " ; * and the 
 next day the President sent to the House a copy of his 
 last epistle, which, it may as well be conceded, settled the 
 matter in controversy. The entire letter should be read,f 
 but we have room for that portion only which reviews 
 the disclosure of the hidden motive for accepting the 
 post of Secretary of War ad interim which Grant had 
 allowed to escape him. 
 
 "First of all, you here admit that from the very begin- 
 ning of what you term 'the whole history' of your, connec- 
 tion with Mr. Stanton's suspension, you intended to cir- 
 cumvent the President. This was in your mind at the time 
 of your acceptance. It was not, then, in obedience to your 
 superior, as has heretofore been supposed, that you assumed 
 the duties of the office. You knew it was the President's 
 purpose to prevent Mr. Stanton from resuming the office 
 of Secretary of War, and you intended to defeat that pur- 
 pose. You accepted the office, not in the interest of the 
 President, but of Mr. Stanton. If this purpose, so enter- 
 
 * Glole, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 1087. 
 -f- See McPh. Recon., pp. 287, 288. 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 333 
 
 tained by you, had been confined to yourself— if, when ac- 
 cepting the office you had done so with a mental reserva- 
 tion to frustrate the President— it would have been a tacit 
 deception. In the ethics of some persons such a course is 
 allowable. But you cannot stand even upon that question- 
 able ground. The 'history' of your connection with this 
 transaction, as written by yourself, places you in a different 
 predicament, and shows that you not only concealed your 
 design from the President, but induced him to suppose that 
 you would carry out his purpose to keep Mr. Stanton out 
 of office, by retaining it yourself after an attempted restora- 
 tion by the Senate, so as to require Mr. Stanton to establish 
 his right by judicial decision." 
 
 Quoting the passage of Grant's letter of the twenty- 
 eighth ult. where he admits he stated "Mr. Stanton 
 would have to appeal to the courts to reinstate him, ' ' the 
 President continues : 
 
 "Now, at that time, as you admit in your letter of the 
 3d instant, you held the office for the very object of defeat- 
 ing an appeal to the courts. In that letter you say that 
 in accepting the office one motive was to prevent the Presi- 
 dent from appointing some other person who would retain 
 possession, and thus make judicial proceedings necessary. 
 You knew the President was unwilling to trust the office 
 with anyone who would not, by holding it, compel Mr. 
 Stanton to resort to the courts. You perfectly understood 
 that in this interview 'sometime' after you accepted the 
 office, the President, not content with your silence, desired 
 an expression of your views, and you answered him that 
 Mr. Stanton 'would have to appeal to the courts.' If the 
 President had reposed confidence Before he knew your 
 
334 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 views, and that confidence had heen violated, it might have 
 been said he made a mistake ; but a violation of confidence 
 after that conversation was no mistake of his, nor of yours. 
 It is the fact only that needs to be stated, that at the date 
 of this conversation you did not intend to hold the office 
 for the purpose of forcing Mr. Stanton into court, but did 
 hold it then, and had accepted it, to prevent that course 
 from being carried out. In other words you said to the 
 President, 'that is the proper course'; and you said to your- 
 self, 'I have accepted this office, and now hold it, to defeat 
 that course.' The excuse you make in a subsequent para- 
 graph of that letter, of the 26th ultimo, that afterwards you 
 changed your views as to what would be the proper course, 
 has nothing to do with the point now under consideration. 
 The point is, that before you changed your views you had 
 secretly determined to do the very thing which at last you 
 did — surrender the office to Mr. Stanton. Tou may have 
 changed your views as to the law, but you certainly did not 
 change your, views as to the course you had marked out for 
 yourself from the beginning." 
 
 Enclosed with this letter were letters of the five Cabi- 
 net ministers present during the interrogation of Gen- 
 eral Grant by the President at the Cabinet meeting of 
 January fourteenth. Welles, McCulloch, Eandall and 
 Browning were direct and explicit in their confirma- 
 tion of the accuracy of the President's version. Seward, 
 in his anxiety to do no injustice to the illustrious sol- 
 dier, allowed the inference that General Grant 's answers 
 may have been only "indirect and circumstantial though 
 not evasive, ' ' but the general effect of his letter was the 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 335 
 
 same.* In Grant's rejoinder, sent to the House later 
 on the same day, he makes no attempt to meet the 
 damaging inferences the President draws from his own 
 admission but puts in a technical defence against the 
 charge of disobedience of instructions, which bears clear 
 traces of Stanton's hand.f In truth, it was his col- 
 loguing with Stanton, whose traits of person and charac- 
 ter he did not like, whose pertinacity in holding on to 
 office he in reality despised, and whose tone of official 
 condescension filled him with disgust, that landed the 
 unsophisticated soldier in his present predicament. 
 
 These two letters followed the others to the recon- 
 struction committee and put that body into something of 
 a quandary. Stevens, its chairman, Boutwell, Farns- 
 worth and Paine were among the fifty-seven who voted 
 for impeachment before and, therefore, might be ex- 
 pected to support impeachment now. Farnsworth after- 
 wards told the House : "In my opinion then and in my 
 opinion now there was enough in that (correspondence) 
 to justify the impeachment of the President. ' ' J Mr. 
 Boutwell, also, said : ' ' Upon the record, the correspond- 
 ence between the President and General Grant, it is con- 
 clusively shown . . . that he intended by a contrivance, 
 by a fraud, by a conspiracy, by a usurpation, in defiance 
 of law, to oust Mr. Stanton from office. "§ Stevens was 
 known to be ready at any and all times to impeach 
 Andrew Johnson on general principles of party policy. 
 
 * See Letters in McPh. Recon., pp. 289-91. 
 •fid., p. 292. 
 
 t Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 1344. 
 I Globe, App., pp. 161. 
 
336 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The three other Republican members, judging from 
 their subsequent utterances, must have been of the same 
 opinion. Bingham, in his argument before the Senate 
 on the trial, insisted that Johnson's letter of February 
 the tenth was positive proof of guilt of having con- 
 trived to defeat and prevent the execution of the law.* 
 Beaman told the House: The President "attempts to 
 draw General Grant into a conspiracy to violate the 
 law."f Hulburd called it "no less than a mean at- 
 tempt to inveigle into violation of law an honest and 
 unsophisticated soldier. "J Yet, notwithstanding this 
 unanimity of opinion among the majority, the committee 
 on Thursday (February 13), on motion of Bingham 
 himself, laid the resolution to impeach on the table by 
 a vote of six (including the two Democrats) to three. 
 The truth is that Johnson 's last letter killed this second 
 impeachment project. How could they impeach him of 
 conspiracy without implicating his co-conspirator? How 
 would the testimony of the five Cabinet ministers sound 
 before the High Court of Impeachment? Stevens 
 stormed at such time-serving cowardice. The old 
 veteran who, in truth, did not relish the coming nomi- 
 nation of 'Andy's 7 Secretary of "War ad interim, rather 
 rejoiced at the plight in which the correspondence placed 
 Grant. 
 
 "A daring and bold conspiracy," he told the House 
 afterwards, "was attempted" by the President "to 
 induce the General of the Army to aid him in defeating 
 
 * Trial, Vol. 2, p. 462. 
 
 t Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., App., p. 177. 
 
 \ Id., p. 266. 
 
REINSTATEMENT OF STANTON 337 
 
 the operation of this law ; . . . and he says that the gen- 
 eral did enter into such conspiracy to aid him in ob- 
 structing the return of the rejected secretary notwith- 
 standing the Senate might decide in his favour. This is 
 denied by the General, and a question of veracity, rather 
 angrily discussed, has arisen between them. Those gen- 
 tlemen seem to consider that that question is one of im- 
 portance to the public. In this they are mistaken. ' ' 
 
 "Which is the man of truth and which the man of false- 
 hood is of no more public importance than if it arose be- 
 tween two obscure individuals. If Andrew Johnson tells 
 the truth then he is guilty of a high official misdemeanor, 
 for he avows his effort to prevent the execution of the law. 
 If the General commanding tells the truth then the Presi- 
 dent is guilty of a high misdemeanor, for he declares the 
 same thing of the President, denying only his own com- 
 plicity. No argument can make this point plainer than 
 the statement of the culprit. If he and the General told 
 the truth then he committed willful perjury by refusing to 
 take care that the laws should be duly executed."* 
 
 But his stormings were of no avail. The politicians 
 were victorious, and the second project of impeachment 
 followed the first into the limbo of the still-born. 
 
 Before leaving the Johnson-Grant correspondence we 
 ought to observe that a perusal of these letters will 
 satisfy any candid p'erson that the claim of the Presi- 
 dent's accusers, that, in the suspension of Stanton and 
 the submission of the reasons to the Senate, the President 
 was acting from the beginning under the Tenure-of -office 
 
 * Qlole, 2d Ses9. 40th Cong., p. 1399. 
 22 
 
338 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 act and was therefore estopped from questioning either 
 its validity or the fact that the Secretary of War was 
 within its terms, is without foundation. As early as the 
 seventh of February, senator Buckalew speaking of the 
 correspondence said: 
 
 "I understand from it that the President asserts that he 
 had power to suspend Mr. Stanton independent entirely of 
 the act of Congress commonly called the tenure of office 
 law; and that in exercising his power of suspension he did 
 not necessarily proceed under the provisions of that law; 
 that, although this act was done by him under his general 
 constitutional power, there was no impropriety in submit- 
 ting his reasons for the act to the Senate of the United 
 States for their consideration."* 
 
 * Glole, 2d Seas. 40th Cong., p. 1035. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The Impeachment of the President 
 
 In the meanwhile, the President was making prepara- 
 tions to drive the intruder out of the War-Office. It may 
 be that he would have resented the clandestine reentry 
 by instant forcible dispossession, had he not been dis- 
 suaded from "precipitating matters" (to quote from the 
 letter of General Sherman already given*), by the assur- 
 ances of that officer and General Grant that they would 
 tell Stanton he ought to resign. It did not take long, 
 however, to convince him that there was no hope in that 
 direction, and, further, that Grant, so far from stand- 
 ing by him, was in league with the clinging official 
 who disregarded the advice given him as though it was 
 a part of the game. From that moment he delayed no 
 longer. He knew that the House of Representatives was 
 watching for some misstep on his part to impeach him. 
 He knew that a large majority of the senators were eager 
 to condemn him, and that the General was ready with the 
 army at his back to carry the judgment into execution. 
 But his mind was made up that there was no longer room 
 in one administration for Andrew Johnson, President, 
 and Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. 
 
 Treading among many pitfalls, he recognized the 
 necessity of the utmost circumspection. The customary 
 
 * Page 325, supra. 
 
 (339) 
 
340 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 method of removing a Cabinet officer while the Senate 
 was in session consisted in sending a nomination to that 
 body, the confirmation of which ipso facto worked the 
 removal. But, in the present imbroglio, this method was 
 impracticable because the Senate would consent to no 
 appointment to displace Stanton. The President, there- 
 fore, fell back upon the exclusive power of removal 
 which he believed was vested in him by the Constitution 
 and to which the circumstance of the Senate being in 
 session, though a restraint on the power of appointment, 
 had no relevancy. He would remove Stanton, and the 
 vacancy thus made he would fill under the act of Con- 
 gress of February, 1795, by a letter of authority to some 
 person to perform the duties of the office until a regular 
 appointment could be made. Having settled upon the 
 modus, he cast about for an army officer with independ- 
 ence of spirit enough to disregard the example of Grant 
 and courage enough to beard the leonine War-Minister 
 in his den. On Saturday afternoon, the twenty-fifth day 
 of January, he sent for General Sherman and tendered 
 him the place. The General made no final answer at the 
 interview itself, but on the following Monday sent a 
 letter inclosing one from Thomas Ewing, whom he 
 promised the President to consult, advising him "to 
 keep clear of political complications. ' ' On the thirtieth 
 (Thursday) the President sent for Sherman again and 
 told him that the relations between himself and Stanton 
 and between Stanton and the other members of the Cabi- 
 net were such that he could not execute the office of Pres- 
 ident of the United States without making provision ad 
 interim for the War-Office ; that he had that right under 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 341 
 
 the law, and his purpose was to have the office admin- 
 istered in the interest of the army and the country ; and 
 he offered it to Sherman with that view. Sherman asked 
 him why the lawyers could not make a case ; expressing 
 his aversion to being brought into any legal controversy. 
 The President replied that it was found impossible— a 
 case could not be made up— adding quickly: "If we 
 could bring the case into the court it would not stand 
 half an hour." The General hesitated: If Stanton 
 would simply retire, although it was against his inter- 
 ests and his wishes, personal and official, he might be 
 willing to administer the office ad interim. The Presi- 
 dent thought him about to yield; but Sherman pressed 
 the point: "Suppose Mr. Stanton does not yield?" 
 ' ' Oh, ' ' said Johnson, ' ' there is no need to consider that 
 question; you present the order and he will simply go 
 away"; Sherman still doubting, the President added, "I 
 know him better than you do. He is cowardly. ' ' Sher- 
 man begged for time to reflect upon the subject ; the next 
 day (Friday, the thirty-first) he, by letter, finally de- 
 clined the office for reasons "mostly personal in their 
 nature ' ' ; and, on the fourth of February, in the midst of 
 the furore raised by the Johnson-Grant correspondence, 
 went "West to his department.* 
 
 The brother of senator Sherman evidently was not the 
 man to take the post Grant had deserted, and fly in the 
 face of the Eepublican party by dispossessing the rein- 
 stated Stanton. Still the President did not even yet re- 
 linquish the hope of securing the services of so power- 
 
 * Gen. Sherman's Mem. ( 4th ed. ) , Vol. 2, pp. 425-6. Testimony on 
 Trial, Vol. 1, pp. 483-5, 521, 529. 
 
342 IMPEACHMENT OF PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ful an ally, if not to force Stanton out, practically to 
 supersede both him and Grant by elevating the Lieu- 
 tenant-General to a position on a level in authority with 
 theirs. On the twelfth day of February, in compliance 
 with the request of the President, a general order was 
 issued by command of the General of the Army ' ' creat- 
 ing a military division to be called the military division 
 of the Atlantic to be composed of the departments of the 
 Lakes, of the East and of Washington, and to be com- 
 manded by Lieutenant-General William T. Sherman, 
 with his headquarters at Washington" ; and, on the suc- 
 ceeding day, the President sent to the Senate a nomina- 
 tion of the officer designated to command the new divis- 
 ion to be brevet general. Sherman telegraphed to his 
 brother in the Senate to oppose confirmation and threat- 
 ened to resign if forced to come to Washington. The 
 telegram made confirmation impossible and the threat 
 resulted in an order relieving him of the command of the 
 new division. The President, then, turned to General 
 Thomas; again astonishing the Senate by nominating 
 that officer first as brevet lieutenant-general and then as 
 brevet general. But the hero of Nashville battle shrank 
 with unconquerable aversion from political controver- 
 sies, and, in a telegram to the President of the Senate, 
 earnestly requested that body not to confirm. The only 
 vantage-ground the President gained by these ma- 
 neuvres, beside the state of alarm in which they threw 
 his adversaries, was the new military division which still 
 remained, though without a commander, and which 
 eventually (on March 28) he filled up by putting Han- 
 cock at its head; that officer's differences with Grant 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 343 
 
 having made it necessary to relieve hirn from the com- 
 mand of the fifth military district.* 
 
 Despairing of help from Sherman, the President at 
 length hit upon Lorenzo Thomas, the titular Adjutant- 
 General. The selection was unfortunate in some re- 
 spects, but, on the whole, in the prevailing dearth of fit 
 instruments for the President's purpose, the best that 
 could have been made. A native of Delaware, sixty- 
 three years of age, a veteran of forty years' service, 
 Thomas, it might be said by his critics, lagged super- 
 fluous on the stage. A gentleman of the old school, 
 scrupulously polite, convivial in his habits and some- 
 what garrulous in conversation, he was, nevertheless, by 
 nature and training, the embodiment of honour and the 
 pink of chivalry. Having been appointed Adjutant- 
 General in 1861, in March, 1863, he was sent to the Mis- 
 sissippi river on inspection duty and to organize the 
 negroes into regiments. After the close of the war, he 
 was employed on inspection duty throughout the coun- 
 try; the work of the office devolving upon the senior 
 assistant Adjutant-General, whom Stanton preferred to 
 have near him. In fact, Grant, if not Stanton himself, 
 had recommended his displacement, but the President 
 refused to set him aside. Since the beginning of this 
 year, he had been sauntering about the capital, finishing, 
 betweenwhiles, his inspection report of the national 
 cemeteries, and anxious to resume his office duties. On 
 Thursday, the thirteenth day of February, the President 
 sent for him and gave him a note addressed to Grant 
 requiring his restoration which, accordingly, took place 
 
 *McPh. Recon., p. 346. Sherman's Mem., id., p. 432. 
 
344 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the next day ; and he signalized his reentrance into his 
 old office by summoning before him the heads of the dif- 
 ferent bureaus with their clerks, room by room, and 
 delivering a formal address. to each group, telling them 
 that the rules governing attendance and office hours, 
 which, it appears, during the interregnum had been too 
 inflexible, should now be so far relaxed as to be tolerable 
 to persons of gentlemanly habits. On the eighteenth 
 (Tuesday), the President disturbed him in the midst of 
 such congenial occupation by sending for him to say that 
 he was thinking of making him Secretary of War. 
 Obedience to orders being the first article in the old sol- 
 dier 7 s creed, he signified his readiness to accept, al- 
 though, perhaps, somewhat astounded by the prospect of 
 so unlooked-for a promotion. 
 
 On Friday, the twenty-first day of February, at about 
 noon, the President summoned his restored Adjutant- 
 General to the White House and on his arrival handed 
 him two papers which he had already prepared— one, a 
 letter addressed to Thomas himself authorizing him to 
 discharge the duties of Secretary of War ad interim ; the 
 other, an order addressed to Edwin M. Stanton removing 
 him from office and directing him to deliver the records, 
 papers and property to Lorenzo Thomas appointed 
 Secretary ad interim— telling Thomas to go and deliver 
 the latter to the person addressed. Thomas undertook 
 the embarrassing mission, not only without demur, but 
 with a sprightliness indicative of an expectation of 
 enjoyment in the coming encounter. The President ex- 
 pressing his determination to uphold the Constitution 
 and the laws and requiring his subordinate to do the 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 345 
 
 same, Lorenzo Thomas was the last man to say him nay. 
 Taking the two papers he walked over to the War De- 
 partment building, mounted the stairs, taking one of the 
 assistant adjutant-generals with him, strode into the 
 office where Stanton was embayed and handed him the 
 order of removal. The War-Minister was evidently 
 taken unawares. Reading the President's order he was 
 perceptibly flurried, his first impulse being to gain time. 
 With unwonted meekness he inquired: "Do you wish 
 me to vacate the office at once, or will you give me time 
 to remove my private property?" "At your pleasure," 
 was the reply. General Grant coming in, the letter of 
 authority was shown him and Stanton asked to be fur- 
 nished with a copy. Eager to oblige, Thomas goes out 
 and down to his late office, has a copy made, certifies to 
 it as Secretary of War ad interim— his first act in that 
 capacity — goes back upstairs and hands it to Stanton, 
 who by this time has so far recovered his self-possession 
 as to say: "I don't know whether I will obey your in- 
 structions or whether I will resist them ' ' ; and Thomas 
 leaves him to his meditations. 
 
 Walking back to the White House he informs the 
 President of what had passed, who jumped to the con- 
 clusion from what he heard that Stanton would make no 
 fight and that Thomas was virtually in. The only re- 
 mark he made was: "Very well, go and take charge of 
 the office. ' '* The regular Friday Cabinet meeting being 
 just about breaking up, he congratulates his ministers 
 on having at last got rid of their too adhesive colleague, 
 
 * Thomas' testimony on Trial, Vol. 1, p. 415 et seq.; Cross., 432-3; 
 Clerks, 215. 
 
346 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and lie sent a message immediately to the Senate inform- 
 ing that body of the removal and the filling of the 
 vacancy. The likelihood of his impeachment was before 
 his eyes, but only because he believed that the removal 
 was an actuality and not a mere removal on paper. As 
 it turned out, however, as soon as Thomas got out of the 
 building, Stanton, with no thought of yielding, started 
 to his feet and hoisted the signal for succour. As quickly 
 as he could write and despatch them messages were on 
 the way to the President pro tern, of the Senate and to 
 the Speaker of the House stating that General Thomas 
 had just delivered to him a copy of the enclosed order 
 which they were requested to communicate to their re- 
 spective Houses. The alarmed secretary sent the news, 
 also, to senators Fessenden, Howe and Conness. 
 
 The momentous tidings threw the House into a twitter. 
 Members gathered in knots here and there or ran singly 
 to and fro. The committee of the whole made an effort 
 to continue the business in hand, but could not keep it up. 
 It rose, the House resumed, the committee sat again and 
 then rose again. The strain was too great. Butler 
 broke the spell by moving to rescind the order devoting 
 to-morrow's session — Washington's birthday— to de- 
 bate only, on the ground that sterner business was likely 
 to be necessary. Covode followed with a resolution im- 
 peaching Andrew Johnson for high crimes and misde- 
 meanours, which was referred to the committee on recon- 
 struction whither Stanton's message had already been 
 sent, and, within two hours of the reception of the start- 
 ling tidings, the House, having initiated the counter- 
 movement, adjourned;— many of its members streaming 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 347 
 
 up the avenue to solace the martyr of their party clinging 
 to his post of duty.* 
 
 In the Senate the same excitement reigned. The mes- 
 sage of the President reached there about the same hour 
 as Stanton's call for help. An important debate on the 
 reconstruction measures was interrupted, the senators 
 hurried into executive session, and seven hours elapsed 
 before they emerged from under the veil of secrecy, f 
 The more radical senators— and they constituted a ma- 
 jority of the Republicans — were fully as prone to pre-, 
 cipitate action as the majority of the House. They even 
 went so far that very afternoon as to send an informal 
 committee to wait upon Stanton and advise him to stand 
 firm. Others sent letters or telegrams imploring him to 
 hold fast until they could come to his rescue. Sumner 
 despatched a paper to him inscribed with the single word 
 "Stick. "% A few Republican senators, by reason of 
 their recorded opinions at the time of the passage of the 
 Tenure-of-ofiice act, found themselves in an awkward 
 predicament. The question presented by the removal 
 wore a very different aspect from the question presented 
 by the suspension. The suspension was made as if under 
 the Tenure act and the reasons of the President were 
 submitted to the Senate for its action. A vote to dis- 
 approve committed a senator to the opinion that Stanton 
 was within the act no further than the submission of the 
 reasons for the suspension to the Senate committed the 
 President. A removal, on the other hand, was either 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 1326-8, 1330. 
 
 ^ Id., p. 1316. 
 
 X Id., p. 1610, Hubbard's Speech. 
 
348 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 outside the act or a violation of it, and brought the alter- 
 native directly before the members. Of the few senators 
 on the record Sherman was in the most hopeless case. 
 Publicly, upon the floor of the Senate, speaking as one of 
 the conference committee appointed on the disagreeing 
 votes of the two houses upon this subject, he had declared 
 with emphasis again and again that the Tenure-of-office 
 act was not intended to include and did not include the 
 Secretary of War. The majority found it necessary, 
 therefore, to accommodate the steps to be taken to the 
 feelings of their indiscreet or over-scrupulous brethren ; 
 for it was considered imperative that to prove an effec- 
 tive bracer to the House the condemnation of the Presi- 
 dent's rash deed must receive the two-thirds vote re- 
 quired to convict in cases of impeachment. The first 
 move in executive session was made by Edmunds, who 
 offered a resolution simply disapproving the action of 
 the President. Chandler moved to add the words "as a 
 violation of the rights of the Senate and unauthorized by 
 law. ' ' But this was disagreed to. Yates proposed to go 
 farther yet and roundly declare the act of the President 
 "simple resistance to law and revolutionary in charac- 
 ter" and "advise" Stanton "not to surrender the office 
 to any person whomsoever" ; but this proposal, too, was 
 voted down. Still, the majority could not rest satisfied 
 with an expression of disapproval merely. Such a half- 
 way measure brought no stimulus to the House, no en- 
 couragement to the besieged War-Minister. Wilson, 
 accordingly, moved a resolution which, if we may credit 
 the statement of senator Fowler made in a speech to the 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 349 
 
 Senate,* was drafted by a distinguished member of the 
 House, afterwards one of the managers on the trial of 
 the President, and so drafted as to meet every difficulty. 
 It declared "that under the Constitution and laws of the 
 United States, the President has no power to remove 
 the Secretary of War and designate any other person to 
 perform the duties of that office ad interim." To such a 
 declaration, senators committed to the opinion that Stan- 
 ton was not within the act could subscribe on the ground 
 either that the removal was in contravention of the Con- 
 stitution because made during the session and not by 
 means of a regular appointment, or that the designation 
 of a secretary ad interim while the Senate was in session 
 was without authority of law. In fact, Trumbull, as he 
 afterwards owned, voted for it on the latter ground be- 
 lieving at the time that the act of 1795 under which the 
 President claimed to have acted was repealed.f The 
 resolution received twenty-eight affirmative votes includ- 
 ing Eoss, Trumbull and Van Winkle who voted "not 
 guilty" on the trial. The nays were six, including 
 Edmunds, who must have voted in the negative solely on 
 account of a formal preference for his own resolution. 
 There were eighteen senators recorded as not voting; 
 among them Fessenden, who opposed the resolution in 
 the debate on the ground that Stanton was not within the 
 act, Howe and Grimes, who were of the same opinion, 
 Sherman, the most deeply committed of them all, and 
 Henderson and Fowler, who afterwards voted for ac- 
 quittal. Seven majority and five minority senators were 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 4509. 
 f Opinion, Vol. 3 of Trial, p. 326. 
 
350 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 absent. The real strength, therefore, of the majority on 
 this question was twenty-eight plus the seven radicals 
 absent and Edmunds, making thirty-six in all— one more 
 than two-thirds.* 
 
 At half -past nine o'clock at night the doors of the 
 Senate Chamber were reopened and messengers sped in 
 hot haste to the White House and to the residence of the 
 new Secretary ad interim to serve copies of the resolu- 
 tion. The President was easily found, but the lively 
 veteran was not caught until a late hour, when, after an 
 agitating search, he was found at a masquerade ball. In 
 the meantime his facile tongue had been making mis- 
 chief. In the afternoon he unbosomed himself to a news- 
 paper man, telling him that on Monday ( Saturday being 
 a holiday) he would demand possession of the War De- 
 partment and, if the demand was refused or resisted, he 
 would apply to the General-in-Chief for a force sufficient 
 for the purpose. That evening he reiterated his purpose 
 to the same reporter, only changing the day from Mon- 
 day to the next morning. To the delegate in Congress 
 from Dakota territory, who called on him in the evening 
 to find out what he meant to do, he also imparted the in- 
 formation that he intended to take possession the next 
 morning at ten o'clock, inviting his visitor to call and 
 see him in his new office. "Suppose Stanton resists?" 
 queries the delegate. ' ' I expect to meet force by force. ' ' 
 ' ' Suppose he bars the doors 1 ' ' pursues this seeker after 
 
 * McPh. Recon., pp. 262-3. (MeCreery and Viekers not yet seated.) 
 Senators Sumner and Williams in their respective opinions give the 
 vote 27 to 6, Trial, Vol. 3, pp. 261, 350. Senator Yates in his opinion, 
 29 to 6, id., p. 107. N. Y. Times of 22d, 29 to 6. See Speech of Rep. 
 Golladay in App. to Globe on p. 197. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 351 
 
 evidence. "I will break them down," was the hardy 
 response. These idle threats were instantly carried to 
 Stanton 's headquarters where they raised a most dispro- 
 portionate commotion. Stanton himself, since his inter- 
 view with Thomas, had not ventured to leave his rooms, 
 but kept up communication with the outside world by 
 means of messengers. To him there hurried his cronies 
 of the House and Senate and around him they remained, 
 ministering to the wants of their sentinel in the enemy 's 
 camp during the silent watches of the night. Eumours 
 of the blood-thirsty purpose of the over-valiant Thomas 
 pouring in fast upon them, at midnight the garrison re- 
 solve to invoke the protection of the law. They send 
 for Judge Cartter of the Supreme Court of the District ; 
 Stanton makes affidavit that he is Secretary of War ; that 
 Andrew Johnson has issued an order to remove him 
 from office and to appoint Lorenzo Thomas in his place ; 
 that such order is illegal and void and contrary to the 
 provisions of the Tenure-of-office act; that Lorenzo 
 Thomas delivered the order to the deponent, is now ex- 
 ercising the duties of the office and "gives out and 
 threatens that he will forcibly remove your deponent 
 from the building and apartments of the Secretary of 
 War" and "forcibly take possession"; and the affiant 
 alleges that the said Thomas, by accepting said appoint- 
 ment is guilty of a " high misdemeanor ' ' under the fifth 
 section of the act. The judge signs a warrant for 
 Thomas' arrest returnable before him at chambers 
 "forthwith," and armed with this document, William 
 A. Pile, at present a representative in Congress from 
 
352 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Missouri— once a preacher, a chaplain in the army and 
 then some sort of a general— sets out for the house of 
 the clerk of the court, "between two and three o'clock 
 in the morning ' ' routs him up, takes him to his office, has 
 him attest and seal the warrant, and then proceeds to 
 put it into the hands of the marshal, whom, however, he 
 does not venture to disturb until seven o'clock. The 
 marshal, taking two assistants, instantly starts in pur- 
 suit of his man, whom he finds at home waiting for a 
 breakfast the unsuspecting criminal is destined never to 
 eat. Having returned rather late from the masquerade 
 ball, his purpose wholly unaffected by the senatorial ad- 
 monition, the aged warrior takes his arrest with the 
 utmost coolness, requesting only permission to stop on 
 the way to see the President. To this the officer assents, 
 premising, however, that he ' ' must not lose sight of his 
 prisoner for a moment ' ' ; and he does not lose sight of 
 him, following Thomas into the very presence of the 
 President. The President hearing of the arrest re- 
 marks: "Very well— that is the place I want it in— the 
 courts"; and directs Thomas to go to the Attorney- 
 General. To the quarters of the Attorney-General the 
 prisoner and the marshal go, and thence, after taking 
 the advice of that officer, to the judge 's chambers where 
 they arrive at nine o'clock. There Thomas is held to 
 bail in $5,000 for his appearance on Wednesday, and, as 
 soon as he is released from custody, returns to the White 
 House. Hearing what was done, the President says : 
 ' ' Very well ; we want it in the courts. Now go and take 
 charge. ' ' Without another word the obedient appointee, 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 353 
 
 intent only upon the performance of his nearest duty, 
 sets out to execute the order of the day before.* 
 
 In the meantime, at about ten o'clock, the night- 
 watchers at the War Office were relieved from duty by 
 the arrival of a delegation of representatives in Con- 
 gress. There came Van Horn, Van Wyck and Clarke 
 of New York, Moorhead and Kelley of Pennsylvania, 
 Dodge of Iowa, Ferry of Michigan, and Delano of Ohio 
 — the last an ex-member. They came to witness the 
 onset of Thomas, if peradventure the terrors of impend- 
 ing imprisonment did not deter the veteran. Every one 
 of his movements had been followed with absorbing in- 
 terest. It was known that, after seeing the President, he 
 had been taken before the judge, and that he had re- 
 turned to the White House, where even now he was 
 closeted with his high-placed accomplice. All eyes were 
 fixed on the front of that mansion. When the white- 
 headed old soldier emerged upon the lawn and turned 
 his steps towards the War building, ' ' There he comes ! ' ' 
 they exclaimed, and, putting themselves in position to 
 cover their chief, they drew out their pencils and ar- 
 ranged their pads. Thomas, for his part, as calm as if on 
 parade, with no thought of danger or trouble, his domi- 
 nant emotion, probably, gratified vanity because of the 
 high duty he was about to discharge, proceeded on his 
 way. The offices of the War Department were closed on 
 account of the holiday, and he found his own (as 
 Adjutant-General) locked. He then climbed the stairs 
 
 * See Testimony on Trial, Vol. 1, pp. 158-9, for service of notice ; 
 threats, pp. 210, 221, id.; affidavit of Stanton, id., p. 515. Proceedings, 
 pp. 509, 516; Thomas' testimony, id., pp. 427-8. 
 
 23 
 
354 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to Mr. Stanton's room, where he found the group, ac- 
 cording to his own description, "all sitting in a semi- 
 ellipsis, the Secretary of War at the apex."* Three of 
 the members of Congress present were careful to take 
 notes— Van Horn, Moorhead and Ferry— and we will 
 let one of them tell the story. 
 
 At twenty five minutes past twelve m., General Thomas,. 
 Adjutant General, came into the Secretary of War's office, 
 saying "Good morning," the Secretary replying, "Good 
 morning, sir." Thomas looked around and said, "I do 
 not wish to disturb these gentlemen, and will wait. ' ' Stan- 
 ton said- "Nothing private here; what do you want, sir?" 
 
 Thomas demanded of Secretary Stanton the surrender 
 of the Secretary of War office. Stanton denied it to him, 
 and ordered him back to his own office as Adjutant General. 
 Thomas refused to go. "I claim the office of Secretary of 
 War, and demand it by order of the President." 
 
 Stanton. "I deny your authority to act and order you 
 back to your own office." 
 
 Thomas. "I will stand here. I want n© unpleasantness 
 in the presence of these gentlemen." 
 
 Stanton. "You can stand there if you please, but you 
 cannot act as Secretary of War. I am Secretary of War. 
 I order you out of this office and to your own. ' ' 
 
 Thomas. "I refuse to go, and will stand here." 
 
 Stanton. "How are you to get possession; do you mean 
 to use force?" 
 
 Thomas. "I do not care to use force, but my mind is 
 made up as to what I shall do. I want no unpleasantness, 
 though. I shall stay here and act as Secretary of War." 
 
 Stanton. "You shall not, and I order you, as your su- 
 perior, back to your own office." 
 
 * Trial, Vol. I, p. 428. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 355 
 
 Thomas. "I will not obey you, but will stand here and 
 remain here." 
 
 Stanton. "You can stand there as you please. I order 
 you out of this office to your own. I am Secretary of "War, 
 and your, superior." 
 
 Thomas then went into the opposite room across hall 
 (General Schriver's) and commenced ordering General 
 Schriver and General E. D. Townsend. Stanton entered, 
 followed by Moorhead and Ferry, and ordered those Gen- 
 erals not to obey or pay attention to General Thomas' 
 orders; that he denied his assumed authority as Secretary 
 of War ad interim, and forbade their obedience of his direc- 
 tions. ' ' I am Secretary of War, and I now order, you, Gen- 
 eral Thomas, out of this office to your own quarters." 
 
 Thomas. "I will not go. I shall discharge the functions 
 of Secretary of War. ' ' 
 
 Stanton. "You will not." 
 
 Thomas. "I shall require the mails of the War Depart- 
 ment to be delivered to me, and shall transact the business 
 of the office. ' ' 
 
 Stanton. "You shall not have them, and I order you to 
 your own office. ' ' 
 
 At this point the Congressmen left the scene, their 
 presence being required at the House. What followed 
 their departure, it was left to Thomas to relate. Stan- 
 ton handed him a note, dated the day before, forbidding 
 him from acting as Secretary of War ad interim; and 
 then the conversation continued as follows : 
 
 I said, "The next time you have me arrested, please do 
 not do it before I get something to eat." I said I had 
 had nothing to eat or drink that day. He put his hand 
 around my neck, as he sometimes does, and ran his hand 
 
356 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 through my hair, and turned to General Sehriver and said, 
 ' ' Sehriver, you have got a bottle here ; bring it out. ' ' 
 
 Sehriver unlocked his case and brought out a small vial, 
 containing I suppose about a spoonful of whiskey, and 
 stated at the same time that he occasionally took a little 
 , for dyspepsia. Mr. Stanton took that and poured it into 
 a tumbler and divided it equally and we drank it together. 
 A fair division, because he held up the glasses to the light 
 and saw that they each had about the same, and we each 
 drank. Presently a messenger came in with a bottle of 
 whiskey, a full bottle; the cork was drawn, and he and I 
 took a drink together. "Now," said he, "this at least is 
 neutral ground." 
 
 Thomas departed and Stanton barricaded himself in 
 his apartments. No serious attempt was made to molest 
 him further. On Monday and again on Tuesday Thomas 
 called, renewed his formal demand and, receiving the 
 stereotyped answer, withdrew. He continued to attend 
 meetings of the Cabinet, however, and was recognized 
 by the President as Secretary of War ad interim, but he 
 did no official act in that capacity. As late as March 
 10th he advised the President to write a note to General 
 Grant, directing that officer to issue an order to the dif- 
 ferent bureaus to send all communications to him as Sec- 
 retary of War ; but the President remarked that the mat- 
 ter better lie over until after the impeachment trial.* 
 
 While this curious encounter was going on in the War 
 Office the President, on his part, did two things. First, 
 he sent to the Senate the nomination of Thomas Ewing, 
 an aged statesman of wide experience, the father-in-law 
 of General Sherman, for Secretary of the Department of 
 
 * See testimony of Ferry, Trial, Vol. I, pp. 232-3 ; of Thomas, pp. 
 429, 444-6. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 357 
 
 "War; but, the Senate having met only to adjourn on ac- 
 count of the holiday, the nomination came back. Second, 
 he sent for General Emory, who was in the command of 
 the Department of Washington, to ascertain whether 
 there had been any recent movements of troops to or 
 around the capital, rumours of which the President had 
 heard but of which he had no official knowledge. Emory 
 informed him that no movements had been .made, and, 
 incidentally, referred to a general order embodying that 
 section of the army appropriation bill fixing the head- 
 quarters of the General at Washington and making it 
 obligatory that all orders of the President or Secretary 
 of War should be issued through the General of the 
 army — a section which, as the President informed the 
 House by message last March, was a gross invasion of his 
 rightful prerogative but which he was compelled to 
 appear to approve rather than veto the whole bill. The 
 President seems to have forgotten the section, for, when 
 Emory called his attention to it, he exclaimed: "This 
 is not in conformity to the Constitution of the United 
 States which makes me Commander-in-Chief, or with 
 the terms of your commission. Am I to understand that 
 the President of the United States cannot give an order 
 except through General Grant?" That was General 
 Emory's impression, he said— the lawyers had so ad- 
 vised— Robert J. Walker and Reverdy Johnson. The 
 officers were "bound by the order constitutional or 
 unconstitutional." The President let fall the remark: 
 "The object of the law is evident." And with this 
 harmless observation the interview terminated.* 
 
 * Ewing's nomination, Trial, Vol. I, pp. 555-6 ; Emory, pp. 235-6 ; 
 section, Ch. II, supra, p. 201-2. 
 
358 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The House met at noon, seething with excitement such 
 as had not been witnessed since the first days of seces- 
 sion. Wild rumours were afloat relating to the employ- 
 ment of troops. Thousands of armed men from Mary- 
 land, it was whispered, were on the march to protect the 
 President. The galleries were filled to overflowing with 
 a "vast, excited and expectant throng"; the lobbies 
 jammed with persons striving to enter the chamber, and 
 the floor itself, including the seats of members, the aisles 
 and spaces outside the circle of seats and in front of the 
 clerk's desk, uncomfortably crowded. The committee 
 on reconstruction was busy preparing its report. Bing- 
 ham, Farnsworth and Boutwell had. been appointed a 
 sub-committee to take what little testimony might be 
 necessary and to formulate the foregone conclusion. But 
 they needed no testimony and took none. The order of 
 removal was before them ; they procured a copy of the 
 letter of authority and with that they considered the case 
 against the President complete. The House was im- 
 patient to begin the business of which all foresaw the 
 inevitable end. Some routine business was done. Pile 
 —the midnight bearer of the warrant against Thomas— 
 for one bright moment distinguished himself by asking 
 leave to introduce a bill to abolish the office of adjutant- 
 general. The crowd on the floor and in the galleries 
 grew more and more restless. Senators, one by one, 
 came wedging themselves in to watch the gestation of 
 the proceeding they were expected to crown with judg- 
 ment; Wade, whom the result was expected to make 
 President of the United States, being provided with a 
 seat near the Speaker. News of the President's inter- 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 359 
 
 view with General Emory began flying about the 
 crowded corridors outside, penetrated thence into the 
 committee room and into the House itself ;— a panic-dis- 
 torted version filling the hearts of the timid with appre- 
 hensions of bloodshed and haunting the minds of all 
 with the uneasy conjecture, '.Johnson means fight then?' 
 At length, at twenty minutes after two o 'clock, the com- 
 mittee winds itself in— Stevens, feebler than usual, 
 tottering at its head. He presents the report signed by 
 every Republican on the committee, a unit at last. After 
 a reference to the resolution of the twenty-seventh day 
 of January directing an inquiry whether there existed 
 any combination to obstruct the law, came the order 
 of the President removing Stanton and the letter author- 
 izing Thomas to act ad interim, and then the resolution : 
 "That Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, 
 be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors"— with 
 the recommendation of its adoption. Stevens was for 
 taking a vote immediately, but, so many of the majority 
 desiring to speak, it was found impracticable to close the 
 discussion with the day ; and an agreement was entered 
 into that the debate should continue during the evening, 
 the session be carried over until Monday, and the debate 
 continue on that day until "five o 'clock, when the vote 
 should be taken. 
 
 In the beginning of the debate the majority wore an 
 air of unbounded confidence. The very offence they so 
 carefully described as a high misdemeanour with the 
 express view to his impeachment— that very offence the 
 President had committed. Said Spalding, who so 
 strongly opposed the first impeachment: "We are not 
 
360 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 called upon to ascertain . . . whether the President has 
 in fact committed a high misdemeanor, because Congress 
 has, already, upon the face of its enactment, declared the 
 alleged act of removal to be such. " " Here in two letters 
 of Andrew Johnson, ' ' said Farnsworth, " ... we have 
 a complete and perfect case. We need swear no wit- 
 nesses; we need take no further testimony. Read the 
 letters— read the constitution, and read the law, and the 
 case is all there as clear and plain as if he confessed the 
 crime" Ingersoll prophesied: "I shall for one be 
 grievously disappointed if, within ten days from this 
 time, honest old Ben Wade is not President of the United 
 States. . . . Not more than ten days ought to be con- 
 sumed in the trial of this case ; for there is but a single 
 crime and the President has been considerate enough to 
 furnish the evidence of his guilt. " Said another: "It 
 is of no use to argue the question. We have before us 
 the law and upon the Speaker's desk the President's 
 admission that he has violated the law. ' ' 
 
 Beside this clear case for impeachment by the House, 
 the Senate also was pledged to convict. "Consider," 
 said Bingham, ' ' the solemn judgment of the Senate pro- 
 nounced but yesterday upon this act of removal. Neither 
 the Supreme Court nor any other court can question 
 or review this judgment of the Senate." "There 
 is no question," Mr. Boutwell exulted, "as to what 
 the judgment of the House is to be here and now, or that 
 that judgment is to be finally sustained by the judgment 
 of the Senate." Still, as the debate ran along, there 
 began to be perceptible an uneasy consciousness of the 
 exceeding slenderness of the single charge to which they 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 361 
 
 had confined the case, and a lack of conviction that the 
 act which was the basis of their proceeding partook of 
 any criminality whatever. They read and reread the 
 penal section of their statute but the words "high mis- 
 demeanor," "imprisonment," "fine" sounded like 
 empty words after all. This troubled state of mind 
 betrayed itself in various forms. Although the leaders 
 congratulated themselves that the charge was all in a 
 nutshell, they could not keep within the record. Almost 
 every speaker on the majority side deserted the case at 
 hand and harked back to the past misdeeds of the Presi- 
 dent for which they were not trying him. It was in vain 
 that the Democrats reminded them of the two previous 
 attempts at impeachment and the "unwilling verdict" 
 wrung from this hostile Congress that "up to the last 
 few days at least the President had so conducted him- 
 self" that no ground for impeachment could be found. 
 They would not be bound by their own self-imposed 
 limits. They fought shy of the compact little charge 
 they had so carefully formulated, to soar and expatiate 
 over the field of Andrew Johnson 's numberless enormi- 
 ties which they had officially -condoned. Kelley said : 
 ' ' The committee 's arraignment is too circumscribed for 
 me. It presents, however, a single point all sufficient for 
 the purpose. But, sir, I hold and assert, that however 
 concise may be the official arraignment we are about to 
 bring to trial the great criminal of our age and coun- 
 try. ' ' Ashley confessed : "I regard this as the smallest 
 of the many offences of which this man has been guilty. 
 If Mr. Johnson had been guilty of no impeachable 
 offence until his removal of Mr. Stanton, no one believes 
 
362 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 that a majority of this House could be induced to vote 
 for his impeachment now." Julian spoke to the same 
 effect : ' ' It is true the removal of the Secretary of War 
 is a relatively small matter, and I believe it would be 
 regarded as scarcely a sufficient ground for this proceed- 
 ing, if not considered in the light of greater previous 
 offences." Butler "mournfully remembers the act by 
 which the President was inducted into his high office, ' ' 
 "his change of purpose in the summer of 1865," his 
 every act of usurpation and violation of law since down 
 to "his attempt to draw into a conspiracy with himself 
 the general officer of the Armies of the United States. ' ' 
 Mr. Boutwell pursues the same course: 
 
 "Now sir, what is the history of this man . . .1 Is he 
 not the man who, in the Senate Chamber on the ever- 
 to-be lamented 4th of March, 1865, humiliated the nation 
 and all the people, dishonored us in the presence of the 
 civilized world, disgraced the office he held, while Booth 
 was wending his criminal way through the crowds in the 
 areas of the Capitol for the purpose of assassinating the 
 President of the nation who within forty days thereafter 
 was destined to fall by the hand of the assassin? Is he 
 not the man who, in violation of his oath of office, appointed 
 men to places of trust and power throughout the ten States 
 of the South who could not take the oath of office prescribed 
 by the law of the country?" 
 
 He concludes by indicating "the plot in which the 
 President is engaged. ' ' 
 
 "He desired first to get control of the "War Department 
 . . . for the purpose of enabling him to succeed in his 
 aspirations for the Presidency. He knew that if he could 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 363 
 
 corrupt the leader of the Army . . . these ten States were 
 in his control, and that he could send to the Democratic 
 party convention . . . men who would sustain his claim for 
 the Presidency. . . . He could secure the electoral votes of 
 these ten States by excluding the negroes whom we have 
 enfranchised from all participation in the election. 
 
 "If, by fortune, as was his hope, he could receive a suf- 
 ficient number of votes in the North to make a majority, 
 then, with the support of the Army which he had corrupted, 
 he had determined to be inaugurated President of the 
 United States at the hazard of civil war. To-day, sir, we 
 escape from these evils and dangers." 
 
 The essential insincerity of the present proceeding 
 was made plainer still by the floods of irrelevant abuse 
 the speakers showered upon the President. Farnsworth 
 called him: "This ungrateful, despicable, besotted, 
 traitorous man"; "this accidental President made so by 
 the assassin's pistol." Logan exhausted his vocabulary 
 in an effort to enumerate the offences of the President : 
 
 "He has not only insulted the nation by his conduct as 
 President of the Senate, but he has disgraced that high 
 office in which he was placed by the death of his illustrious 
 predecessor; he has dragged, as a demagogue, the robes of 
 his high official position in the purlieus and filth of treason. 
 ... He has done every act a man can conceive, not only 
 calculated to degrade himself, but to destroy the rights of 
 the American people." 
 
 One member compared the President to Nero who 
 "poisoned his brother" and "assassinated his wife and 
 mother." Washburne— the silent but stern contemner 
 
364 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of the first attempt at impeachment— outdid them all in 
 the fierceness of his invective : 
 
 "His whole official career as President has been marked 
 by a wicked disregard of all the obligations of public duty 
 and by a degree of perfidy and treachery and turpitude 
 unheard of in the history of the rulers of a free people ; his 
 personal and official character has made him the opprobrium 
 . of both hemispheres, and brought ineffable disgrace on the 
 American name." 
 
 A member just opened his lips to say : "I am in favor 
 of the official death of Andrew Johnson without debate. 
 I am not surprised that one who began his presidential 
 career in drunkenness should end it in crime. ' ' Indeed, 
 the longer the debate lasted the more manifest it became 
 that the majority, while painting the President as the 
 blackest criminal of the age, were proposing to impeach 
 him for a harmless peccadillo. 
 
 The speakers of the minority, on their side, stuck the 
 more closely to the actual case the farther the majority 
 flew away from it. The two specific statutory offences 
 were described in the sixth section of the Tenure-of -office 
 act and, with an eye to some future proceeding such as 
 this, declared to be "high misdemeanors" punishable 
 by a fine of $10,000 and imprisonment for five years. 
 They were: (1) "Every removal, appointment or em- 
 ployment made . . . contrary to the provisions of this 
 act," and (2) "the issue of any letter of authority for 
 or in respect to any such appointment or employment. ' ' 
 The case must stand or fall, therefore, on the question 
 whether the two acts of the President, as evidenced by 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 365 
 
 the two letters, were "contrary to the provisions of the 
 act. ' ' Viewed from this central stand-point, it soon be- 
 came apparent that the case against the President rested 
 entirely upon an error in the construction of the statute. 
 The arguments by which this error was demonstrated 
 were marshalled in full force by the Democratic leaders 
 in this extemporized discussion; but, as they were re- 
 peated with greater elaboration and finish on a grander 
 stage, we need not review them with any particularity 
 here. One or two, however, it may be desirable to dwell 
 upon for a moment so as to gather a clear idea of the gist 
 of the matter from the start. Holman of Indiana, then 
 in his youth, puzzled the impeachers by pointing out a 
 state of affairs they could not very well controvert : 
 
 "You propose to impeach the President upon a mere 
 question of opinion, when, in fact, no crime or misdemeanor 
 has been committed, nor, indeed, any material step taken 
 toward the commission of any offence under any interpre- 
 tation of the law. It can only be said that the President 
 of the United States has assigned a military officer to a 
 given duty, to the same duty to which he recently assigned 
 the General of the Army, and that officer has sought to 
 enter upon the discharge of that duty, but has failed to 
 do so, and the incumbent remains in his office. It cannot 
 be said, no matter what interpretation you place on the 
 Tenure of office law, that an offence has been in fact com- 
 mitted; for, if Edwin M. Stanton was Secretary of "War 
 he is still Secretary of War; he is still in fact as he was 
 in possession of his office; for the Senate has declined to 
 confirm a successor." 
 
366 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 How then could the President be said to have "made 
 a removal" at all? The answer was made that there 
 was no distinction between an attempt to remove and an 
 actual removal. " It is a removal in the eye of the law. ' ' 
 "The President would be liable to impeachment if he 
 should attempt to violate a law he has sworn to execute. ' ' 
 But the sixth section does not mention attempts, deal- 
 ing only with consummated acts. This was, in fact, 
 conceded by Lawrence : ' ' The attempt of the President 
 to remove the Secretary of War is not an indictable 
 offence under the Tenure-of-office law. ... I have ex- 
 amined the act of Congress critically, and no lawyer will 
 controvert what I say. The signing of a letter of ap- 
 pointment is indictable but not the issuing of an order 
 of removal. ' ' 
 
 But it was upon their main contention, viz : Stanton 
 was not protected by the Tenure-of-office act, that the 
 opponents of Impeachment won their most conspicuous 
 triumph. The argument to establish this conclusion was 
 stated in the clearest manner by George C. Woodward of 
 Pennsylvania — formerly the chief justice of his state — 
 a jurist of profound learning, a terse and logical speaker, 
 and a Democrat of the most fearless and uncompromis- 
 ing type. He said : 
 
 "Mr. Speaker, this is the third attempt to impeach the 
 President. The first, founded on his alleged usurpation of 
 powers which the Constitution had delegated to the legisla- 
 tive department, was crushed to death by the ponderous 
 volume of testimony of more than twelve hundred pages 
 which was brought in with the impeaching resolution. The 
 second attempt, founded on the Johnson-Grant correspond- 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 367 
 
 ence, was strangled in the birth, and the issue of fact raised 
 between those distinguished correspondents was left to be 
 decided by each man for himself upon evidence that was 
 altogether favorable to the President. 
 
 "Now comes for the third time during our. present ses- 
 sion, another resolution of impeachment, founded on the 
 President's removal of E. M. Stanton from the "War De- 
 partment . . . ; this resolution is founded in a mistake, and 
 any impeachment of the President on the idea that Secre- 
 tary Stanton is within the protection of the tenure of office 
 bill is what Fouehe, the Chief of the French police, would 
 have called worse than a crime — a blunder. . . . 
 
 "It is the removal of Mr. Stanton that is complained of, 
 but the removal which the sixth section condemns is every 
 removal 'contrary to the provisions of this act.' If Mr. 
 Stanton is not within the act then the removal of him is 
 not contrary to it." 
 
 Beading the first section he continues : 
 
 "Such is the tenure of Cabinet officers. A month after 
 the expiration of the term of the President by whom they 
 were appointed their tenure expires, and they become ten- 
 ants at sufferance. Until that time they are removable by 
 advice of the Senate ; after that time they have no title and 
 their possession can be ousted at the pleasure of the Presi- 
 dent. . . . 
 
 "Thus, then, it stands: the sixth section punishes re- 
 movals contrary to the act; but Cabinet ministers can only 
 be removed contrary to the act by the President who ap- 
 pointed them. Mr. Stanton was appointed by President 
 Lincoln, and his title to office expired a month after Lin- 
 coln's death; from that time he retained his portfolio at 
 the pleasure and will of him upon whom all the powers and 
 duties of the office had devolved ; he was a mere locum 
 tenens; and when Mr. Johnson removed him he acted within 
 
368 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the strictest bounds of the Constitution, and offended not 
 against the statute; he went not 'contrary' to it, and so 
 incurred not the penalties of the sixth section." 
 
 Mr. Boutwell, alone of the speakers of the majority, 
 attempted an answer by claiming that the Constitution 
 having defined the term of the President as a " term of 
 four years" and, in case of death, devolving "not the 
 office, not the term but the powers and duties of the 
 office" upon the Vice President; "Johnson himself has 
 no term ' ' and it was in Lincoln 's term that Stanton was 
 removed. But Woodward exploded this verbal fallacy 
 by anticipation : 
 
 "It was Mr. Lincoln's power and duty to hold his office 
 for the term of four years, and at his death this power and 
 duty, as far as they were unperformed, devolved upon the 
 Vice-President by the very words of the Constitution. The 
 term became Mr. Johnson's term for its unfinished period, 
 as much so as the right to possession of the White House, 
 the right to the salary, or to any of the perquisites and 
 functions of the office. It would be as unreasonable to 
 call Mr. Johnson's possession of these Mr. Lincoln's pos- 
 session, or Mr. Johnson's Administration Mr. Lincoln's 
 Administration, as to call Mr. Johnson's term of office Mr.. 
 Lincoln's term. Neither in popular language nor in con- 
 stitutional phrase can such a misnomer be found. It would 
 be as absurd as to confound their names, or the identity of 
 their persons." 
 
 James F. Wilson, who was one of the members of the 
 conference committee when the Tenure-of -office bill was 
 passed, in his speech in this debate did not allude to 
 this question, and Schenck and Williams, the other mem- 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 369 
 
 bers, did not speak. Bingham made no attempt to show 
 by the act itself that Stanton was within it, but, referring 
 to the suspension of that officer and the Senate 's action 
 on it, declared that the President "recognized that act 
 as embracing the Secretary of War," submitted that 
 question to the judgment of the Senate, and "by its 
 judgment the President and every other person is con- 
 cluded. ' ' 
 
 But the majority were the less solicitous to maintain 
 the validity of their case under the Tenure act, because 
 they jumped to another conclusion, viz : that Stanton 's 
 removal in the circumstances under which it was made 
 was without authority, independently of that act. From 
 Stevens, who advanced the proposition in the few words 
 he spoke when presenting the report of his committee, 
 down to the last speech in the debate, every speaker on the 
 side of the majority assumed as a matter of course that, 
 in the case of an officer whose appointment was required 
 to be made "by and with the advice and consent of the 
 Senate," his removal without the consent of the Senate 
 while that body was in session was a clear violation of 
 the Constitution. "Nobody ever pretended that I ever 
 heard of that the President during the session of the 
 Senate could remove an officer," said one member. "I 
 hold that his offence is complete, even if there had been 
 no Tenure-of -office law in existence, for under the Con- 
 stitution the President has no authority whatever, while 
 the Senate is in session, to remove a Cabinet officer," 
 said another. "It has never been contended that the 
 Executive had the power of removal during the session 
 of the Senate. The only course which he can pursue is 
 
 24 
 
370 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to send a nomination to the Senate, which, if confirmed, 
 displaces the person in office, ' ' said another. 
 
 But this second assumption, like the first, was founded 
 in error and a lack of accurate information. As Wood- 
 ward stated the case : 
 
 "An idea has got possession of gentlemen's minds, in- 
 spired, no doubt, by the Tenure of office law, that the pecu- 
 liar enormity of the President's act consisted in removing 
 Stanton while the Senate was in session. The Constitution 
 does not forbid him to do so, but leaves him free at all times 
 to rid himself of an unacceptable Cabinet minister. It is 
 better done when the Senate is in session than when it is 
 in recess, because the new nomination can be immediately 
 considered without prejudice to the public interests from 
 delay of a confirmation ; and such has been the practice of 
 the Government from its foundation. Indeed, the Senate 
 is always in session when a new Administration comes in 
 and substitutes new Cabinet officers for the old ones." 
 
 When the vote came to he taken at five o 'clock on Mon- 
 day afternoon (the twenty-fourth), though the. argu- 
 ments of their adversaries may have made them uneasy 
 over the unforeseen weakness of a case they at first 
 thought invulnerable, there was no break in the serried 
 ranks of the majority and but little abatement of en- 
 thusiasm. On the contrary, some injudicious warnings 
 of a menacing character uttered by the Democrats served 
 but to heighten their ardour. Brooks ' prediction, that the 
 trial, with all its cumbrous forms and ceremonial, would 
 necessarily outlast the term of the President, only stimu- 
 lated them to further haste ; but his threat of resistance 
 by the people to any departure from constitutional 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 371 
 
 methods, such as suspension during trial, was greeted 
 with derisive laughter. "Woodward denied their ' ' right 
 to impeach anybody and the present Senate's right to 
 try any impeachment. ' ' 
 
 "Says the Constitution: 'The House of Representatives 
 shall have the sole power of impeachment,' and the House 
 of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen 
 every second year by the people of the several States. This 
 House of Representatives is not so composed; but, on the 
 contrary, the representatives chosen from ten of the ' several 
 States' have been and are excluded from these Halls. . . . 
 
 "The Constitution says: 'The Senate shall have the sole 
 power to try all impeachments,' and that the Senate shall 
 be composed of two senators from each State. The ten 
 excluded States are entitled to twenty senators upon that 
 floor, and until they are admitted and incorporated into 
 that body I deny that it is the Senate to whom the Consti- 
 tution commits the power to try impeachments. What 
 criminal was ever before arraigned before a court from 
 which twenty of his legal triers had been excluded? . . . 
 
 "The flippant reply to this grave question is that we pass 
 laws, and therefore we are a House and Senate to impeach. 
 But the answer is, your legislative powers have not been 
 questioned, your impeaching powers are;" 
 
 but when he ended his speech with the following menace 
 he only concentrated the wrath and solidified the resolve 
 of the majority : 
 
 "Mr. Speaker, so sure am I that the American people 
 will respect this objection that I will say, if I were the 
 President's counsellor, which I am not, I would advise him, 
 if you prefer articles of impeachment, to demur both to 
 your jurisdiction and that of the Senate, and to issue a 
 
372 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 proclamation giving you and all the world notice that while 
 he held himself impeachable for misdemeanors in office be- 
 fore the constitutional tribunal, he neve"r would subject the 
 office he holds in trust for the people to the- irregular, un- 
 constitutional, fragmentary bodies who propose to strip him 
 of it. Such a proclamation, with the Army and Navy at 
 hand to sustain it, would meet a popular response that 
 would make an end of impeachment and impeachers." 
 
 Stevens closed the debate in a short and sententious 
 speech which is characteristic of the man and still more 
 of the debate itself. He alludes to the "high misde- 
 meanor" of the statute with a kind of contemptuous in- 
 dulgence and then dogmatically affirms that ' ' an indict- 
 able offence or an act malum in se" is not necessary to 
 sustain impeachment. "The question is wholly politi- 
 cal. ' ' He points to the removal of Stanton as a violation 
 of law, but he makes no attempt to answer the argument 
 that Stanton was not within the law. He treats the 
 offence only as one of many grosser usurpations and 
 higher crimes. He proposes to try Andrew Johnson for 
 "misprision of bribery" in offering General Grant, if 
 he would unite with him in his lawless violence, "to 
 assume in his stead the penalties" of the law. He pro- 
 poses to try him for violation of his official oath— "a 
 solemn and enduring obligation"; adding with grim 
 humour, ' ' nor can he plead exemption from it on account 
 of his condition at the time it was administered to him. ' ' 
 He proposes to prove his (the President's) obstruction 
 of the reconstruction policy of Congress : 
 
 "In my judgment his conduct. in regard to that transac- 
 tion was a high-handed usurpation of power which ought 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 373 
 
 long ago to have brought him to impeachment and trial 
 and to have removed him from his position of great mis- 
 chief. He has been lucky in thus far escaping through 
 false logic and false law. But his then acts, which will 
 on the trial be shown to be atrocious, are open evidence of 
 his wicked determination to subvert the laws of his 
 country. ' ' 
 
 His last words, and the last words in the debate, were : 
 
 "As we deal with the first great political malefactor, so 
 will be the result of our efforts to perpetuate the happiness 
 and good government of the human race. . . . This is not 
 to be the temporary triumph of a political party, but is 
 to endure in its consequence until this whole continent shall 
 be filled with a free and untrammeled people or shall be 
 a nest of shrinking, cowardly slaves." 
 
 The vote was then taken; one hundred and twenty- 
 six in the affirmative— every man a Republican; 
 forty-seven in the negative— every Democrat on the 
 roll but one and he was paired. Of the sixteen Re- 
 publicans not voting, all were unavoidably absent 
 but the one paired with the Democrat; one had 
 not attended the House on account of illness since the 
 session began; two made haste to apologize for their 
 absence and announced their agreement with the major- 
 ity ; nine were proclaimed by colleagues to be in favour 
 of the resolution; leaving three not recorded, one of 
 whom voted for the first impeachment. So that it may 
 be stated with substantial truth, that the solid represen- 
 tation of the Republican party in the House, without a 
 dissenting or deprecating voice— the Speaker even rush- 
 ing forward gratuitously to pillory himself in the gaze 
 of all coming generations— joined in a deed, of which at 
 
374 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the present day no intelligent human being acquainted 
 with the facts— scarcely even one of the surviving par- 
 ticipants—will utter a word in justification. They hated 
 the President and yearned to make away with him be- 
 cause of political offences for which they tried once and 
 again and failed to impeach him. They seize upon a 
 technical infraction of an unjust statute— a statute they 
 made haste to repeal as soon as they had a President of 
 their own— as a pretext to drag him before a court they 
 believed had already prejudged his case. They dis- 
 cover on the threshold that he is not and, on account of 
 a blunder of their own, cannot be guilty of the trivial 
 offence they have made a stalking-horse for their revo- 
 lutionary aim; and they go right on and impeach him 
 nevertheless. 
 
 A committee of two (Stevens and Bingham) having 
 been appointed to notify the Senate of the action of the 
 House, and a committee of seven to prepare articles of 
 impeachment, the House adjourned.* 
 
 On this same Monday the nomination of Thomas 
 Ewing sr., for Secretary of War, in the place of Edwin 
 M. Stanton removed, reached the Senate chamber again, 
 and this time was not, as on Saturday, hindered by an 
 unlooked-for adjournment. It was accompanied by a 
 message from the President in the nature of an answer 
 to, or a protest against, the Senate 's resolution of Friday 
 night. The senators being in no mood to displace Stan- 
 ton, the nomination was shelved as a matter of course. 
 But the message was calculated to make them reflect. In 
 
 * For this debate, see Cong. Globe of the dates indicated. For vote, 
 see id., p. 1400; committees, p. 1402. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 375 
 
 it the President dwelt almost exclusively on the construc- 
 tion of the proviso of the Tenure-of -office act which ex- 
 cepted from that law those members of his Cabinet who, 
 like Stanton, were not appointed by himself. He stated 
 that his opinion of its unconstitutionality, sent to the 
 Senate with his veto of the bill, remained unchanged ; but 
 that, the bill having become a law over his objections, he 
 had striven to observe it in every particular ; making no 
 removals contrary to its provisions except in the alleged 
 instance of Stanton, and in his case only after coming to 
 the conclusion that he was not within the letter or spirit 
 of the statute. "If upon such a question I have fallen 
 into an erroneous construction, I submit whether it 
 should be characterized as a violation of official duty or 
 law. " "I have endeavored to proceed with the greatest 
 circumspection and have acted only in an extreme and 
 exceptional case, carefully following the course that I 
 have marked out for myself as a general rule, faithfully 
 to execute all laws though passed over my objections on 
 the score of constitutionality." The stubbornness of 
 pose and fearlessness of nature characteristic of the man 
 are revealed in the closing paragraph : 
 
 "In the present instance I have appealed or sought to 
 appeal to that final arbiter fixed by the Constitution for 
 the determination of all such questions. To this course I 
 have been impelled by the solemn obligations which rest 
 upon me to sustain inviolate the powers of the high office 
 committed to my hands. "Whatever be the consequences 
 personal to myself, I could not allow them to prevail against 
 a public duty so clear to my own mind and so imperative. 
 If what was possible had been certain, if I had been fully 
 advised when I removed Mr. Stanton that, in thus defend- 
 
376 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ing the trust committed to my hands, my own removal was 
 sure to follow, I could not have hesitated, actuated by 
 public considerations of the highest character." 
 
 The next morning, the House committee of two ap- 
 peared, and Stevens "in the name of the House of Eep- 
 resentatives and of all the people of the United States ' ' 
 impeached "Andrew Johnson, President of the United 
 States, of high crimes and misdemeanors in office," 
 promised to exhibit articles in due time and demanded 
 that the Senate "take order for the appearance of the 
 said Andrew Johnson to answer said impeachment." 
 The President pro tempore responded that the Senate 
 would take order, the committee withdrew and a select 
 committee of seven was appointed by the Senate to con- 
 sider and report upon the necessary preliminaries. 
 
 Meantime, the midnight warrant against Thomas, 
 after having failed in its object of scaring off the new 
 secretary, was turning into something very like a 
 boomerang in the hands of the prosecution. Thomas 
 retained Richard T. Merrick and a consultation was held 
 by him with the President as to how -the arrest of his 
 client might be taken advantage of to get the case into 
 the Supreme Court. The President, also, employed 
 Walter S. Cox, another Washington lawyer, to institute 
 proceedings after consultation with the Attorney-Gen- 
 eral, to test Thomas ' right to the office and put him in 
 possession. These two counsel attended on Wednesday 
 (twenty-sixth), the day to which the criminal proceed' 
 ing had been adjourned before Judge Cartter, and for- 
 mally surrendered the defendant to the custody of the 
 marshal ; at the same time presenting to the judge a pe- 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 377 
 
 tition for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the pris- 
 oner. The counsel for Stanton protested vehemently 
 that the defendant was not in custody, that he could not 
 put himself in custody, that they did not want him in 
 custody. The judge echoed their protestations, ruling 
 that the defendant was not in custody, could not put 
 himself in custody, that the judge did not desire to put 
 him in custody, that his bare word was sufficient. The 
 defendant's counsel then moved his discharge, the coun- 
 sel for the complainant made no objection, the judge dis- 
 charged the culprit with as much alacrity as he had 
 signed the order for his arrest, and that was the last of 
 the celebrated case of Edwin M. Stanton vs. Lorenzo 
 Thomas.* 
 
 The Senate committee on Eules and the House com- 
 mittee on Articles were hard at work during the week, 
 and the former succeeded in reporting to the Senate, on 
 Friday, twenty-five ' ' rules of procedure and practice in 
 the Senate when sitting as a High Court of Impeach- 
 ment ' ' ; but, when they were taken up for discussion the 
 next day, grave and embarrassing questions immediately 
 arose. The objection that the Senate sitting as a senate 
 could not adopt rules to govern the Senate sitting as a 
 court raised the question whether the Senate sitting for 
 the trial of an impeachment was a court or not — a ques- 
 tion on which a serious division of opinion existed 
 among the majority. Conkling succeeded, after one 
 defeat, in striking out the word "court" which the com- 
 mittee had employed in the draft, and in substituting for 
 
 * Testimony of Cox and Merrick. Trial, Vol. 1, pp. 605, 607, 617, 
 618-622. 
 
378 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the title "High Court of Impeachment" the title "The 
 Senate sitting for trial of an Impeachment"; leaving 
 the question " as it is left by the Constitution. " ' ' Calling 
 this a court, " as he said, ' ' does not make it a court ; and 
 failing to call it a court does not prevent its being a 
 court, if in truth it is so. ' ' The debate was drawn out to 
 an unexpected and unwelcome length, going over until 
 Monday (March 2) and continuing far into the night 
 before the rules as amended were finally adopted. 
 
 The committee of the House had a much harder task. 
 The object in view in confining the charges to the issuing 
 the order of removal and the letter of authority was to 
 dispense with the necessity of sustaining them with 
 other than documentary evidence and thus preclude the 
 possibility of an insufferable prolongation of the trial. 
 But the debate on the resolution of impeachment taught 
 the House that there was such a thing as making the 
 charges too narrow, and the committee on the articles, 
 therefore, felt the need, in the first place, of supporting 
 the two letters by the production of some evidence, at 
 least, that there had ever been an effort to put them in 
 force; in the words of Butler, they "wanted to clothe 
 these naked bones and sinews with flesh and enliven them 
 with blood." Accordingly, with the utmost care and 
 caution not to widen the door for oral testimony farther 
 than absolutely necessary, the committee on Wednesday 
 (February 26) heard the testimony of Burleigh and 
 Wilkeson relating to the loose threats of Thomas, and of 
 Van Horn, one of the members of Congress who gathered 
 round Stanton when Thomas made his advance upon the 
 War Office. They also heard the testimony of General 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 379 
 
 Emory relating the circumstances of his interview with 
 the President, the details of which had been so magnified 
 by rumour. They summoned another army officer (Col. 
 Wallace) who had a brief conversation with the Presi- 
 dent on Sunday, the twenty-third, of the same tenor. 
 And they summoned Thomas, just escaped from the 
 clutches of the law that morning, and plied him with 
 question after question until his head was in a whirl. 
 This comprised all the testimony they took. A letter of 
 the President notifying the Secretary of the Treasury 
 of the change in the War Department comprised all 
 the additional documentary evidence. They then turned 
 to the formulation of articles, their chief anxiety being 
 to meet every phase of opinion in the majority of the 
 Senate ; and on Saturday (twenty-ninth) they reported 
 them to the House. 
 
 The first article related exclusively to the "order of 
 removal" ;— charging it as an attempt to remove in vio- 
 lation of the Tenure act and, also, of the Constitution, the 
 Senate being in session. The second related exclusively 
 to the letter of authority to Thomas; the letter being 
 charged as constituting a regular appointment and con- 
 trary both to the act and to the Constitution. The third 
 differed from the second only by making no reference 
 to the Tenure act. The succeeding five— called "the 
 Conspiracy Articles"— charged a conspiracy between 
 the President and Thomas, "by intimidation and 
 threats, ' ' to prevent Stanton from holding office, in vio- 
 lation of the Constitution and the conspiracy act of 1861 
 (fourth); "by force" to hinder the execution of the 
 Tenure act by preventing Stanton from holding office 
 
380 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 (fifth) ; "by force to seize" the property of the United 
 States in the War Department contrary to the act of 
 1861 and with intent to violate the Tenure act (sixth) ; 
 "to prevent and hinder" the execution of the Tenure act 
 by preventing Stanton from holding office (seventh) ; 
 ' ' to seize ' ' the property of the War Department contrary 
 to the Tenure act (eighth). The ninth was a repetition 
 of the second and third, charged with the additional in- 
 tent to obtain control of the moneys appropriated for the 
 War Department. The tenth and last was founded upon 
 the Emory interview, and charged, in effect, that the 
 expression by the President to an officer of the army of 
 his opinion that a section of an act of Congress ' ' depriv- 
 ing him of his powers as Commander-in-Chief was un- 
 constitutional" was a "high misdemeanor." 
 
 From the time of Johnson's accession, the more spite- 
 ful of his adversaries were addicted to the habit of 
 denying he was President, asserting that he was still 
 Vice President and, for the time being only "Acting 
 President. ' ' And yet by the articles reported he was im- 
 peached as ' ' President of the United States. ' ' Mr. Bout- 
 well affected apprehension that the Senate might decide 
 that Johnson was not President and in that case the 
 whole proceeding would have to be gone over from the 
 beginning. "A different court," he said, "must be 
 organized for the trial of the Vice-President from that 
 authorized by the Constitution to try the President." 
 And the objection gave Bingham the opportunity to 
 trample this offspring of petty malice out of existence. 
 
 "I desire to say that I was not aware when the report 
 was read there was a member of that committee who had 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 381 
 
 the slightest doubt that Andrew Johnson was the Presi- 
 dent of the United States. I desire to say he must be 
 impeached if he be impeached at all, either distinctively 
 as President ... or as Vice-President. . . . Again, Andrew 
 Johnson is estopped by record in five hundred instances 
 from denying that he is President of the United States. 
 The Senate is estopped; the House of Representatives is 
 estopped. Your Constitution declares that no bill shall 
 be a law until it be presented to the President for his 
 approval or disapproval. If he be not President, if the 
 people have no President, then you can pass no law. If 
 he be President, then let him be called President on your 
 records. ' ' 
 
 From the very nature of things, his enemies were 
 forced to place the crown on Johnson's head before they 
 could indulge themselves in the pleasure of taking it off. 
 
 The discussion of the articles was for the most part 
 but a repetition of the debate on the resolution ; but the 
 speech of Stevens, in which he exposed the duplicity of 
 the whole proceeding in his most satirical vein, cannot 
 be passed over without notice. ' ' Never, ' ' said he, ' ' was 
 a great malefactor so gently treated as Andrew John- 
 son." The "monstrous usurpation, worse than sedition 
 and little short of treason," of the President, "funda- 
 mental offenses much more worthy of punishment, the 
 committee have omitted because they determined to deal 
 gently with the President." Their "tender mercies 
 have rested solely on the most trifling crimes and mis- 
 demeanors which they could select from the official life 
 of Andrew Johnson." He then produced an article of 
 his own which, he stated, he had offered in committee 
 and thought it had been put in, but which, he sus- 
 
382 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 pected, had been omitted through mistake. "I will 
 therefore read it and call it one and a half, as, in my 
 judgment, it is the gist and vital portion of this whole 
 prosecution." Keciting the suspension of Stanton and 
 the submission by the President of his reasons to the 
 Senate, the article charged that, while the Senate was 
 considering their sufficiency, the President formed a 
 deliberate design to prevent Stanton from resuming the 
 office if the Senate should decide in his favour; and, 
 when defeated by the integrity and fidelity of the Secre- 
 tary ad interim, sought to arrive at the same end by 
 issuing a letter of authority to Thomas. "If there be 
 shrewd lawyers," he added, "as I know there will be, 
 and cavilling judges, and, without this article, they do 
 not acquit him, they are greener than I was in any case 
 I ever undertook before the court of quarter sessions. 
 If it be inserted . . . how, then, can he or his counsel 
 hope to escape even if there were no other charge — it 
 is worth all of them put together— unless it be upon 
 what I know they will rely on, the unconstitutionality 
 of the Tenure-of -office act." On that question, he re- 
 marked, the Senate had voted four times in favour of 
 the law, and, "Let me see," said he, "the recreant who 
 will now dare tread back upon his steps and vote upon 
 the other side." 
 
 On Monday at three o'clock P. M. the committee re- 
 ported a revised version in which the changes were 
 merely verbal or unimportant, with the exception that 
 the seventh was dropped ; reducing the number to nine. 
 Jenckes of Rhode Island having prepared a voluminous 
 article now moved to add it to the others. It charged 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 383 
 
 the issuing of the letters of removal and authority as 
 the outcome of a premeditated design to usurp the entire 
 control of the army, unlimited by the acts of Congress 
 regulating the same, and by means of the army to 
 obstruct the execution of the reconstruction acts. But, 
 apprehensive that its insertion would render the trial 
 interminable, the House voted it down without cere- 
 mony. Butler now came to the front. Prom the begin- 
 ning of the movement, before he was a member of Con- 
 gress, he had made the study of Impeachment a spe- 
 cialty. He considered it the one remedy for all the ills 
 of the party under whose banners he was enlisted for 
 the time being. Far and wide over the country, in the 
 fall of 1866, he advertised its curative qualities, address- 
 ing meetings in various states and even a legislature or 
 two ; and he was sent to the fortieth Congress to preside 
 over its administration. The wreck of the first project 
 on what he regarded as a miserable technicality of law 
 filled up the measure of his disgust; and he was pro- 
 foundly dissatisfied with the meagre charges now made 
 against the President in deference to a doctrine which he 
 denounced as "unsound in law, fallacious in reasoning 
 and dangerous in principle. ' ' Being suspected of oppo- 
 sition to the nomination of Grant, he was left off 'the 
 committee to draft the articles. But he was a man who 
 could not be silenced. The speeches of the President, 
 at Washington and on his tour West, in 1866, seemed to 
 him to furnish most convenient material for impeach- 
 ment and an excellent opportunity to expatiate on the 
 atrocities of Andrew Johnson. Finding a precedent in 
 the case of Justice Samuel Chase where the charge of 
 
384 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 making an intemperate and inflammatory harangue to 
 a grand jury obtained the greatest number of votes, he, 
 too, prepared an article based on certain violent utter- 
 ances of the President. The substance of the charge was 
 that Andrew Johnson, intending to bring ridicule, re- 
 proach and popular odium upon the Congress and the 
 laws passed by it, made certain speeches against that 
 august body; extracts of which were set forth in three 
 specifications; the first taken from the speech of the 
 eighteenth of August, 1866, at the Executive Mansion in 
 reply to the address delivered by Reverdy Johnson when 
 presenting a copy of the proceedings of the Philadelphia 
 Convention, the most notorious sentence of which was: 
 ' ' We have seen hanging on the verge of the Government, 
 as it were, a body called, or which assumes to be, the 
 Congress of the United States, while in fact it is a Con- 
 gress of only a part of the States"; the second taken 
 from the Cleveland speech in which Congress is said to 
 be "trying to break up the Government"; the third 
 from the St. Louis speech charging "the Eadical Con- 
 gress ' ' with being the source of the New Orleans riot 
 and containing Johnson's remarks about "Christ" and 
 his "Judas." This article, he had pressed upon the 
 committee in vain. Its subject-matter antedated the 
 defeat of the first impeachment by more than a year, and 
 a part of it had been included in the charges then made 
 and passed adversely upon by the House. Besides, 
 there, again, was the danger of prolonging the trial. 
 Butler, not at all discouraged by its rejection by the com- 
 mittee, offered it to the full House, apologizing for the 
 fact that not a particle of evidence had been adduced of 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 385 
 
 the charges contained in it by saying that ' ' the language 
 cited was taken from perfectly reliable documents, and 
 two of the three citations were proved before the judi- 
 ciary committee" (i. e., on the former investigation), 
 "and there can be no doubt the speeches were de- 
 livered "; adding that he had "made no allegation of 
 the truth or falsity of the utterances because it would 
 not have been consistent with the dignity of the House. ' ' 
 On the statement of Wilson that ' ' it was agreed by the 
 committee not to present an article based upon the sub- 
 ject-matter involved in this amendment," the House re- 
 jected the article by a vote by tellers of 48 yeas to 74 
 nays. At four o'clock, the nine articles, as agreed to in 
 the committee of the whole, were reported to the House 
 and adopted seriatim. The election of seven managers 
 by ballot was next in order. The members selected in 
 the caucus of the Saturday night before were put in 
 nomination: Stevens, Butler, Bingham, Boutwell, "Wil- 
 son, Williams and Logan. Bingham led. the list with 
 114 votes out of 118 cast, and Stevens was at the foot 
 with 105 ; the Democrats taking no part in the balloting. 
 A message was sent to the Senate communicating the 
 election of managers and the order that they exhibit the 
 articles ; and the House adjourned.* 
 
 The next day, when the message announcing that the 
 Senate was ready to receive the managers reached the 
 House, it found them in no condition to attend. Butler 
 was engaged in pressing again upon the House his own 
 article which the managers, in the meanwhile, reversing 
 
 * For debate on Rules in Senate and on Articles in House see Globe 
 of dates indicated. 
 
 25 
 
386 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the course of action of the committee, had authorized 
 him to report. To dispel the fear that it would protract 
 the trial, to which he attributed its defeat the day before, 
 he pointed out how quickly the speeches could be proved 
 by the stenographers who took them down; "and be- 
 sides," he said, "the managers have all this in their 
 hands ..." "If we find the article would cause un- 
 profitable delay" we can withdraw it or any portion of 
 it. He quieted Garfield, who expressed his anxiety on 
 this point, saying: "I voted in the negative last evening, 
 not because I was opposed to it but from fear it would 
 increase the time"— with the information that "the 
 reason why the person who drew the article drew it with 
 three specifications . . . was that the managers could 
 withdraw either specification ... or offer proof under 
 either. ' ' Finally Butler 's article was adopted by a vote 
 of but 87 yeas to 40 nays, and it became article X. Bing- 
 ham, then, by the unanimous instruction of the board of 
 managers, reported still another. Its authorship was 
 attributed to Stevens and he openly fathered it, but it 
 differed in almost every feature from the article offered 
 by him the day before and which he commended to the 
 House in such extraordinary terms. The gravamen of 
 that article was the premeditated design of the President 
 to prevent the reinstatement of Stanton after the Senate 
 had non-concurred in that officer's suspension, as shown 
 by the Grant-Johnson correspondence. The article now 
 reported was a mosaic of fragments of those already 
 adopted, of the Jenckes article rejected and of the 
 original Stevens article ; and the object of its concoction 
 seems to have been to catch the votes of doubtful sena- 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 387 
 
 tors. Only one overt act was charged, viz : an attempt 
 on the twenty-first of February to prevent the execution 
 of the Tenure-of -office act ; but this one act was buried 
 under such a mass of indirect allegations by way of in- 
 ducement to commit it and of means whereby it was com- 
 mitted, that it was almost impossible to disinter it. I. 
 The declaration of the President in his speech of August 
 18, 1866, that the Thirty-ninth Congress was only a 
 Congress of a part of the States (taken from the Butler 
 article) is averred to be a denial that the legislation of 
 that Congress was valid or obligatory upon Andrew 
 Johnson except so far as he saw fit to approve it, and a 
 denial of the power of that Congress to propose amend- 
 ments to the Constitution (a new averment) ; and then 
 it is alleged that the attempt was committed in pursuance 
 of this declaration. II. The attempt itself, it charges, 
 was committed (1) by devising means to prevent the 
 reinstatement of Stanton (this is from the original 
 Stevens article) ; (2) by devising means to prevent the 
 execution of the army appropriation act (this is taken 
 from the Emory article) ; and, also, (3) by devising 
 means to prevent the execution of the reconstruction act 
 (this is taken from the rejected Jenckes article). So 
 elaborate a structure furnished common standing- 
 ground for the advocates of impeachment on account of 
 the President's course since the commencement of his 
 administration— the movement defeated by the House; 
 for the advocates of impeachment founded on the John- 
 son-Grant quarrel — the movement stifled in committee; 
 and for the advocates of impeachment on account of 
 specific offences made high misdemeanours by the sixth 
 
388 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 section of the Tenure-of -office act,— the movement now 
 on foot. It is best described in the words of senator 
 Buckalew : 
 
 "As an article on which to convict, its strength consists 
 in its weakness — in the obscurity of its charges and the 
 intricacy of its form. . . . 
 
 ' ' Considered in parts it is nothing— the propositions into 
 which it is divisible cannot stand separately as charges of 
 criminal conduct or intention; and considered as a whole 
 it eludes the understanding and baffles conjecture. . . . 
 
 "The matter of this article, so far as substance can be 
 detected in it, is drawn mostly from the other articles; but 
 that matter is arranged, manipulated, and combined to- 
 gether in a manner to vex the student and confound the 
 judge; and the new particulars of charge or aggravation 
 (whichever they may be) contained in the article are hinted 
 at rather than expressed, and we vainly explore the con- 
 text to discover distinctly their antecedents or the conclu- 
 sions to which they lead. ' '* 
 
 This Omnibus article, as it was fitly called, was ac- 
 cepted by a vote of 108 yeas to 32 nays, and numbered 
 article XI. 
 
 The list being complete, the next thing to be done was 
 to present the articles to the Senate. On Wednesday, 
 the fourth day of March, the House resolved itself into 
 a committee of the whole and followed the managers to 
 the Senate chamber. The Senate had just listened to the 
 reading of an opinion, sent in by the Chief Justice, to 
 the effect that when the Senate sits for the trial of an 
 impeachment it sits as a court; that, therefore, the 
 
 * Opinion, Trial, Vol. 3, p. 228. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 389 
 
 organization of the Senate as a court should precede the 
 actual announcement of the impeachment on the part of 
 the House; that articles should only be presented to a 
 court of impeachment; and that rules for the govern- 
 ment of such a court should be framed only by the court 
 itself. This opinion from so high an authority, the 
 Senate disregarded entirely by proceeding immediately 
 to listen to the managers read the articles in the presence 
 of the House, the Speaker being provided with a seat at 
 the right of the President pro tern. This ceremony over 
 and the managers with their retinue gone, the Senate 
 resolved that at one o 'clock the next afternoon it would 
 proceed with the Impeachment ; notice to be sent to the 
 House and a committee of three to wait upon the Chief 
 Justice to conduct him to the chair. That evening, 
 Chase held a reception at his residence. At about mid- 
 night the doors are thrown open, ' ' the President of the 
 United States ' ' is announced, and Andrew Johnson, the 
 Great Impeached, walks in. The ordinary exchange of 
 courtesies between the distinguished host and his dis- 
 tinguished guest takes place, and the incident is at an 
 end. But the report in the newspapers next morning 
 sent a flurry through the ranks of the advocates of im- 
 peachment and, following as it did the opinion of the 
 Chief Justice, convinced the radicals that the officer to 
 preside at the trial was an enemy to their scheme.* 
 
 The next day— Thursday, the fifth— the Senate cham- 
 ber is crowded by persons curious to witness the meta- 
 morphosis of a legislative body into a judicial tribunal. 
 When the fine head of the Chief Justice comes into view 
 
 * Washington newspapers. 
 
390 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 as he advances through the crowd of representatives 
 flooding the back spaces and outer circles of desks, the 
 lion-like countenance of Justice Nelson following, the 
 senators all rise. Wade vacates the chair, and the Chief 
 Justice, taking it, announces that he attends for the pur- 
 pose of joining the senators "in forming a court of im- 
 peachment for the trial of the President of the United 
 States, ' ' and is ready to take the oath. In prescribing a 
 form of oath for its own members the Senate had ignored 
 the Chief Justice as being merely a presiding officer and 
 as such not required to be sworn. This theory, Justice 
 Nelson demolishes by administering the senators' oath 
 to the Chief Justice as being actually a member of the 
 court; the senators looking on in silence. The roll is 
 then called alphabetically, and the Chief Justice admin- 
 isters the oath to every senator, to " do impartial justice 
 according to the Constitution and laws." The slow 
 process is almost over when, in answer to the name of 
 Benjamin F. Wade, that senator comes forward to be 
 sworn. Hendricks protests that, in accordance with the 
 spirit of the constitutional provision that when the Pres- 
 ident is impeached the Vice President cannot preside at 
 the trial, the President pro tern., being next in succession 
 to the present Chief Magistrate, has no right to become 
 a member of the court. Sherman comes to the defence 
 of his colleague, pleading that Wade is a senator of 
 Ohio, Ohio is entitled to two votes in the Senate, of 
 which the state cannot be deprived; Wade is not Vice 
 President and, therefore, the constitutional inhibition 
 does not apply, and it is for him to say how far his in- 
 terest in the event of the trial will suffer him to go. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 391 
 
 Howard contends that there is no right of challenge in 
 cases of impeachment and points to the fact that the son- 
 in-law of the accused had already sworn in. Reverdy 
 Johnson, on the other side, recalls the Stockton case, 
 when Sumner championed "the honor of the American 
 Senate. ' ' With his usual audacity in dealing with the 
 facts of history, Sumner denies point-blank that the 
 reason why the Vice President was incapacitated from 
 presiding on the trial of the President was the one as- 
 signed by Hendricks, and states that "the reason for the 
 introduction of the clause" (a reason heard of now for 
 the first time) was "because the framers of the Consti- 
 tution contemplated the possibility of the suspension of 
 the President from the exercise of his powers, in which 
 event the Vice President could not be in the chair of the 
 Senate because he would be in the President's place." 
 The discussion was carried over to the next day, when a 
 senator impatient of the delay invoked the twenty-third 
 rule as adopted by the Senate. The Chief Justice de- 
 cided that the rule did not yet apply as the Senate was 
 not yet organized for the trial of an impeachment— a 
 decision which provoked the radicals to appeal and the 
 chair was sustained by 24 to 20— the first significant 
 vote in the proceeding. Hendricks finding some of his 
 political associates of the opinion that the question 
 under debate ought more properly to be raised when 
 the court was fully organized, withdrew his objection, 
 and "Bluff Ben" Wade, with unruffled countenance, 
 took the oath.* 
 
 * A report of this debate is given at end of Vol. 3 of Trial. 
 
392 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 It is not a subject of regret that the important legal 
 question raised at this time, but never coming up again, 
 was left undecided. In the absence of an express inhibi- 
 tion, there can be little doubt that a senator does not 
 lose his constitutional right to be a member of the sen- 
 atorial court on the trial of the President by being 
 elected to the chair of the Senate and thus, because of an 
 act of Congress, put in the line of succession to the chief 
 magistracy. But, while this is so, there can be no doubt 
 whatever that a senator occupying that invidious posi- 
 tion is morally disqualified and ought at least to forego 
 his privilege. In truth, the reason for the exclusion of 
 the President pro tempore of the Senate, when ex officio 
 Vice President, is much stronger than the reason for the 
 exclusion of the Vice President. The Vice President 
 proper can vote on the trial, even on incidental questions, 
 only in case of a tie, can in no event vote on the final 
 judgment because it takes two-thirds to convict, and, 
 consequently, cannot contribute to his own elevation; 
 whereas an ex officio Vice President, like "Wade, can 
 vote on all questions arising during the progress of the 
 trial and his one vote may be decisive of the final judg- 
 ment ; thus literally making him President of the United 
 States. In Wade 's case, moreover, the impropriety was 
 particularly glaring. He was one of the bitterest ad- 
 versaries of the President, had denounced Andrew John- 
 son far and wide over the country, loading the name 
 with opprobrious epithets in the use of which he was a 
 master. He was universally known as an outspoken 
 advocate of the deposition of the President. He was 
 the only senator who publicly gloried in seizing on every 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 393 
 
 advantage sickness or death might give him in the strug- 
 gle for the two-thirds majority in the Senate; he was 
 prominently conspicuous in urging the admission of 
 undeveloped territories into the Union for the purpose 
 of adding to the number of judges in the court of im- 
 peachment favourable beforehand to conviction ; he had 
 been lately rejected by his own state and a gentleman of 
 opposite politics selected to succeed him; there was 
 never from the beginning the slightest uncertainty about 
 his vote of "guilty," and his partisans were even now 
 betting that in ten, twenty or at most thirty days 
 "honest old Ben "Wade" would be in the White House. 
 It was fortunate, therefore, that a decision of the naked 
 legal right, which must have been one of affirmance, was 
 never pronounced: — leaving the breach of the most 
 fundamental canon of judicial decency to stand forth in 
 all its grossness, unrelieved by cloak, apology or miti- 
 gation. 
 
 The remaining senators present having taken the 
 oath, the Chief Justice, again calling attention to his 
 disregarded opinion and giving the senators no oppor- 
 tunity for reflection or interruption, put the question 
 whether the rules adopted on the second of March should 
 be considered the rules of this body. The senators re- 
 sponded orally in the affirmative, and the Chief Justice 
 scored another victory. It was about three o 'clock when 
 the managers demanded process against Andrew John- 
 son. The Senate ordered that a summons issue return- 
 able on Friday, the thirteenth of March, and the 
 "Court" ("to use a brief expression," as Howard said) 
 adjourned to that day. 
 
394 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 During the week's interval not much legislative busi- 
 ness was done. It was thought "incongruous and im- 
 proper to be sending bills to the President for signature 
 when he is being tried for high crimes and misde- 
 meanors"; Sumner being exceedingly sensitive about 
 holding any intercourse whatever with a President "ar- 
 raigned at our bar in the name of the people of the 
 United States," even protesting against the Senate 
 going into executive- session. But when (on the ninth) 
 the credentials of George Vickers, elected by the legisla- 
 ture of Maryland to fill ' ' the unexpired term of the Hon. 
 Philip F. Thomas who was refused a seat," were pre- 
 sented, the senator from Massachusetts challenged the 
 validity of the election on the ground that Maryland 
 had not a republican form of government and moved to 
 refer the credentials ; the effect of which action would 
 have been to deprive the President of a friendly judge 
 on the coming trial. The motion, however, met with 
 little favour and Vickers was sworn in, making the Sen- 
 ate, as at present constituted, full. 
 
 There was more business out of doors. The managers 
 summoned Thomas before them and for a second time 
 he was put upon the rack. Stanton got hold of a witness 
 for them— one George Washington Karsner from Dela- 
 ware—who, on Monday evening, the ninth, in the east 
 room of the President's House, whither he had gone full 
 of curiosity to see the distinguished citizen of his own 
 state now standing by the President as his ad interim 
 Secretary of War, succeeded in getting eyes on his hero 
 whom he took the liberty to exhort to stand firm, telling 
 him that "the eyes of Delaware were upon him," and 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 395 
 
 eliciting the off-hand reply : "In two or three days ' time 
 I will kick that fellow out." Of this conversation, the 
 Delawarian boasted to one of the clerks of the War De- 
 partment who carried him before his intrenched chief 
 and thence he was sent in hot haste before the managers, 
 and this bit of testimony secured. 
 
 On Friday, the thirteenth of March, the Senate cham- 
 ber for the first time assumed the appearance it retained 
 throughout the trial. The senators, having resolved to 
 retain their seats and not transfer themselves to a plat- 
 form put up for the purpose on each side of the chair, 
 as was done in Judge Humphrey's case, the last preced- 
 ing trial, confined themselves as far as possible to the 
 two inner rows of desks; surrendering the outer rows, 
 as well as the surrounding back spaces filled with chairs 
 by their order, to the members of the House. The man- 
 agers on their entrance were conducted to a place 
 assigned them on the left of the chair. The sergeant-at- 
 arms in a loud voice called Andrew Johnson thrice ; but 
 Andrew Johnson did not answer. Instead of so notable 
 an appearance, manager Butler came hurrying in and, 
 as the crier's voice resounded through the chamber, 
 halted in mid-aisle, seemingly at a loss to conceive why 
 so offensive a name should be hurled at him in so 
 obstreperous a manner. The merriment excited by this 
 incident died away as from an adjoining room there 
 entered the President's counsel— Henry Stanbery (just 
 resigned as Attorney-General), Benjamin B. Curtis and 
 Thomas A. B. Nelson— who were conducted to a posi- 
 tion to the right of the chair corresponding to the place 
 assigned to the managers on the left. The House of 
 
396 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Representatives was then announced and the members, 
 headed by Elihu B. Washburne chairman of the com- 
 mittee of the whole, surged into the chamber and spread 
 themselves over the space assigned them, taxing the 
 utmost capacity of the floor. 
 
 Thereupon, Mr. Stanbery rose and read a communi- 
 cation addressed to the Chief Justice and signed Andrew 
 Johnson, notifying the appearance of the President by 
 counsel (in addition to the three present naming Jere- 
 miah S. Black and William M. Evarts), and asking for 
 forty days to prepare an answer. He also read a state- 
 ment, signed by all five counsel, to the effect that the 
 time asked for, "with the utmost diligence," was no 
 more than ' ' reasonable and necessary. ' ' The managers 
 were prepared for some such application, for some dila- 
 tory movement, but for no such "huge canlle" as this. 
 "Forty days!" Butler exclaimed, "as long as it took 
 God to destroy the world by a flood!" Forty days to 
 plead not guilty ! In the discussion that ensued, it was 
 curious to hear with what scrupulosity the managers on 
 their side addressed the presiding officer as "Mr. Presi- 
 dent," and the counsel for the President on their side 
 as "Mr. Chief Justice." Edmunds, at length, moved 
 an order that the respondent file his answer on or before 
 the first day of April, the managers their replication 
 within three days thereafter, and the trial begin on the 
 sixth; whereupon the Chief Justice and the senators 
 retired to the reception room for consultation. The 
 audience instantly relaxes its attention, the buzz of con- 
 versation rises, members go in and out, groups gather 
 on the floor, and comparative disorder reigns in the 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 397 
 
 galleries. After a tedious interval of two hours, the 
 court returns; there is an instant hush; and the Chief 
 Justice announces the order granting the President ten, 
 instead of forty, days. 
 
 This matter having been settled, the managers moved 
 that upon the filing of the replication the trial proceed 
 forthwith ; and their motion gave rise to the second sig- 
 nificant vote of the senators. Twenty-five Republicans 
 voted for the motion and fifteen voted with eleven 
 opposition senators against it ; the motion being lost by 
 one vote. The struggle over the fixing of a day certain 
 for the trial to commence resulted in the indefinite order 
 that it proceed immediately after the replication shall 
 be filed, "unless otherwise ordered for cause shown"; 
 and the court adjourned until Monday, the twenty-third, 
 amid the angry ejaculations of the extremists : ' ' Another 
 ten days thrown away!" 
 
 During the interval the President lost the services of 
 the most eminent of his counsel. Black was the leading 
 lawyer for an American firm who claimed the small 
 island of Alta Vela, lying near St. Domingo, (or the 
 guano on it), by the right of discovery and occupation, 
 but whose settlement and works there the Dominican 
 government had broken up, and then leased the island 
 to another American firm, who were now contesting the 
 validity of the claim of the former before the executive 
 of the United States. Black urged the redress of his 
 client's grievance by the summary method of sending a 
 United States vessel to take possession of the island, 
 arguing the case before the Attorney-General and bring- 
 ing his personal influence as a political friend and 
 
398 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 adviser to bear upon the President. But Seward was 
 strongly averse to interference by the government, and, 
 it was said, his opposition alone stood in the way of the 
 President's yielding to the force of his own opinion that 
 the original occupiers had a right to the possession of 
 the island. Other and less justifiable methods were re- 
 sorted to. The summons of the Senate in the impeach- 
 ment proceeding was served on the President on Satur- 
 day, the seventh of March, and Black must have been 
 already retained as one of his counsel. On Monday (the 
 ninth) Col. J. W. Shaffer, one of the junior counsel with 
 Black and a former aid-de-camp to General Butler, went 
 to that gentleman in the House of Representatives and 
 secured the manager's opinion, in the shape of a letter 
 dated that day and addressed to Shaffer, favourable to 
 the validity of the claim of his clients, and stating that 
 the writer had "never been able to understand why the 
 Executive did not long since assert the rights of the 
 Government and sustain the rightful claims of its citi- 
 zens to the possession of the island in the most forcible 
 manner consistent with the dignity and honor of the 
 Nation." This letter Shaffer carried around to man- 
 ager Logan who wrote under its signature, ' ' I concur in 
 the opinion above expressed by General Butler; John 
 A. Logan": and, then, to representative Garfield, who 
 wrote underneath, "and I, J. A. Garfield." The docu- 
 ment was given by Shaffer to Chauncey F. Black, the 
 son of Judge Black, and another counsel in the case, 
 who sent or handed it to the President. On Friday, 
 the thirteenth, the elder Black's name was signed to 
 the appearance entered by the President before the 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 399 
 
 Court of Impeachment, although he was not personally 
 present. On the following morning, the younger Black 
 enclosed to the President a copy of Butler's letter with 
 the addenda of Logan and Garfield (the original Of 
 which was already in the President's hands) to which 
 had been added in the meantime another concurrence 
 signed by W. H. Koontz (a representative), J. K. Moor- 
 head (one of the Stanton body-guard on the twenty- 
 second), Thaddeus Stevens (manager), J. G. Blaine, 
 and John A. Bingham (chairman of the board of man- 
 agers). Here were four out of the seven managers of 
 the Impeachment and four prominent members of the 
 impeaching body, one of them a prospective witness for 
 the prosecution, backing the leading counsel retained to 
 defend the President in a demand upon that officer to 
 send forthwith an armed vessel and take forcible pos- 
 session of an island claimed by another power with 
 which the United States were at peace, for the benefit of 
 private parties— the clients of that counsel. As might 
 have been foreseen by any one who knew Andrew John- 
 son, such covert attempts at coercion only rendered him 
 the more immovable ; and on Thursday, the nineteenth, 
 Judge Black, who, it is but justice to state, knew noth- 
 ing of the maneuvre, declined to appear further on the 
 trial of the President. As he said : ' ' When I found that 
 Seward's policy was stronger than legal duty, I was 
 done." The sudden retirement of this redoubtable 
 champion, the circumstances of which were not accu- 
 rately known at the time, was trumpeted abroad by the 
 detractors of the President, as a proof not only of the 
 
400 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 incorrigible quarrelsomeness of his nature, but also of 
 the inherent weakness of his defence;— since so great a 
 lawyer refused to undertake it. On the other hand, the 
 defection was denounced by the friends of the President 
 as the outcome of a plot of the managers to rob him of 
 the services of the most invincible of his defenders. The 
 absence of Judge Black from the trial is in truth to be 
 deplored. His participation would have lent a pungency 
 to the proceedings adding greatly to their interest, and a 
 speech of Jeremiah S. Black in defence of Andrew John- 
 son against the Republican party would have been an 
 ever-living treat to students of the pathology of party 
 politics, and taken rank with the classic invectives of 
 ancient and modern times. His argument before the 
 Electoral Commission in 1877 may give us a faint idea 
 of what we have lost.* 
 
 When the "Court" reassembled on Monday, the 
 twenty-third, Black's place was supplied by William S. 
 Groesbeck, and the President's counsel for the first time 
 appeared in full force. In response to the inquiry of the 
 Chief Justice, Stanbery arose and stated that they were 
 ready to read and file the answer. This pleading was 
 lengthy, minute and elaborate ; particularly the defence 
 to the first article of Impeachment, which was read by 
 Mr. Curtis and was a history of the attempted removal 
 of Stanton given from the stand-point of the President 's 
 position, opinions and motives. The defences to the 
 succeeding articles down to and including the ninth, 
 
 * For Alta Vela matter see Nelson's Speech on Trial, ut infra, and 
 Debate in House, Globe, pp. 2337-2348. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 401 
 
 were read by Mr. Stanbery. The defences to the tenth 
 and eleventh— the Butler and Stevens articles— were 
 read by Mr. Evarts. The reader, having become ac- 
 quainted with the main outlines of the President 's posi- 
 tion during the progress of our narrative, can dispense 
 with any elaborate analysis of the formal plea. It was 
 called "a masterpiece of forensic argument," and its 
 straightforward explanation of the President's motives 
 and course of action produced a favourable impression 
 throughout the country. 
 
 The managers announcing their expectation to be able 
 to file their formal replication by one o 'clock to-morrow, 
 Mr. Evarts applied for an allowance of thirty days 
 thereafter to prepare for trial; fortifying the applica- 
 tion with a written statement of the necessity for that 
 amount of time, signed by himself and his four asso- 
 ciates. The prospect of still further delay threw the 
 managers into another fit of exasperation. "Mr. Pres- 
 ident" and "Mr. Chief Justice" alternated in the dis- 
 cussion with redoubled pertinacity. Manager Bingham 
 gave the Senate the first specimen of the kind of elo- 
 quence for which he was famous. Quoting the words of 
 the answer claiming the exclusive power of removal, he 
 "ventured to say 
 
 before the enlightened bar of public opinion in America, 
 by these words incorporated in his answer, the President 
 is as guilty of malfeasance and misdemeanor in office as 
 ever man was guilty of malfeasance or misdemeanor in 
 office since nations began to be upon the earth. What! 
 That he will suspend all executive officers of this Govern- 
 26 
 
402 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ment at his pleasure, not by force of the Tenure of office 
 act, to which he himself refers, and which he says is void 
 and of no effect, but by force of the Constitution of the 
 United States; and that, too, he adds, while the Senate of 
 the United States is in session! What does he mean by 
 it? Let the Senate answer when they come to vote on 
 this proposition for an extension of time. . . . 
 
 "If it be the judgment of the Senate that he has power 
 thus to lay hands upon the Constitution of the country 
 and rend it in tatters in the presence of its custodians, the 
 sooner that judgment is pronounced the better." 
 
 Pending a motion to allow ten days, the court ad- 
 journed. The following day (Tuesday, the twenty- 
 fourth) , the managers being prompt to the moment with 
 their replication, Sumner moved as an amendment that 
 the trial proceed from day to day ; and the court retired 
 for consultation. After an absence of two hours, the 
 court returned and announced the next Monday (the 
 thirtieth) as the day fixed upon for the commencement 
 of the trial; to which date the court adjourned.* 
 
 The veto of the bill cutting off the right of appeal to 
 the Supreme Court in the McCardle case (a case which 
 involved the question of the constitutionality of the re- 
 construction acts) at the moment it was about to be 
 decided by that court, was sent to, the Senate the next 
 day ; and the majority in both Houses spent' the most of 
 the week imbedding into the record of their proceedings 
 an imperishable testimonial to their want of confidence 
 in the validity of their own legislation and their distrust 
 
 * For Preliminaries see Trial, Vol. 1, pp. 11-80. 
 
THE IMPEACHMENT 403 
 
 of another of the three coordinate departments of the 
 government, by enacting this iniquity into a law.* 
 
 * The history of this piece of legislation is as follows : MeCardle 
 having been arrested in Mississippi in the fall of 1867, obtained a writ 
 of habeas corpus from the U. S. Circuit Court directed to the military 
 commander of the district, who made return that the prisoner was held 
 under the reconstruction act, and he was thereupon remanded. From 
 this order MeCardle appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States 
 under an act of Congress approved February 5, 1867. A motion was 
 made to that court in December to dismiss the appeal for lack of juris- 
 diction under that act and after argument the court affirmed its juris- 
 diction and denied the motion. (Ex parte MeCardle, 6 Wall. 318.) 
 The appeal was argued upon the merits by eminent counsel on the 
 second, third, fourth and ninth of March, 1868, and the court took 
 the ease under advisement. (Ex parte MeCardle, 7 Wall. 507.) On 
 the twelfth Schenck of Ohio asked and obtained the unanimous consent 
 of the House to take up a bill of one section granting appeals in revenue 
 cases, which had passed the Senate the day before ; and James F. Wilson, 
 of Iowa, as he subsequently avowed on the floor of the House for the 
 purpose of cutting off the right of appeal in the MeCardle case, moved 
 as an amendment an additional section repealing so much of the act 
 of February, 18G7, as authorized appeals in certain cases to the Supreme 
 Court of the United States or the exercise of jurisdiction by that 
 tribunal on appeals " which have been or may hereafter be taken." 
 The amendment was adopted sub silentio and the bill was sent back to 
 the Senate. (Globe, pp. 1859, 1860, 1881, 2059.) Senator Buckalew, de- 
 fecting the trick, strove in vain to obtain either explanation or postpone- 
 ment, and on the same day the amendment was concurred in. (Id., 
 1847.) On the twenty-fifth the bill was vetoed on the ground that the 
 second section, so surreptitiously smuggled on it, was pointed at a 
 particular case pending in the Supreme Court; but, although in the dis- 
 cussion that followed in both Houses the trick was thoroughly exposed, 
 the bill was passed over the objections of the President. The court 
 instantly on its attention being called to the act stayed its decision 
 until argument could be heard on the effect of the repealing section ; and, 
 in December following, dismissed the appeal on the ground that that 
 section deprived the court of its jurisdiction. (Ex parte MeCardle, 7 
 Wall. 507.) See Evarts' allusion to the mutilation, in his argument, 
 on the Trial, Vol. 2, p. 272. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Trial, oe the President 
 
 Never before in the history of the world did forensic 
 orator face a higher tribunal, in a cause between parties 
 more exalted and before a more splendid audience, than 
 did Benjamin F. Butler, when, on the thirtieth day of 
 March, 1868, he rose to make the opening argument in 
 the trial of Andrew Johnson. Fifty-four senators, rep- 
 resenting half as many states, presided over by the 
 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Union, con- 
 stituted the tribunal; the House of Bepresentatives 
 numbering one hundred and ninety members chosen by 
 thirty million constituents was the accuser ; the accused 
 was the elective ruler over a republic of continental 
 dimensions and forty millions of people; and the 
 audience seemed an epitome of the beauty of the women 
 and the chivalry of the men of the country, set off by 
 the pomp of ministers from foreign courts. Still, 
 because of its spectacular grandeur, the theatricality 
 of the whole performance was all the more instinc- 
 tively felt. In those rare historic trials when 
 mighty peoples called their rulers to account, the 
 issue was so transcendent as to dwarf into insignifi- 
 cance the paraphernalia of the process. When Charles 
 I stood before the High Court of Justice, when 
 Louis XVI stood before the French Convention, what 
 
 (404) 
 
THE TRIAL 405 
 
 made the occasion capital was not the dignity of the 
 court nor the confrontation of the majesty of the king 
 with the majesty of the people, but the weightiness of 
 the cause. In the impeachment of Warren Hastings, 
 it was not that brilliant assemblage, painted as it has 
 been upon its historic back-ground by the pen of Ma- 
 caulay, that signalizes the trial as an event worthy of 
 the notice of history, but the enormity of the charges 
 against the defendant. Precisely the reverse were the 
 circumstances of the present trial. Here was the High 
 Court. Here were the exalted parties. Here the fit 
 audience. But there was no case. The tribunal of Chief 
 Justice and senators, the representatives accusing, the 
 President defending, the amphitheatre of beauty and 
 chivalry in which they were set;— without some supreme 
 emergency summoning them upon the stage, what were 
 they but "forms, modes, shows"— "actions that a man 
 might play"? The ponderous two-handed engine of 
 impeachment, designed to be kept in cryptic darkness 
 until some crisis of the nation's life cried out for its 
 interposition, was being dragged into open day to crush 
 a too formidable political antagonist a few months 
 before the appointed time when the people might get rid 
 of him altogether. The nodus was lamentably unworthy 
 the intervention of the god. And this sub-conscious im- 
 pression did not arise from any widespread misgiving 
 as to the result. On the contrary, the prevalent assump- 
 tion that the judgment of the court was a foregone con- 
 clusion, if it did not originate, contributed materially to 
 strengthen the feeling that the august performance was 
 but a solemn farce. In full view of the audience sat the 
 
406 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 fifty-four senators, every senator in the attitude of an 
 impartial judge ; yet every onlooker was conscious that 
 all but twelve belonged to the same political party as 
 the one hundred and twenty-six members of the House 
 who voted the accused guilty of high crimes and misde- 
 meanours ; that before the vote was cast twenty-eight of 
 these judges had already passed condemnation upon 
 the overt acts of the President which formed the basis 
 of the charge; that a clear majority of the court were 
 party partisans, as eager to contribute their vote to the 
 removal of the ' Incubus ' (as they did not scruple to style 
 him) as the hottest fanatic ever was to add his fagot to 
 the burning pile of the unbeliever. 
 
 Another conspicuous circumstance there was which 
 enhanced the air of unreality hovering over the trial. 
 This was the absence of the defendant. The presence of 
 Charles I and Louis XVI, visibly contending for their 
 lives before their judges, adds immeasurably to our 
 impression of the dead-earnestness of the struggle and 
 the tremendous interests at stake; and the iron count- 
 enance of Hastings softening only for a moment be- 
 neath the unrivalled eloquence of Burke, the imperturb- 
 ability and skill with which he lent assistance to his 
 counsel, and the lofty bearing with which he confronted 
 his judges, are the features which convert the long trial 
 into a living thing. But Andrew Johnson in person 
 never entered the court room, never stood face to face 
 with his accusers, never appeared before the court and 
 the audience in the attitude of a culprit. The House 
 was there; the Senate; the Chief Justice;— all visible in 
 the flesh; but the defendant came not. His place was 
 
THE TRIAL 407 
 
 vacant. The Hamlet of the play was missing. And, 
 from this point of view, so significant a gap in the 
 programme suggested the idea that Andrew Johnson, 
 having despatched his five counsel to play their part 
 in the insubstantial pageant, had returned to the dis- 
 charge of the multiplex duties of his exalted office, 
 contemptuously indifferent to this make-believe game 
 his enemies were playing with ancestral weapons much 
 too big for their case. 
 
 To crown it all, the irony of events was seen playing 
 round the hollow spectacle. Another trial had been set 
 down for the coming month. Another President of 
 another and a vanished republic was under prosecution. 
 And, in his case, there was no need of pageantry to swell 
 the proportions of the charge. Treason of no construc- 
 tive character was the high crime; and the presence 
 of the distinguished defendant was certain to be forth- 
 coming. But, as it was shrewdly said, Jefferson Davis 
 could hardly be tried for "insisting that the Southern 
 States were out of the Union while Andrew Johnson 
 was being tried for insisting they were in." The real 
 trial was made to give place, therefore, to the sham 
 trial ; Chief Justice Chase protesting with much reason- 
 ableness that he could not act in both at the same time. 
 
 So that, all things considered, while manager Butler 
 might be felicitated on the glorious theatre in which he 
 was to play his part, the part assigned him— to raise a 
 cause radically inadequate to the high plane of the im- 
 perial process— rendered him, rather, an object of com- 
 miseration. Moreover, it was singularly unfortunate 
 that his own presence and participation served but to 
 
408 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 deepen the prevalent impression. Known as a keen and 
 adroit lawyer, a ready and witty debater, a cunning and 
 most versatile politician, his reputation for sincerity 
 was not high ; and his recent career as a volunteer war- 
 rior, whether deservedly or not, carried a histrionic air 
 about it which sometimes suggested the comic. That 
 General Butler was to open the cause of all the people of 
 the United States against Andrew Johnson, the Presi- 
 dent thereof, arraigned for high crimes against the 
 Union, was enough of itself to shake the gravity of the 
 whole procedure. Nevertheless, Butler was, in truth, 
 one of the sincerest among the leaders of the Impeach- 
 ment. He may be said to have been the representative 
 of its coarsest phase. But he knew exactly what he 
 wanted and was not ashamed to own it. He wanted 
 Andrew Johnson turned out of office as speedily as pos- 
 sible; and the validity of the pretext concerned him 
 very little. Forms, it was unfortunately true, must be 
 observed in order to capture the two-thirds vote of the 
 Senate. But the two-thirds vote of the Senate once made 
 sure of, forms might shift for themselves. Andrew 
 Johnson once out, the means by which he was got out 
 would never return to plague the inventors. 
 
 His opening argument illustrated the foregoing view 
 of the trial and was characteristic of the man. It was 
 carefully prepared and read from manuscript. There 
 was but little straining after oratorical effect. It was a 
 lawyer's plea tainted with a dash of the demagogue. No 
 man knew better than Benjamin F. Butler that the Pres- 
 ident, in the two formal acts laid against him, had com- 
 mitted no offence deserving to be classed with treason 
 
THE TRIAL 409 
 
 and bribery. It was imperative, therefore, to concoct 
 a definition of impeachable offences comprehensive 
 enough to embrace any act, whether violative of common 
 law or statute or not, and no matter how empty of 
 criminality, which a majority of the House of Bepre- 
 sentatives for the time being might see fit to brand a 
 "high crime against the nation." With the help of 
 William Lawrence of the House, who compiled for him 
 a brief of all the precedents and authorities on the sub- 
 ject both in England and in this country, he was able to 
 evolve a definition which it was judged would pass 
 muster. 
 
 "We define, therefore, an impeachable crime or misde- 
 meanor to be one in its nature or consequences subversive 
 of some fundamental or essential principle of government, 
 or highly prejudicial to the public interest, and this may 
 consist of a violation of the Constitution, of law, of an 
 official oath, or of duty, by an act committed or omitted, 
 or, without violating a positive law, by the abuse of discre- 
 tionary powers from improper, motives, or for any im- 
 proper purpose." 
 
 After defining every offence as impeachable the House 
 chose to impeach, the manager proceeds to divest the 
 proceeding before the Senate of every restraint incident 
 to a trial by reducing it to a simple inquest of office, and 
 the tribunal before him of every attribute of a court by 
 absolving it from every rule of law, precedent or evi- 
 dence. "As a constitutional tribunal, solely," he told 
 the listening Senate, "you are bound by no law, either 
 statute or common, which may limit your constitutional 
 
410 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 prerogative. . . . You are a law unto yourselves, bound 
 only by the natural principles of equity and justice, and 
 that salus populi suprema lex." The "determining 
 quality, ' ' principally dwelt upon by Butler, that distin- 
 guished the tribunal he was addressing from a court, 
 was the immunity of its members from challenge for 
 bias; but, the larger number of English precedents he 
 cited being the ordinary trials of peers before the 
 tribunal established by law for that purpose— unmis- 
 takably a court in every sense of that term and in fact 
 so designated by the manager himself— showed on the 
 contrary that immunity from challenge was no essential 
 attribute of a court of judicature. 
 
 With so elastic a definition of the character of the 
 offence to be proved ; with so convenient a mode of pro- 
 cedure to prove it; with so absolute a tribunal to pro- 
 nounce it proved:— the manager might well advance 
 with confidence to the exposition of the articles. There 
 being little to be said upon the first eight affirmatively, 
 the first part of the manager 's argument was devoted to 
 demolishing the defences interposed to them. To Butler 
 as to Bingham, the claim set up in the answer that the 
 Constitution vested exclusively in the President the 
 power of removal from office seemed a greater outrage 
 than any offence charged in the articles. Said the 
 counsel, "the momentous question, here and now, is 
 raised whether the Presidential office itself {if it bear 
 the prerogatives and power claimed for it) ought, in 
 fact, to exist as a part of the constitutional government 
 of a free people." "Whoever, therefore, votes 'not 
 guilty' on these articles votes to enchain our free in- 
 
THE TRIAL 411 
 
 stitutions, and to prostrate them at the feet of any 
 man who, being President, may choose to control them. ' ' 
 Upon that part of the President's defence which 
 seems to us the most conclusive, to wit: that Stanton 
 was not within the act, Butler's direct attack is hut 
 a repetition of the play upon the word "term" prac- 
 ticed, as we have seen, in the House. "Whose presi- 
 * dential term was he (Stanton) holding under when 
 the bullet of Booth became the proximate cause of 
 this trial?" — is his allusive way of putting the case. 
 "Whose presidential term is the respondent now serv- 
 ing out? His own or Mr. Lincoln's? If his own, he 
 is entitled to four years up to the anniversary of the 
 murder, because each presidential term is four years 
 by the Constitution. ' ' Again he argues : " If Mr. Stan- 
 ton 's commission was vacated in any way by the 
 'tenure-of-office act,' then it must have ceased one 
 month after the fourth of March, 1865"— or, if the act 
 "had no retroactive effect, then his commission must 
 have ceased, if it had the effect to vacate his commis- 
 sion at all, on the passage of the act, to wit, March 2d, 
 1867"; and in that case the President has been guilty 
 of a high misdemeanour in "employing" him "con- 
 trary to the act." His passing eulogium on Stanton 
 for holding fast to the place "against the wishes of 
 his chief" was eminently Butlerian. "The respondent 
 did not call Mr. Stanton into his council. The blow 
 of the assassin did call the respondent to preside over 
 a cabinet of which Mr. Stanton was then an honored 
 member . . . ; and if the respondent deserted the prin- 
 ciples under which he was elected, betrayed his trust, 
 
412 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and sought to return rebels . . . again to power, are 
 not those reasons why Mr. Stanton"— should, in a 
 word, 'stick'? "To desert it now would be to imitate 
 the treachery of his accidental Chief." The less able 
 to meet the question of statutory construction in front, 
 the more strongly did the manager insist that the 
 President was estopped by his submission of the rea- 
 sons for the suspension to the Senate. And, at this 
 point, "the shameless avowal" (as he calls it) in the 
 answer, that the President never meant to be bound 
 by the decision of the Senate if adverse to his own 
 views— a mental reservation studiously concealed from 
 the Senate— aroused Butler's deepest indignation. 
 The want of "open and frank dealing," of "a manly 
 straightforward bearing," the "keeping back his 
 claims of power," "concealing his motives" are de- 
 clared to be characteristic of the culprit as self- 
 revealed in his answer ; while, at the next moment, they 
 are denounced as "the subterfuge and evasion and 
 after-thought which a criminal brought to bay makes 
 to escape the consequences of his act. " " Senators ! He 
 asked you for time in which to make his answer. You 
 gave him ten days, and this is the answer he makes. 
 If he could do this in ten days, what should we have had 
 if you had given him forty?" 
 
 Passing to the letter of authority to Thomas, Butler 
 contended that the act of February, 1795, under which 
 the President claimed to have acted, did not apply to the 
 case of a "vacancy caused by removal," because of the 
 presence of the clause, "whereby" the officer "cannot 
 perform the duties of his office ' ' ; although that clause 
 
THE TRIAL 413 
 
 was a stereotyped form of words used in all similar 
 statutes. He argued, also, that the act of 1863 repealed 
 so much of the act of 1795 as permitted the President 
 to select any person to perform the ad interim duties of 
 the office, and restricted his choice to the head of another 
 executive department:— although the act of 1863 on its 
 face provides for vacancies in cases of death, resigna- 
 tion, absence, or sickness, only; and not for vacancies 
 caused by removal or expiration of term. The way he 
 dealt with the claim that a President, believing a law 
 to be unconstitutional, has a right to violate it to bring 
 the matter before the Supreme Court for adjudication, 
 is much more effective. He takes the ground that the 
 right of the President to judge of the unconstitution- 
 ality of an act of Congress is exhausted when he vetoes 
 the bill. After its passage over his veto, "he and all 
 other officers must execute the law, whether in fact con- 
 stitutional or not." To do otherwise, "would in effect 
 be for him to execute his veto and leave the law unex- 
 ecuted." He may do it "at his peril; but that peril" 
 is impeachment. In answer to the question, will you 
 condemn the President for a crime because in good 
 faith he removed Mr. Stanton for the purpose of testing 
 the validity of the law— even though he may not have 
 had the right to do so! Butler promises to show that 
 the President never took a step to submit the question 
 to the courts; on the contrary, that he complied with 
 the law in every particular, causing the forms of com- 
 missions of officers to be changed so as to conform to 
 the act; in the very case of Stanton he acted under the 
 law and never instituted proceedings in the nature of 
 
414 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 a quo warranto, as he alone could do, to try Stanton's 
 title. Had he informed the Senate on the twenty-first 
 of February that he had removed the Secretary of War 
 for so innocent a purpose, then the manager acknowl- 
 edged "the representatives of the people might never 
 have deemed it necessary to impeach the President. ' ' 
 
 The last three articles, according to Butler, raise the 
 inquiry "whether Andrew Johnson had so conducted 
 himself that he ought longer to hold any constitutional 
 office whatever,"— a question, he declares, that "sinks 
 into merited insignificance compared with the grand- 
 eur" of the question raised by the first eight, that con- 
 cerns the very existence of the presidential office itself. 
 Nevertheless, it is in the exposition of one of these 
 three comparatively "insignificant" articles, that the 
 manager redeems his opening argument from the dull- 
 ness associated with reading of a dry legal disserta- 
 tion. The ninth article founded on the Emory inter- 
 view, even Butler's ingenuity could not make much 
 of; he himself admitting that "if the transaction set 
 forth . . . stood alone . . . doubts might arise as to 
 the sufficiency of the proof." And article eleven he 
 thought it unnecessary to discuss, because, if the other 
 articles fail "so large a part of the intent and purpose 
 with which the respondent is charged in this article 
 would fail of proof" also, while, if the other articles 
 are sustained, "we shall take judgment upon this by 
 confession." But the tenth article was his own- 
 originated by him to give flesh and blood to the dry 
 bones of the other charges. Upon this one he feels 
 himself at liberty to expatiate freely. The sleepy 
 
THE TRIAL 415 
 
 senators and weary auditors wake up when he begins 
 to read parts of the St. Louis speech. • In a carefully 
 prepared address he rings the changes with the greatest 
 gusto on the offences against good taste, dignity and 
 propriety, committed by Andrew Johnson in an ex 
 tempore, speech, delivered at night, in the open air, to 
 an excited and disorderly crowd, some persons in which 
 were present designedly to provoke the President's 
 well-known pugnacity. The manager achieved a cheap 
 and temporary triumph. It is probable this was the 
 only part of his task he thoroughly enjoyed. On be- 
 half of the American people, he apologized to the sneer- 
 ing monarchists of the old world for having such a 
 President by telling them "this man" "by murder most 
 foul succeeded to the Presidency, and is the elect of an 
 assassin to that high office, and not of the people" ; "we 
 are about to remove him from the office he has dis- 
 graced by the sure, safe and constitutional means of 
 impeachment"— "while your king, Oh, Monarchist! 
 if he becomes a buffoon, or a jester, or a tyrant, can 
 only be displaced through revolution, blood-shed, and 
 civil war. ' ' But he said nothing of the fact that these ' 
 speeches were delivered nearly two years ago ; that the 
 thirty-ninth Congress, whose sovereign dignity they 
 were charged to have assailed, passed out of existence 
 without embodying its resentment in any act; that a 
 committee of the House of the present Congress failed 
 to find in them ground of impeachment, and that the 
 House itself, which, at the last moment under the whip 
 and spur of Butler himself, consented to add his article, 
 
416 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 a month or two before, with the speeches before it, 
 virtually acquitted the President on the same accusation. 
 His peroration is open to the same criticism. He 
 closes his three hours ' speech by replying to a question 
 he might well imagine "to have arisen in the mind of 
 some senator":— "Why are these acts of the President 
 only presented by the House when history informs us 
 that others equally as dangerous to the liberties of the 
 people, if not more so, and others of equal usurpation 
 of power, if not greater, are passed by in silence!" 
 The answer, lying on the surface of things, that the 
 House of Eepresentatives, in December last, despite his 
 own efforts, decided that these other acts of which 
 "history informs us," were not of a character to call 
 for the exercise of the power of impeachment:— he 
 does not make. The answer that he does make is that 
 the acts charged are but ' ' the culmination of a series of 
 wrongs, malfeasance and usurpations ' ' which, although 
 the House once condoned them, the House nevertheless 
 means upon the present trial to spread before the 
 Senate to characterize the "scope and design" of the 
 acts charged. "For the evidence," he says, "we rely 
 upon common fame and current history as sufficient 
 proof. ' ' And, in two long paragraphs, he recapitulates 
 the real charges against Andrew Johnson, on which the 
 Republican party was anxious to put him out of the 
 way. "I speak, therefore, not the language of exagger- 
 ation," was Butler's closing sentence, "but the words 
 of truth and soberness, that the future political welfare 
 and liberties of all men hang trembling on the decision 
 of the hour." 
 
THE TRIAL 417 
 
 It fell to manager Wilson to introduce the evidence 
 on the part of the House, which he proceeded to do in 
 the shape of documentary proofs; and the first day of 
 the trial terminated in the middle of the reading of the 
 President's message submitting his reasons for Stan- 
 ton's suspension to the Senate. 
 
 The next day the oral testimony began. Witnesses 
 were called to prove the service on the President, on 
 Thomas and on Stanton, of the Senate's resolutions of 
 non-concurrence and of disapproval, and to show the 
 change in the forms of commissions after the Tenure-of- 
 office bill became a law ; and, then, representatives Van 
 Horn and Moorhead repeated from the notes they were 
 so careful to make what took place on the twenty-second 
 of February, prior to their departure to the House, 
 between Stanton and Thomas at the War Office. Bur- 
 leigh, the Dakota delegate, was called to testify to the 
 belligerent sparks he managed to strike out of Thomas^ 
 Stanbery objected. The Chief Justice thought the testi- 
 mony competent, whereupon, his right to decide ques- 
 tions of evidence in the first instance being challenged 
 by Drake, the court, after hearing long arguments by 
 Butler and Bingham adverse to the right, resolved to 
 retire by the casting vote of the Chief Justice, and 
 after three hours' absence returned with a decision 
 favourable to the right. This consumed the day. 
 
 Wednesday was ushered in by a motion of Sumner 
 to declare the casting vote given by the Chief Justice 
 the day before "without authority under the Constitu- 
 tion." A vote was taken without discussion and the 
 roll-call was followed with intense interest. Twenty- 
 
 27 
 
418 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 one voted in the affirmative and twenty-seven in the 
 negative. The question of the admissibility of Bur- 
 leigh's testimony was then argued at length by counsel 
 on both sides. The Chief Justice submitted the ques- 
 tion to the Senate and the testimony was admitted by 
 a strict party vote. This decision may pass; but the 
 next seems indefensible. Thomas's talk to his clerks, 
 just after he was restored to the Adjutant-General's 
 office, concerning the relaxation of the rules— words 
 uttered some days before he was. notified of his new 
 appointment— it was offered to prove ; and, after the in- 
 competency of the testimony on this ground was clearly 
 pointed out by the President's counsel, and the Chief 
 Justice pronounced it inadmissible, the Senate let it 
 in by a vote of 28 to 22. Wilkeson then testified to 
 Thomas's threats, and Karsner convulsed the audience 
 with laughter by his version of the scene in the East 
 Eoom of the White House, when he told Thomas that 
 "the eyes of Delaware were upon him."* 
 
 On the fourth day, after representative Ferry read 
 his memorandum of the encounter in the War Office, 
 General Emory was sworn; and his testimony, it was 
 universally felt, gave a death-blow to the ninth article, 
 casting the first cloud over the superabounding con- 
 fidence of the impeachers. The letter of General Grant 
 requesting the President to put into writing the verbal 
 order to disregard the orders of Stanton unless known 
 to emanate from the President himself, and the Presi- 
 dent 's instructions to that effect, were then read; and 
 were followed by the reading of the President's final 
 
 * See supra, Chap. V, p. 394. 
 
THE TRIAL 419 
 
 letter of the Johnson-Grant correspondence. The coun- 
 sel for the respondent insisted that the accompanying 
 corroboratory letters of the Cabinet ministers should 
 also be read as part of the same communication; but 
 the court decided adversely by a vote of 29 to 20. Col. 
 Wallace's testimony as to his casual conversation with 
 the President on the night of the twenty-second in 
 reference to the movement of troops about Washington 
 was even more colourless than that of Emory ; its utter 
 inadequacy provoking an outburst of petulance from 
 Butler. The telegrams interchanged between Parsons 
 —the first provisional governor of Alabama— and the 
 President on the subject of the ratification of the four- 
 teenth amendment by the legislature then in session, 
 the President in strong language dissuading any such 
 action, were then admitted after argument. 
 
 Friday and Saturday— the fifth and sixth days- 
 were devoted almost exclusively to proving the Presi- 
 dent's speeches;— at the Executive Mansion in August, 
 and at Cleveland and St. Louis in September, 1866. 
 There was a tedious dispute over the accuracy of the 
 reports, and several versions were introduced. The 
 Chief Justice decided one inadmissible on the ground 
 that the reporter used the notes of another person be- 
 side his own; but the Senate overruled him. The re- 
 publication of the speeches did no injury to the Presi- 
 dent. On the contrary, it may be said that the manner 
 in which they were again brought before the public 
 caused a revulsion of sentiment. It was no longer 
 Andrew Johnson exhibiting himself voluntarily in un- 
 dignified positions ; it was the managers with premedi- 
 
420 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tated design searching out again these verbal indiscre- 
 tions and, after the President's long and stately silence, 
 flaunting them before the eyes of the country. But 
 what more than anything else neutralized the effect of 
 their reproduction was the absence of even the slightest 
 v whisper, either of accusation or of proof, of a scandal- 
 ous charge connected with them. During that unfor- 
 tunate tour, it was widely reported, that the whole party, 
 including the President, was on a wild spree, and that 
 the incoherencies of speech and the breaches of good 
 taste disfiguring the addresses were the consequences 
 of over-indulgence in drink. Before the investigating 
 committee on the first impeachment, it was proved that 
 Johnson was not under the influence of liquor during 
 this tour ; but few obtained access to the testimony and 
 it was little known. Now, however, the absence of any 
 such allegation from Butler 's article and from his open- 
 ing speech where it was sure to appear if it had the least 
 foundation, and the absence of any attempt to prove it 
 on the trial— although the managers had examined the 
 witnesses concerning every incident of the tour— at 
 once opened the eyes of the country to the falsity of 
 these reports and the wrong they inflicted. Many per- 
 sons had been chary about alluding to the disagreeable 
 subject because General Grant was more or less in- 
 volved in it; but from the time of the Impeachment 
 trial— there was no more serious talk among well- 
 informed people about the intemperate habits of 
 Andrew Johnson. 
 
 On Saturday afternoon, after the introduction of a 
 schedule of removals of heads of departments made 
 
THE TRIAL 421 
 
 while the Senate was in session from the foundation of 
 the government, containing hut one name— Timothy 
 Pickering removed May 13, 1800 ; and a schedule of ap- 
 pointments of heads of departments during the session 
 of the Senate, containing numerous names; and the 
 correspondence between President Adams and his 
 recalcitrant Secretary (which seems now to make for 
 the defence) ; the managers announced the close of their 
 case. Mr. Curtis, thereupon, applied for an adjourn- 
 ment until the next Thursday (April 9) so as to give 
 three working days to the counsel for arranging and 
 preparing the testimony for the defence; and, after 
 considerable opposition in which Sumner was the most 
 aggressive, the request was granted. 
 
 The popular impression produced by the first week 
 of the trial was that the presentation of the proofs had 
 added nothing to the strength of the case against the 
 President. The alleged conspiracy between the Presi- 
 dent and his newly-appointed Secretary ad interim, 
 the threats of General Thomas, the assault upon the 
 War Office with force and arms, the secret preparations 
 of the President to precipitate an armed conflict in and 
 around Washington, looked much more formidable 
 spread out in the phraseology of an indictment than 
 after the words of living witnesses demonstrated the 
 openness and publicity of every act of the President, the 
 harmlessness of the old Adjutant-General, the inter- 
 change of peaceful courtesies between the two con- 
 tenders for the War Office, the quiet talk of the President 
 with the commander of the city, and the isolation and 
 powerlessness of the Executive in the face of a hostile 
 
422 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 General of the Army and triumphant majorities in both 
 Houses of Congress. It was felt that the Conspiracy 
 articles— and the Emory article— in short, every arti- 
 cle where the supporting documents needed to be sup- 
 plemented by oral testimony— were much damaged. 
 
 There was a reflow of the throng into the Senate 
 chamber on the day of the opening for the defence. 
 The tall form of William T. Sherman, clad in the gor- 
 geous uniform of the Lieutenant-General, was noticed 
 in the audience, and, close by, the venerable Thomas 
 Ewing, whose nomination as Secretary of War was 
 still lying on the table of the Senate soon to be with- 
 drawn for that of General Schofield. The case for the 
 prosecution was reopened to allow the examination of 
 two witnesses whose testimony was of no importance ; 
 and then the court prepared to listen to the counsel for 
 the President. 
 
 The counsel who arose to make the opening argument 
 for the defence presented a striking contrast to the 
 counsel who had discharged the corresponding duty 
 for the prosecution. Both citizens of the same state, 
 both lawyers, and both Benjamins— they could hardly 
 have been more different men. Butler— despite his 
 bald head, the younger by just nine years— always car- 
 ried a devil-may-care air about him. Curtis was the 
 very personification of judicial dignity. Butler often- 
 times dropped into loose and easy-going attitudes, ges- 
 tures and modes of statement. Curtis with undeviating 
 regularity was precision itself. In their common pro- 
 fession the same divergence was apparent. Butler was 
 at home in the cut-and-thrust combats before juries. 
 
THE TRIAL 423 
 
 Curtis sought the retirement of the counsel 's office, the 
 stately contests of the appellate courts and the repose 
 of the bench. Butler looked the alert, wily, active 
 politician all over, wherever he was. Curtis looked 
 like a statesman of the Websterian school, unbend- 
 able to the tricks of party warfare. Butler was the 
 free lance, riding, unincumbered, hither and thither, 
 heedless of corselet and helm. Curtis was the man-at- 
 arms, cumbrous with defensive weapons, stately in 
 march, slow in movement, deadly with the battle-axe, 
 yet, once overthrown, liable to be suffocated by the 
 ponderosity of his armour. It was curious to note that 
 Butler, though he read his address from manuscript, 
 conveyed an impression of extemporaneous speech, 
 while Curtis, though he spoke like an advocate at the 
 bar, turned out his sentences as though they were 
 written. 
 
 The President displayed excellent judgment in his 
 choice of counsel; but in no instance so much as in the 
 choice of Curtis. As one of the two dissenting judges 
 in the Dred Scott case, Curtis achieved a fame which 
 the civil war had almost canonized. His opinion in that 
 case was everywhere quoted as one of the classic docu- 
 ments of the struggle with slavery. Just after this 
 decision he voluntarily retired from that illustrious 
 bench where Marshall and Story and Taney were con- 
 tent to spend their lives, and resumed the practice of his 
 profession; and from that retirement he emerged for 
 the first time at the summons of Andrew Johnson. The 
 contrast between the two arguments was as great as that 
 between the two men. Butler's was a laboured effort 
 
424 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to hoist the ease made for him up to the level of the 
 process ; except in the matter of his own article where 
 he threw off his harness and roamed in comparative 
 freedom. Curtis 's was a steady, gradual, unrelenting 
 pulverization of the case against his client; except in 
 the matter of the Butler article which he demolished 
 with one or two quick strokes. With the art of a 
 skilful advocate, he put the one invulnerable position 
 of the defence immediately in the front. Stanton was not 
 within the act. By showing this to be the case he took 
 the life out of every article but one. And he showed it, 
 first, by the words of the law. The proviso reads that 
 "the Secretaries" (including the Secretary of War) 
 ' ' shall hold their offices respectively for and during the 
 term of the President by whom they may have been 
 appointed and one month thereafter." Stanton was 
 appointed during the first term of President Lincoln. 
 Therefore, the words "during the term of the Presi- 
 dent" do not apply to Stanton's case, unless the ex- 
 pounder of the law had the right to add, ' ' and any other 
 term or terms for which he may hereafter be elected" 
 —which, of course, nothing short of legislative power 
 can do. Again: was Stanton holding during the term 
 of the President by whom he was appointed, when he 
 was removed? The counsel used but few words to 
 overthrow the position of the managers that Johnson 
 had no term, but was merely serving out Lincoln 's term 
 —by knocking away the sole support they put up for it : 
 viz., that a presidential term must be four years and 
 no less. "The limit of four years is not an absolute 
 
THE TRIAL 425 
 
 limit. Death is a limit. A 'conditional limitation,' 
 as the lawyers call it, is imposed on his tenure of office. ' ' 
 
 "When the President dies, his term of four years for 
 which he was elected, and during which he was to hold, 
 provided he should so long live, terminates and the office 
 devolves on the Vice President. For what period of time ? 
 For the remainder of the term for which the Vice Presi- 
 dent was elected." 
 
 "The term assigned to Mr. Lincoln by the Constitution 
 was conditionally assigned to him. It was to last four 
 years if not sooner ended: but if sooner ended by death, 
 then the office devolved on the Vice President, and the term 
 of the Vice President to hold the office began. ' ' 
 
 Second: he showed it hy pointing out the reason 
 why the exception of Cahinet officers was inserted in 
 the act. They were made by the Constitution the ad- 
 visers of the President, not only respecting the affairs 
 of their respective departments, but, also, according 
 to the correct grammatical construction of the pro- 
 vision and its practical interpretation from the begin- 
 ning, respecting the duties of the entire executive de- 
 partment. They were the assistants of the President — 
 to speak and act for him, and he was responsible for 
 them. Therefore it was, that the legislature refused 
 to fasten these confidential servants upon the Presi- 
 dent who had not made them his choice. Third: he 
 showed it by the exposition of the act at the time of its 
 passage : bringing Schenck, in the House, and Sherman, 
 in the Senate, to bear witness (Sherman explicitly) 
 that the proviso was not intended to apply to the case 
 
426 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of Stanton. Recurring to article first the counsel points 
 out that it does not allege a removal hut only an attempt 
 to remove, an offence which is not prohibited by the 
 penal section of the act ; moreover, the offence must not 
 only be a removal, but a ' ' removal contrary to the pro- 
 visions of the act, ' ' and the counsel clenches this branch 
 of his argument by the simple remark that, if Stanton 
 was not within the act, his removal, if effected, could 
 not have been contrary thereto. 
 
 But, pursues the counsel, the President is charged not 
 merely with a violation of the act but with an inten- 
 tional violation. Now, senators may have different 
 views of the construction of this act ; but all must admit 
 there is a fair question of construction ' ' whether it was 
 applicable to Mr. Stanton's case; a very honest and 
 solid question which any man could entertain." The 
 President was bound to construe the law when the case 
 came before him. He did construe it ; and he came to 
 the conclusion, not merely by an examination of the law 
 itself, but by resorting to the advice which the Consti- 
 tution enabled him to call for to assist him in coming to 
 a correct conclusion. ' ' Having done so, are the Senate 
 prepared to say that the conclusion must have been a 
 wilful misconstruction 1 ? . . . How is it possible for this 
 body to convict the President of the United States of a 
 high misdemeanor for construing a law as those who 
 made it construed it at the time when it was made ? ' ' 
 
 Coming to the charge that, independent of the Tenure- 
 of-office act, the order of removal was a violation of the 
 Constitution because issued while the Senate was in 
 session, Mr. Curtis soon clears away the misapprehen- 
 
THE TRIAL 427 
 
 sion which seems to have prevailed on this point. If 
 Stanton held under the act of 1789 and under the terms 
 of his commission, he was removable at the pleasure of 
 the President. There is no restriction as to the time — 
 whether in recess or in session. That distinction has 
 reference only to the filling of vacancies, not to the 
 making of them. The first Congress came to the con- 
 clusion that the power of removal was vested in the 
 President independently of the Senate. That decision 
 may be proper to be reversed and may have been 
 reversed by the thirty-ninth Congress; but— as long as 
 it remains — the fact that the Senate is in session has 
 no effect on the exercise of the power. If the Senate is 
 not in session and the President makes a removal, a 
 vacancy is created which is filled by a commission until 
 the end of the next session of the Senate. If the Senate 
 is in session and the President makes a removal, a 
 vacancy is created which is filled by a nomination to the 
 Senate. With the act of removal the Senate never has 
 anything to do. 
 
 Here the counsel might have stopped, for the bottom 
 was out of the main part of the case. But, as he said, 
 "there is a broader view of the matter" which, although 
 "not essential to the vindication of the President from 
 this charge," it is due to him, should he be brought 
 before the court. And, then, the counsel unfolds his 
 position on the right of the President negatively to 
 decline to execute or affirmatively to violate an act of 
 Congress which he believes to contravene the Constitu- 
 tion, for the express purpose of testing the case before 
 the judiciary. If it be the duty of every citizen to 
 
428 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 obey every law passed through all the forms of legisla- 
 tion without question;— then "there never could be a 
 judicial decision that a law is unconstitutional, inas- 
 much as it is only by disregarding a law that any ques- 
 tion can be raised judicially under it." It is uni- 
 versally recognized that it may be a patriotic duty of a 
 citizen to raise the question, as for example in the case 
 of John Hampden. In the case of a trustee for a third 
 person, it might be a sacred duty to raise it. "Why not 
 then in the case of the Executive who is the trustee for 
 the people? The counsel, however, is very careful to 
 restrict this right within the narrowest limits. As a 
 general proposition the President is bound to execute 
 laws without reference to his own judgment on their 
 constitutional validity. "He is not to erect himself 
 into a judicial court. ' ' That would be indeed to execute 
 his veto and prevent a judicial decision. As long as a 
 law requires nothing of him but "ministerial action," 
 or affects the interests of third persons alone— it is his 
 duty to execute it. But when "a particular law has cut 
 off a power confided to him by the people, through the 
 Constitution, and he alone can raise the question," 
 and "after due deliberation, with the advice of those 
 who are his proper advisers, he settles dqwn firmly upon 
 the opinion that such is the character of the law"— 
 it cannot be " a violation of his duty when he takes the 
 needful steps to raise that question and have it peace- 
 fully decided." It is admitted that there are extreme 
 cases when he may undoubtedly invoke the aid of the 
 courts; but where is the line to be drawn! "When the 
 President came to consider the question whether the 
 
THE TRIAL 429 
 
 Tenure-of -office act was unconstitutional, he found that, 
 if Stanton was within it, it took away from him a power 
 which the first Congress decided the Constitution 
 vested in the President beyond the reach of Congress. 
 And this contemporaneous exposition of the funda- 
 mental law, the counsel pointed out, met every one of 
 the tests laid down by the learned commentators: "In 
 the first place the precise question was under discus- 
 sion ; secondly, there was a deep sense of its importance ; 
 next, the determination was thereby to fix a system for 
 the future; and in the last place the men who partici- 
 pated in the work must be admitted to have been ex- 
 ceedingly well qualified for their work." The Presi- 
 dent, also, found that "from 1789 down to 1867 every 
 President and every Congress participated in and acted 
 under the construction given in 1789 ' ' ; and not only so, 
 but it was sufficiently discussed among the people to 
 bring the question to their consideration, yet so far from 
 expressing any disapprobation, all parties favoured 
 and acted under this system. In the debate of 1789 
 there were three distinct theories held. One, that the 
 Constitution lodged the power of removal with the 
 President alone; another, that the Constitution lodged 
 the power with the President acting with the Senate; 
 a third, that the Constitution lodged it nowhere but 
 left it to the legislative power to regulate. The first 
 two received by far the greatest attention; the third 
 had but few advocates and only recently has come into 
 vogue. Yet the Tenure-of-office act is founded upon 
 this last theory; and it is not at all strange that the 
 President could see nothing in it. The President had, 
 
430 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 also, to consider the consequences if Mr. Stanton were 
 within the law. As the counsel ingeniously argued, 
 the Constitution undoubtedly has given the President 
 alone the power of choice. "In the first place, he alone 
 can nominate. When the Senate has advised and con- 
 sented to the nomination, he is not bound to commission 
 the officer. He has a second opportunity for considera- 
 tion. ' ' As Chief Justice Marshall, in Marbury vs. Madi- 
 son, holds, there go to complete an appointment three 
 operations : 1. The nomination, the sole act of the Presi- 
 dent and completely voluntary. 2. The appointment — 
 also the act of the President and also voluntary— though 
 it can only be performed by and with the advice and 
 consent of the Senate. 3. The commission. It is not 
 until the signature of the President is placed to the 
 commission that his choice is finally made. Then 
 "the time for deliberation is passed. He has decided. 
 The officer is appointed. ' ' 
 
 If this be an accurate view of the law, then, if Stanton 
 is within the Tenure-of -office act, his is a "legislative 
 appointment, ' ' his is " a legislative commission. " " The 
 President has had no voice in the matter." Nor the 
 Senate as the adviser of the President. If then the 
 President, in view of these weighty considerations com- 
 ing to the conclusion that the Tenure act of Congress, 
 in attempting to deprive him of this particular power, 
 in this unusually delicate case, contravened the Consti- 
 tution he was specially sworn "to preserve, protect and 
 defend";— is he to be impeached for holding such 
 opinion, to be impeached "for acting upon it to the 
 extent of obtaining a judicial decision whether the ex- 
 
THE TRIAL 431 
 
 ecutive department was right in its opinion or the 
 legislative department was right in its opinion?" And, 
 here, the counsel fastens upon the acknowledgement 
 of Butler that if the President, instead of the message 
 announcing the removal to the Senate (which Butler 
 stigmatized as "defiant"), had sent a message, such 
 as he outlined, announcing the removal only for the 
 purpose of testing the law, the House might never 
 have impeached. "Strangely enough," exclaims the 
 counsel, "the honorable manager says: 'No, he is not 
 to be impeached for that.' So that it seems after all 
 that it is not the removal of Stanton but the manner in 
 which the President communicated the fact of that 
 removal to the Senate after it was made. ' ' 
 
 The counsel makes short work of the doctrine of 
 estoppel, sought to be applied in a trial for crime to 
 a "President asserting a great public right confided to 
 his office by the people"— the people who "if anybody 
 is estopped, would be estopped themselves." First. 
 There was nothing inconsistent in the President's act- 
 ing, as far as possible without surrendering his right, 
 on the line of a law he considered did not affect Stanton, 
 or, if it did, was unconstitutional; and, second, he ex- 
 pressly stated the two questions involved under the 
 law and the determination of himself and his Cabinet 
 (including Stanton) thereon, in his message to the 
 Senate. Besides, the counsel adds as he closes the 
 first day of his masterly argument: 
 
 "The law may be a constitutional law; it may not only 
 be a law under which the President has acted in this in- 
 stance, but under which he is bound to act, and willing 
 
432 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to act, if you please, in every instance; still, if Stanton 
 is not within the law, the case remains as it was originally 
 presented, and that case is, that not being within the law, 
 the first article is entirely without foundation." 
 
 In truth, this was the pivot of the entire impeachment. 
 Stanton was out of the act— the eleven articles fell to 
 pieces. 
 
 The following day the counsel attacked the second 
 article, showing, first, that, whether Stanton was remov- 
 able at the pleasure of the President or not, the issue 
 of the letter of authority to Thomas was not a violation 
 of the Tenure-of-office act which prohibited only ap- 
 pointments or employments to offices which, by reason 
 of nominations not being sent to the Senate or because 
 of rejections of nominations actually sent in, were to 
 remain in abeyance. The claim that, even if Stanton 
 was not within the act, the letter of authority to Thomas 
 was without warrant of any law whatever, he answered 
 by quoting the act of 1795 which met the case precisely, 
 and by the argument that the act of 1863, not being re- 
 pugnant and dealing partly with a different subject- 
 matter, did not repeal the older statute. ' ' But whether 
 it did or not, ' ' asked the counsel, "is it not a fair ques- 
 tion? Is it a crime to be on one side of that question 
 and not on the other ? Is it a high misdemeanor to be- 
 lieve that a certain view taken of the repeal of this 
 earlier law by the later one is a sound view?" So 
 stringent a rule even the honourable managers do not 
 contend for; "their article alleges as matter of fact a 
 wilful intention on the part of the President to issue 
 this letter to General Thomas without authority of law ; 
 
THE TRIAL 433 
 
 not on mistaken judgment, not on an opinion which 
 after due consideration lawyers might differ about; 
 but by wilful intention to act without authority— 
 and that, from the nature of the case, cannot be made 
 out. ' ' Nor was this letter a violation of the Constitution 
 because issued when the Senate was in session. The 
 Constitution provides "two modes of filling offices. 
 The one is by temporary commissions during the recess 
 of the Senate ; the other is by appointment by and with 
 the advice and consent of the Senate. But cases occur 
 to which neither of these modes would be applicable, 
 cases of absence, sickness, resignation or removal when 
 there is not time to make a regular appointment or issue 
 a commission." And Congress, by the three acts of 
 1792, 1795 and 1863, endeavoured to supply the de- 
 ficiency. They provided for the designation of a per- 
 son to discharge the duties of the vacant office tem- 
 porarily—a^ interim— until the regular appointment be 
 made. "It is entirely evident that these temporary 
 vacancies are just as liable to occur during the session 
 of the Senate as during the recess. ' ' And this has been 
 the practical construction ever since 1792, as counsel 
 showed by precedents — among others the designation 
 of Postmaster-General Holt to discharge the duties of 
 the War Department ad interim on the hasty resigna- 
 tion of Floyd, the Senate being in session: in which 
 case, the Senate calling for the authority of the Presi- 
 dent, the President sent in a message with a long 
 list of similar designations. The counsel, in this con- 
 nection, takes up the eighth article, which he states dif- 
 fers from the second only in the particular that it 
 
 28 
 
434 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 charges an attempt to control the moneys in the 
 Treasury- appropriated for military service — on which 
 particular there had been no proof. 
 
 The third article, he said, is founded on the erroneous 
 supposition that the authorization of Thomas to per- 
 form the duties of the War Department was an ap- 
 pointment. It was in no sense an appointment. Even 
 a commission issued in recess is not an appointment. 
 The office is not filled. The President never had any 
 idea of appointing Thomas Secretary of "War. And, 
 therefore, he did not apply to the Senate for its advice 
 and consent in the case of Thomas as he did, in fact, 
 in the case of Ewing. The averment that there was no 
 vacancy at the time is simply begging the question 
 whether Stanton was within the act or not. If he was 
 not, there was a vacancy caused by the removal made 
 at the same time with the issue of the letter of authority. 
 "It is impossible for the honorable managers to con- 
 struct a case of an intention on the part of the President 
 to violate the Constitution out of anything he did in- 
 reference to the appointment of General Thomas, pro- 
 vided the order to Mr. Stanton was a lawful order and 
 Mr. Stanton was bound to obey it." 
 
 It is unnecessary to follow the counsel in his remarks 
 on the so-called Conspiracy articles. Incidentally, he 
 points out that the Conspiracy act of 1861 on which two 
 of them (the fourth and sixth) are founded has no appli- 
 cation to the District of Columbia; and the other two 
 (fifth and seventh) are founded on no law at all. The 
 ninth article the counsel says is not only unproved but 
 disproved by the testimony. 
 
THE TRIAL 435 
 
 The Butler article is then taken up and most cruelly 
 handled. The counsel, in asking what are impeachable 
 offences under our Constitution, refuses to follow the 
 manager back "to the times of the Plantagenets, the 
 Tudors and the Stuarts ' ' in search of precedents. He 
 confines himself to the Constitution itself. "Treason, 
 bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, ' ' ac- 
 cording to Curtis, mean only "high criminal offences 
 against the United States made so by some law of the 
 United States." He contends that by the Constitution 
 this tribunal is a court, this is a trial of a crime ; there 
 must be a judgment of conviction or acquittal ; and there 
 may be a punishment inflicted. How then are you 
 "bound by no law"? If that be so what becomes of 
 the prohibitions against bills of attainder and ex post 
 facto laws? If you are bound by no law, then, by this 
 proceeding, although "as Congress you cannot create 
 a law to punish these acts if no law existed at the time 
 they were done," yet, "while the case is on trial, you 
 may individually each one of you create a law by him- 
 self to govern the case." The oath which the Consti- 
 tution provides shall be taken by senators on the trial 
 of an impeachment does not mean that they will observe 
 the Constitution and the laws, but that they shall follow 
 their own individual wills ! In bills of attainder ' ' the 
 Parliament make the law for the facts they find. Each 
 legislator is a 'law unto himself.' . . . According to 
 the doctrine now advanced bills of attainder are not 
 prohibited by the Constitution; they are only slightly 
 modified. It is only necessary for the House by a 
 majority to vote an impeachment and . . . two-thirds 
 
436 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of this body vote in favor of conviction, and there is 
 an attainder: and it is done by the same process and 
 depends on identically the same principles as a bill of 
 attainder in the English Parliament. The individual 
 wills of the legislators, instead of the conscientious dis- 
 charge of the duty of the judges, settle the result. ' ' 
 
 The tenth article, the counsel pressed on, "depends 
 upon no law. " "So far as regards the preceding arti- 
 cles, the gist of the charge is that the President broke 
 a law. You must find that the law existed, you must 
 construe and apply it to the case; you must find his 
 criminal intent wilfully to break the law, before the 
 article can be supported. ' ' But, in regard to the tenth, 
 you need not be troubled with any law. "The com- 
 plaint is that the President made speeches against the 
 Congress." Really, not against the Congress proper, 
 because "he undoubtedly did not mean the entire con- 
 stitutional body; he meant the dominant majority in 
 Congress. Everybody so understood it, everybody 
 must so understand it. . . . "Well, who are the grand 
 jury in this case? One of the parties spoken against. 
 And who are the triers? The other party spoken 
 against. One would think there was some incongruity 
 in this ; some reason for giving pause before taking any 
 very great stride in that direction. ' ' 
 
 "The House of Representatives has erected itself into 
 a school of manners, selecting from its ranks those gentle- 
 men whom it deems most proper by precept and example 
 to teach decorum of speech; and they desire the judgment 
 of this body whether the President has not been guilty of 
 
THE TRIAL 437 
 
 indecorum, whether he has spoken properly, to use the 
 phrase of the honorable manager. ' ' 
 
 The question whether the speeches are true or false 
 is to be no test, it seems. For, the manager who opened 
 the case proclaims that it is not within the power of 
 any man to slander the Congress of the United States. 
 "That is a pretty lofty claim." The Plantagenet 
 Parliaments did not venture to make it because, under 
 their statutes, their ' ' prelates, dukes, earls and barons ' ' 
 were protected only "from horrible and false lies"; 
 and, under our own odious sedition act making penal 
 written libels against Congress, it was expressly pro- 
 vided that the truth could be given in evidence in de- 
 fence. "The prohibition of the Constitution against 
 any legislation by Congress in restraint of the freedom 
 of speech," as the counsel showed by reading some 
 weighty words from Madison, "is necessarily an absolute 
 prohibition ; and therefore this is a case not only where 
 there is no law made prior to the act to punish the act, 
 but a case where Congress is expressly prohibited from 
 making any law to operate even on subsequent acts." 
 "What is the law to be? . . . that you may require the 
 speaker to speak properly. Who are to be the judges 
 whether he speaks properly? The Senate?" or in 
 effect each individual senator? And "that is supposed 
 to be the freedom of speech secured by this absolute 
 prohibition of the Constitution!" 
 
 With a brief contemptuous reference to the eleventh 
 article as a mere farrago of the others:— "Here are the 
 speeches, we will have something about them, ' ' here is 
 
438 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ' ' the old matter of the removal of Stanton, ' ' we will say 
 something on that and so on— the counsel ended with a 
 sentence which, for its precise characterization of the 
 occasion, deserves quotation alongside the rhetorical 
 exaggeration of the corresponding sentence of Butler: 
 
 ' ' This ' ' trial ' ' is and will be the most conspicuous instance 
 which has ever, been or can ever be expected to be found of 
 American justice or American injustice, of that justice 
 which Mr. Burke says is the standing policy of all civil- 
 ized states, or of that injustice which is sure to be discov- 
 ered and which makes even the wise man mad, and which, 
 in the fixed and immutable order of God's providence, is 
 certain to return to plague its inventors." 
 
 After a recess of a few minutes, General Thomas 
 was sworn and detailed the particulars of his appoint- 
 ment ad interim, of his interview with Stanton, and of 
 his interviews with the President. When the witness 
 came to describe the scene between Stanton and him- 
 self, which occurred after the body-guard of Congress- 
 men had departed for the House and concerning which 
 there had been no testimony before ; when, with inimit- 
 able simplicity, he told of the caresses the great War- 
 Minister lavished upon him, of the interchange of jokes 
 between them, of the bottle from which the assailed 
 succoured his famished assailant and drank with him 
 the "equal" drink; the impression that hostilities be- 
 tween the rival claimants threatened a small civil war 
 evaporated in a burst of laughter. When the witness 
 was allowed, over the objection of the managers, to reply 
 to the question whether the President at any time au- 
 
THE TRIAL 439 
 
 thorized or directed him to use force or threats to get 
 possession of the War Office and swore that the Presi- 
 dent did not, there was an end, as it seemed to the 
 audience, of the conspiracy articles. Butler's cross- 
 examination of the guileless veteran was not a pleasing 
 exhibition. The lynx-like attorney displayed his skill 
 in bemuddling an honest but mentally confused wit- 
 ness, but the substance of his testimony (except in the 
 confounding of the incidents of the two interviews of 
 the twenty-first and twe,nty-second— which he was re- 
 called to clear up) remained unshaken, and, though 
 visibly under torture, he maintained a soldierly bear- 
 ing and impressed all who heard him that, although 
 unequal to cope with the wiles of the lawyer, he meant 
 to be truthful in speech and was right at heart. 
 
 On Saturday (eleventh) a veteran of another sort 
 took the witness-stand ; one whom Butler would be much 
 more chary how he handled. Lieutenant-General Sher- 
 man testified to the interviews he had with the President 
 concerning the case of Stanton after the latter 's rein- 
 statement. But when he was asked what conversation 
 took place between them on the first of them (January 
 15), strenuous objection was made by the managers 
 and a long argument ensued, during which manager 
 Wilson made the pregnant suggestion that, should 
 such testimony be admitted, then, by introducing ' ' con- 
 versations between the President, his Cabinet and Gen- 
 eral Grant," the defendant's counsel might precipitate 
 upon the Senate "a question of veracity between the 
 General of the Army and the President of the United 
 States"— "in order that the preponderance of testi- 
 
440 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 mony (considered numerically at least) may weigh down 
 the General of the Army." The Senate, overruling 
 the Chief Justice, excluded the testimony by a vote of 
 28 to 23. The witness was then permitted to tell of 
 the President's tender to him of the office of Secretary 
 of War ad interim on the twenty-fifth of January and 
 again on the thirtieth, and that he finally replied in 
 writing ; but what was said on these two occasions, gen- 
 erally or particularly, was rigorously excluded. This 
 struggle consumed the day ; and the second week of the 
 trial was over. 
 
 On Monday, the efforts of counsel to get this testi- 
 mony before the Senate were renewed and after several 
 failures were finally successful. Eeverdy Johnson 
 put the following question: When the President tend- 
 ered to you the office of Secretary of War ad interim, 
 on the twenty-fifth and thirtieth of January, did he, 
 at the very time of making each tender, state to you 
 what his purpose in doing so was? To the surprise 
 and mortification of the managers, the Senate admitted 
 the question by a vote of 26 to 22, and General Sher- 
 man was permitted to give his testimony, the substance 
 of which we have already detailed. 
 
 On Tuesday, the severe illness of Stanbery compelled 
 an adjournment; and, on Wednesday, the remaining 
 counsel for the President proceeded in his absence, con- 
 fining themselves to the introduction of documentary 
 proof. 
 
 On Thursday, Sumner enlivened the proceedings by 
 one of his peculiar moves. He sent to the Chair "a 
 declaration of opinion," as he called it, "to be adopted 
 
THE TRIAL 441 
 
 by the Senate in answer to the constantly recurring ques- 
 tions on the inadmissibility of testimony. ' ' The paper 
 proposed, "considering" the irresponsible character 
 of the tribunal "to hasten the despatch of business" 
 by admitting "all evidence offered on either side not 
 trivial or obviously irrelevant. ' ' Sumner, for his part, 
 was so thoroughly convinced of the guilt of the Presi- 
 dent, he needed no testimony to sustain his prejudg- 
 ment, and no evidence, whatever its weight, could have 
 shaken his conviction in the slightest particular. He 
 was impatient to reach a result he considered certain, 
 and regarded these bickerings over questions of evi- 
 dence with much disfavour. Hitherto he had acted on 
 this idea and voted to admit every bit of testimony 
 offered. His proposition got eleven votes and was 
 laid on the table. Counsellors Cox and Merrick were 
 then examined concerning the criminal prosecution of 
 Thomas and its termination in his discharge— a matter 
 already narrated. Several attempts to keep out so 
 much of the evidence of these witnesses as tended to 
 prove the intent of the President to get the question 
 into the courts were made by the managers, but without 
 success. Butler was much irritated and could not 
 forbear from lashing out. Towards the end of the 
 dispute he rose and said: "Mr. President, I wish it 
 simply understood, that I may clear my skirts of this 
 matter, that this all goes in under our objection and 
 under the ruling of the presiding officer." To this 
 insolent insinuation the Chief Justice quietly rejoined: 
 "It goes in under the direction of the Senate of the 
 United States." Edwin 0. Perrin, who called on 
 
442 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the President in company with a member of Congress 
 on the afternoon of the twenty-first of February, 
 was sworn for the purpose of showing that at the 
 time of the interview the President supposed that 
 Stanton had virtually retired and Thomas was already 
 in office; but, after considerable discussion, although 
 the Chief Justice thought the testimony admissible 
 within the other rulings of the Senate, it was excluded 
 by a large majority. At this point, Evarts intimating 
 that, on account of Stanbery's illness, it would be more 
 convenient for the defence to produce no more testi- 
 mony that day, Butler's ill-suppressed dissatisfaction 
 with the recent rulings of the court burst forth in a most 
 extraordinary appeal. "The whole legislation of this 
 country is stopping " ; he cried. ' ' While we are wait- 
 ing for the Attorney General to get well, and you are 
 asked to delay this trial for that reason, numbers of 
 our fellow citizens are being murdered day by day. 
 There is not a man here who does not know that the 
 moment justice is done on this great criminal, these 
 murders will cease." Waving aside the protests the 
 President's counsel here interposed, he persisted in 
 dragging before the court matters foreign to the issue, 
 of which there was no proof, nor could properly be 
 any : the Ku-Klux-Klan outrages ; the flight of Spencer, 
 register in bankruptcy; sales of gold by the Treasury 
 at enormous sacrifices ( a tabular statement of which he 
 swung aloft in his hand) ; fraudulent purchases of U. S. 
 bonds. 
 
 "Now, I say," he wildly implored, "for the safety of 
 the finances of the people, for. the progress of the legisla- 
 
THE TRIAL 44a 
 
 tion of the people, for the safety of the true and loyal 
 men, black and white, in the South who have perilled their 
 lives for four years; yea, five years; yea, six years; yea, 
 seven years, in your behalf; for the good of the country, 
 for all that is dear to any man and patriot, I pray let this 
 trial proceed ; let us come to a determination of this issue. ' ' 
 
 "Threats of assassination" are made, he said, "every 
 hour and upon every occasion, even when objection to 
 testimony is made by the managers." "We have not 
 the slightest fear of these cowardly menaces; but all 
 these threats, these unseemly libels on our form of 
 government, will go away when this man goes out of 
 the White House." Evarts, naturally, was shocked at. 
 such impropriety. 
 
 "I have never heard such a harangue before in a court 
 of justice. . . . All these delays and the ill consequences 
 seem to press upon the honorable managers except at the- 
 precise point of time when some of their mouths are open 
 occupying your attention with their long harangues . . . 
 and now twenty minutes by the watch with this harangue- 
 of the honorable manager about the Ku-Klux-Klan. I 
 have said what I have, said to the Senate. ' ' 
 
 And thereupon the Senate adjourned. 
 
 The greater part of the fourteenth day of the trial 
 was consumed in taking the testimony of persons— re- 
 porters and others — who heard the speeches of the 
 President and gave of them smoother versions. But 
 towards the close of the session, a genuine sensation was 
 raised by the calling of Secretary Welles. The first 
 fresh fact he disclosed was that the Emory interview 
 was occasioned by a rumour of the clandestine move- 
 
444 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ments of troops which the Secretary himself carried to 
 the President. The witness then detailed the conversa- 
 tion at the close of the Cabinet meeting of the twenty- 
 first of February, showing that the President supposed 
 Thomas was in possession and Stanton had yielded; 
 requiring only time to remove his papers. Incidentally 
 it was brought out that the nomination of Ewing was 
 already written out. The examination reverting to 
 the Cabinet consultation over the Tenure-of-office bill 
 at the time of its passage, a formal offer was made to 
 prove that the members of the Cabinet advised the 
 President that the bill was unconstitutional, and that 
 the task of preparing a message to that effect was de- 
 volved on Mr. Seward and Mr. Stanton. The managers 
 at once perceived that this matter was vital. Butler 
 "opened the debate" as he called it, by stating the 
 question to be "whether after a law has been passed 
 . . . the President can show what his opinions were, 
 and the opinions of his Cabinet, before it was passed, 
 as a justification for refusing to obey it and execute 
 it"; and, at the close of a reply by Evarts, the Senate 
 adjourned. 
 
 The next morning the managers came in anticipation 
 of a field-day. They had assigned to Wilson the task of 
 impugning the relevancy of this important testimony; 
 and that manager had passed the night in the prepara- 
 tion of his argument which was, in truth, a dissertation 
 adverse to the claim of the President to question in any 
 way an act of Congress passed over his veto on the 
 ground of its constitutional invalidity, and may be con- 
 sidered as the manager's contribution to the summing 
 
THE TRIAL 445 
 
 up of the cause, in which, he did not participate. Mr. 
 Curtis, who replied, declined to follow the manager into 
 the large field he opened and contented himself with 
 pushing the point that, the articles having charged the 
 President with intending to violate the Constitution, 
 the present offer was, certainly, material to rebut that 
 charge— whatever might be its weight; the testimony 
 was offered to establish what is necessarily the first 
 step in the President's justification, namely: "that he 
 honestly believed this law to be unconstitutional." 
 The Chief Justice held the evidence admissible on the 
 question of intent, and senator Howard promptly called 
 for a vote. The question was considered a test one— 
 decisive of one entire branch of the defence. The 
 utmost interest was excited because it was known that 
 Seward and McCulloch, Browning and Randall, stood 
 ready to follow Welles, if his testimony in this partic- 
 ular was admitted; and also that Stanton might be 
 forced to take the stand. The yeas were twenty, the 
 nays twenty-nine. 
 
 Then followed another offer of proof more significant 
 and vital still, viz : That at the Cabinet meetings at the 
 time the Tenure-of-office bill was before the President 
 for approval, Mr. Stanton being present, the question 
 whether the Secretary of War and the other Secretaries 
 appointed by Mr. Lincoln were within the restrictions 
 imposed by the act was considered, and that the opinion 
 was expressed that they were not. The Chief Justice 
 held the testimony proper, but in deference to the pre- 
 vious ruling submitted it to the Senate, and it was ex- 
 cluded by a vote of 22 yeas and 26 nays. Two other 
 
446 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 offers were made; one to prove that the Cabinet con- 
 sidered that the public service made it desirable that 
 upon a proper case a judicial determination of the con- 
 stitutionality of the law should be obtained; the other 
 to prove that in the deliberations of the Cabinet on the 
 subject no suggestion of the use of force was ever made : 
 —but with a like result. Welles was not allowed to 
 speak and left the stand. The Secretaries of State, 
 of the Treasury and of the Interior, in attendance ready 
 to testify, were not sworn, and the Postmaster-General 
 took the stand only to prove that Foster Blodgett— a 
 witness for the prosecution, for whom its side of the 
 case was reopened that he might testify that the reasons 
 •of his suspension were not communicated to the Senate 
 —was, in fact, suspended because he had been indicted 
 for perjury. Before Eandall left the stand, senator 
 Sherman submitted a question: "State if the question 
 whether the Secretaries appointed by President Lincoln 
 were included within the provisions of the Tenure act 
 came before the Cabinet for discussion; and, if so, 
 what opinion was given on the question by members of 
 the Cabinet to the President!" Butler and Bingham 
 objected that this was the same question just voted on 
 and senator Howard challenged the right of a senator 
 to repeat it. The Chief Justice promptly affirmed the 
 right. Butler called for the reading of the recent offer ; 
 and then the Senate voted with the same result as be- 
 fore. Sumner's course on this important matter ex- 
 cited remark but, indeed, was characteristic of the man. 
 He was the proposer of a rule to admit everything in 
 evidence, not manifestly trivial, to avoid delay. And 
 
THE TRIAL 447 
 
 yet, on a crucial occasion coming almost immediately 
 after his proposal, he sat silent in his seat and deliber- 
 ately refused to vote. 
 
 There is reason to believe that these questionable 
 decisions not only increased the popular reprehension 
 of the Impeachment but actually contributed to the ac- 
 quittal of the President ; one, if not more, of the Repub- 
 lican senators who joined the Democrats in voting for 
 the admission of the testimony, subsequently avowed 
 that he could not vote for conviction after such material 
 and important facts for the defence had been deliber- 
 ately shut out by the court.* 
 
 The taking of testimony virtually ended with these 
 votes ; for, although the court adjourned until Monday, 
 nothing of interest or importance took place on that day ; 
 and an adjournment was taken until Wednesday when 
 the final arguments were to begin. From the opening 
 speech of Butler to the close of the testimony (exclud- 
 ing intermissions), were sixteen days. Deducting the 
 time consumed in incidental discussions, the taking of 
 testimony consumed not more than four days on both 
 sides; and what little oral testimony there was raised 
 no serious conflict on a single question of fact. Yet the 
 final arguments of both sides stretched from Wednes- 
 day, the twenty-second of April, to Wednesday, the 
 sixth of May, of which period, deducting the two Sun- 
 days, the managers occupied six days and the counsel 
 for the President seven. Wilson contented himself 
 with his elaborate argument against the admissibility 
 of the testimony of the Cabinet. Butler had already 
 
 * Henderson's Opinion, Vol. 3 of Trial, p. 304. 
 
448 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 played his part in the opening address. Logan was 
 forced to be satisfied with filing an argument of fifty- 
 pages of print. But the remaining four— Boutwell, 
 Williams, Stevens and Bingham— were accorded the 
 privilege of speaking as against four of the counsel 
 for the President— Nelson, Groesbeck, Stanbery and 
 Evarts. 
 
 The arguments pro and con of these eight lawyers 
 on the question confronting them on the threshold of 
 the cause and the determination of which in the Presi- 
 dent's favour would at once end the whole proceeding, 
 followed the same line as the respective arguments of 
 Butler and Curtis on the same subject; and it will be 
 more profitable to extricate them from the bulk of the 
 speeches and recapitulate them by themselves. 
 
 Mr. Boutwell insisted, as he did in the House, that 
 Andrew Johnson had no term, that he was serving out 
 Abraham Lincoln's term, and, therefore, Stanton came 
 within the words of the proviso. He .said nothing in 
 answer to Curtis 7 s argument that, Stanton having been 
 appointed during Lincoln's first term, Lincoln, if liv- 
 ing, would have been at liberty to remove him notwith- 
 standing the Tenure-of -office act;— nor did he tell what 
 had become of Andrew Johnson's term as Vice Presi- 
 dent. His whole argument upon this branch of the 
 case occupies but three of his fifty-one printed pages. 
 Groesbeck refuted him upon this point in a few words : 
 
 ' ' The gentleman has said this is Mr. Lincoln 's term. The 
 dead have no. ownership in office or estate of any kind. 
 Mr. Johnson is the President of the United States with 
 
THE TRIAL 449 
 
 a term and this is his term. But it would make no differ- 
 ence if Mr. Lincoln were living to-day ; if Mr. Lincoln were 
 President to-day, he could remove Mr. Stanton. Mr. Lincoln 
 would not have appointed him during this term. It was 
 during the last term that Mr. Stanton received his appoint- 
 ment, and not this; and an appointment by a President 
 during one term, by the operation of this law will not ex- 
 tend the appointee through another term because that 
 same party may happen to be re-elected to the Presidency. 
 Stanton, therefore, holds under his commission, and not 
 under the law." 
 
 Bingham- excelled himself in the vehement dogma- 
 tism with which he expounded the statute. The ' ' term 
 of the President by whom" these officers were ap- 
 pointed meant, he said, as many terms as any one 
 President may be reelected to fill. 
 
 "That is the meaning of the law. That is all there is 
 of it. The word 'term' determines it. Did that mean 
 that a President re-elected for a term . . . should be relieved 
 from his own appointees by operation of law, and that, too,, 
 without his consent, and, if you please, against his wish? 
 It never entered the mind of a single member of the 
 thirty-ninth Congress." "If Mr. Lincoln had lived . . . 
 he could not have removed a single head of department 
 appointed by himself at any time during his term: and 
 I do not care how often his term was renewed it was still 
 the term and answered to the statute." "They were to 
 hold their offices . . . during the entire term, if it should 
 be eight years, twelve years or sixteen years, of the Presi- 
 dent by whom they were appointed." 
 
 Williams, who, as one of the conferees on the part 
 of the House when the Tenure act was passing, had 
 
 29 
 
450 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 suggested this unlucky proviso "for the purpose," as 
 he now admitted, "of ohviating the objection . . . that 
 the effect of the amendment would be to impose on an 
 incoming President a cabinet that was not of his own 
 choosing," was listened to with great attention when 
 he touched upon this branch of the case. His solution 
 was more novel than satisfactory. He stated that "if 
 it was intended or expected that it (the proviso) should 
 operate to create exceptions in favor of an officer whose 
 notorious abuse of power was the proximate cause, if 
 not the impelling motive, for the enactment of the law, 
 I did not know it : " and in making this avowal he may 
 well be believed. There cannot be much doubt that 
 the majority of the House believed they had protected 
 Stanton; and Williams, by his mode of meeting the 
 point of the President's counsel, simply shows how he 
 and the House with him happened to fall into this mis- 
 understanding. "The argument of the defendant," 
 he said, "rests upon the meaning of the word 'ap- 
 pointed.' " 
 
 ' ' That word has both a technical meaning and a popular 
 one. In the former, which involves the idea of a nomina- 
 tion and confirmation in the constitutional way, there was 
 no appointment certainly by Johnson. In the latter, which 
 is the sense in which the people will read it, there unques- 
 tionably was. What, then, was meant by the employment 
 of this word? 
 
 "For the President of the United States to say, however, 
 after having voluntarily retained Mr. Stanton for more 
 than two years of his administration, that he was there 
 only by sufferance, or as a mere movable, or heirloom, or 
 
THE TEIAL 451 
 
 incumbrance that passed to him with the estate, and not 
 by virtue of his own special appointment, if not 'paltering 
 with the people in a double sense,' has very much the ap- 
 pearance of a not very respectable quibble. The unlearned 
 man who reads the proviso— as they for whose perusal it 
 is intended will read it— and who is not accustomed to 
 handle the metaphysic scissors of the professional casuists 
 who are able 'to divide a hair 'twixt west and northwest 
 side,' while he admits the ingenuity of the advocate, will 
 stand amazed, if he does not scorn the officer who would 
 stoop to the use of such a subterfuge." 
 
 Mr. Boutwell revived the contention tHat, once shown 
 to be out of the proviso, Stanton fell inevitably within 
 the main body of the section. Stevens regarded this a 
 "more conclusive answer" than the play upon the 
 word "term." Williams, also said: "If Mr. Stanton 
 was appointed by President Johnson within the mean- 
 ing of the proviso, he holds, of course, until the expira- 
 tion of his term. If not, he holds subject to removal 
 like other officers under the enacting clause. ' ' Bingham 
 was overwhelmingly emphatic on this point. "His 
 (the President's) own counsel who opened the case . . . 
 declares that there are no express words within the 
 proviso that bring the Secretary of "War, Edwin M. 
 Stanton, within the proviso. That is his own position, 
 and that being so, he must be within the body of the 
 statute. There is no escape from it." 
 
 Evarts had no difficulty in escaping from it in the 
 following complete fashion : 
 
 ' ' The argument that if Stanton is not within the proviso 
 then he is within the body of the section stumbles over 
 
452 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 this transparent and very obvious fallacy. . . . You have 
 not made a law about Mr. Stanton by name. The question 
 is whether the office of Secretary of War is within the sec- 
 tion or within the proviso ; and will any body doubt that ? 
 It is on the same footing as the other Secretaryships. The 
 question whether the office of Mr. Stanton or the office of 
 Mr. Browning is within one or the other alternatives of 
 the section is not a question of construction of the law, 
 but a question of whether the tenure or actual incumbency 
 of the one or the other bring him within the proviso ; his 
 office being there, the fact that he is not in does not carry 
 the office back into the first part because his office would 
 be back there for the future as well as for the past and 
 for the present. It is a statute made for permanent en- 
 durance and the office of Secretary of "War, now and for- 
 ever, as long as the statute remains upon the book, is dis- 
 posed of one way or the other within the first part or 
 within the proviso. . . . There is no doubt about the office 
 being under the proviso. It says so : 
 
 " 'Provided, That the Secretaries of State, of the Treas- 
 ury, of War, of the Navy, and of the Interior, the Post- 
 master General, and the Attorney General shall hold their 
 offices respectively,' &c. That does not mean the men; it 
 means the offices shall have that tenure." 
 
 It only remains to inquire whether the proviso covers 
 Mr. Stanton's particular predicament: 
 
 "That is the question of fact in the construction of the 
 proviso. He either stays in the proviso or he drops out 
 of the proviso ; and if he personally drops out of the pro- 
 viso in his present incumbency he cannot get back into 
 the operative clause, because he cannot get back there with- 
 out carrying his office there, and his office never can get 
 back." 
 
THE TRIAL 453 
 
 And the counsel then throws in the following 
 reductio ad absurdum: 
 
 ' ' How absurd a result that is, to give this poor President 
 control of his cabinet, that those he appointed himself, 
 if he should happen to be re-elected, he could get rid of in 
 a month, and those that Mr. Lincoln appointed for. him 
 from the beginning, and before he had any choice in it, 
 he must hold on to forever, till you consent that they 
 shall go out." 
 
 In reply to the argument of Curtis that an erroneous 
 construction by the President of an ambiguous statute 
 could not be an impeachable offence, Mr. Boutwell 
 freely admitted that in such a contingency the President 
 "would be fully justified and upon no principle of right 
 could he be held to answer as for a misdemeanor in 
 office." ," But," added the manager, "that is not this 
 case. ' ' He could not and did not deny that the law was 
 ambiguous, at least; but he claimed that the President 
 from the first had no doubt about the intention of the 
 Congress;— citing, in proof, the veto message where 
 the President arraigns the bill as in conflict with the 
 Constitution because it restricted the President 's time- 
 honoured power "to remove from their places any civil' 
 officer." Bingham in his turn avoided the same point 
 in a similar manner. He even contended that the 
 proviso was susceptible of but one meaning— was not 
 ambiguous at all. "I have no doubt of its being the 
 true construction of the law, neither had the accused"; 
 and he stamped any other construction as "an after- 
 thought." 
 
454 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 With respect to the other of the two acts which con- 
 stituted the proximate occasion of the Impeachment— 
 the letter to Thomas— it would seem that the unlawful- 
 ness of this subsidiary exercise of authority was so 
 wrapped up in the unlawfulness of the main act of 
 removal that they must necessarily stand or fall to- 
 gether. Yet, for a reason which will become apparent 
 when we come to consider the verdict, "the managers 
 were deeply solicitous to establish some semblance of 
 criminality in the temporary designation of Thomas, 
 even conceding the power to remove Stanton. To do 
 this they were compelled to follow Butler in advancing 
 arguments of such technical nicety as (1) that the act of 
 1795 did not apply to vacancies caused by removal, (2) 
 that the six months' clause was violated for the reason 
 that General Grant's term ad interim expiring on the 
 12th of February, no other ad interim supply was per- 
 missible; and (3) that the act of 1795 was repealed by 
 the act of 1863; the first of which the President's 
 counsel ^answered by appealing to the practice of the 
 government; the second, by pointing out that suspen- 
 sion did not vacate an office at all, -a vacancy being 
 made only by a complete removal— in practice dating 
 only from the date of removal ; the third, by the argu- 
 ment that, there being no express repeal of the act of 
 1795 by the act of 1863 and the latter not covering cases 
 of vacancies provided for by the former, there could 
 be no total repeal by implication. But the most 
 effectual refutation of this class of arguments when 
 applied to such a cause lay in the absurdity, as Evarts 
 expressed it, "that the removal of the President should 
 
THE TRIAL 455 
 
 depend upon the question whether an Adjutant General 
 was a proper locum tenens or not, or whether, entangled 
 between the horns of the repealed and unrepealed 
 statutes, the President may have erred in that on which 
 he hung his rightful authority." The same counsel, 
 in another place, conceding for the sake of the argument 
 this temporary appointment to be without any authority 
 whatever, asks what it would amount to? 
 
 "It would simply be that the President in the confusion 
 among the statutes, had appointed, or attempted to appoint, 
 an ad interim discharge of the office without authority of 
 law. You could not indict him very well for it, and I do 
 not think you can impeach him for it." 
 
 Or, as he remarks elsewhere : 
 
 "Truly, indeed, we are getting very nice in our measure 
 and criticism of the absolute obligations and of the abso- 
 lute acuteness and thoroughness of executive functions 
 when we seek to apply the process of impeachment and 
 removal to a question whether an act of Congress re- 
 quired him to name a head of a department to take the 
 vacant place ad interim or an act of Congress not repealed 
 permitted him to take a suitable person. You certainly 
 do not, in the ordinary affairs of life, rig up a trip-hammer 
 to crack a walnut." 
 
 The managers hazarded the assertion that no ad 
 interim appointment was warranted while the Senate 
 was in session— that such an exercise of power was a 
 virtual nullification of the right of the Senate to parti- 
 cipate in the appointing power. The Constitution, they 
 claimed, only recognized such quasi appointments dur- 
 ing recess by providing that commissions might be 
 
456 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 issued to expire at the end of the next session of the 
 Senate. But, here again, Evarts demonstrated that, 
 respecting these temporary designations, the discrimin- 
 ation between session and recess could have no founda- 
 tion. "Ad interim appointments do not rest upon the 
 Constitution at all. ' ' They are ' ' not a filling of the office 
 which remains just as vacant ... as if the temporary 
 appointment had not been made. ' ' 
 
 "When the final appointment is made it dates as from 
 and to supply the place of the person whose vacancy led 
 to the ad interim appointment. That in the very nature 
 of things there should be no difference in this capacity 
 between recess and session sufficiently appears, and the 
 acts of Congress draw no distinction, and the practice of 
 the Government makes not the least difference." 
 
 We have now given the substance of the arguments 
 on the leading, it might properly be called the preroga- 
 tive, issue in the cause; and it is evident that, had the 
 summing up been confined to what Stanbery called 
 ''the head and front of the entire case,"— "Strike it out 
 and all that remains is leather and prunella"— the 
 orators must have exhausted the subject in two or three 
 days at the longest. The kernel extracted, the several 
 speeches may now be passed in review upon their main 
 subject-matter, which, in the speeches of the managers 
 at least-, lay outside their treatment of the particular 
 charges on which the Impeachment was founded. The 
 managers were not troubled over the establishment of 
 the validity of what was more or less consciously recog- 
 nized as but a pretext for Impeachment, to such a de- 
 
THE TRIAL 457 
 
 gree as to waste six whole days and delay the result they 
 regarded so certain for that length of time. Their 
 chief concern was to find some public justification for 
 this arraignment of the President of the United States 
 as a criminal, and the dislocation of the whole adminis- 
 trative machinery of the government by his deposition. 
 The inadequacy of the actual case to call forth this ex- 
 treme remedy of state drove them to escape from its 
 narrow limits, and, following in the wake of Butler, 
 expend their powers of speech upon the transcendent 
 magnitude of issues not before the court or not neces- 
 sarily involved in the cause, and upon the countless 
 enormities of Andrew Johnson for which the House of 
 Representatives, nevertheless, had refused to impeach 
 him. The counsel for the President, on their part, were 
 forced to pursue their opponents along the circum- 
 ference of the wide circle they cut, if for nothing else, 
 to draw them back to the central nucleus of real 
 matter, which seemed to work upon them with so 
 centrifugal a force. It is for this reason that none 
 of the speeches takes rank with the celebrated forensic 
 efforts of history. The eloquence of a Sheridan or 
 a Burke could have made nothing of the formal 
 infraction of an ambiguous clause in a statute, that 
 hurt nobody and loosened no cog in the machinery 
 of government— nothing, of stale charges of treason, 
 so vague, indefinite and intangible, that the accusatory 
 body dared not make them the subject of a formal 
 indictment. 
 
 In the final argument Mr. Boutwell led the way, as it 
 was meet he should, because, if not the father, he was 
 
458 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the nursing mother of the Impeachment. For the last 
 two years he had worked early and late to bring this 
 monstrous malefactor of his imagination to the bar, and 
 now that his labours were crowned with success, he pre- 
 pared himself to make the effort of his life to transfuse 
 his own fervent conviction into the minds of the court 
 and the country. Trusting nothing to the inspiration 
 of the moment, he had written out his entire speech, and 
 he read it from printed slips. It was a strong presenta- 
 tion of a case against the President, on which, however, 
 he was not being tried. Starting with the admission 
 common to all the managers that "the issues of record 
 . . . are technical and limited,"— he makes haste to 
 maintain that "the grave, national, historical, constitu- 
 tional issue" is that raised, not by the articles of Im- 
 peachment, but by the claim made in the President's 
 answer "of the power at any or all times of removing 
 from office all executive officers for cause to be judged 
 by the President alone." He proceeds to discuss the 
 distribution of power between the respective depart- 
 ments of the government ; and holds that the executive 
 and judiciary, so far from being coordinate with the 
 legislative, are in effect subordinate ; Congress having, 
 beside its coordinate sphere, a general supervisory and 
 regulatory jurisdiction over the other two. 
 
 "The legislative department has original power derived 
 from the Constitution, by which it can set and keep itself 
 in motion as a branch of the government, while the execu- 
 tive and judicial departments have no self-executing con- 
 stitutional capacity, but are constantly dependent upon 
 the legislative department. ..." 
 
THE TRIAL 459 
 
 "In fine, the power to set the government in motion and 
 to keep it in motion is lodged exclusively in Congress, 
 under the provisions of the Constitution." 
 
 The conclusion he draws from this proposition is that 
 "the people have vested discretionary power" in the 
 Congress alone, "while they have denied to the execu- 
 tive and judicial departments all discretionary or im- 
 plied power whatever." This is the reason why vari- 
 ous enumerated powers are denied to Congress, to the 
 United States and to the several states; hut no power 
 is specifically denied to the President except to pardon 
 in cases of Impeachment. And therefore "the Presi- 
 dent . . . can exercise those powers only which are 
 specifically conferred upon him and can take nothing by 
 construction, by implication, or by what is sometimes 
 termed the necessity of the case." Like the judge in 
 a court of law, he must take the law as he finds it. 
 When he has vetoed a bill his power is exhausted. If 
 the bill is passed over his veto he has only to execute 
 it without question or demur. 
 
 "To the President in the performance of his executive 
 duties all laws are alike. He can enter into no inquiry 
 as to their expediency or constitutionality. All laws are 
 presumed to he constitutional, and whether constitutional 
 or not, it is the duty of the Executive so to regard them 
 while they have the form of law. . . . 
 
 "Hence it follows that the crime of the President is not, 
 either in fact or as set forth in the articles of impeachment, 
 that he has violated a constitutional law; but his crime is 
 that he has violated a law, and in his defence no inquiry 
 can be made whether the law is constitutional." 
 
460 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 And the manager maintains that no senator on this 
 trial has a right to inquire into the constitutionality of 
 the law the President is alleged to have violated, nor to 
 allow his opinion of its unconstitutionality to govern 
 him in his verdict; and that the President, having no 
 right even to question its constitutionality, could ■ not 
 possibly have violated it from any other than a bad 
 motive. He sees in the President's alleged purpose to 
 test the law in the courts nothing but a pretext to con- 
 ceal his treasonable designs. 
 
 To minimize the force of the support of the President 
 by his Cabinet, he heaps scorn upon the subserviency 
 of such officers; revealing a singularly low conception 
 of a position he himself, not long after, condescended to 
 accept. 
 
 "Of what value can be the advice of men who, in the 
 first instance, admit that they hold their offices by the will 
 of the person who seeks their advice, and who understand 
 most clearly that if the advice they give should be contrary 
 to the wishes of their master, they would be at once, and 
 in conformity with their own theory of the rights of the 
 President, deprived of. the offices they hold ? . . . 
 
 "It was the advice of serfs to their lord, of servants to 
 their master, of slaves to their owner. . . . 
 
 "The Cabinet responds to Mr. Johnson like old Polonius 
 to Hamlet. 
 
 "The President is a man of strong will, of violent pas- 
 sions, of unlimited ambition, with a capacity to employ 
 and use timid men, adhesive men, subservient men, and 
 corrupt men, as the instruments of his designs. It is the 
 truth of history that he has injured every person with 
 whom he has had confidential relations, and many have 
 
THE TRIAL 461 
 
 escaped ruin only by withdrawing from his society alto- 
 gether. He has one rule of life : he attempts to use every 
 man of power, capacity, or influence within his reach. 
 Succeeding in his attempts, they are in time, and usually 
 in a short time, utterly ruined. If the considerate flee 
 from him, if the brave and patriotic resist his schemes or 
 expose his plans, he attacks them with all the enginery and 
 patronage of his office, and pursues them with all the vio- 
 lence of his personal hatred. He attacks to destroy all 
 who will not become his instruments, and all who become 
 his instruments are destroyed in the use. He spares no 
 one. Already this purpose of his life is illustrated in the 
 treatment of a gentleman who was of counsel for the re- 
 spondent, but who has never appeared in his behalf." 
 
 This blighting effect of the President's influence he 
 illustrated by a reference to the position of the figures 
 in Carpenter's Painting, "The signing of the Eman- 
 cipation Proclamation " : — 
 
 "It was natural and necessary that the artist should 
 arrange the personages of the group on the right hand and 
 on the left of the principal figure. Whether the particular 
 assignment was by chance, by the taste of the artist, or 
 by the influence of a mysterious Providence which works 
 through human agency, we know not. But on the right 
 of Lincoln are two statesmen and patriots who, in all the 
 trials and vicissitudes of these eventful years, have re- 
 mained steadfast to liberty, to justice, to the principles of 
 constitutional government. . . . 
 
 "On the left of Lincoln are five figures representing the 
 other members of his Cabinet. One of these is no longer 
 among the living; he died before the evil days came, and 
 we may indulge the hope that he would have escaped the 
 
462 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 fate of his associates. Of the other four, three have been 
 active in counselling and supporting the President in his 
 attempts to subvert the government. They are already- 
 ruined men." 
 
 As a matter of fact, of the two figures on the right 
 (Chase and Stanton) Chase was already falling away. 
 Of the five on the left, two— the same number as on the 
 right— Smith and Bates— "remained steadfast," and 
 thus marred the symmetry of the orator's "providen- 
 tial" arrangement, while Blair, like Chase, was never 
 in Johnson's Cabinet or under Johnson's influence. 
 
 Upon his doctrine of the sovereignty of the legislative 
 department, the manager ingeniously constructs his 
 theory concerning the power of removal. Not being 
 mentioned in the Constitution except in cases of im- 
 peachment, that power in fact resides nowhere. The 
 executive taking nothing by implication does not pos- 
 sess it. And it is not specifically granted the Congress. 
 It is not an independent power, but only an incident of 
 the power of appointment, and, so far as the Constitu- 
 tion deals with it, can only be exercised by making an 
 appointment. It is nothing more than a power of 
 supersession exercisable only while the Senate is in 
 session. There being, then, no provision in the Consti- 
 tution for the removal of incapable or dishonest officials 
 during recess, Congress, under the grant of power to 
 make all laws necessary or proper to carry into execu- 
 tion all the powers vested in any department of the 
 government, can step in and supply the casus omissus 
 by statute. Congress neglected its duty, in this respect, 
 until it passed the Tenure-of-office act, and the practice 
 
THE TRIAL * 463 
 
 that grew up during this long interval is of no account 
 upon "a subject clearly within the jurisdiction" of the 
 law-making power. The act of 1789, according to Mr. 
 Boutwell, simply recognized "the power of removal 
 during the recess of the Senate"; the practice under it 
 "upon the opinions of Attorney Generals" having been 
 tolerated by the country until 1867. The habit of ignor- 
 ing inconvenient facts or reversing the conclusions of 
 history, to which many fervid advocates are addicted, is 
 exemplified by the manager's treatment of the great 
 debate in the first Congress on this subject. He deliber- 
 ately interjects the distinction between removal during 
 session and removal during recess — a distinction of 
 which there is no trace in the debate itself. He be- 
 littles "Madison's views" which he declares "were 
 gradually and finally, successfully undermined." He 
 dwells almost exclusively on the arguments of Eoger 
 Sherman and other members of the minority who in- 
 sisted that, in the exercise of the power of removal as 
 in the exercise of the power of appointment, the 
 Senate was associated with the President; quoting the 
 remarks of Sherman at great length and challenging 
 Evarts "to overthrow the constitutional argument of 
 his illustrious ancestor." This method of quotation is 
 very much like the citation of a dissenting opinion to 
 ascertain the principle of law decided in a given case. 
 The exact reverse of the conclusions arrived at could 
 not be more accurately stated than is done in what 
 follows : 
 
 "The results reached by the Congress of 1789 are con- 
 clusive upon the following points: that the body was of 
 
464 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 opinion that the power of removal was not in the President 
 absolutely, to be exercised at all times and under all cir- 
 cumstances; and, secondly, that during the sessions of the 
 Senate the power of removal was vested in the President 
 and Senate to be exercised by their concurrent action; 
 while the debate and the votes indicate that the power of 
 the President to remove from office, during the vacation 
 of the Senate, was, at best, a doubtful power under the 
 Constitution. ' ' 
 
 Mr. Boutwell closes this branch of his argument by 
 holding that, without the Tenure-of-office act at all, the 
 President was guilty of a violation of the Constitution, 
 even under the act of 1789, because he removed Stan- 
 ton during the session of the Senate. 
 
 "We do not propose to follow the manager in his ex- 
 tremely technical argument to establish the conclusion 
 that the ad interim appointment of Thomas was without 
 authority of law; nor in his laboured exposition of the 
 conspiracy articles and his inflammatory exaggeration 
 of the Emory article— already recognized by almost 
 everyone as doomed — but to hurry on to the close of his 
 address where the real source of his zeal for the removal 
 of the President discloses itself in the bitterness of his 
 speech. He demands a conviction on the tenth article- 
 not because the President slandered or libelled the Con- 
 gress; this he could not do; but because the speeches 
 show him "unfit for the office that he holds." In this 
 connection he lays down a proposition of law, so vague 
 and elastic that, if once incorporated into the funda- 
 mental law of the country, it would render impeach- 
 ments as common as elections. 
 
THE TRIAL 465 
 
 "We claim that the common law of crimes, as under- 
 stood and enforced by Parliament in cases of impeach- 
 ment, is in substance this : that no person in office shall do 
 any act contrary to the good morals of the office; and 
 that, when any officer is guilty of an act contrary to the 
 good morals of the office which he holds that act is a mis- 
 demeanor for the purpose of impeachment and removal 
 from office." 
 
 The eleventh article it is that furnishes Mr. Boutwell 
 the text from which he rises to the height of his invec- 
 tive. The President's jnost heinous offence is his re- 
 sistance to the congressional plan of reconstruction. 
 Confounding all distinction between accusations of the 
 former impeachment and accusations incorporated into 
 the articles, the manager goes back to the beginning 
 of the administration of Andrew Johnson, and, because 
 of the course of policy the President adopted on the sub- 
 ject of reconstruction, arraigns him as a tyrant, a 
 usurper, an apostate and a traitor. ' ' His entire scheme 
 of criminal ambition, ' ' the manager cries out, ' ' was no 
 less than this " : 
 
 "To obtain command of the War Department and of 
 the army, and by their combined power to control the 
 elections of 1868 in the ten States not yet restored to the 
 Union; ... to inaugurate a policy throughout the ten 
 States by which the former rebels, strengthened by the 
 support of the Executive here, and by the military forces 
 distributed over the South, would exclude from the polls 
 every colored man, and to permit the exercise of the elec- 
 tive franchise by every white rebel; ... to control the 
 entire vote of the ten rebel States; ... to secure the elec- 
 
 30 
 
466 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion of delegates to the democratic national convention 
 favorable to his own nomination to the presidency, ... to 
 secure first, the nomination of the democratic party in the 
 national nominating convention, and, secondly, the elec- 
 toral vote of these ten States. This being done, he had 
 only to obtain enough votes from the States now repre- 
 sented in Congress to make a majority of electoral votes, 
 and he would defy the House and Senate should they 
 attempt to reject the votes of the ten States, and this 
 whether those States had been previously restored to the 
 Union or not; . . . and he would have been inaugurated 
 on the 4th of March next president of the United States 
 for four years." 
 
 The rapt orator continues : 
 
 "Never in the history of any free government has there 
 been so base, so gross, so unjustifiable an attempt upon 
 the part of the executive, whether Emperor, King or Presi- 
 dent, to destroy the just authority of another department 
 of the government. 
 
 "The exhibition which he made in this chamber on the 
 4th of March, 1865, .by which the nation was humiliated 
 and republican institutions disgraced in the presence of 
 the representatives of the civilized nations of the earth, 
 is a truthful exhibition of his character." 
 
 He compares Andrew Johnson unfavourably with the 
 most celebrated impeached culprits of history. The 
 offence for which the Earl of Macclesfield was con- 
 victed was "a trivial crime compared with the open, 
 wanton and defiant violation of law" of this Chief 
 Magistrate. Warren Hastings, even "if the charges 
 preferred against him had been fully sustained," 
 
THE TRIAL 467 
 
 "would be regarded as an unimportant criminal when 
 compared with, this respondent." Verres— "the great 
 political criminal of history"— by reason of the small 
 area of the country he scourged, was an insignificant 
 malefactor beside him. Andrew Johnson, the man- 
 ager declares, "takes the place of Charles I," and Stan- 
 ton the place of John Hampden. Having thus pictured 
 forth the monstrous figure inflaming his own imagina- 
 tion, he felt impelled to invent for it a punishment as 
 fantastic as itself : 
 
 ' ' Travellers and astronomers inform us that in the south- 
 ern heavens, near the southern cross, there is a vast space 
 which the uneducated call the hole in the sky, where the 
 eye of man, with the aid of the powers of the telescope, 
 has been unable to discover nebulas, or asteroid, or comet, 
 or planet, or star, or sun. In that dreary, cold, dark re- 
 gion of space, which is only known to be less than infinite 
 by the evidences of creation elsewhere, the Great Author 
 of celestial mechanism has left the chaos which was in the 
 beginning. If this earth were capable of the sentiments 
 and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal 
 things are the evidences and the pledge of our Divine 
 origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throw, 
 with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and 
 project this enemy of two races of men into that vast re- 
 gion, there forever to exist in a solitude eternal as life, 
 or as the absence of life, emblematical of, if not really, 
 that 'outer darkness' of which the Saviour of men spoke 
 in warning to those who are the enemies of themselves, 
 of their race, and of their God." 
 
 Thomas A. R. Nelson, who followed Mr. Boutwell, 
 was the personal friend as well as counsel of the Presi- 
 
468 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 dent. Born and brought up in the same section of Ten- 
 nessee, although opposed to each other in the days first 
 of the Whig and then of the American parties, they 
 were united in their stand for the Union. A representa- 
 tive in the Congress that immediately preceded the out- 
 break of the civil war and an ardent opponent of the 
 extreme measures of the majority of his colleagues from 
 the South, Nelson witnessed the unequal fight the soli- 
 tary senator from his state made against the banded 
 forces of their common section; and, subsequently, in 
 his retirement, he looked on while Andrew Johnson bore 
 off the standard of Tennessee through the encompass- 
 ing hosts of her rebellious sons. With such remem- 
 brances fresh in his mind, he was shocked by the whole- 
 sale denunciations and abusive epithets hurled at the 
 President by Butler and Boutwell; and his speech is 
 chiefly remarkable as an impulsive outburst of righteous 
 indignation at what appeared to him such gross and 
 almost inconceivable injustice. 
 
 "Who is Andrew Johnson?" he cried. "When treason 
 was rife in this capitol . . . where was Andrew Johnson 
 then? Standing here, almost within ten feet of the place 
 in which I stand now, solitary and alone, in this magnifi- 
 cent chamber, when 'Bloody treason flourished over us,' 
 his voice was heard arousing the nation. Some of you 
 heard it. I only heard its echoes as it rolled along from 
 one end of the land to the other. ... He who has periled 
 his life in a thousand forms to put down treason— he now 
 is stigmatized as a traitor himself. . . . Who is the Presi- 
 dent of the United States ? A Democrat of the straightest, 
 of the strict constructionists: an old Jacksonian, Jeffer- 
 
THE TRIAL 469 
 
 sonian Democrat: a man who proclaimed his democracy in 
 the very letter of acceptance which he wrote when nomi- 
 nated for the Vice-Presidency." 
 
 The resolution of July, 1861, of which he was the 
 author, setting forth the real object of the war, "is the 
 chart that has guided him in the discharge of his offi- 
 cial duty ; there is the platform on which he stood. ' ' 
 
 "Up to the assembling of the Congress of the United 
 States in December, 1865, who was there in all this broad 
 land, from one end of it to the other, that dared to point 
 'the slow, unmoving finger of scorn' at Andrew Johnson 
 and say that he was a traitor to his party, or say that he 
 had betrayed any trust reposed in him ? He was faithfully 
 carrying out what, I repeat, he believed to be the policy 
 of Congress and of his predecessors. He was anxious that 
 this Union should be restored. He was anxious to pour 
 oil upon the troubled waters and heal the wounds of his 
 distracted and divided country. If he erred in this, it was 
 almost a divine error." 
 
 And yet, the counsel exclaims in sheer wonder : 
 
 "Never since the days of Warren Hastings, ay, never 
 since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, has any man been 
 stigmatized with more severe reprobation than the President 
 of the United States. All the powers of invective which 
 the able and ingenious managers can command have been 
 brought into requisition to fire your hearts and to preju- 
 dice your minds against him. A perfect storm has been 
 raised around him." 
 
 "But," he adds with a pardonable pride, 
 
 "I have the pleasure to state to you, senators, to-day, and 
 I hope that my voice will reach the whole country, that 
 
470 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 in the midst of it all he still stands firm, serene, unbent, 
 unbroken, unsubdued, unawed, unterrified, hurling no words 
 of threat or menace at the Senate of the United States, 
 threatening no civil war to deluge his country with blood; 
 but feeling a proud consciousness of his own integrity, 
 appealing to heaven to witness the purity of his motives 
 in his public administration, and calling upon you, sena- 
 tors, in the name of the living God, to whom you have 
 made an appeal, ... to pronounce him innocent of the 
 offences which have been charged against him." 
 
 Mr. Boutwell 's allusion to Black 's abandonment of the 
 defence provoked the counsel to give the Senate a narra- 
 tive of the attempt to extort a favourable decision from 
 the President in the Alta Vela matter, in doing which 
 he stated the contents of Butler's letter and its date 
 of March ninth ;* and, in connection with this revelation, 
 he mentions one trait of Andrew Johnson : 
 
 "He is a man of peculiar temperament and disposition. 
 By careful management and proper manipulation he may, 
 perhaps, be gently led; but it is a pretty difficult thing 
 to do that. But with his temperament and his disposition, 
 no man, no power under the heavens can compel him to 
 go one inch beyond what he believes to be right; and al- 
 though he knew that in rejecting this claim in the peculiar 
 situation in which he was placed he might raise up enemies 
 against him, although he was well aware that a powerful 
 influence might be brought to bear, against him in this trial, 
 and that it would be trumpeted abroad from one end of the 
 Union to the other that Judge Black had become disgusted 
 with his cause and dissatisfied with it, and had deserted it 
 and abandoned it on account of his full conviction of his 
 * See supra, Chap. V, p. 397. 
 
THE TRIAL 471 
 
 guilt ... he was determined not to employ the whole power 
 of the United States in a war against a little power down 
 here that had no capacity of resistance." 
 
 "William S. Groesbeck, who followed Nelson, was the 
 least known of the President's counsel. Though born 
 in the city of New York in the year 1815, he had spent 
 the whole of his active life in the city of Cincinnati en- 
 gaged in the practice of his profession. A Democratic 
 representative in the thirty-fifth Congress (57-9) ; a 
 member of the Peace Congress in 1861 ; and a senator in 
 the Ohio legislature the following year:— this was the 
 extent of his public service and, as he was by nature 
 modest and unobstrusive, he made no noise in the world. 
 He was a lawyer rather than a politician— and a lawyer 
 who loved the still air of delightful studies more than 
 the loud contentions of the forum. Substituted at the 
 last moment for the distinguished Black, he sat through 
 the trial without uttering a word; content, apparently, 
 with the unpretentious function of private consultation 
 and silent preparation; and, probably, he did not ex- 
 pect to speak at all until it was ascertained that four of 
 the managers would participate in the final argument. 
 When he arose to address the court he was labouring 
 under severe physical indisposition so perceptibly that 
 before he had proceeded far senator Pessenden pro- 
 posed to relieve him by an adjournment. This kind 
 offer he put aside with the remark— "I have appre- 
 hensions that I shall not be better if this matter is 
 postponed"; and continued right on to the end of the 
 day. His argument was plain, sententious, straightfor- 
 
472 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ward, without digression and without a flaw. Com- 
 ing immediately after Nelson's incontinent declama- 
 tion, it struck with double force. His terse and impres- 
 sive exordium at once attracted the undivided atten- 
 tion of the court : 
 
 "Since the organization of our government we have had 
 five trials of impeachment— one of a senator and four of 
 judges who held their, office by appointment and for a 
 tenure that lasted during their life or good behavior. It 
 has not been the practice, nor is it the wise policy, of a 
 republican or representative government to avail itself of 
 the remedy of impeachment for the control and regulation 
 of its elective officers. Impeachment was not invented for 
 that purpose, but rather to lay hold of offices that were 
 held by inheritance or for life. And the true policy of a 
 republican government, according to my apprehension, is 
 to leave these matters to the people. They are the great 
 and supreme tribunal to try such questions, and they as- 
 semble statedly with the single object to decide whether 
 an officer shall be continued or whether, he shall be removed 
 from office." 
 
 We cannot follow him in his neat demonstration that 
 the tribunal he was addressing was a court, presup- 
 posed to be so by the words of the Constitution, desig- 
 nated by itself a court in every one of the five pre- 
 cedents of our history; and that, being a court, there 
 could be no trial of any charge but those preferred in 
 the articles before them, and they must be sustained, not 
 by ' ' common fame, " or " newspaper rumor, " or " views 
 of party policy," but "upon the evidence offered here 
 and nothing else." Nor is it necessary to give even 
 
THE TRIAL 473 
 
 a summary of his argument proving, first, the Presi- 
 dent's right to remove Stanton and, second, his right 
 to issue the letter of authority to Thomas, two proposi- 
 tions on the establishment of which he says truly ; ' ' the 
 first eight articles fell into ruins instantly," "there 
 is nothing left of them":— the less so as we have 
 already cited the passage which is its keystone. But 
 we cannot refrain from glancing at the admirable man- 
 ner in which he answers Mr. Boutwell's theory of the 
 superiority of the legislative department over the others 
 and the abject servitude of the executive under an act 
 of Congress. "Our government is composed of three 
 departments," Groesbeck quietly premises. "They 
 are each independent of the other. No one is respon- 
 sible to the other. They are responsible to the people 
 or to the state. All this is carefully set down in the 
 Constitution. ' ' 
 
 "Those who have charge of these various departments, 
 by the theory and structure of the government, are en- 
 joined each to take care of its own prerogative, if I may use 
 such a word, and to protect itself against all possible en- 
 croachment from the others. This they do, each and every 
 department, by observing with the utmost fidelity the pro- 
 visions of the written Constitution." "At the head of one 
 of these departments stands the President." "He is re- 
 quired, in addition to the oath covering his ordinary execu- 
 tive duties, to swear to the best of his ability to preserve, 
 protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. 
 That oath is administered to the President alone of all the 
 officers of the government. 
 
 "It does seem to me that the terms of such an oath 
 solemnly imposed upon him would impress him with the 
 
474 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 idea, or any of us with the idea, that it was the first para- 
 mount duty that he should ever, in all his executive eon- 
 duet, keep his eye upon the Constitution of the United 
 States; in all trial that he should look to it; in all doubt 
 that he should lean toward it; in all difficulty that he 
 should take shelter under it." 
 
 "The sum and substance" of Mr. Boutwell's eloquent 
 argument, "was that the President is but the constable of 
 the Congress ; no more ; that he is put into his place merely 
 to execute the laws of Congress. Why, senators, this is 
 not the right interpretation of the Constitution. He is the 
 Chief Magistrate of the nation, having charge of one of 
 its great departments; and he is faithless to his trust if 
 he do not protect the powers conferred by the Constitution 
 upon that department." "What then? "Shall he disre- 
 gard law? Never. He should never in mere wantonness 
 disregard any law of Congress that may be passed. " " Shall 
 he execute all law?" as the manager insists. 
 
 "Let me tell the gentleman, in answer to his long argu- 
 mentation upon this point, that he makes no distinction 
 between law whatever, that if an act of Congress be un- 
 constitutional it is no law; it never was a law; it never 
 had a particle of validity, although it went through the 
 forms of congressional enactment; from the beginning db 
 initio it was null and void, and to execute it is to violate 
 that higher law, the Constitution of the United States, 
 which declares that to be no law which is in conflict with 
 its provision.'-' 
 
 "If a law be declared by the Supreme Court unconstitu- 
 tional he should not execute it. If the law be upon its 
 very face in flat contradiction to the plain express pro- 
 visions of the Constitution, as if a law should forbid the 
 President to grant a pardon in any case,' or if a law should 
 
THE TRIAL 475 
 
 declare that he should not be Commander-in-chief, or if 
 a law should declare that he should take no part in the 
 making of a treaty, I say the President, without going to 
 the Supreme Court of the United States, maintaining the 
 integrity of his department, which for the time being is 
 intrusted to him, is bound to execute no such legislation; 
 and he is cowardly and untrue to the responsibilities of 
 his position if he should execute it." 
 
 But "the difficulty is not here. The difficulty arises 
 in doubtful cases. ' ' 
 
 "Suppose an act of Congress interpret the Constitution 
 for the first time, shall the President execute it? I say 
 yes. Suppose an act, instead of giving an interpretation 
 for the first time in a doubtful case, contradicts a long 
 accepted previous interpretation — in this supposition we 
 are approaching the case before us — what is to be done? 
 To follow the Constitution is the first and paramount duty 
 of the President, and to maintain the integrity of his de- 
 partment is also a duty ; and if an act of to-day is contrary 
 to a long established interpretation of the Constitution 
 upon a question of power, and a fit case presents itself 
 when he is required to act, it is right and proper, in a 
 peaceable way, with due regard for the public welfare, to 
 test the accuracy of the new interpretation in the forum 
 which is the highest and the final interpreter of such ques- 
 , tions. " 
 
 The counsel then goes on to show that the act of 1789 
 was "constitutional interpretation": 
 
 "Washington approved the bill, Adams's vote passed it, 
 Jefferson maintained the same position, Madison drew the 
 bill, Monroe and Jackson and the Presidents that followed 
 
476 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 them all maintained the same construction, and every Presi- 
 dent, including President Lincoln, through all our history 
 of eighty years and twenty administrations maintained this 
 construction upon the question of where the power of re- 
 moval is lodged," and every subsequent Congress down 
 to the Thirty-ninth. 
 
 On the other hand, the civil tenure act of 1867 is also 
 "constitutional interpretation," and between the two 
 the question arises, what is the duty of the President? 
 
 "All the Presidents, every revered name that ever filled 
 the office, affirming this doctrine ; the Supreme Court utter- 
 ing itself upon this doctrine ; thirty-eight Congresses affirm- 
 ing this doctrine ; this on one side and one Congress on the 
 other. May not human reason pause? May not human 
 judgment doubt? . . . was it criminal, I say, that he, too, 
 believed in that way, and thought that it was a proper case, 
 it being simply a question of constitutional interpretation, 
 to pass to that tribunal which has a higher right than the 
 Executive and higher than Congress upon the subject of 
 interpretation?" 
 
 "Now what was Mr. Johnson's condition! He had 
 a cabinet officer who was unfriendly to him personally 
 and politically." 
 
 "He carried on the department without communication 
 with the President; a sort of secondary executive. The 
 unity of the Cabinet was gone. . . . That was the case, his 
 own case, a case pressing upon him, not sought; and in 
 executing the duty, as he conceived it to be, to effect that 
 change he came in conflict with this law, and proposed to 
 have its constitutional validity tested. 
 
THE TRIAL 477 
 
 "But, say the gentlemen, he executed this law in other 
 respects, he changed the forms of his commissions; he re- 
 ported suspensions under this law. So he did; and, sena- 
 tors, it is one of the strongest facts in this case. He did 
 not take up the law and tear it to pieces. That is lawless- 
 ness. He took it up to have it interpreted in the case that 
 pressed upon him individually, and in all other respects 
 he executed it without the surrender of his own convic- 
 tions. ... 
 
 "He tried to pluck a thorn out of his very heart. . . . 
 You fastened it there and you are now asked to punish 
 him for attempting to extract it. What more? He made 
 an ad interim appointment to last for a single day. You 
 could have terminated it whenever you saw fit. You had 
 only to take up the nomination which he sent to you, which 
 was a good nomination, and act upon it, and the ad interim 
 appointment vanished like smoke." 
 
 Coming to the tenth article he threw that specimen of 
 pleading into a shape that made its charges ridiculous. 
 
 "In 1798 some good people in the country seem to have 
 been operated upon very much as the managers, or rather 
 the House of Representatives, were in this instance, and 
 they took it into their heads to get up what is called a sedi- 
 tion law, which is very like article ten." 
 
 Beading the law he remarked : 
 
 ' ' It was the most offensive law that has ever been passed, 
 since the government was organized. So offensive was it 
 that the people would not rest under it although it was 
 passed to last but three years. They started, as it were, 
 the hue and cry against everybody who defended it or was 
 concerned in it, and hunted them to political death. But 
 
478 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 it was a good law compared to article ten. It condemned 
 the act of coolly and under no provocation or excitement 
 preparing and publishing a libel against the government. 
 . . . But so unpopular was it, that Congress has not ven- 
 tured to pass a law upon the subject of libel against the 
 government or any department from that day to this. 
 
 "It has been reserved for the House of Representatives, 
 through its managers, to renew the practice in a more ob- 
 jectionable form. And I take it upon myself to suggest 
 that before we are to be condemned in a court of impeach- 
 ment we shall have some law upon the subject j and I have 
 ventured to draw up . . . the draught of a bill which I have 
 made on article ten of this impeachment." 
 
 The reading of the bill making penal the acts charged 
 in the article was greeted by the spontaneous laughter 
 of the court. 
 
 The peroration of the address ought to be given with- 
 out mutilation; but we are compelled to excerpt: 
 
 "But, says the gentleman who last spoke on behalf of 
 the managers, he tried to defeat pacification and restora- 
 tion. I deny it in the sense in which he presented it — 
 that is, as a criminal act. Here, too, he followed precedent 
 and trod the path on which were the footprints of Lincoln, 
 and which was bright with the radiance of his divine utter- 
 ance, ' Charity for all, and malice toward none. ' He was 
 eager for pacification. He thought that the war was ended. 
 It seemed so. The drums were all silent ; the arsenals were 
 all shut; the roar of the cannon had died away to the last 
 reverberations ; the army was disbanded ; not a single enemy 
 confronted us in the field. Ah, he was too eager, too for- 
 giving, too kind. The hand of conciliation was stretched 
 out to him and he took it. It may be he should have put 
 
THE TRIAL 479 
 
 it away, but was it a crime to take it? Kindness, forgiv- 
 ness a crime ? Kindness a crime ? Kindness is omnipotent 
 for good, more powerful than gunpowder or cannon. Kind- 
 ness is statesmanship. Kindness is the high statesmanship 
 of heaven itself. The thunders of Sinai do but terrify and 
 distract; alone they accomplish little; it is the kindness of 
 Calvary that subdues and pacifies. 
 
 "What shall I say of this man? He is no theorist; he 
 is no reformer. I have looked over his life. He has ever 
 walked in beaten paths, and by the light of the Constitu- 
 tion. The mariner, tempest-tossed in mid-sea, does not 
 more certainly turn to his star for guidance than does this 
 man in trial and difficulty to the star of the Constitution. 
 He loves the Constitution. It has been the study of his 
 life. He is not learned and scholarly, like many of you; 
 he is not a man of many ideas or of much speculation ; but 
 by a law of the mind he is only the truer to that he does 
 know. He is a patriot, second to no one of you in the 
 measure of his patriotism. He loves his country. He 
 may be full of error ; I will not canvass now his views ; but 
 he loves his country. He has the courage to defend it; 
 and I believe to die for it if need be. His courage and 
 his patriotism are not without illustration. . . . How his 
 voice rang out in this hall in the hour of alarm for the good 
 cause, and in denunciation of the rebellion. But he did 
 not remain here; it was a pleasant, honorable, safe, easy 
 position ; but he was wanted for a more difficult and ardu- 
 ous and perilous service. He faltered not but entered upon 
 it. That was a trial of his courage and patriotism of which 
 some of you who now sit in judgment on more than his 
 life know nothing. I have often thought that those who 
 dwelt at the north, safely distant from the collision and 
 strife of the war, knew but little of its actual and trying 
 dangers. "We who lived on the border know more. Our 
 
480 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 horizon was always red with its flames; and it sometimes 
 burned so near us that we could feel the heat of it upon 
 the out-stretched hand. But he was wanted for greater 
 peril, and went into the very furnace of the war, and there 
 served his country long and well. . . . 
 
 "And it seems hard, it seems cruel, senators, that he 
 should be dragged here as a criminal, or that any one who 
 served his country and bore himself well and bravely 
 through that trying ordeal should be condemned upon mis- 
 erable technicalities. 
 
 "If he has committed any gross crime, shocking alike 
 and indiscriminately the entire public mind, then condemn 
 him; but he has rendered service to the country which 
 entitles him to kind and respectful consideration. He has 
 precedents for everything he has done, and what excellent 
 precedents ! The voices of the great dead come to us from 
 the grave sanctioning his course. All our past history 
 approves it. How can you single out this man, in this con- 
 dition of things, and brand him before the world, put your 
 brand of infamy upon him because he made an ad interim 
 appointment for a day, and possibly may have made a mis- 
 take in attempting to remove Stanton? I can at a glance 
 put my eye upon senators here who would not endure the 
 position which he occupied. Tou do not think it is right 
 yourselves. You framed this civil tenure law to give each 
 President his own cabinet, and yet his whole crime is that 
 he wants peace and harmony in his." 
 
 As the unassuming orator, faint from the illness he 
 so far had mastered, sank into his seat, a wave of ad- 
 miration swept over the court and the audience, thence 
 to roll on to the farthest borders of the republic and 
 make the hitherto unknown name of Groesbeck familiar 
 
THE TRIAL 481 
 
 as a household word. "Well might that stern old Cato— 
 Stevens — say of him: "The gentleman in his perora- 
 tion on Saturday implored the sympathy of the Senate 
 with all the elegance and pathos of a Roman senator 
 pleading for virtue ; and it is to be feared that his grace 
 and eloquence turned the attention of the Senate upon 
 the orator rather than upon the accused. ' ' 
 
 Stevens, in fact, followed him, resolute to play his 
 part in the drama to the end in spite of his pitiable state 
 of physical infirmity. He stood a few minutes reading 
 his address until he was forced to take a seat, and in 
 this position continued to read for about a half-hour 
 when, his voice becoming too weak to be heard, Butler 
 concluded the reading. So indomitable a resolve we 
 may be sure did not spring from the mere love of dis- 
 play — of which there was not a grain in his composition- 
 Like an Indian warrior incapacitated by age for the' 
 war-path, he was not to be deprived of his share in the 
 torturing of the captive. The ruler of the dominant 
 faction of his party, he must do his best to keep weak- 
 backed senators in line by the terrors of his scorn- 
 Besides, he had an article he called his own to defend. 
 
 "I shall discuss but a single article," he, therefore, 
 opened, "the one that was finally adopted upon my earnest 
 solicitation, and which, if proved, I considered then, and 
 still consider, as quite sufficient for the ample conviction 
 of the distinguished respondent and for his removal from 
 office, which is the only legitimate object for which this 
 impeachment could be instituted." 
 
 As there was to be "no personal punishment" "it 
 is apparent that no crime containing malignant or in- 
 
 31 
 
482 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 dictable offences higher than misdemeanors was neces- 
 sary either to be alleged or proved. If the respondent 
 was shown to be abusing his official trust to the injury 
 of the people . . . the true mode of dealing with him 
 was to impeach him . . . and thus remove him from 
 the office which he was abusing." "What does it 
 matter, then, what the motive of the respondent might 
 be?" "Mere mistake of intention, if persevered in 
 after proper warning ... is quite sufficient to warrant 
 the removal of the officer." Nevertheless, he charged 
 the President with "the foul offence" of "misprision 
 of official perjury"— which at least sounds like a high 
 crime. It consisted in the breaking of his official oath 
 by obstructing the execution of the civil tenure act; 
 and the peculiar felicity of the article was that it let 
 in the letter of the President to General Grant which 
 Stevens insisted established the offence. 
 
 "Whichever of these gentlemen may have lost his mem- 
 ory, and found in lieu of the truth the vision which issues 
 from the Ivory Gate — though who can hesitate to choose 
 between the words of a gallant soldier, and the pettifogging 
 of a political trickster — is wholly immaterial, so far as the 
 charge against the President is concerned. That charge is, 
 that the President did attempt to prevent the due execu- 
 tion of the tenure of office law by entangling the General 
 in the arrangement; and unless both the President and the 
 General have lost their, memory and mistaken the truth 
 with regard to the promises with each other, then this 
 charge is made out." 
 
 But it was the faintheartedness of certain senators 
 that this one of the managers mainly feared, and for 
 
THE TRIAL 483 
 
 this reason he waved that resolution of their own, con- 
 demnatory of the President, in terrorem over their 
 heads : 
 
 "And now this offspring of assassination turns upon the 
 Senate, who have thus rebuked him in a constitutional man- 
 ner, and bids them defiance. How can he escape the just 
 vengeance of the law? Wretched man, standing at bay, 
 surrounded by a cordon of living men, each with the axe 
 of an executioner uplifted for his just punishment. Every 
 senator now trying him, except such as had already adopted 
 his policy, voted for this same resolution, pronouncing his 
 solemn doom. Will any of them vote for his acquittal on 
 the ground of its unconstitutionality? I know that sena- 
 tors would do any necessary act if indorsed by an honest 
 conscience or an enlightened public opinion; but neither 
 for the sake of the President nor any one else would one 
 of them suffer himself to be tortured on the gibbet of 
 everlasting obloquy. How long and dark would be the 
 track of infamy which must mark his name, and that of 
 his posterity ! Nothing is therefore more certain than that 
 it requires no gift of prophecy to predict the fate of this 
 unhappy victim." 
 
 It is unnecessary to review the argument of man- 
 ager Williams who followed Stevens, because, out- 
 side of his exposition of the Stanton proviso already 
 given, it was but an expansion of the arguments of 
 his speech explanatory of the Tenure bill which he in- 
 troduced in the House, and a repetition of the charges 
 made in the majority report on the first Impeachment, 
 of which he was the author. Of all the addresses made 
 on this trial, his was the most ornate in diction and meta- 
 
484 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 phorical in style, and, in its description of the enormity 
 of the defendant's guilt and its personal assaults 
 upon Andrew Johnson, it was more hyperbolical and 
 more bitter even than Mr. Boutwell's. Of all the man- 
 agers, he was the only one who ventured to cast doubt 
 upon the patriotic disinterestedness with which Andrew 
 Johnson took his stand against secession. "I will not 
 stop to inquire whether his resistance to the hegira of 
 the southern senators was not merely a question, him- 
 self being the witness, as to the propriety and wisdom 
 of such a step at that particular time." Against the 
 Cabinet he seemed to cherish a special animosity— "the 
 trusted counsellors" who "so largely comforted and 
 encouraged" the President "through all his manifold 
 usurpations." "These gentlemen," he sneered, "have 
 not been allowed to prove their opinion and advice. It 
 may be guessed, I suppose, without damage to our case, 
 that if allowed, they would have proved it." He 
 regretted that ' ' the public curiosity has been balked by 
 the denial of the high privilege of listening to the 
 luminous expositions of these learned Thebans." He 
 stigmatized the institution as "this illegitimate body, 
 this excrescence, this mere fungus, born of decay"; 
 and Johnson's Cabinet in particular as "a mere cabal 
 which looked for all the world like some dark conclave 
 of conspirators plotting against the liberties of the 
 people"; "mere beds of justice" to register the de- 
 crees of "an imperious and self willed man like the 
 present Executive." Judge of the condition of the 
 brain of an orator who; under the actual circumstances 
 of this case, could address to the High Court of Im- 
 
THE TRIAL 485 
 
 peachment engaged in the trial of the Chief Magistrate 
 of the republic, an exhortation like the following : 
 
 "If you acquit him, you affirm all his imperial preten- 
 sions and decide that no amount of usurpation will ever 
 bring a Chief Magistrate to justice, because you will have 
 laid down at his feet your own high dignity, along with 
 your double function as legislators and advisers, which will 
 be followed of course by that of your other, I will not say 
 greater, office as judges. It will be a victory over you and 
 us which will stir, the heart of rebeldom with joy, while 
 your dead soldiers will turn uneasily in their graves; a 
 victory to be celebrated by the exultant ascent of Andrew 
 Johnson to the Capitol, like the conqueror in a Roman 
 triumph, dragging not captive kings but a captive Senate 
 at his chariot wheels, and to be crowned by his reentry into 
 the possession of that department of the government over 
 which this great battle has been fought. It is shown in 
 evidence that he has already intimated that he would wait 
 on your action here for that purpose. But is this all? 
 Hug not to your bosoms, I entreat you, the fond illusion 
 that it is all to end there. It is but the beginning of the 
 end. If his pretensions are sustained, the next head that 
 will fall as a propitiatory offering to the conquered South, 
 will be that of the great chief who humbled the pride of 
 the chivalry by beating down its serried battalions in the 
 field, and dragging its traitor standard in the dust; to be 
 followed by the return of the rebel office-holders, and a gen- 
 eral convulsion of the state which shall cast loose your 
 reconstructed laws, and deliver over the whole theater of 
 past disturbances to anarchy and ruin." 
 
 Williams closed about the time of the usual recess; 
 and the expectation that Evarts would follow crowded 
 
486 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the Senate chamber with an eager audience. They were 
 compelled to wait, however, while Butler fell foul of 
 Nelson on account of his statement of the Alta Vela 
 matter, which he stigmatized as an "insinuating cal- 
 umny," "injurious to some of the managers and other 
 gentlemen, members of the House, who have no oppor- 
 tunity to be heard." He averred that "his opinion," 
 as he called his letter, "must have been given in the 
 early part of February"; certainly before the act was 
 committed by Andrew Johnson which brought on his 
 impeachment. Nelson rose, in great heat, to justify his 
 introduction of a subject so foreign to the trial by 
 pointing out the previous allusion to it by Mr. Boutwell : 
 "It was for that reason and for no other that I spoke 
 of it, not with any desire to make an assault upon the 
 managers." And, then, hurried on by his wrath, he 
 turned on Butler : 
 
 "I treated the gentleman on the other side with courtesy 
 and kindness. He has rewarded me with insult and with 
 outrage in the presence of the American Senate. It will 
 be for you, senators, to judge whose demeanor is most 
 proper before you, that of the honorable gentleman who 
 foully and falsely charges me with insinuating calumny, 
 or my course in vindicating the President of the United 
 States in the discharge of my professional duty here. So 
 far as any question that the gentleman desires to make of 
 a personal character with me is concerned, this is not the 
 place to make it. Let him make it elsewhere, if he desires 
 to do it." 
 
 Being promptly called to order, the ■counsel begged 
 pardon of the Senate, proceeded with his explanation 
 
THE TRIAL 487 
 
 I 
 
 and, insisting that the date of the original Butler letter 
 was March ninth, 1868, and promising to bring all the 
 original letters into court, asked permission to lay them 
 before the Senate. Manager Logan rose and stated that 
 he ''signed the letter long before there was anything 
 thought of impeachment." This closed the incident 
 for the day, but we may as well follow it to its end. The 
 next morning, Sumner sent an order to the chair declar- 
 ing that Mr. Nelson for using language "intended to 
 provoke a duel" "justly deserved the disapprobation 
 of the Senate" ; which Sherman's objection carried over 
 the day. Despite Sumner's strenuous protest, Nelson 
 was allowed to produce and file the letters, among them. 
 Butler's, which, notwithstanding his and Logan's dis- 
 claimer, bore date as of the ninth of March. The next 
 day, Sumner's resolution coming up, Reverdy Johnson 
 moved to lay it on the table ; and before taking the vote 
 senator Anthony inquired of the counsel "if, in the re- 
 mark" he had made, "it was his intention to challenge 
 the manager to mortal combat ? ' ' Nelson replied : 
 
 "I cannot say I had the idea of a duel particularly in 
 my mind, as I am not a duelist by profession; but, never- 
 theless, my idea was that I would answer the gentleman 
 in any way in which he chose to call upon me for it. I 
 did not intend to claim any exemption on account of age 
 or any exemption on account of other things that are ap- 
 parent to the Senate. That was all that I meant to signify, 
 and I hope the Senate will recollect the circumstances under 
 which this thing was done. ' ' 
 
 So manly a frankness, while it only hardened Sumner 
 who demanded that his resolution be read again, 
 
488 IMPEACPIMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 touched the hearts of the majority and the order was 
 laid on the table by the vote of 35 to 10. 
 
 From this unpleasant episode we now turn to the 
 address which it interrupted. William M. Evarts had 
 come to Washington heralded as one of the greatest 
 lawyers of the state of New York; and this high repu- 
 tation he well sustained in the incidental discussions 
 during the trial. Since the defeat of William H. 
 Seward, his favourite for the presidential nomination in 
 1860, he had mingled but little in politics. The candi- 
 date of the Seward wing for United States senator in 
 opposition to Horace Greeley when the contest resulted 
 in the election of Ira Harris, he had made no nearer 
 approach to federal affairs. All eyes were turned on his 
 tall, slender figure as he arose to address the court. 
 Something extraordinary in the way of argument and 
 eloquence was expected from him, and, in certain re- 
 spects, his auditors were not disappointed. Although 
 tied to the ground by the essential pettiness of the cause 
 he was engaged in, the speech of Evarts may be 
 said at times to soar. It reaches almost, if it does not 
 quite, the classic heights. One superficial but all-per- 
 vading fault it had— the inveterate proclivity of the 
 speaker to entangle himself in the involutions of his long- 
 drawn-out sentences. With this drawback, however, 
 and although it was the longest of all the arguments— oc- 
 cupying three days in its delivery— the speech is entitled 
 to be called a great oration. Evarts, it is true, was pre- 
 eminently a lawyer. He undoubtedly belonged to that 
 class of men whom Mr. Boutwell lunged at as ' ' attorneys 
 whose practice of the law had sharpened but not en- 
 
THE TRIAL 489 
 
 larged their intellects";— a sneer which the counsel 
 made him smart for. But if Bvarts was a lawyer, 
 he was a lawyer of the philosophic mind. His intellect 
 was acutely penetrative, able to ferret through the most 
 intervoluted complications of a case, traverse the sharp- 
 est edge of technical law and pierce the best-laid scheme 
 of logic to its central fallacy. But, at the same time, 
 it was comprehensive enough to grasp the fundamental 
 principles which elucidate concrete complications, show 
 subtlety sometimes to be wisdom, and illumine the nar- 
 rowest cause by viewing it in the light cast by the 
 massive forces with which it is environed. He was able 
 on the present occasion, therefore, not only to wring the 
 life out of the record prosecution to its minutest ex- 
 tremities ; but to dissolve it into its essential nullity by 
 re-immersing it into the heated political atmosphere 
 whence it arose. 
 
 "All the political power of the United States is 
 here ' ' ; with this stroke he began. The House of Repre- 
 sentatives, the President, the Senate, the Chief Justice. 
 But all at some disadvantage. The House and the Sen- 
 ate, owing to rebellion, deprived of the full attendance of 
 members. The Executive, owing to assassination, "in 
 the last stage of its maintenance under mere constitu- 
 tional authority." "If the President be condemned 
 . . . there will be no President of the United States," 
 and "the office sequestered will be discharged by a 
 member of the body whose judgment sequestered it." 
 "The sober thoughtful people of this country," "never 
 fond of pageants, are thinking of far other things than 
 these." They are thinking of their Supreme Court 
 
490 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 sent away with its jurisdiction cut off "by the sharp 
 edge of a congressional enactment " ; of their President 
 elected by their voices, ' ' accused by one branch of Con- 
 gress, to be tried by the other, his office put in commis- 
 sion and an election ordered " ; of his oath ' ' to preserve, 
 protect and defend the Constitution." "They are con- 
 verts of no theories of congressional omnipotence. 
 They understand none of the nonsense of the Constitu- 
 tion being superior to the law except that the law must 
 be obeyed and the Constitution not." "When they 
 hear that this tremendous enginery of impeachment 
 . . . has been brought into play, that this power which 
 has lain in the Constitution like a sword in its sheath, 
 is now drawn, they wish to know what the crime is that 
 the President is accused of." 
 
 "They wish to know whether the President has betrayed 
 our liberties or our possessions to a foreign state. They 
 wish to know whether, he has delivered up a fortress or 
 surrendered a fleet. They wish to know whether he has 
 made merchandise of the public trust and turned authority 
 to private gain. And when informed that none of these 
 things are charged, imputed, or even declaimed about, they 
 yet seek further information and are told that he has re- 
 moved a member of his cabinet." 
 
 They are very familiar with removal from office. 
 Like the old lady who cried out that if you took away 
 her "total depravity" you took away her religion, 
 many of them might say if you take away removal from 
 office you take away their politics. " 'How came this to 
 be a crime?' they inquire." Why, Congress passed a 
 
THE TRIAL 491 
 
 law calling it a high, misdemeanour. The President '' ' has 
 removed or undertaken to remove a member of his 
 Cabinet and he is to be removed himself for that cause. 
 He undertook to make an ad interim Secretary of War, 
 and you are to have made for you an ad interim Presi- 
 dent in consequence." " 'Was the Secretary of War 
 removed then?' No; he was not removed, he is still 
 Secretary, still in possession of the department. 'Was 
 force used f ' No ; it was all on paper and all went no 
 further" than making a case for the Supreme Court. 
 But here Congress intercepts, again prevents the 
 Supreme Court "from interposing its serene judg- 
 ment" and declares that the case shall be determined 
 by process of impeachment. The people do not see 
 why this is not ' ' a question between the omnipotence of 
 Congress and the supremacy of the Constitution. ' ' 
 
 His treatment of the argument of Butler that the 
 tribunal before him was not a court exhibits a still airier 
 touch. "The intrepid manager" "knew that the only 
 way he could prevent his cause from being turned out 
 of court was to turn the court out of his cause." But 
 he does "not tell us what this was, if it was not a 
 court. ' ' 
 
 "It is true he said it was a Senate, but that conveys no 
 idea. It is not a Senate conducting legislative business; 
 it is not a Senate acting upon executive business; it is not 
 a Senate acting in caucus on political affairs ; and the ques- 
 tion remains, if it is not a court what is it 1 " 
 
 He answers his own question: "It is an altar of 
 sacrifice if it is not an altar of justice"— an altar 
 
492 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 erected to "the savage demon" of "party hate and 
 party rage. ' ' 
 
 ' ' If this is not a court it is a scaffold : and an honorable 
 manager (Stevens) yesterday told you so, that each one of 
 you brandished now a headsman's axe to execute vengeance, 
 you having tried the offender on the night of the 21st 
 of February already." 
 
 "Forensic discussion" it has hitherto been supposed 
 is the true method of dealing with such issues as the 
 present— "a method to penetrate the position and if 
 successful to capture it"; not "the Chinese method 
 of warfare which is the method of concussion and con- 
 sists of a great braying of trumpets, sounding of gongs, 
 shouts and shrieks in the neighborhood of the opposing 
 force." Manager Butler "seems to have repeated the 
 experiment he tried during the war." 
 
 "The air was filled with epithets, the dome shook with 
 invective. Wretchedness and misery and suffering and 
 blood, not included within the record, were made the means 
 of this explosive mixture. And here we are surviving the 
 concussion, and after all reduced to the humble and homely 
 method of discussion which belongs to 'attorneys whose in- 
 tellects have been sharpened but not enlarged by the prac- 
 tice of law. * ' ' 
 
 The chief aim of the counsel in this branch of his 
 argument was to extricate the actual charge from the 
 political elements which enveloped it, to show how in- 
 trinsically insignificant it was, and to demonstrate that 
 "whatever else there is, attendant, appurtenant, or in 
 the neighborhood," was "wholly political, and not the 
 
THE TRIAL 493 
 
 subject of jurisdiction in this court or in any court, 
 but only in the great forum of the popular judgment. ' ' 
 
 1. "The formal contravention of a statute," he 
 argues first, "could not be an impeachable offence 
 merely because it was qualified by the word 'high' in 
 the penal section of the act. You must look at the 
 punishment. That could not be a 'high' crime which 
 Congress allowed a judge in his discretion to punish 
 by a six cents fine or one day 's imprisonment. ' ' In the 
 course of the discussion of this section at the time of 
 the passage of the Tenure-of-office bill, Sumner "sug- 
 gested that it would be well, at least, to have a moderate 
 minimum of punishment that would secure something 
 like substance necessarily in the penal infliction"— say 
 "$1000 or $500 as the lower limit"; but Edmunds and 
 Williams would have none of it; Williams remarking 
 that "this is a mere offence created by statute"— "not 
 involving moral turpitude, but rather a political 
 offence. ' ' 
 
 2. He showed that "in act, purpose and in conse- 
 quence the whole criminality we can attach to the im- 
 puted offence is a formal contravention of a statute. ' ' 
 
 "Up to twelve o'clock on February the 21st, 1868, the 
 President was innocent and unimpeachable, and at one 
 o'clock on the same day he was guilty and impeachable of 
 the string of offences that fill up all the articles except 
 that devoted to the speeches" and the Emory article. 
 
 "Nothing was done whatever except to issue a paper 
 and have it delivered, which puts the posture of the thing 
 in this condition and nothing else: the Constitution, we 
 will suppose, says that the President has a right to remove 
 
494 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the Secretary of War; the act of Congress says that the 
 President shall not remove the Secretary of War ; the Presi- 
 dent says 'I will issue an official order which will raise the 
 same question between my conduct and the statute that 
 the statute raises between itself and the Constitution.' . . . 
 He issues an order on paper which is but an assertion of 
 the Constitution and a denial of the law, and that paper 
 has legal validity if the Constitution sustains it, and it is 
 invalid and ineffectual, a mere imbelle telum, if the law 
 prohibits it and the law is conformed to the Constitution." 
 
 3. "All else is political." And here the counsel calls 
 attention to the actual condition of the two contending 
 departments of the government. The executive is not 
 filled by one who has received the suffrage of the people 
 for that office and on this account "discord, dislocation, 
 deficiency, difficulty show themselves." And "this 
 weakness of the Presidency is encountered in the present 
 state of affairs by an extraordinary development of 
 party strength in Congress"— a three-fourths majority 
 in both Houses. The ' ' three barriers against the will of 
 Congress" — the requirement of a two-thirds vote to 
 expel a member, to override a veto, to convict and re- 
 move the President— are broken down. The abnormal, 
 unbalanced condition of these two great departments 
 furnishes "ground to pause and consider";— will you 
 precipitate the struggle to its fatal pitch— involving 
 ' ' the greater and higher question " " whether it is in the 
 power of a written Constitution to draw lines of separa- 
 tion and put up buttresses of defence between the co- 
 ordinate branches of this government?" 
 
 "And with that question settled . . . that one can devour, 
 and having the power, will devour the other, then the bal- 
 
THE TRIAL 495 
 
 ances of the American Constitution are lost and lost for- 
 ever. Nobody can reinstate on paper what has once been 
 struck down in fact. Mankind are governed by instances, 
 not by resolutions." 
 
 It is " the political situation which forms the staple of 
 the pressure on the part of the managers to make out a 
 crime, a fault, a danger that should enlist the terrible 
 machinery of impeachment and condemnation." 
 
 ' ' If the honorable managers will go back to the source of 
 their authority, if they will obtain what was once denied 
 them, a general and open political charge, it may, for 
 aught I know, be maintainable in law; it may be main- 
 tainable in fact; but then it would be brought here; it 
 would be written down; its dimensions would be known 
 and understood ; its weight would be estimated ; the answer 
 could be made." 
 
 The counsel neatly turned the laugh on Mr. Bout- 
 well's "astronomical" mode of punishment. Many 
 professors, he gravely affirmed, are wholly ignorant of 
 any such facts as the manager describes. 
 
 "But nevertheless, while some of his honorable coPeagues 
 were paying attention to an unoccupied and unappropriated 
 island on the surface of the sea, Mr. Manager Boutwell, 
 more ambitious, had discovered an untenanted and unap- 
 propriated region in the skies, reserved, he would have us 
 think, in the final councils of the Almighty, as the place 
 of punishment for convicted and deposed American Presi- 
 dents. 
 
 "At first I thought that his mind had become so 'en- 
 larged' that it was not 'sharp' enough, to discover the Con- 
 stitution had limited the punishment ; but on reflection I 
 
496 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 saw that he was as legal and logical as he was ambitious 
 and astronomical, for the Constitution has said 'removal 
 from office, ' and put no limit to the distance of the removal, 
 so that it may be, without shedding a drop of his blood, 
 or taking a penny of his property, or confining his limbs, 
 instant removal from office and transportation to the skies." 
 
 But, ■ as nobody knows where the space is but the 
 manager himself, ' ' he is the necessary deputy to execute 
 the judgment of the court." And the counsel draws a 
 picture of "the honorable and astronomical manager," 
 "with the President fastened to his broad and strong 
 shoulders, ' ' taking his flight from the top of the capitol, 
 and the two Houses of Congress and all the people 
 shouting "Sic itur ad astral" As "he passes through 
 the constellations," "what thinks Bootes as he drives 
 his dogs up the zenith in their race of sidereal fire?" 
 (sic). 
 
 Evarts' second full day was chiefly devoted to an 
 exploration of the controversy over ' ' the allocation ' ' of 
 the power of removal; and, in doing so, he opened 
 up an entirely new vein, digging deeper than any of 
 the speakers before him. The inroad upon the solid 
 mass of executive power vested in the President, 
 made by the association of the Senate in the power 
 of appointment, he showed, was due, not, as had been 
 taken for granted, to any jealousy of the executive, but 
 to the memorable ' ' contest in the body of the Conven- 
 tion ' ' over ' ' the balance between the weight of numbers 
 in the people and the equality of the States. ' ' And here 
 it was that those "opinions of Eoger Sherman," which 
 Mr. Boutwell had challenged his descendant to confute, 
 
. THE TRIAL 497 
 
 "had their origin." Sherman's "firm maintenance of 
 the equality of the States, ' ' it was, that impelled him 
 to insist that participation in appointments should be 
 accorded to the Senate; while his opponents thought 
 this ' ' too great a subtraction from the sum of executive 
 power." John Adams "died in the conviction" that 
 this participation "would be the point on which the 
 Constitution would fall." "When you add to that this 
 change which gives to the Senate a voice in the removal 
 from office . . . you change wholly the question of the 
 Constitution." "You break down at once the balance 
 between the executive and legislative powers, . . . you 
 break down the federal election of President at once and 
 commit to the equality of States the partition and dis- 
 tribution of the executive power of the country. ' ' 
 
 As a matter of fact, however, "the power of removal 
 is and always has been claimed and exercised by the 
 Executive of this government separately and independ- 
 ently of the Senate ' ' ; says the counsel, once more unfold- 
 ing a novel view of the subject. Until the Tenure act 
 "the actual power of removal by the Senate never has 
 been claimed." Nor does this act even "assume in 
 terms to give the Senate a participation in the distinct 
 and separate act— the removal from office." "The 
 scheme of the law is— to change the tenure of office, so 
 that removability as a separate and independent act . . . 
 is obliterated from the powers of this government." 
 During recess a delinquent officer may be suspended, not 
 removed. During the session of the Senate, a delin- 
 quent cannot even be suspended. The only way an offi- 
 cer can be removed, no matter under what "stress of 
 
 32 
 
4y8 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 public necessity," is by a "complete appointment of a 
 successor concurred in by the Senate and made operative 
 by the new appointee going into and qualifying himself 
 in the office. ' ' 
 
 "The legislative construction of 1789, as worked into 
 the bones of the government by the indurating process of 
 practice and exercise," — the counsel concludes,— "the doc- 
 trine that finally triumphed, was this : primarily the whole 
 business of official subordinate executive action is a part 
 of the executive function; that being attributed in solido 
 to the President, we look to exceptions to serve the turn 
 and precise measure of their own definition, and discard 
 that falsest principle of. reasoning in regard to laws or in 
 regard to conduct, that exception is to breed exception 
 or amplification of exception. The general mass is to lose 
 what is subtracted from it by exception, and the general 
 mass is to remain with its whole weight not thus separately 
 and definitely reduced. When therefore these statesmen 
 said you find the freedom of executive action and its solid 
 authority reduced by an exception of advice and consent 
 in appointment, you must understand that that is the limit 
 of the exception, and the executive power in all other re- 
 spects stands unimpaired." 
 
 The last consideration the counsel advanced in sup- 
 port of "the view that all here that possesses weight 
 and dignity is political and not criminal or suitable for 
 judicial cognizance," was, singularly enough, the very 
 thing which the managers held up in the faces of the 
 senators as a solemn pledge binding them to convict. 
 If by passing the Tenure-of-office bill in the first in- 
 stance, if by passing it over the veto of the President in 
 
THE TEIAL 499 
 
 the second instance, if, finally, by resolving that the 
 President had no power to remove Stanton and to ap- 
 point Thomas, senators had already decided the matter 
 in dispute between two of the departments of the gov- 
 ernment—what is the true conclusion? Surely, not 
 that they have predetermined the President's guilt 
 of "crimes involving turpitude and personal delin- 
 quency!" No principle of justice is more immutable 
 than these: "that no man shall be a judge in his own 
 cause, and that no man shall be a judge in a matter in 
 which he has already given judgment." "You must 
 have regarded it as a matter of political action"— "as a 
 matter that could not possibly be brought before you in 
 your judicial capacity. ' ' As was said ' ' by the great and 
 trusted statesman of the Whig party" when the Senate 
 was debating the resolution condemnatory of President 
 Jackson's removal of the deposits : "If there was in the 
 atmosphere a whisper, if there was in the future a 
 menace that impeachment was to come, debate must be 
 silenced and the resolution suppressed." "The other 
 principle is equally contravened." "You are to pass 
 judgment" on "the partition of the offices of the gov- 
 ernment between the President and yourselves. The 
 very matter of his fault is that he claims them ; the very 
 matter of his condemnation is that you have a right to 
 them." You are a court, "and yet you are full of 
 politics. Why? Because the question is political ; and 
 
 the whole point of my reference is as an absolute demon- 
 stration that the Constitution of the United States never 
 forces honorable men into a position where they are judges 
 of their own cause, or where they have in the course of their 
 
500 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 previous duties expressed a judgment. ... It is all political. 
 All these thunder-clouds are political, and it is only this 
 little petty pattering of rain and these infractions of 
 statutes that are personal or criminal." 
 
 We shall not follow the counsel in his examination of 
 the articles seriatim. He takes them up in reverse order, 
 beginning with the eleventh, on which he scarcely 
 pauses, and ending with the first or main article, of his 
 treatment of which we have already given a specimen. 
 The Butler article he, like Groesbeck, laughs out of 
 court. "It is a novelty in this country to try anybody 
 for making a speech." What is to be the standard of 
 propriety? The rule ought to work both ways — in the 
 legislative as well as in the executive branch. In the 
 Senate, Sumner calls the President "an enemy to his 
 country." In the House, representatives Butler and 
 Bingham — now brothers in the same cause— belabour 
 each other over Jefferson Davis, Fort Fisher and Mrs. 
 Surratt ; and he adds : 
 
 "I am not entirely sure that when you make allowances 
 for the difference between an ex . tempore speech of the 
 President to a mob, and a written, prepared, and printed 
 speech to this court, by an honorable manager, but that 
 there may be some little trace of the same impropriety in 
 that figure of argument which presented Mr. Carpenter to 
 your observation as an inspired painter, whose pencil was 
 guided by the hand of Providence to the apportionment of 
 Mr. Stanton to perpetual bliss, and of Governor Seward 
 to eternal pains." 
 
 We should like to linger over one or two delightful 
 turns of argument, e. g., where the counsel, observing 
 
THE TRIAL 501 
 
 that Stanton holds under his commission as well as 
 under the act, points out that the President by revoking 
 his commission— which was all in fact he did— ought 
 to have the right to force him to fall back on his naked 
 statutory title ; but we forbear and hasten to the closing 
 words of the orator respecting Andrew Johnson himself. 
 
 "And I ask you to notice that, bred in a school of Ten- 
 nessee democratic politics, he had always learned to believe 
 that the Constitution must and should be preserved; and 
 I ask you to recognize that when it was in peril, and all 
 men south of a certain line took up arms against it, and all 
 men north ought to have taken up arms in politics or war 
 for it, he loved the country and the Constitution more than 
 he loved his section and the glories that were promised by 
 the evil spirits of the rebellion. . . . 
 
 "He is no rhetorician and no theorist, no sophist and no 
 philosopher. The Constitution is to him the only political 
 book that he reads. The Constitution is to him the only 
 great authority which he obeys. His mind may not expand ; 
 his views may not be so plastic as those of many of his 
 countrymen; he may not think we have outlived the Con- 
 stitution, and he may not be able to embrace the Declara- 
 tion of Independence as superior and predominant to it. 
 But to the Constitution he adheres. For it and under it 
 he has served the State from boyhood up— labored for, 
 loved it. For it he has stood in arms against the frowns 
 of a Senate; for it he has stood in arms against the rebel- 
 lious forces of the enemy ; and to it he has bowed three times 
 a day with a more than eastern devotion." 
 
 When the court reassembled after the recess that 
 followed Evarts's speech, it was observed that Stan- 
 
502 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 bery was present. Up to the eleventh day of the trial 
 the ex-Attorney-General had borne the chief burden 
 of the defence— he being not only the senior in years 
 of his associates but, by reason of the office he had re- 
 signed to come amongst them, the closest to the Presi- 
 dent. On that day— more than a fortnight ago— he was 
 stricken down by illness, and, although most anxious 
 to be present, had not been well enough since; his 
 share of duty devolving upon Evarts. There was no 
 public expectation that he would be able to take part 
 personally in the final argument, and, consequently, 
 there was a buzz of astonishment when it was dis- 
 covered that he had rallied sufficiently to drag. his limbs 
 to the Senate chamber. Stanbery was a remarkably 
 handsome man of imposing presence. As a lawyer 
 he stood in the front rank of his profession, and he 
 carried his preeminence with dignity and grace. He 
 possessed a persuasive manner, his voice was musical, 
 and his elocution finished. To the Republican senators 
 he was an object of special disfavour because of his 
 official opinions ; and his ambition to sit upon the bench 
 of the Supreme Court, they had once taken pains to 
 thwart. But, when with signs of weakness and distress 
 he raised himself to speak on this occasion, a sympa- 
 thetic stillness descended on Senate and audience; and 
 every heart yielded a responsive throb as these sentences 
 fell upon the ear : 
 
 "Mr. Chief Justice and Senators, it may seem an act of 
 indiscretion almost amounting to temerity that in my pres- 
 ent health I should attempt the great labor of this case. 
 I feel that in my best estate I could hardly attain to the 
 
THE TEIAL 503 
 
 height of the great argument. Careful friends have ad- 
 vised me against it. My watchful physician has yielded 
 a half-r.eluctant consent to my request, accompanied with 
 many a caution that I fear I shall not observe. But, sena- 
 tors, an irresistible impulse hurries me forward. The flesh 
 indeed is weak ; the spirit is willing. Unseen and friendly 
 hands seem to support me. Voices inaudible to all others 
 I hear, or seem to hear. They whisper words of consola- 
 tion, of hope, of confidence. They say, or seem to say to 
 me: 'Feeble champion of the right, hold not back; remem- 
 ber that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle 
 to the strong ; remember that in a just cause a single pebble 
 from the brook was enough in the sling of the young shep- 
 herd.' " 
 
 Despite his resolution, the counsel was soon com- 
 pelled to beg the indulgence of the court, and an 
 adjournment was taken until the morrow. The next 
 morning, he proceeded for awhile until forced to ask 
 permission that a young friend present might relieve 
 him "by reading from his brief." His friend read for 
 him during the main part of the session, but towards 
 its close he resumed and concluded. The written argu- 
 ment, in which there is very little new, it is not neces- 
 sary to go over ; but we cannot refrain from giving the 
 noble tribute to Andrew Johnson with which the 
 orator closed. Its concluding paragraph touches a 
 higher mark of eloquence than any other utterance on 
 the trial. 
 
 "Now, listen for a moment to one who, perhaps, under- 
 stands Andrew Johnson better than most of you; for his 
 opportunities have been greater. When, nearly two years 
 
504 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ago, he called me from the pursuits of professional life to 
 take a chair in his cabinet I answered the call under a 
 sense of public duty. I came here almost a stranger to 
 him and to every member of his cabinet except Mr. Stan- 
 ton. We had been friends for many years. Senators, need 
 I tell you that all my tendencies are conservative? You, 
 Mr. Chief Justice, who have known me for the third of a 
 century, can bear me witness. Law, not arms, is my 
 profession. From the moment that I was honored with a 
 seat in the cabinet of Mr. Johnson not a step was taken 
 that did not come under my observation, not a word was 
 said that escaped my attention. I regarded him closely 
 in cabinet, and in still more private and confidential con- 
 versation. I saw him often tempted with bad advice. I 
 knew that evil counsellors were more than once around him. 
 I observed him with the most intense anxiety. But never, 
 in word, in deed, in thought, in action, did I discover in 
 that man anything but loyalty to the Constitution and the 
 laws. He stood firm as a rock against all temptation to 
 abuse his own powers or to exercise those which were not 
 conferred upon him. Steadfast and self-reliant in the 
 midst of all difficulty, when dangers threatened, when temp- 
 tations were strong, he looked only to the Constitution of 
 his country and to the people. 
 
 "Yes, senators, I have seen that man tried as few have 
 been tried. I have seen his confidence abused. I have 
 seen him endure, day by day, provocations such as few men 
 have ever been called upon to meet. No man could have 
 met them with more sublime patience. Sooner or. later, 
 however, I knew the explosion must come. And when it 
 did come my only wonder was that it had been so long 
 delayed. Yes, senators, with all his faults, the President 
 has been more sinned against than sinning. Fear not, 
 
THE TRIAL 505 
 
 then, to acquit him. The Constitution of the country is 
 as safe in his hands from violence as it was in the hands 
 of Washington. But if, senators, you condemn him, if 
 you strip him of the robes of office, if you degrade him to 
 the utmost stretch of your power, mark the prophecy : The 
 strong arms of the people will be about him. They will 
 find a way to raise him from any depths to which you may 
 consign him, and we shall live to see him redeemed, and to 
 hear the majestic voice of the people, 'well done, faithful 
 servant ; you shall have your reward ! ' 
 
 "But if, senators, as I cannot believe, but as has been 
 boldly said with almost official sanction, your votes have 
 been canvassed and the doom of the President is sealed, 
 then let that judgment not be pronounced in this Senate 
 Chamber; not here, where our Camillus in the hour of our 
 greatest peril, single-handed, met and baffled the enemies 
 of the republic; not here, where he stood faithful among 
 the faithless; not here, where he fought the good fight for 
 the Union and the Constitution ; not in this chamber, whose 
 walls echo with that clarion voice that, in the days of our 
 greatest danger, carried hope and comfort to many a de- 
 sponding heart, strong as an army with banners. No, not 
 here. Seek out rather the darkest and gloomiest chamber 
 in the subterranean recesses of this Capitol, where the 
 cheerful light of day never enters. There erect the altar 
 and immolate the victim." 
 
 On Monday, the fourth, of May, there was a great 
 rush to the capitol to hear the chief of the managers 
 wind up the prosecution. Bingham was well known 
 as a clever and forcible speaker, overflowing with 
 rhetorical phrases, patriotic appeals and the still warm 
 rallying cries of the war. Besides, he possessed a 
 
506 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 store of uproarious invective which he could turn on 
 the momentary victim of his wrath with prodigious 
 effect. The more ardent impeachers, therefore, packed 
 the galleries to hear him demolish in Western style 
 the too stately Curtis and trample over the too 
 scholarly Evarts; but, especially, "to feast their ears 
 on his excoriation of ' Andy. ' ' ' The task before him, 
 however, was by no means easy, for not a single argu- 
 ment remained that had not been already threshed out 
 backwards and forwards, three or four times. And 
 he himself laboured under one heavy disadvantage 
 which had not hampered his associates. Alone among 
 the managers (except Wilson, who did not participate 
 in the summing up) he had opposed the first impeach- 
 ment movement, and the second, he had stifled in com- 
 mittee. Butler and Boutwell and Stevens and Williams 
 scrupled not to sweep into the field of view the long 
 series of charges which the adverse vote of the House 
 had made obsolete; because they really believed the 
 House had shirked its duty and that in these charges 
 lay the real crimes of the President. But from Bing- 
 ham, who had voted these charges either unproved, or 
 undeserving the exercise of the impeaching power, any 
 such license of expatiation was shut off. He, at least, 
 from very shame, must confine himself to the law and 
 the testimony, and not permit himself to wander among 
 extraneous offences his own vote had condoned. ~5£et, 
 notwithstanding these disadvantages, the manager 
 proved equal to his task. In truth, he enjoyed two gifts 
 from nature that probably made him unconscious of 
 any difficulty. He could talk upon any subject for any 
 
THE TRIAL 507 
 
 length of time, and his self-sufficiency was so entire 
 that the possibility of failure never entered his mind. 
 It was not a necessary antecedent to the uninterrupted 
 flow of his argument that he should .believe in his case. 
 A certain measure of sincerity, we may accord to But- 
 ler, Boutwell, Stevens and Williams, because, in one 
 way or another, they believed that Andrew Johnson 
 was guilty of a long series of offences for which he 
 ought to be turned out of office. If they did not be- 
 lieve in the present case as made by the record, there 
 could be no doubt of their belief in the case outside the 
 record. Their speeches, consequently, in some parts 
 at least, have the true ring. With Binghani it was not 
 so. His vote on the first impeachment and his active 
 opposition to the second demonstrate that, up to the 
 twenty-first day of February, 1868, he believed the 
 President guilty of no impeachable offence ; and it was 
 freely admitted by members more radical tban Bing- 
 ham, that, standing alone, the acts of the twenty-first 
 of February were not such as to call forth the exercise 
 of the impeaching power. 
 
 That this view is not too uncharitable, the speech 
 of Bingham, taken as a whole, proves. The thought is 
 constantly recurring to the reader's mind that the 
 speaker does not, at heart, believe what he is saying. 
 The speech is full of self-glorifying demolitions of 
 positions the defendant had never taken up, of whole- 
 sale begging of the questions in dispute, of reiterations 
 of propositions unaccompanied by proof and of refuta- 
 tions which do not refute, accompanied by vociferous 
 assertions of there being no doubt whatever about the 
 
508 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 propositions and nothing whatever left of the defence. 
 At the threshold of his address he protests that he 
 comes to the argument "in no mere partisan spirit, in 
 no spirit of resentment or prejudice" ; and immediately 
 proceeds to falsify this protest by dragging before the 
 court "the disgraceful part which Andrew Johnson had 
 played here upon the tribune of the Senate on the 4th 
 day of March, 1865"; — an incident, not relevant to the 
 issue, not comprehended in the proof, and to which 
 none but the bitterest partisan would have permitted 
 himself to allude. To a certain extent he does respect 
 the barrier raised by his previous votes, and takes no 
 long flight into events antedating the twenty-first of 
 February. Nevertheless, he will not be tied to that 
 fatal date. He cannot go back; therefore he must go 
 forward. Debarred from the past, he launches into 
 the future. According to the manager, the crime the 
 Senate is trying is not what the President did on the 
 twenty-first nor what he did before that day, but the 
 crime consists in the defence he sets up now. 
 
 "The fact is we are passing upon the question whether 
 the President may not, at his pleasure, and without peril 
 to his official position, set aside and annul both the Consti- 
 tution and the laws of the United States, and in his great 
 office inaugurate anarchy in the land. . . . 
 
 "No matter what demagogues may say of it outside this 
 chamber, no matter what retained counsel may say of it 
 inside this chamber, that is the issue; and the recording 
 angel of history has already struck it into the adamant of 
 the past, there to remain forever ; and upon that issue, sena- 
 tors, you and the House of Representatives will stand or fall 
 
THE TRIAL 509 
 
 before the tribunal of the future. That is the issue. It is 
 all there is of it. It is what is embraced in the articles of 
 impeachment. It is all that is embraced in them. In spite 
 of the technicalities, in spite of the lawyer 's tricks, in spite 
 of the futile pleas that have been interposed here in the 
 President's defence, that is the issue. It is the head and 
 front of Andrew Johnson's offending, that he has assumed 
 to himself the executive prerogative of interpreting the 
 Constitution and deciding upon the validity of the laws at 
 his pleasure, and suspending them and dispensing with 
 their execution. . . . The man who has heard this prolonged 
 discussion running through days and weeks, who does not 
 understand this to be the plain, simple proposition, made 
 in the hearing of senators, insisted upon as the President's 
 defence, is one of those unfortunates whom even a thrush 
 might pity, to whom God in his providence has denied the 
 usual measure of that intellectual faculty which we call 
 reason. ' ' 
 
 This defence means, he claims, that the courts at the 
 last have a supervising power over the power of im- 
 peachment vested in the House and over the power to 
 try vested in the Senate. "On this proposition I am 
 willing to stand, defying any man here or elsewhere to 
 challenge it successfully. The position assumed by the 
 accused means that or it means nothing. " " Just noth- 
 ing. ' ' All day long, the first day, he rings the changes 
 on the enormity of this defence— "the monstrous plea 
 interposed for the first time in our history"— striking 
 the top of his compass in such a note as this : 
 
 "The Constitution itself, according to this assumption, 
 is at his mercy, as well as the laws, and the people of the 
 United States are to stand by and be mocked and derided 
 
510 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 in their own Capitol when, in accordance with the express 
 provision of their Constitution, they bring him to the bar 
 of the Senate to answer for such a crime than which none 
 greater ever was committed since the day when the first 
 crime was committed upon this planet as it sprung from 
 the hand of the Creator; that crime which covered one 
 manly brow with the ashy paleness and terrible beauty of 
 death, and another with the damning blotch of fratricide ! ' ' 
 
 This monstrous claim "is the defence and the whole 
 defence of the President." "It cannot be otherwise. 
 It is written in his answer. It is written in the argu- 
 ments of his counsel printed and laid upon your tables. 
 No mortal man can evade it. It is all there is of it. ' ' 
 
 Bingham goes farther than any of his associates had 
 ventured, in boldly denying that in any case, no matter 
 how extreme, the President could be justified in protect- 
 ing the Constitution against the laws ;— for example, not 
 even against "a law declaring he shall not be Com- 
 mander-in-Chief of the Army, a law declaring that he 
 shall not exercise the pardoning power in any case what- 
 ever. ' ' The President in no event is to interfere. That 
 is for the people to do by repealing the law. The air 
 of condescension with which John A. Bingham speaks 
 of Thomas Jefferson, whose opinions on this subject 
 happened to clash with his own, is characteristic : 
 
 "I am not disposed to cast reproach upon Mr. Jefferson. 
 I know well that he was not one of the framers of the Con- 
 stitution. I know well that he was not one of the builders 
 of the fabric of American empire. While he contributed 
 much to work out the emancipation of- the American people 
 from the control and domination of British rule and de- 
 
THE TRIAL 511 
 
 serves well of his country, one (!)* of the authors of the 
 Declaration of Independence, yet I know well enough that 
 his opinions on that subject are not accepted at this day 
 by the great body of the American people and find no 
 place in the authoritative and commanding writers upon 
 the text of your Constitution." 
 
 We cannot follow the manager in his review of the 
 articles and the evidence ; nothing novel or noteworthy- 
 being developed. It was not, indeed, to hear expositions 
 of articles or demonstrations of guilt, that his enthu- 
 siastic admirers in the galleries and on the floor ex- 
 ultingly followed him through three long days, and 
 went about extolling the performance as "a splendid 
 speech." The supremely confident bearing of the 
 speaker, the swelling tones of his voice rising higher 
 and higher as he piled one "I demand to know" on top 
 of another, and the graceful sweep of his gestures car- 
 ried along the thin thread of his reasoning in a kind of 
 momentary triumph. But for the reader, alas ! all these 
 superficial adjuncts are absent, and the speech lies bare 
 in all its intrinsic vapidity. To compare it with a piece 
 of close-wrought logic such as the argument of Curtis, 
 or with a plain terse specimen of forensic argumentation 
 such as that of Groesbeck, or with a philosophic oration 
 like that of Evarts, is impossible because it belongs to 
 a different species of address: On the other hand, com- 
 paring it with the arguments of his associates, it falls 
 below Mr. Boutwell's statesmanlike method of arranging 
 his propositions; with all its affected bitterness it has 
 not the genuine stinging power of Stevens; notwith- 
 
 * Italics and punctuation mine. 
 
512 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 standing its frequent outbursts of patriotic fervour, it 
 does not rise to the height of feeling we still detect be- 
 neath the ornate periods of Williams; with the hollow 
 tone that runs through its most passionate invective, it 
 lacks the downright vigour which Butler's earnestness 
 lent to his blows. 
 
 Overlooking particular arguments and matters of de- 
 tail, the central aim of the speech, as we have already 
 pointed out, is directed against what the speaker brands 
 as "the monstrous claim," put forward by the Presi- 
 dent, of the right to test the constitutionality of a law in 
 the courts. With a fierce attack upon it he began ; with 
 a final desperate charge upon it he ended : 
 
 "Is it not in vain, I ask you that the people have thus 
 vindicated by battle the supremacy of their, own Constitu- 
 tion and laws, if, after all, their President is permitted to 
 suspend their laws and dispense with the execution thereof 
 at pleasure, and defy the power of the people to bring him 
 to trial and punishment before the only tribunal authorized 
 by the Constitution to try him? That is the issue which 
 is presented before the Senate for decision by these articles 
 of impeachment." 
 
 It was the same defence, he continued,— this right to 
 dispense with the laws— that Charles I and James II 
 set up to justify their usurpation. The one lost his head, 
 the other his throne. Surely such a defence "ought to 
 cost Andrew Johnson his office. ' ' 
 
 "May God forbid that the future historian shall record 
 of this day's proceedings, that by reason of the failure of 
 the legislative power of the people to triumph over the 
 
THE TRIAL 513 
 
 usurpations of an apostate President through the defection 
 of the Senate of the United States, the just and great 
 fabric of American empire fell and perished from the 
 earth ! . . . Pardon me for saying it ; I speak it in no offen- 
 sive spirit ; I speak if from a sense of duty ; I utter but my 
 own conviction, and desire to place it upon the record, that 
 for the Senate to sustain any such plea, would, in my 
 judgment, be a gross violation of the already violated Con- 
 stitution and laws of a free people. ... I put away the 
 possibility that the Senate of the United States, equal in 
 dignity to any tribunal in the world, is capable of record- 
 ing any such decision even upon the petition and prayer 
 of this accused and guilty President. ... I ask you to con- 
 sider that we stand this day pleading for the violated 
 majesty of the law, by the graves of half a million of mar- 
 tyred hero-patriots who made death beautiful by the sacri- 
 fice of themselves for their country, the Constitution and 
 the laws, and who, by their sublime example, have taught 
 us that all must obey the law ; that none are above the law, 
 that no man lives for himself alone, but each for all; that 
 some must die that the State may live; that the citizen is 
 at best but for to-day, while the Commonwealth is for all 
 time; and that position, however high, patronage, however 
 powerful, cannot be permitted to shelter crime to the peril 
 of the republic. ' ' 
 
 These final words, devoid as they are of any genuine 
 spirit-stirring power, drove the crowded galleries 
 frantic. To the grand perorations of Groesbeck and 
 Stanbery they listened in silence. They now broke out 
 into noisy and disorderly manifestations of approba- 
 tion. Men and women rose to their feet cheering, clap- 
 ping hands and waving handkerchiefs. The appeals of 
 
 33 
 
514 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the Chief Justice for order were greeted with laughs of 
 derision and hisses of hate. The galleries were ordered 
 cleared, and the court sat silent and shamed, while the 
 people, the innocent with the guilty— even the reporters 
 of the press— were slowly driven out. Thus ended this 
 celebrated trial. The case was now wholly withdrawn 
 into the bosom of the court. The next day, behind closed 
 doors, a rule was adopted fixing Monday, the eleventh, 
 for deliberation on the articles and the day following 
 for the final vote. 
 
 [The authority for the statements and extracts contained 
 in this chapter being, of course, the official report of the 
 trial, a more particular reference was considered unnecessary.] 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Acquittal 
 
 To the New Hampshire Republican convention which 
 met on the fourth of May to elect delegates to the na- 
 tional convention to nominate General Grant, Wash- 
 burne sent a telegram : ' ' Bingham is making a splendid 
 speech. All looks well. The Constitution will be vindi- 
 cated, and the recreant put out of the White House be- 
 fore the end of the week"; and Butler regaled the same 
 body with similar tidings put into poetic form: "The 
 removal of the great obstruction is certain. Wade and 
 prosperity are sure to come with the apple-blossoms. ' '* 
 But the confidence of the majority of the leaders in 
 the success of the movement was not so overweening. 
 Butler himself was more than half convinced that his 
 pet charge would have to go by the board. The Emory 
 article, also, it was almost universally admitted, was 
 demolished beyond reparation. Even the conspiracy 
 articles depended for their life upon the rhetoric of 
 Bingham, who, since his memorable achievement in the 
 assassination ' ' Conspiracy Trial, ' ' was looked up to as 
 an expert in dealing with that species of crime. Before 
 the arguments were over it was generally felt that the 
 prosecution must rely for conviction on the charges 
 of attempting to remove Stanton and of appointing 
 Thomas, involved in the first three articles, or, in case 
 
 * See Prefatory note. 
 
 515 
 
516 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the unlucky proviso stood in the way, then upon the 
 enigmatic eleventh which had been concocted at the last 
 moment for just such an emergency, 
 """^jfreat was the uneasiness over particular senators. 
 The test votes, taken while the court was being organ- 
 ized and during the trial, were carefully studied, and, at 
 the close of the case for the prosecution, the Republican 
 politicians were able to spell out twenty-nine senators 
 sure to vote guilty on one or more articles, including 
 Wade who thus far had abstained from voting. This 
 left thirteen Republican senators whose votes were 
 favourable to the President in a majority of instances, 
 thus casting doubt over their attitude on the final ques- 
 tion. At the close of the testimony, when the yeas and 
 nays on the closest vote excluding the evidence of the 
 members of the Cabinet were subjected to scrutiny, the 
 twenty-six senators who voted in the negative, together 
 with the five not voting (Conkling, Morton, Nye, Sum- 
 ner and Wade) making thirty-one, were counted as solid 
 for conviction. Only five more were necessary. Of the 
 eleven Republican senators who voted in the affirmative, 
 Fessenden, who opposed the resolution censuring the 
 President, was almost despaired of; Grimes and Trum- 
 bull were impervious to outside influence ; Anthony was 
 an intimate friend of the Chief Justice, and Sprague 
 was his son-in-law; Sherman was committed adversely 
 on the Cabinet proviso ; the two West Virginia senators 
 were in the habit of taking opposite sides on momentous 
 questions ; Henderson, Fowler and Ross were silent and 
 claimed by both the President 's counsel and the man- 
 agers ; yet out of these the indispensable five must come. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 517 
 
 From the outset, the Republican representatives 
 never made any secret of their practice of bringing 
 party influence to bear upon members of the court. 
 Secret meetings of senators, representatives, office- 
 holders, office-seekers, party bosses and party leaders 
 were held, in which the result of the trial was canvassed 
 with all the eagerness of a party conclave preliminary 
 to a nominating convention. In truth, the entire im- 
 peachment trial was, in effect, as much a convention of 
 the Republican party to put Andrew Johnson out, as 
 the assembly to meet in Chicago was a convention of the 
 Republican party to put General Grant in. Indeed, but 
 few of the majority senators thought it obligatory to 
 hold themselves aloof from discussing the merits of 
 the case out of court. On the day the impeachment 
 was voted, senators were seen on the floor of the 
 House urging the representatives to do their duty; 
 and during the trial senators kept lists on which the 
 doubtful judges were noted in order to extort from 
 them a declaration of opinion. When the case was 
 closed and the court about to deliberate in secret, 
 the suspense over members who, in spite of every 
 importunity, persisted in maintaining silence, rose 
 to such a pitch that the leaders threw off the last 
 vestige of decorum, went into caucus and organized 
 a far-reaching combination to coerce the suspected 
 judges into submission to their party's decree. De- 
 tectives kept a secret eye on their residences and on 
 the residence of the Chief Justice. Spies mingled 
 in the social circles they frequented, to catch some 
 unguarded word, and agents were employed to pester 
 
518 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 them with every species of importunity to disclose 
 their real intentions. They were threatened in the 
 party pres.s; their constituents were stirred up to 
 threaten them from home; letters were sent to them 
 from all quarters filled with threats of political ostra- 
 cism and even of assassination, in the event of their 
 treason. Crowds of professional bettors flocked to 
 Washington, and during the week before the eleventh 
 much money was staked on the result— the odds being 
 in favour of acquittal. On the eighth, Stevens reported 
 a bill for the admission of Arkansas under her Afri- 
 canized government, and when the minority protested 
 against his attempt to put it on its passage before they 
 had time to examine the constitution of the state, 
 avowed: "There are reasons which I do not think it 
 proper or necessary to mention now, why this bill 
 should be considered, passed and sent to the Senate 
 before next Monday"; as though it might be necessary 
 in the last resort to add two more senators to the court. 
 On Monday (the eleventh) after the galleries were 
 cleared and the doors were closed, the Chief Justice read 
 the views he had prepared at the request of the Senate 
 upon the mode of putting the question on the several 
 articles of impeachment, in which, among other things, 
 in answer to a suggestion that the eleventh article be 
 divided into clauses and the vote taken clause by clause, 
 he stated "that he found himself unable to divide the 
 article" because the "several facts are so connected 
 that they make but one allegation, and they are charged 
 as constituting one misdemeanor." "The single sub- 
 stantive matter charged," according to the Chief 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 519 
 
 Justice, "is the attempt to prevent the execution of the 
 Tenure-of -office act; and the other facts are alleged 
 either as introductory and exhibiting the 'general pur- 
 pose, or as showing the means contrived in furtherance 
 of that attempt. ' ' This matter being disposed of, Sum- 
 ner pressed forward a rule, offered by him some days 
 before (April 25), providing, in case of conviction, that 
 judgment of removal from office which necessarily fol- 
 lowed should be pronounced forthwith, but that "any 
 further judgment shall be on the order of the Senate." 
 He had, also, offered an amendment to the rules that 
 "any further judgment," the infliction of which was 
 optional with the Senate, i. e., disqualification from 
 office, "shall be determined by a majority of the mem- 
 bers present." In short, this judge of the High Court 
 was already devising a way to deprive the convicted and 
 deposed President of his last resource— an appeal to the. 
 people. The proposed order was debated until the hour 
 fixed for the final deliberation on the verdict (eleven 
 o'clock), when action upon it was necessarily suspended 
 and the matter never came up again. From the hour 
 mentioned until eleven o'clock at night, with the excep- 
 tion of twenty minutes recess at about two and of two 
 hours recess at half-past five, the proceedings were 
 shrouded in almost impenetrable secrecy, while the con- 
 centrated anxiety of the whole nation was symbolized 
 by the crowds surging around the closed doors. Under 
 the rules, every senator might speak on the articles, but 
 no longer than fifteen minutes and but once; he might 
 file, however, a written opinion within two days after 
 the vote was taken. An effort had been made to secure 
 
520 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the ultimate publicity of the discussion by allowing the 
 official reporters to take down the speeches, but the sen- 
 ators would not consent; so that what individual sena- 
 tors took part and what any of them said can only be 
 gathered from reports, more or less reliable, current at 
 the time, and the few indications the opinions, after- 
 wards filed, afford. During the two intervals of recess 
 and after the session was over at midnight, the released 
 senators were beset by groups of curious people im- 
 ploring information. And the stalwarts, whose opinions 
 were known and who were themselves active in elec- 
 tioneering their less forward associates, were not scru- 
 pulous in keeping the secrets of the tribunal. The first 
 item of interesting news that leaked out was that the 
 first article was in peril. Sherman had declared that 
 in the face of his record he could not vote for it, and 
 Howe followed him with a similar declaration. Then it 
 was reported that Edmunds and Stewart had come out 
 in support of it; but the effect of this report was im- 
 mediately neutralized by the counter-report that Van 
 Winkle and Willey agreed with Sherman and Howe. 
 The President's stock rose. One of the many telegrams 
 sent out described the situation as follows : "Hell going 
 on in Senate now. ' ' Later on came the decisive infor- 
 mation that Fessenden, Grimes and Trumbull had de- 
 livered opinions favourable to the President on all the 
 articles. At the two hours recess for dinner, it was 
 ascertained that Sherman and Howe, notwithstanding 
 their falling away on the first, were for conviction on 
 some of the other articles and it was rumoured that 
 Willey would vote for the second; so that there was a 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 521 
 
 momentary reaction; but it was soon authoritatively 
 stated that Henderson had spoken against the first eight 
 articles before he was cut off by the expiration of his 
 time. As the senators flocked out to dinner Henderson 
 was seen, in company with the Chief Justice, Reverdy 
 Johnson and Sprague, to enter Sprague's carriage, and 
 all were driven to the Chief Justice's residence where 
 Henderson dined. The spirits of the Impeachers fell. 
 "We are sold out," Butler came into the House ex- 
 claiming, and the majority exhibited premonitory symp- 
 toms of a panic. They were anxious to adjourn over 
 the national convention (to meet on the twentieth), so as 
 to enable members to attend, but in the dubious straits 
 they were now in they knew not what to do. First, by 
 the vote of the Speaker on a tie, they laid the resolution 
 to adjourn over on the table. Then they took it up 
 again and adopted it by a majority of one. Stevens 
 reported from the reconstruction committee a bill for 
 the admission of North Carolina, South Carolina, 
 Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama ; and it was made the 
 special order for the next Wednesday, so that the pros- 
 pect of ten more senators, as well as the two from 
 Arkansas, might be before the eyes of the judges on the 
 morrow. During the night session, it leaked out that 
 Harlan, Conness, Pomeroy and Morton had spoken 
 strongly for conviction on the principal articles; but 
 this, being no more than was expected, did little to allay 
 the prevailing disquietude ; while, coupled with this re- 
 port came another, that Fowler talked so unreliably as 
 to be almost given over, and Ross kept up the same 
 ominous silence he had persisted in all day. At mid- 
 
522 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 night, the impeachers were assured that, despite the 
 malign influence of Chase, Anthony and Sprague were 
 sound on at least one of the articles, but even, with those 
 senators, they were unable to make out a list of the indis- 
 pensable thirty-six without including Willey and Ross. 
 There was no sleep that night for the leaders of the 
 impeachment, whether in the House or in the Senate. 
 Howard, whose vote, as they now saw, they could not do 
 without, had been absent from the secret session, and it 
 was announced that he was too ill to be present on the 
 morrow. An adjournment was therefore imperative; 
 and in the meantime the heaviest pressure from all 
 quarters was at once to be brought to bear upon every 
 senator whom they had the slightest hope still to secure. 
 Before the court assembled on the twelfth, and when 
 as yet postponement was formally undetermined, the 
 Republican representatives in Congress from Missouri 
 laid siege in due form to their backsliding senator. 
 John B. Henderson— a Douglas Democrat in 1860— was 
 sent to the Senate in 1862 to fill the vacancy caused 
 by the expulsion of Trusten Polk— gone over to the 
 secessionists; and, in the following year, was elected 
 for a full term. He was one of the majority of Re- 
 publican senators, who in the winter of 1864-5 sustained 
 President Lincoln in his purpose of admitting 
 Louisiana and other reconstructed states— a purpose 
 frustrated by the tactics of Sumner. He had, conse- 
 quently, preserved at least a remnant of his conserva- 
 tive tendencies during the succeeding period of white 
 disfranchisement and negro enfranchisement in his 
 state. A man of superior ability and unblemished 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 523 
 
 character; anxious to preserve harmony between the 
 administration and his party ; never indulging in abuse 
 of the President; planting himself from the first upon a 
 policy, original with himself, that the states should be 
 allowed to regulate the suffrage, subject only to a con- 
 stitutional restriction that in prescribing the qualifica- 
 tions of the voter there should be no distinction on ac- 
 count of race or colour ; his speeches in the Senate, while 
 justly liable to no charge of infidelity to his party, 
 presented in one aspect a refreshing contrast to those 
 of his ■ impetuous colleague and the reckless band of 
 fiery radicals that the doctored constituencies of his 
 state had sent to the House. And yet a studious ob- 
 server of his career can discover that his conservatism 
 halted upon one foot ; that, when it came to the decisive 
 point, the senator frequently supported by vote meas- 
 ures he deprecated in speech. He seemed hampered 
 by the changed condition of affairs in his state. He 
 said he did not believe in such legislation as the Freed- 
 men's Bureau act, yet he voted for it. The fourteenth 
 amendment ran counter to his favourite remedy con- 
 cerning suffrage, yet he supported it. He recoiled 
 from lending active aid to such an iniquity as the ex- 
 pulsion of Stockton; yet by voting against postpone- 
 ment he indirectly contributed to its success. And his 
 trimming did him no good eventually with the zealots 
 that swarmed in his state. His term was to expire in 
 the ensuing spring, and he must have been aware that 
 the legislature of his state would select a more daring 
 radical than he could pretend to be. His course on the 
 Impeachment was typical of the temper of mind which 
 
524 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 his embarrassing situation superinduced. He did not 
 vote on the non-concurrence with the suspension of 
 Stanton, but it was stated he was paired with Hendricks 
 in its favour. On the resolution declaring that the 
 President had no power to remove Stanton, he did not 
 vote. During the trial, on the test votes for and against 
 the admissibility of evidence, he was always with the 
 conservatives. Since the close of the case he had ex- 
 pressed to one or more of the favourers of Impeachment 
 his belief that the President ought to be convicted, and 
 that, while he could not support the main articles, he 
 was inclined to vote for the eleventh; and, the after- 
 noon before in the secret session, as we have seen, he 
 had consumed his fifteen minutes in delivering an 
 opinion against the first eight articles; the ninth and 
 tenth, it was to be presumed, would fare no better at 
 his hands. The incident of his going to Chase's house 
 for dinner had grown in bulk during the night, and it 
 was believed in the morning that, following the carriage 
 that took him there, was a hack hired by Chase, con- 
 taining four more senators— Fessenden, Trumbull, 
 Grimes and (as it was variously stated) Fowler or Van 
 Winkle — who, also, alighted at the Chief Justice's and 
 dined there; the guests being plied with wine and 
 arguments against impeachment while consulting with 
 their host concerning the organization of a third party.* 
 Such was the situation, when on the morning of the 
 twelfth, five of the eight Eepublican members of the 
 House from Missouri, together with a member of the 
 Missouri legislature to whom Henderson had ex- 
 
 * New York Sun correspondence of May 11. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 525 
 
 pressed the equivocal opinion mentioned above, invaded 
 the rooms of their wavering senator. They told him 
 that the position he had taken on the Impeachment 
 question was against the almost unanimous wish of the 
 "Union" party of their state, and that violence and 
 bloodshed, they feared, would follow the President's 
 acquittal. So peremptory were they in their language, 
 that Henderson must have lost his self-possession, judg- 
 ing by the proposition he made in reply. After saying 
 that he could not as a man of honour vote contrary to 
 the opinion he had expressed in the Senate on the first 
 eight articles, that he was no less decided in his judg- 
 ment against the sufficiency of the ninth and tenth, and 
 was in doubt only as to the last, he offered to telegraph 
 his resignation to the governor who could without delay 
 appoint his successor, so that by four o 'clock that after- 
 noon they would have a senator to their liking, whose 
 credentials would be here in time for the vote on Satur- 
 day (the day to which it had been informally decided 
 the court would adjourn). Inquiries were naturally 
 made whether the new appointee, not having sat dur- 
 ing the trial, would be allowed to vote on the judgment ; 
 and it appears that the senator assured the delegation 
 that such a course was legal, and there would be no 
 difficulty on that question. The representatives, how- 
 ever, were not satisfied on this point and protested that 
 they did not want his resignation, what they wanted 
 was his vote; on those articles on which he had ex- 
 pressed an opinion, he might withhold his vote, but on 
 the eleventh and on any others he might favour he could 
 vote in the affirmative. The senator requested his 
 
526 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 friends to retire, hold a consultation among themselves, 
 and advise him what they thought proper to do under 
 the circumstances. In compliance with this singular 
 request, the visiting members withdrew, called to their 
 aid their colleagues, and the following letter was sent 
 
 the same morning : 
 
 Washington, May 12, 1868. 
 Sir: 
 
 On a consultation of the Republican members of the 
 House of Representatives from Missouri, in view of your 
 position on the Impeachment Articles, we ask you to with- 
 hold your vote on any article upon which you cannot vote 
 affirmatively. This request is made because we believe 
 the safety of the loyal people of the United States demands 
 the immediate removal of Andrew Johnson from the office 
 of President of the United States. 
 
 Respectfully, 
 
 George "W. Anderson 
 William A. Pile 
 Benjamin P. Loan C. A. Newcomb 
 John J. Benjamin Joseph W. McClurg 
 Joseph J. Gravely. 
 Hon. John B. Henderson, 
 
 United States Senate. 
 
 The court convened at the usual hour, Henderson in 
 his seat. Chandler announced that his colleague (How- 
 ard) had been delirious all day yesterday and was now 
 so ill as to be unable to be present; and, as was antici- 
 pated, the court adjourned until Saturday. That even- 
 ing, another interview took place between Henderson 
 and his colleagues of the House (except Anderson). 
 The senator told them that he could not comply with 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 527 
 
 their request without a degree of humiliation and shame 
 to which he was satisfied they would not wish to subject 
 him. They agreed to reconsider their request, but still 
 insisted that duty required the senator to cast a vote of 
 guilty on one article, if that vote were found indis- 
 pensable to secure a conviction. Henderson pointed out 
 the difficulty attending this suggestion; senators were 
 so reticent he could not ascertain their position, and they 
 were liable to change their minds at any moment before 
 the final vote was taken. He exhibited a list of thirty- 
 six senators, beside himself and Wade, who, he thought, 
 would vote for conviction on the eleventh article, and 
 thereby the President might be removed without his 
 vote. The delegation assured him that conviction was 
 all they wanted, and that he need not resign unless his 
 vote was absolutely indispensable and he could not bring 
 himself to cast it for the eleventh article. He promised 
 to ascertain the probable event on one or two articles; 
 see senators Anthony, Sprague, Willey and Van Winkle, 
 and, if they would agree to vote for the eleventh article, 
 then the desire of his Missouri friends would be accom- 
 plished and he would retain his seat. He felt, so he said, 
 inclined to vote for the single clause of the eleventh 
 article which charged that the President attempted to 
 prevent Stanton from resuming the office of Secretary 
 of "War, but the Senate had wrongly refused to permit 
 a vote to be taken on the separate clauses, and a vote 
 for the article entire would seem to endorse the Emory 
 article which no one approved; he would give them his 
 final conclusions by twelve o'clock to-morrow. 
 The next day he received the following telegram : 
 
528 IMPEACHMENT OP PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 St. Louis, May 13, 1868. 
 Hon. John B. Henderson: 
 
 There is intense excitement here. Meeting called for 
 tomorrow night. Can your friends hope that you will vote 
 for the eleventh article ? If so, all will be well. 
 
 E. W. Fox. 
 
 Samuel S. Cox, an old-time political comrade of Hen- 
 derson's, at this time out of Congress and residing in 
 the city of New York, who had been sent for on the idea 
 that he might influence the senator in the President's 
 favour, happened to call on him just after the receipt 
 of the foregoing message. As Cox states : ' ' His sense 
 of justice had been affronted by this. In this mood the 
 writer found him. He seemed to want advice and coun- 
 sel. It was not long before the writer was requested to 
 pen and send a telegram" in answer. 
 
 E. W. Fox, St. Louis, Mo. 
 
 Say to my friends that I am sworn to do impartial jus- 
 tice according to law and evidence, and I will try to do it 
 like an honest man. 
 
 J. B. Henderson. 
 
 This act seems to have restored his usual sense of 
 honour and propriety, and he wrote a letter to the 
 representatives of his state, informing them that he 
 could not ascertain the probable outcome of the trial; 
 that he could not, consistently with the obligations of 
 his oath, resign; and that he had resolved to remain 
 at his post and to do his duty as it was given him to 
 know it. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 529 
 
 "If I resign and a successor should come, perhaps a 
 proper sense of delicacy would prevent him from violating 
 every precedent on this subject by casting a vote at all. . . . 
 If he voted affirmatively and thus secured conviction, this 
 manner of obtaining conviction would likely neutralize in 
 the end every advantage to be derived from impeach- 
 ment. ' ' * 
 
 Following the example of the Missouri delegation, 
 the eleven Republican members of the House from 
 Illinois held a meeting and discussed a proposition, sup- 
 ported, doubtless, by Logan, Farnsworth and Wash- 
 burne, to unite in a letter to Trumbull "with a view 
 to influence his vote for conviction, or of inducing him 
 to withhold his vote if he could not vote for conviction. ' ' 
 But, in this instance, so much opposition was made by 
 five of the delegation that no letter was sent— a failure, 
 to which the apprehension that such a missive would 
 have met with a sterner reception than the one sent to 
 Henderson, may have contributed. f 
 
 The method of coercing wavering senators by pres- 
 sure from home was set on foot systematically by an 
 organization of Republican members of Congress called 
 "the Union Congressional Committee." Senators as 
 well as representatives belonged to it, and senators as 
 well as representatives showed no hesitation in under- 
 taking work of this kind. Robert C. Schenck was chair- 
 man, and, on the twelfth, sent to every state having a 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 2471. Henderson's testimony before 
 Com. of Investigation. S. S. Cox's Three Decades, p. 594. Howland's 
 and Gravely's testimony before Com. of Investigation, quoted in Butler's 
 report of managers, Cong. Doc, No. 75. 
 
 t As to Trumbull see Globe, id., p. 2529. 
 
530 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 senator whose position was not definitely ascertained 
 the following circular telegram : 
 
 Washington, D. C. May 12, 1868. 
 Great danger to the peace of the country and the Repub- 
 lican cause if impeachment fails. Send to your senators 
 public opinion by resolutions, letters and delegations. 
 
 Robert C. Schenck, Chairman. 
 
 And they came— from Maine, from Illinois, from 
 Kansas, from Rhode Island, from West Virginia, from 
 Tennessee— resolutions, letters, telegrams, delegations, 
 all demanding the conviction of the President and de- 
 nouncing the least hesitation on the part of his Republi- 
 can triers. Even Holden, the first of Andrew John- 
 son's provisional governors — rewarded for his deser- 
 tion with the governorship of his Africanized state— 
 joined in hounding on the impeachment and flashed 
 over the wire the words, "Strike the usurper from his 
 seat. ' ' The general conference of the Methodist Epis- 
 copal Church being in session at Chicago on the four- 
 teenth of May— composed of nine bishops and two hun- 
 dred and forty-two delegates "representing," as was 
 stated, "more than eleven hundred thousand members" 
 —after referring in a preamble to "painful rumors in 
 circulation that partly by Unworthy jealousies and 
 partly by corrupt influence, pecuniary and otherwise, 
 most actively employed, efforts are being made to in- 
 fluence senators improperly and prevent them from per- 
 forming their high duty," thought it no blasphemy 
 unanimously to "appoint an hour of prayer from nine 
 to ten A. M. to-morrow to invoke humbly and earnestly 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 531 
 
 the mercy of G-od upon our nation and beseech Him to 
 save our senators from error, and so influence them that 
 their decision shall be in truth and righteousness. " The 
 action of this powerful ecclesiastical organization was 
 telegraphed immediately to the seat of government, 
 and on the same day its example was followed by the 
 African M. E. Church in conference at Washington ; the 
 coloured brethren, however, employing no pious cir- 
 cumlocution but addressing their prayer for the convic- 
 tion of the President, not to the Deity, but directly to the 
 Senate.* The managers, also, in this stirring campaign 
 of intimidation could not be idle. Their legitimate 
 work. being done, they organized themselves into an 
 Inquisition. Certain newspaper correspondents were 
 so positive about the opinion of certain senators and 
 the consequent acquittal of the President as to arouse 
 painful suspicions ; the Chief Justice had given another 
 dinner, and several senators were tracked coming away 
 from the entertainment at a late hour ; and a secret ex- 
 amination of reporters for the press was immediately 
 begun. Stanton, of course, was at work day and night. 
 Every rumour of defection f ocussed in the "War Office ; 
 and, sitting there in seclusion, the. secretary marked 
 down each doubtful senator. A military officer, likely 
 to be of influence because of previous intimacy with the 
 suspected man, was summoned to headquarters and 
 given his instructions. Generals, deprived of their 
 command and sore against the President, were told that 
 the friends of Andrew Johnson were engaged in tamper- 
 
 * See Prefatory note and Globe, 2d Sesa. 40th Cong., speech of Doo- 
 little, pp. 2521, 2525. 
 
532 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ing with some particular senator, and thereby induced 
 to go and tamper with him in their turn. Grant, with 
 habitual caution, kept silent in the background; but it 
 was published abroad everywhere that the prospective 
 candidate for President was "of the opinion that An- 
 drew Johnson ought to be removed. ' ' All his old cronies 
 in the army proclaimed it. Logan made no secret of it. 
 Washburne was now among the fiercest of the fierce in 
 pushing on the movement. The silent, undeviating 
 course of Eoscoe Conkling on every question arising 
 during the trial is strong evidence of Grant 's inveteracy 
 against the President. From the very first day, Conk- 
 ling displayed a stubborn hostility against the accused 
 entirely foreign to his character as a statesman and a 
 lawyer, and wholly unaccountable upon any other 
 hypothesis than that he was disposed to comply with the 
 wishes of the man whose devoted supporter he was and 
 continued to be afterwards through every vicissitude 
 of fortune. He said nothing. He delivered no opinion. 
 He filed none. He voted guilty sans phrase. The one 
 instance, in which he veered round to the conservatives 
 on the question of the admission of the letters of the 
 Cabinet officers corroboratory of the President 's version 
 of the colloquy between himself and General Grant, 
 tells the same story ; he would not have his hero appear 
 to shrink from any testimony seemingly adverse to him 
 on a question of veracity. 
 
 The inclinations of the General of the army once 
 ascertained determined the direction of the efforts of 
 a host of officers. Aides-de-camp, they rushed hither 
 and thither as if upon the battle-field, delivering re- 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 533 
 
 ports concerning the whereabouts and doings of cer- 
 tain senators, or directing their fire directly upon the 
 men themselves, or laying down the lines of the siege 
 to be made upon them. Never, perhaps, were men sub- 
 jected to such an ordeal of pressure as were the four 
 or five senators reported doubtful during the days that 
 elapsed from the Monday when the Senate deliberated, 
 to the Saturday when the Senate voted. Henderson 
 having been given up, the West Virginia senators were 
 allowed no peace. Willey, it was reported, was sure 
 on the second article, but Van Winkle seemed wrapped 
 up in impenetrable dubitation.* Both, it was said, 
 were engaged in writing opinions without having 
 reached any conclusion. It was suspected that, if both 
 votes of the state were necessary to prevent conviction, 
 both would be forthcoming; whereas, if one would 
 suffice for acquittal, the other would go the other way. 
 At length, it was announced that Van Winkle must have 
 written himself into a state of mind favourable to the 
 President, as he was consorting with Trumbull and din- 
 ing with Chase. A determined effort was then made 
 to rescue Willey who, it was discovered, had been able 
 to write nothing, and showed symptoms of a teachable 
 disposition. He was a prominent Methodist, and it was 
 said that that Church had him prominently in her eye 
 when she "unanimously" resorted to the Throne of 
 Grace. He was kept under constant care, supervision 
 
 * Pomeroy testified before the managers that Van Winkle told him 
 in the interval between Monday and Saturday that " his mind was to 
 vote for conviction on the eleventh article and was preparing an opinion 
 to sustain his vote." Butler's Report, p. 32. 
 
534 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and drill up to the last hour ; and, after all, went to the 
 testing a riddle to his trainers and a perplexity to the 
 believer in the efficacy of prayer. 
 
 Senator Fowler was subjected to a somewhat different 
 course of treatment. An early offspring of the Brown- 
 low government, his vote had been considered from the 
 first a fixed asset of the party. But it turned out that 
 his electors had not been sufficiently circumspect. He 
 was not a man very easy to rule. A professor in a Nash- 
 ville college, a pious man, an unostentatious citizen, on 
 the Union and slavery he had convictions of his own 
 which at the outbreak of secession whirled him into un- 
 looked-for prominence in the stormy atmosphere of his 
 state. But, although after their going over to negro 
 suffrage, he made himself agreeable to the Brownlowites 
 by his advocacy of that measure, he still cherished an 
 admiring remembrance of Andrew Johnson's career 
 as a Unionist and Military Governor, and he could not 
 shake off the conviction that it was impossible so heroic 
 a patriot should have become the traitor the senator's 
 party associates represented him to be. Great were the 
 surprise and indignation of the radicals, in and out of 
 his state, when, during the trial, he was found voting 
 with the conservative senators on incidental questions, 
 and, after the trial, either keeping a suspicious silence, 
 or talking in a manner most exasperating by reason of 
 its inconclusiveness. Him, therefore, the official manip- 
 ulators of the senatorial laggards, wisely concluding 
 that ordinary methods of persuasion would be thrown 
 away, undertook to scare back into the ranks by a dis- 
 interment of his record. As long ago as the tenth of 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 535 
 
 January— at a meeting of the Union Congressional 
 Committee— it was recalled that Fowler made certain 
 remarks on the subject of impeachment. His words 
 were not taken down at the time — the minutes disclos- 
 ing only the bare fact that certain senators and repre- 
 sentatives had spoken. To a copy of the minutes of 
 this meeting, William D. Kelley of the House now 
 appended a report of Fowler's remarks; certifying 
 that it was his "recollection of their tenor and 
 phraseology," and, further, that the senator had 
 "frequently pressed the same views upon him and 
 upon others in his presence." He makes Fowler 
 advocate the impeachment and removal of Andrew 
 Johnson as absolutely necessary to prevent blood- 
 shed in the South, restore peace to the country, and 
 the enforcement of the laws. The accuracy of his 
 version is certified to by Robert C. Schenck and seven 
 others who were present at the meeting. This docu- 
 ment* — minutes, speech and certifying signatures— was 
 printed; a copy sent to Fowler on the evening of the 1 
 fifteenth, and the next morning— the day the vote was: 
 to be taken— it appeared in the radical organs in flaming 
 colours. The implicated senator afterwards denounced 
 the speech as a forgery ; declaring in the Senate : "I did 
 not utter one single sentence that Kelley has coined. He 
 neither gives the spirit nor the connection nor the object 
 of my remarks"; stating further that his allusion to 
 impeachment was only for the purpose of stimulating 
 the committee to more strenuous efforts to carry the 
 
 * The document will be found in the speech of the senator cited infra 
 and in Butler's Report of Managers, printed as No. 75, pp. 28-9. 
 
536 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 state of Alabama; that, since Congress had failed to 
 impeach Andrew Johnson who was a man of power and 
 desired the success of his policy, it was the duty of the 
 committee to combat him in the open field of the state ; 
 that if they failed to carry the state the fault would be 
 their own. Whatever may be the truth on this par- 
 ticular matter in dispute, the underlying motive of the 
 whole proceeding becomes manifest when we hear the 
 balance of the senator 's story : 
 
 "A few hours after the forgery came to me, three per- 
 sons visited my rooms to poll my vote. I detected their 
 sinister motives by a false and contradictory statement of 
 one of them, and the arrogance, insincerity and weak pre- 
 sumption of another. I shall not stop to speak of the 
 ungentlemanly conduct of the chaplain of the company, 
 who seemed thoroughly in the interest of the revolutionary 
 leaders. Those men left disappointed. I met the reverend 
 meddler the next morning in the Capitol, and he threatened 
 the investigation of the inquisition, the exposure and ex- 
 pulsion from the Senate. I will only add that the same 
 threat had been made by others." 
 
 They might badger the Tennessee senator ; they could 
 get no satisfaction out of him. Over him, to the last, 
 they hovered between hope and fear. For, as he his- 
 torically stated: "I expressed no opinion of any article 
 involved in the trial of the President until the Chief 
 Justice asked my decision."* 
 
 With Grimes, Fessenden and Trumbull outspoken for 
 acquittal; with Henderson despaired of; with Van 
 Winkle and Willey see-sawing between "Guilty" and 
 
 * Fowler's speech, Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 4507, 4510. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 537 
 
 "Not Guilty"; with Fowler stubbornly non-committal: 
 the full brunt of the struggle turned at last on the one 
 remaining doubtful senator— Edmund G. Ross. That 
 a senator from Kansas should ever be a source of appre- 
 hension to the radicals seemed like a malignant stroke 
 of fate. As Sumner testified before the managers : "It 
 was a very clear case, especially for a Kansas man. . . . 
 I did not think that a Kansas man could quibble against 
 his country. ' '* Just at the close of the first session of 
 the thirty-ninth Congress (July 25, 1866), Ross took 
 his seat in the Senate at the same time with Joseph H. 
 Fowler. He was appointed by the governor to fill the 
 place of James H. Lane, who died by his own hand on 
 the eleventh of that month, and who enjoyed in life 
 so curious an intimacy with Andrew Johnson; and he 
 was subsequently elected by the legislature to fill out 
 Lane 's unexpired term. " We have his own authority for 
 stating that he was "baptized in politics in the old 
 Abolition party in 1844," and "led a colony to Kansas 
 in 1856." He entered the ranks of the Union army as 
 a private soldier, and served with gallantry and well- 
 earned promotion during the war. He was unknown 
 to the country at the time of his entrance into the Senate 
 (he had then reached his fortieth year), and, since his 
 admission, he had contented himself, except at an early 
 period when he read a declaration of his adherence to 
 the radical policy, in giving a silent vote for all the 
 political measures of the Republicans ; simply following 
 in this respect the example of his older and more ex- 
 perienced colleague. The possibility of defection on his 
 
 * Butler's Report ut supra, p. 30. 
 
538 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 part in the fight with the administration never dawned 
 upon the mind of the most nervous radical. Yet, some- 
 how, from the beginning of the pending impeachment, 
 his conduct had been eccentric. When the Senate re- 
 solved to non-concur in the suspension of Stanton by a 
 vote of thirty-five, including Fessenden, Fowler, Trum- 
 bull and Van Winkle, the Kansas senator, though in 
 his seat, did not vote ; owing, it was said at the time, to 
 a quarrel with the Secretary of War. On the other 
 hand, when the more decisive action declaring the re- 
 moval of the same officer unlawful was taken, he voted 
 with the majority. During the trial, on incidental ques- 
 tions he was so often found with the conservatives as to 
 excite curiosity, though not so invariably as to excite 
 alarm. When the trial was about half over (so Sumner 
 testified) he approached that senator for the first time 
 in his life and volunteered the' information that, not- 
 withstanding these equivocal votes, he expected to vote 
 with Sumner in the end.* After the trial was over, he 
 himself confessed in open Senate, "to having enter- 
 tained doubts on the eleventh and other articles until a 
 few days before the vote was taken, ' ' and then, as he ex- 
 pressed it, he resolved the question in his own mind by 
 giving his country the benefit of his doubts ; that it was 
 his intention to support a portion of the articles— an 
 intention he communicated to "numbers of those who 
 approached him on the subject," but, he emphatically 
 added, "no man had from me a positive assurance that 
 I would vote for conviction or acquittal" before Thurs- 
 day, the fourteenth, f Nevertheless, he was claimed by 
 
 * Butler's Report, ut supra, p. 30. 
 
 t Speech in Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 2599. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 539 
 
 both sides with almost equal positiveness ; and he cer- 
 tainly succeeded up to the very last in keeping both 
 sides in a fever of suspense. During this week, Wash- 
 ington was crowded with all sorts of people from all 
 parts of the country— every one intent upOn the impend- 
 ing result; and this hitherto undistinguished senator 
 moved along among them, the target of every eye; his 
 rooms beset by his radical constituents, associates and 
 friends wild to gain some satisfactory inkling of his 
 mind. His outgoings and incomings, his companions 
 and his convivialities, his breakfast, his dinner, his 
 lodgings, were marked and set down in note-books; his 
 name speeding over the wires, back and forth, to and 
 from all points of the compass, and ringing from every 
 one's mouth in all quarters of the swarming, simmer- 
 ing, half-delirious capital. Wrapped in the solitude 
 of his own impenetrability, he calmly watched the 
 raging eddies of which he was the centre. His political 
 pedigree and his domestic affiliations were probed from 
 top to bottom. It was discovered that from the time of 
 his election, and even before, he was mixed up in some 
 unexplained manner with the business of the Indian 
 Bureau out in Kansas; that Thomas Ewing, Jr., who 
 was the attorney of certain contractors for Indian sup- 
 plies, was friendly to him ; that Perry Fuller, an enter- 
 prising Indian agent and for a long time his friend and 
 supporter, was the son-in-law of the woman at whose 
 house he lodged, and whose remaining daughter, living 
 at home, was Vinnie Ream, the sculptress, now en- 
 gaged in modeling the statue of Abraham Lincoln, 
 under a contract with the government, in a room fur- 
 
540 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 nished her in the crypt of the capitol. Browning, the 
 Secretary of the Interior, in whose department was the 
 Indian Bureau ; Taylor of Tennessee, the Commissioner 
 of Indian affairs by appointment of the President ; Ful- 
 ler and Ewing:— were all known as supporters of the 
 President and ready to do their utmost for his acquittal. 
 Miss Beam— hardly more than a girl when, in July, 
 1866, she was awarded her valuable contract — proved 
 herself then an adept in the practice of influencing con- 
 gressmen; the award passing the House without any 
 opposition and the Senate by a large majority, in the 
 face of the active hostility of Sumner and Howard, both 
 of whom impugned the capacity and skill of the artist. 
 It was bruited about that the Kansas senator was in the 
 habit of frequenting her studio and talking of the im- 
 peachment, and that she was using her influence in per- 
 suading him to vote for acquittal ; and, on the faith of 
 these rumours, George W. Julian was commissioned by 
 several of his fellow members to warn her against such 
 a course of conduct. It was stated and restated on the 
 floor of the House that Julian "threatened her that if 
 she did not use her influence for conviction, it would be 
 the worse for her." The threat Julian denied; but he 
 admitted that he talked to her on the matter and that 
 she denied the report of her mission, telling him Boss 
 was going to vote for conviction, as Boss himself told 
 him on the following day.* 
 
 At length, the leading impeachers could stand this 
 suspense no longer. They determined in caucus (sen- 
 ators as well as representatives attending) to force the 
 
 * Globe. 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 2674-5. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 541 
 
 delinquent to speak. That stout radical, Samuel 0. 
 Pomeroy, known to fame in 1864 as the author of the 
 "Pomeroy Circular" and, after the Credit-Mobilier 
 scandal, under the sobriquet of "Subsidy Pom"— he 
 must tackle his rebellious younger brother and teach 
 him to obey the curb. It was on Wednesday, the thir- 
 teenth, that Pomeroy made his first attack. Noticing 
 that his colleague had gone into the room of the 
 sergeant-at-arms in the dangerous company of senator 
 Trumbull and following him there, he found the two 
 in animated conversation on the subject of impeach- 
 ment. "Waiting until the interview was over and Trum- 
 bull gone, he took Ross into a corner of the room and 
 proceeded to put him to the question. He had pro- 
 vided himself with the printed list of senators com- 
 monly in use for taking the yeas and nays, and upon 
 it he had noted opposite the name of every senator 
 counted on for conviction, including his own, the arti- 
 cles it was supposed he intended to vote for. He com- 
 menced operations by asking his partner plumply and 
 without apology, how he was going to vote on the im- 
 peachment. Eoss replied that he was uncertain, that 
 he would probably vote for some of the articles and not 
 for the others. Pomeroy said that he was canvassing 
 the Senate, that he had got the names of thirty-five 
 senators, pledged, every one of them in their own hand- 
 writing, for conviction, and that he wanted Ross's 
 pledge to make conviction sure. Ross asking to see 
 the list, the veteran canvasser produced it ; when, among 
 other names, Ross noticed his own set down for convic- 
 tion on the first, second, third, eighth and eleventh 
 
542 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 articles. Upon his expressing surprise at this sum- 
 mary disposition of his vote, Pomeroy claimed that from 
 previous conversations he supposed those were the arti- 
 cles his colleague would vote for. Perceiving that all 
 the marks on the paper were in the same handwriting, 
 and suspecting therefore that the whole thing was 
 guess-work and a plan to entrap him into a written 
 committal for conviction, Eoss with some asperity repu- 
 diated his colleague's authority to put him down on the 
 list at all either for or against conviction, and then ex- 
 plicitly defined his position as follows : 
 
 "That I should probably vote for conviction on the first 
 article, as that, in my judgment, contained all there was 
 in the whole bill of indictment; that the eighth I should 
 not support, and that as to all the others enumerated, I 
 was undecided ; that their fate depended very much on that 
 of the first article. If that were carried I said to him, 
 these would be very much strengthened thereby, but if that 
 were lost, in my opinion all the others went with it." 
 
 Thereupon, Pomeroy, taking a pencil, drew a circle 
 around the eighth to indicate that Ross would not sup- 
 port it, made a dot over the others, except the first, to 
 indicate they were doubtful, and then hied himself away. 
 As it had already been determined in caucus, because 
 of the refusal of Sherman, Howe and others to vote 
 for the first, to commence the vote with the last, Ross's 
 equivocal promise did not meet the crisis. Votes 
 for the eleventh article were what was wanted and 
 Pomeroy went after his colleague once again. On the 
 night of Thursday, the fourteenth, he found him in the 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 543 
 
 rooms of senator Van "Winkle with Trumbull, Hender- 
 son and "Willey, and, unabashed by the company he 
 was in, began a conversation on the result. In answer 
 to doubts expressed by Henderson, he insisted that con- 
 viction was certain on the eleventh article, because he 
 had conversed with a sufficient number of senators to 
 know that it would be carried by one vote. Ross in- 
 quired if he was numbered among the thirty-six, and 
 Pomeroy answered in the affirmative. The Kansas sen- 
 ator then repeated the conversation of the day before, 
 and assured his colleague that he need not count on his 
 vote for conviction under any circumstances. That same 
 evening a member of the Kansas legislature called on 
 Ross ' ' to talk the matter over, ' ' and Ross told him that 
 he was opposed to bringing on a vote at this time ; that 
 "the best thing was postponement, the next best con- 
 viction." The next day (Friday) a telegram arrived 
 from Kansas addressed to both senators of that state, as 
 follows : 
 
 Leavenworth, May 14th. Kansas has heard the evi- 
 dence, and demands the conviction of the President. 
 
 D. R. Anthony, and 1000 others. 
 
 Ross called at the residence of his colleague in the 
 evening to procure a copy of this dispatch and stayed to 
 dinner. Pomeroy importuned him again, and he replied 
 as before ; admitting, however, that the eleventh was the 
 strongest article and that he was freer to vote for that 
 than the others. As late as half-past eleven that night, 
 he was seen in a restaurant with Van "Winkle and Hen- 
 derson by a friend to whom, after the senators were 
 
544 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 gone, he said he thought it was dangerous to take a vote 
 in the morning and was himself in favour of postpone- 
 ment until the first of July. Even at this late hour, the 
 impeachers gave him no rest. General Sickles, urged 
 on by Stanton, sought him at his lodgings and remained 
 until four o 'clock in the morning, determined to see him 
 and "save him"; but was denied the opportunity 
 by Miss Eeam who told him, at last, with tears and 
 wringing of hands, that Eoss "would support the 
 President."* Spies traced the pestered senator to 
 his breakfast that morning at the residence of Perry 
 Fuller, where Henderson was, also, a guest; and, ten 
 minutes before the vote was taken, in the lobby of the 
 Senate and in the presence of Thaddeus Stevens who 
 looked grimly on, Pomeroy bearded his colleague for 
 the last time, warning him that to vote otherwise than 
 for conviction would be his political death, and threat- 
 ening that a vote for acquittal would be investigated 
 on a charge of bribery. That morning Eoss had sent 
 the following reply to the Anthony telegram: 
 
 Washington, May 16. 
 Gentlemen : 
 
 I do not recognize your right to demand that I shall vote 
 either for or against conviction. I have taken an oath to 
 do impartial justice . . . and I trust I shall have the courage 
 and honesty to vote according to the dictates of my judg- 
 ment and for the highest good of my country. 
 To D. R. Anthony and 1000 others. E. G. Ross. 
 
 * Correspondence from Topeka, Kan., October 20, 1896, to the Chi- 
 cago Record; reprinted in N. Y. Sun of October 25, 1896. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 545 
 
 And, before the day was over, he received the follow- 
 ing spicy but not fragrant rejoinder : 
 
 Leavenworth, Kansas, May 16, 1868. 
 Hon. E. G. Ross, United States Senator, Washington, D. C. 
 Your telegram received. Your vote is dictated by Tom 
 Ewing, not by your oath. Your motives are Indian con- 
 tracts and greenbacks. Kansas repudiates you as she does 
 all perjurers and skunks. 
 
 D. R. Anthony and Others.* 
 
 The most astonishing feature of this crusade against 
 the doubtful senators was the apparent absence of any 
 sense of its impropriety on the part of the actors. Such 
 a course of conduct, undertaken in an ordinary prosecu- 
 tion before a common law court or jury, would have sub- 
 jected the perpetrators to the reprobation of mankind 
 as well as to an indictment for felony, and would have 
 vitiated any verdict obtained by such disreputable 
 means. And the parties engaging in any such enter- 
 prise would have carried on their operations under the 
 cover of darkness and secrecy, conscious they were 
 violating the fundamental principles of justice, as well 
 as the commandment of the law. But, here, on this 
 world-stage, before this high tribunal, in this historic 
 state-trial, every thing that was done was done openly, 
 publicly, as it were boastingly and defiantly, without 
 shame and with a consciousness, of impunity, if not of 
 deserving well of the country. In the light of history 
 and precedents, it may be true, that the utmost strict- 
 
 * Concerning Ross, see his speech in self-vindication, Globe, 2d Sess. 
 40th Cong., p. 4513. Cf. Pomeroy's testimony before managers, quoted 
 in same speech. 
 35 
 
546 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ness of judicial propriety cannot be expected from a 
 court such, as is the Senate organized for the trial of im- 
 peachments ; that senators must be allowed freer move- 
 ments than ordinary judges ; may act on testimony they 
 have not heard and arguments they have not listened 
 to ; pass more than half the time of the trial outside of 
 the tribunal, as one of the senators from Illinois notori- 
 ously did on this occasion, and reappear only at times 
 when a vote against the accused is wanted. It may be 
 true that senators, as Sumner contended, cannot divest 
 themselves of their political capacity; have a right, 
 therefore, to form and express their opinions on the 
 guilt or innocence of the President before hearing the 
 evidence; and may look upon the wearisome trial as a 
 concession to constitutional forms necessary in order to 
 reach a conclusion already predetermined ; that the votes 
 of the senators on impeachment differ in no respect 
 from their votes on measures of legislation and that, 
 therefore, the senators being equally responsible to the 
 people must be answerable to popular influence and 
 criticism in the one case as in the other. It may be true 
 that from the very nature of the proceedings it is impos- 
 sible to shut out political and personal influences which 
 in ordinary courts would be reprobated as illegitimate 
 and improper. For instance, it has been related by a 
 writer who was at the capital during these days, on the 
 authority of a warm friend of the President, that some 
 of the doubtful senators expressing to Grimes their 
 apprehensions that the President, if acquitted, might 
 break loose in some high-handed attempt to put a stop 
 to congressional reconstruction, Reverdy Johnson 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 547 
 
 brought about a casual meeting at his house of the Pres- 
 ident and the senator without the foreknowledge of 
 either, when the President was led to express senti- 
 ments negativing any such notion— sentiments subse- 
 quently conveyed by the senator to the waverers with 
 the desired effect.* Again : according to a memorandum 
 which General Schofield states he made at the time 
 (May, 1868), he called upon Mr. Evarts, at the request 
 of that counsel of the President, on the twenty-first of 
 April, i. e. the day after the testimony on the trial was 
 closed and the court had adjourned over to the twenty- 
 second to hear the arguments. Evarts sounded the Gen- 
 eral upon the question of his acceptance, should the 
 President send to the Senate his nomination as Secre- 
 tary of War; representing that "a majority of the Re- 
 publicans in both Houses of Congress now regret the 
 commencement of the impeachment proceedings, since 
 they find how slight is the evidence of guilty intent"; 
 that "the removal of the President for political reasons 
 would be ruinous to the party and cause the political 
 death of every senator who voted for it" ; that such was 
 the view of ' ' several among the most prominent Repub- 
 lican senators" from whom, in fact, "came the sug- 
 gestion," which the counsel had made to the General 
 "in order that the Senate might vote upon the Presi- 
 dent's ease in the light of that nomination." And, 
 understanding "this proposition as coming originally 
 from the Republican side of the Senate and as being 
 accepted by the President in the interest of peace and 
 for the purpose of securing harmony between the legis- 
 
 * Cox's Three Decades, pp. 592-4. 
 
548 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 lative and executive departments of the government, 
 and a just and faithful administration of the laws, ' ' the 
 General, the next day, ventured so far as to say he 
 would "deem it my (his) duty to say nothing on the 
 subject of accepting or declining the appointment until 
 the Senate acted upon it";— and, on the twenty-fourth, 
 the President sent the nomination to the Senate where, 
 as everybody must have foreseen, it lay unacted upon 
 until the result of the trial forced Stanton to 'relinquish' 
 his post.* No one of the high parties engaged in these 
 respective maneuvres, it may be admitted, even so much 
 as dreamed they were violating the proprieties of a 
 court of justice. And, as we are saying, such may be the 
 correct view of trials of this peculiar character. But 
 —granting all this for the sake of the argument, it not 
 being necessary to insist on any rigid enforcement of 
 the rules governing ordinary judges— there can be no 
 doubt that under the Constitution the President was 
 entitled to the actual judgment of the individual sena- 
 tors on the articles presented against him. If, after 
 hearing the testimony and the arguments of counsel, a 
 senator— however greatly influenced by party consider- 
 ations or by personal bias— became convinced that the 
 charges were not proved;— any and all attempts to in- 
 duce or coerce him to declare otherwise because of party 
 considerations or considerations of friendship must be 
 classed in the same category of offences as tampering 
 with an ordinary court or jury when deliberating on a 
 decision or verdict. And this is just what the impeaeh- 
 ers in this case did with reference to Henderson, Fowler 
 
 * Schofield's Forty-six Years in the Army, p. 413 et seq. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 549 
 
 and Ross. They did not seek to influence their reason 
 on the facts and the law. They cared nothing for the 
 conclusion the senators had actually come to. They 
 wanted these senators to vote 'Guilty' whether they 
 thought the President guilty or not. And to this end 
 they bent all their energies. To them, as party politi- 
 cians, it was self-evident that Andrew Johnson ought 
 to be removed from office. The mode of accomplishing 
 this necessary end was immaterial. Whether Johnson 
 was guilty or not as charged made no difference. He 
 was guilty of rebellion against the party and of obstruct- 
 ing its policy. Republican senators ought not "to 
 quibble with their country." This was the character 
 and style of pressure brought to bear upon these judges, 
 in a cause pending before them, and at times when they 
 were out of court ; and if such a course of conduct does 
 not deserve the everlasting condemnation of all fair- 
 minded men — then the process of impeaching and try- 
 ing a President of the United States is but a mockery 
 of forensic justice ; the prostitution of a solemn judicial 
 proceeding into a sort of by-election of a new President 
 to take place whenever a majority of the House and 
 two-thirds of the Senate become too restive under the 
 incumbent for the time being to await the expiration of 
 the constitutional term. 
 
 The dragooning of senators necessarily ceased, for 
 a time at least, when, at noon, on Saturday, the six- 
 teenth of May, Chief Justice Chase took the chair and 
 called the High Court of Impeachment to order. Of 
 
550 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 the fifty-four senators, every man was in his seat 
 except one. Howard was there, but Grimes, it was 
 whispered, had been taken ill, and his seat was empty. 
 All seven of the managers were in attendance. Of the 
 President's counsel, Stanbery, Evarts, Nelson and 
 Groesbeck appeared in their place. The House of 
 Representatives was present in mass, and the galleries 
 were packed. The prevailing excitement had reached 
 a pitch of intensity that manifested itself by a stillness 
 that is felt. A realizing sense that the deposition of 
 an American President was something more than a 
 politician 's game seemed to have descended at last upon 
 the entire assemblage ; and that the destiny of the great 
 modern Republic might be hanging on the decision of 
 the hour. Williams of Oregon, the mouthpiece of the 
 caucus which the majority of this senatorial court had 
 deemed it decorous to hold, was the first to break the 
 spell. He moved the adoption of an order that the 
 Chief Justice, in directing the secretary to read the 
 several articles, should direct him to read the last 
 article first, upon which the question should be taken, 
 and thereafter on the other ten successively as they 
 stood. The motion was a critical one, the yeas and 
 nays were demanded, and the order was agreed to by 
 34 yeas to 19 nays, absent 1. "Wade had voted at last, 
 but the required two-thirds were not quite there. Of 
 the seven suspected senators, every one was in the nega- 
 tive except the absent Grimes, and his place was sup- 
 plied by Willey. 
 
 Edmunds moves that the Senate proceed to judg- 
 ment. The decisive hour has come. For an instant, 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 551 
 
 Fessenden staves it off by begging for time that Grimes 
 may be present. But Reverdy Johnson announces in 
 sentences broken by the strain of the moment: "The 
 Senator is here. I have sent for him. He is down- 
 stairs. He will be in the Chamber in a moment. He 
 is here. ' ' And Grimes, faint and pale, is borne through 
 the press and fairly lifted into his seat. The High 
 Court is full and there is to be no delay. The Chief 
 justice directs the secretary to read the eleventh arti- 
 cle ; and it is read to impatient and unheeding ears. A 
 thousand hearts stand still as the Chief Justice rises, 
 grasps the sides of the desk before him and utters the 
 words: "Call the roll." "Mr. Anthony," the clerk 
 calls; and the Rhode Island senator stands up in his 
 place. The Chief Justice puts the question: "Mr. 
 Senator Anthony, how say you"? Is the respondent, 
 Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, guilty 
 or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this 
 article?" And, looking into the eyes of his eminent 
 friend, the senator dispels the last cloud of suspicion 
 arising from their intimacy by responding 'Guilty.' 
 Two Democrats follow with their anticipated answers, 
 when Cameron provokes a momentary laugh by run- 
 ning right over the presiding officer with his eager 
 'Guilty' before the question is half out. Seven votes 
 for conviction are heard in quick succession ; then three 
 for acquittal; then three for conviction; when at the 
 name of Fessenden there is a breathless pause, and his 
 'Not Guilty,' high and clear, is followed by a sigh of 
 relief. Fowler comes next. The tremendous nervous 
 strain is too heavy for him and his faltering articula- 
 
552 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 tion is mistaken for the word 'Guilty 7 ; there is a thrill 
 of triumph or despair, when, on the demand of the 
 presiding officer, the senator, repeating his actual 
 answer, half stuns his hearers by the violence of the 
 reaction.* When Grimes is called, his feebleness is so 
 manifest that the Chief Justice suggests his voting in 
 his seat; but the senator is bound to furnish no handle 
 to an accusation of shamefacedness, and with the assist- 
 ance of friends he staggers to his feet to declare his in- 
 dependence as a judge. Howard, likewise, declines the 
 same privilege and conquers his physical weakness to 
 record in the most conspicuous manner his belief in the 
 guilt of the President. The eyes of the managers and 
 of the Missouri representatives burn with a wicked 
 light when Henderson is called. He has not resigned ; 
 will he withhold his vote? If a glimmer of hope still 
 flickers in their breasts, his prompt response extin- 
 guishes it forever. Ten votes for conviction follow, 
 interspersed with five for acquittal, when the clerk calls 
 a fatal name. Twenty-four 'Guilties' have been pro- 
 nounced and ten more are certain to come. Willey is 
 almost sure and will make thirty-five. Thirty-six are 
 needed, and with this one vote the grand consummation 
 is attained, Johnson is out and Wade in his place. It 
 is a singular fact that not one of the actors in that high 
 scene was sure in his own mind how this one senator 
 was going to vote, except, perhaps, himself. "Mr. 
 Senator Eoss, how say you?" the voice of the Chief 
 Justice rings out over the solemn silence. "Is the 
 respondent, Andrew Johnson, guilty or not guilty of a 
 
 * Julian's Political Recollections, p. 317. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 553 
 
 high misdemeanor as charged in this article!" The 
 Chief Justice bends forward, intense anxiety furrowing 
 his broad brow. The seated associates of the senator 
 on his feet fix upon him their united gaze. The repre- 
 sentatives of the people of the United States watch every 
 movement of his features. The whole audience listens 
 for the' coming answer as it would have listened for 
 the crack of doom. And the answer comes, full, dis- 
 tinct, definite, unhesitating and unmistakable. The 
 words 'Not Guilty' sweep over the assembly, and, as 
 one man, the hearers fling themselves back into their 
 seats ; the strain snaps ; the contest ends ; impeachment 
 is blown into the air. The clerk drones on— Mr. Sher- 
 man, Mr. Sprague, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Sumner; but the 
 voices of the respondents are unheeded. The two 
 Nebraska senators fulfil the contract of their admission 
 and duly "reinforce" the majority, but they might as 
 well be still knocking at the door. "Would that Colo- 
 rado were in ! " Trumbull 's vote has been discounted. 
 At the call of Van Winkle there may have been a feeble 
 afterglow of hope; but the senator votes 'Not Guilty' 
 with no sign of compassion. Wade comes next; no 
 glittering prize dangling before his eyes, his presidency 
 pro tern, clattering like an empty clog at his heels ; but 
 he votes 'Guilty,' like the Duke of Orleans, "in his 
 heart and conscience." Willey's vote is no longer a 
 source of anxiety; he may keep to his conservatives 
 now. But Willey, once his colleague has made acquittal 
 sure, reverts irresistibly to the majority and to the 
 Methodist Church. Williams, Wilson, Yates follow 
 like the last drops of an exhausted vein, and the roll- 
 
554 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 call ends. "Andy" has escaped conviction by one 
 vote. There are whisperings between senators; rep- 
 resentatives rush hither and thither; and there is a 
 bustling and a rustling in the galleries. The Chief 
 Justice quietly directs the secretary to read the first 
 article. A vote on the first article, with Sherman and 
 Howe committed against it, cannot fail to prove still 
 more disastrous than the vote just taken ; and Williams, 
 in the distraction of the moment, proposes a recess 
 of fifteen minutes for consultation. Such a breach 
 of judicial decorum finds, even at this high crisis, no 
 favour, and the senator finally moves the adjournment 
 of the Senate sitting as a court for ten days. Pending 
 this motion, the announcement of the result on the 
 eleventh article, hitherto overlooked in the excitement, 
 is called for; and the Chief Justice proclaims that 
 thirty-five senators have voted "Guilty" and nineteen 
 "Not Guilty. " "Two-thirds not having pronounced 
 guilty, the President is, therefore, acquitted on this 
 article." The question then recurs on the adjourn- 
 ment. The Chief Justice decides the motion out of 
 order on the ground that the execution of an order 
 already made by the Senate is pending. There is an 
 appeal from the decision; and the Chief Justice is 
 overruled. Henderson, then, moves to adjourn to the 
 first of July— a proposition which receives the votes 
 of the memorable nineteen and Willey's besides. 
 McCreery's common sense amendment to adjourn with- 
 out day gets but six votes. The Court then adjourns 
 to the twenty-sixth. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 555 
 
 Meanwhile, the audience has streamed forth from the 
 eapitol, and the tidings of the President's acquittal 
 are sent careering through the country on the wings of 
 the lightning. At all the commercial centres, the news 
 is received with a feeling of relief. The business 
 men, without distinction of party, had always depre- 
 cated the project as essentially revolutionary and as 
 destructive of the material interests of the people. 
 The champions of the President, we may be sure, did 
 not leave him long in suspense. During the actual trial, 
 his secretaries kept him informed of the incidents of 
 every day; and, on the decisive occasion, every vote 
 was telegraphed from the eapitol to the White House. 
 On the formal announcement of the result, Stanbery 
 and Nelson escaped from the Senate chamber and 
 hastened to congratulate their client; Nelson, espec- 
 ially, being beside himself with delight. The Presi- 
 dent received the news without visible emotion. In- 
 deed, throughout the whole of this trying time, the 
 demeanour, carriage and conversation of Andrew John- 
 son were enough of themselves to stamp him as an ex- 
 traordinary man. Confronted by an overwhelming 
 majority of both Houses of Congress, every one bent 
 upon turning him out of office; outside of his Cabinet 
 and a few prominent office-holders, with hardly a ser- 
 viceable friend upon whom to rely— he appeared 
 wholly undismayed, unflurried, serenely confident in his 
 ultimate triumph. While every one else was going 
 wild with excitement on his account, he alone was calm 
 and cool. His prosecutors appeared over-heated and 
 nervous at all times; when affairs were not to their 
 
556 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 mind they were peevish, irascible and abusive; when 
 affairs were on the mounting hand they were reckless, 
 domineering, coarsely incontinent. He, on the con- 
 trary, was always placid, cheerful, apparently indif- 
 ferent. When the prospect was blackest, no word of 
 despondency or petulance escaped his lips; when the 
 horizon lightened, there was no burst of undignified 
 hilarity, no fitful study of revenge, no arrogant boast- 
 ing. Not that he had lost one jot of his native pugnac- 
 ity. In fact, he was more than ever resolved to fight 
 the multitude of his enemies, every day and at all times, 
 as, in fact, he did to the end. An unwonted playful- 
 ness of humour was observed in him as the days of 
 stress went by. "Well, what are the signs of the 
 Zodiac to-day 1" was his greeting to his secretary when 
 that official came to make his evening report. We have 
 said that he was apparently indifferent to the result. 
 We might have said that in point of fact he was indif- 
 ferent. At times, he seemed buoyed up by a belief in 
 the impossibility that the Senate of the United States, 
 of which he had been so long a member, could convict 
 him of a crime; and, when he did break his habitual 
 reticence on the subject, it was to express the conviction 
 that among the Republican senators there would be 
 found in the end enough high-minded men to eman- 
 cipate themselves from party ties so far as to declare 
 that the President had committed no offence deserving 
 impeachment. But, on the other hand, there were 
 moments when he must have looked an adverse judg- 
 ment in the face. His counsel, his most confidential 
 advisers, his most intimate friends, were troubled with 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 557 
 
 grave misgivings and at times gave up hope. There 
 were moments when he, too, seemed sunk in deep 
 meditation, when he would sit stern and silent in his 
 chair or pace up and down the rooms and halls of the 
 White House in the still hours of the night. Yet, the 
 resultant impression left on the minds of those nearest, 
 and dearest to him was, that he was not only careless 
 about the result but that to him conviction would be 
 welcome. That he contemplated forcible resistance 
 is not likely. He believed, as was stated in open court, 
 by his intimate friend as well as counsel, that the 
 Senate, with twenty of its members shut out, had no- 
 constitutional right to try him ; but he did not plead to 
 its jurisdiction, and, therefore, we may believe that he 
 concluded to waive the point once for all. It is possible 
 he may have counted up his resources, calculated the 
 cost and meant, in the last extremity, calling upon 
 General Hancock for assistance, to put his fate to the 
 touch and win or lose it all ; and, in such a contingency, 
 we can understand why an adverse judgment might in 
 a certain sense have been welcome. But, considering 
 on the one hand the slenderness of his available forces, 
 and on the other the plenitude of the power of his ad- 
 versaries, we may put aside any such supposition as 
 out of the question. If, however, conviction had been 
 secured by so gross an outrage as the introduction at 
 the last moment of senators who had taken no part in 
 the trial, we may rest assured that, rather than sub- 
 mit, he would have been hewn to pieces on the thres- 
 hold of the White House. But, had conviction come 
 under the regular constitutional forms, however illegal 
 
558 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 and unjust in substance it may have appeared to him 
 to be, there is little doubt but that he had schooled him- 
 self to yield and, at once, appeal to the people. It may 
 be objected to this view that the Senate would have pre- 
 cluded the possibility of a renewal of the contest by 
 superadding to the removal the further penalty of dis- 
 qualification from office; a penalty we have already seen 
 Sumner laying his plans to impose by a majority vote. 
 But, even if the senator from Massachusetts had suc- 
 ceeded in carrying out his vengeful purpose and thus 
 shut out Johnson from contesting the Presidency, still, 
 the additional punishment the Senate might constitu- 
 tionally inflict extending no further than disqualifica- 
 tion to hold office "under the United States," would 
 not have debarred the unconquerable defendant from 
 seeking public favour in his own state and coming back 
 to the Senate. 
 
 Waiving these hypothetical considerations, what we 
 have to record as matter of fact is that, after the ac- 
 quittal on the eleventh article, which the public mind 
 naturally assumed to be the final disposition of the 
 whole proceeding, but little time elapsed before it began 
 to look that, if the martyrdom of removal from office 
 was what the President was itching for, he might still 
 have his wish. For, what could be the meaning of this 
 sudden breaking off in the process of giving judgment, 
 leaving ten articles still undetermined, and adjourning 
 the court for ten days and over the date of the meeting 
 of the Eepublican national convention? The testimony 
 was all in — in nearly a month ago ; the arguments were 
 closed— closed ten days before; the secret deliberation 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 559 
 
 of the court was over— over five days before. Why, then, 
 did the majority not go on and end the proceeding— a 
 proceeding blocking all legislation, keeping every one 
 concerned in it in a fever of unrest and vexing the heart 
 of the nation! Why did they prolong the agony ten 
 days more? There can be but one answer to these 
 questions. In the depth of their disappointment they 
 still clung to the hope that they might yet impale their 
 enemy on some one of the other articles. They lacked 
 but a single vote. Give them but time, and, with the 
 superabundance of their resources, that vote surely 
 might be captured. How they were to capture it, was 
 the next topic on which conjecture became rife. Would 
 they move to re-open the case for additional testimony ? 
 Would they prefer additional charges, as the House had 
 expressly reserved the right to do? Would they throw 
 aside all sense of fairness and decency and reinforce the 
 court with the hybrid representatives of the Africanized 
 South, now wandering about the streets of the capital, 
 ready to jump at any chance, no matter how disrep- 
 utable, to demonstrate the loyalty with which they were 
 overflowing? Would they make a combined attack on 
 one of the back-sliding senators and compel him to come 
 in! Such queries as these gained increasing reasonable- 
 ness and pertinency from what went on in the two 
 Houses during the interval. 
 
 After the acquittal on the eleventh article, as soon as 
 the Chief Justice left the chair and the representatives 
 the chamber, the President pro tern, called the Senate 
 to order and the senators plunged into a controversy 
 over the resolution sent from the House to take a recess 
 
560 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 until the twenty-fifth instant, in order to enable mem- 
 bers of Congress who so desired to attend the Chicago 
 convention. Vigorous opposition was made on the 
 ground, as stated by Wilson, that the bills to restore 
 "Arkansas and five other Southern States," already 
 passed by the House, should be passed by the Senate 
 "within the next three or four days." Sumner, who, as 
 he said, could not recall a single instance when he had 
 voted for "adjournment or recess," now favoured the 
 resolution in the following fashion : 
 
 "I have always felt from the first moment he (the Presi- 
 dent) was arraigned at our bar that it was unbecoming 
 the Senate to transact business with him. I have felt as 
 if it was the same as if the judge on the bench should con- 
 tinue to transact business with the criminal in the 'dock, 
 or, if the Senate prefers that term, with the culprit in the 
 dock. . . . Profoundly believing the President of the United 
 States guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors — and I can 
 have no hesitation in declaring it, for I have voted to-day 
 on one important article— having that profound conviction, 
 and knowing that there are other articles that still await 
 the judgment of the Senate, how can I as a senator, con- 
 sent to continue in communication with him on important 
 public business? 
 
 "It may be that when these proceedings are brought to 
 an end, that he may come forth with a nominal acquittal 
 of one vote. Condemned by a majority of the Senate, as 
 he has already been condemned in advance by two-thirds 
 and more of the House of Representatives, and, as is un- 
 questionable, condemned by the great body of the American 
 people, it may be, I say, that he may go forth from this 
 Chamber with a nominal acquittal; but he must go forth 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 561 
 
 as a blasted public functionary. That is his inevitable 
 destinj^. ' ' 
 
 Nye, on the other hand, was in favour of putting the 
 Arkansas bill "through all the forms" "before the sun 
 goes down." "Let the President have another sweet 
 morsel to roll under his tongue. Let him veto it and we 
 will meet it. . . . The President, I think, will waive the 
 peculiar circumstances which he is in and admit her. I 
 have no doubt the message is written already." Yates 
 came out still more plainly: 
 
 "I wish to send him (the President) such a bill as that. 
 I wish to send it to him in the interim between now and 
 the final vote on impeachment, ... so that we might have 
 for our Republican colleagues, our Republican friends, a 
 new veto upon human rights and upon the best interests of 
 our country. ... I believe in some respects it would be 
 as well for Congress to adjourn and for members to go 
 home and breathe the breath of popular opinion among 
 their constituents, and understand how a great people feel 
 outraged and indignant at the verdict which has been pro- 
 nounced here to-day on this most important trial." 
 
 He could not favour an adjournment because of the 
 important business before the Senate, but he trusted 
 that "in the meantime we shall be able to hear from the 
 country and feel the effect of popular opinion. " " I do 
 not mean upon the votes of the members; but I mean 
 that, if that opinion can in any way influence our decis- 
 ion, it will be for the best interests of the country. ' ' The 
 Senate, at first, rejected the resolution and then recon- 
 sidered and adopted it; too late, however, because the 
 House had also reconsidered and voted it down. 
 
 36 
 
562 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 On a motion to take up the Arkansas bill, the question 
 was raised whether the senators from the new state, pro- 
 vided they were admitted on the floor, can become mem- 
 bers of the court of impeachment. "Of course they can 
 be, ' ' said Sumner. Fessenden remarked : 
 
 "I should not envy the condition of that member of the 
 Senate who should propose to administer the oath as a 
 member of the court of impeachment to either of those 
 gentlemen if they should come here as senators from Ar- 
 kansas. Still less should I envy the condition of any one 
 who proposed to take the oath and to act as a member of 
 the court under such circumstances." 
 
 But Dixon insisted : 
 
 ' ' There are Senators in this body, able and distinguished 
 men and lawyers, who think that if the Arkansas gentle- 
 men were admitted as Senators of the United States, there 
 is no power here to refuse them the oath; and, moreover, 
 there are some senators who believe they would be com- 
 pelled to act." 
 
 He cited the New York Tribune and the Washing- 
 ton Chronicle as having "suggested the idea that these 
 senators should be admitted, and that they should be 
 sworn as members of the court of impeachment and act 
 upon the case." In the case of Warren Hastings (as 
 manager Butler pointed out in his opening speech), of 
 the more than one hundred and seventy peers who com- 
 menced the trial but twenty-nine sat and pronounced the 
 verdict at the close ; and, during the trial, there had been 
 by death, succession and creation, more than one hun- 
 dred and eighty changes in the House. Doubtless, the 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 563 
 
 swearing in of additional members after the court was 
 in process of giving judgment, would be going a step 
 farther than any precedent even of the most lawless 
 periods of English history; but, notwithstanding this, 
 there were more than a few senators and many represen- 
 tatives who argued that the impropriety of the act could 
 not alter the right of the senator to make one of a court 
 into which the Senate from time to time resolved itself. 
 It was said that such an outrage was impossible, because 
 the ten days allowed the President to veto a bill would 
 preclude the admission of the senators until after the 
 day fixed for the completion of the judgment; but a 
 second adjournment would be as easy and not much 
 more indecorous than the first. The Senate, however, 
 disposed of the question by refusing to take up the 
 Arkansas bill.* 
 
 The proceedings of the House were much more un- 
 equivocal. When the representatives, leaving the Sen- 
 ate, flocked across the capitol into their own chamber, 
 the managers, snatching up their papers, departed to 
 hold a secret session. It has been already noted that, 
 during the week before the vote, they had been hear- 
 ing witnesses detail the movements and sayings of sena- 
 tors and describe the guests and their doings at the 
 dinners of the Chief Justice; and they imagined they 
 had struck the track of a conspiracy to make Chase 
 President. After a brief conference on this occasion, 
 they filed into the House and, by the mouth of their 
 chairman, presented a preamble reciting that "informa- 
 tion has come to the managers which seems to them to 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 2492-6, 2514-6. 
 
564 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 furnish probable cause to believe that improper and cor- 
 rupt means have been used to influence the determina- 
 tion of the Senate upon the articles of impeachment," 
 and a resolution directing the managers ' ' for the further 
 and more efficient prosecution of the impeachment of 
 the President" to summon witnesses, send for persons 
 and papers, employ a stenographer and appoint sub- 
 committees to take testimony. Bingham explained that, 
 at the formal close of the testimony, he had notified the 
 Senate and the counsel for the President "that the 
 House of Eepresentatives did not surrender its right 
 at any time before judgment to present additional testi- 
 mony"; and, further, "the Constitution having vested 
 in the House 'the sole power of impeachment' has 
 clothed this body with power unto the day of judgment 
 to investigate all corruptions by any man or any men, 
 with a view to prevent the decision of this case accord- 
 ing to the law and the evidence." 
 
 "I am not talking of impeaching senators. But, sir, 
 at an early day in the history of the country nobody chal- 
 lenged the right to do it. The House proceeded to the 
 bar of the Senate and demanded the sequestration of the 
 seat of a senator and it was done. This House is clothed 
 with full power to do this thing and no man can challenge 
 it here or anywhere else successfully." 
 
 An effort was made by the Democrats to have the 
 investigation confided to a committee on which they 
 might have at least one representative ; but the majority 
 would not yield an inch, and the preamble and reso- 
 lution were adopted. Stevens, on Monday, offered a 
 resolution requesting the Senate to transmit to the 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 565 
 
 House a certified copy of the proceedings of the last 
 two days of the trial; in order, as he proceeded to ex- 
 plain, to have an official record of the votes of different 
 senators. His remarks, of which the following is a 
 specimen, for some reason were at times almost unin- 
 telligible : 
 
 "There will undoubtedly be some further proceedings 
 had in regard to this impeachment; what those proceed- 
 ings will be I do not know. I suppose that we shall be able 
 in some way or other to vote upon the articles which are 
 still before the Senate. ... I do not suppose that any one 
 believes that the question which was passed upon on Sat- 
 urday last is to remain a defunct question. I do not sup- 
 pose that any one believes that that question is to be carried 
 to the country in its present condition. . . . 
 
 "I make no accusation; I charge nobody with anything. 
 But to me it seems amazing that a body of that kind, having 
 before it a body of men of the highest character, will give 
 to themselves and to others the character which they have 
 given, and which they feel disposed to stamp upon the 
 country. . . . "We are therefore asking that as these mat- 
 ters have been sent before the Senate for the purpose of be- 
 ing investigated, every opportunity shall be allowed for the 
 purpose of ascertaining who have been willing to listen and 
 who have refused to listen to the instructions of the accused. 
 That there has been great, manifold, deep damnation, and 
 that there is somewhere to be found the greatest of all 
 mysteries, the mystery of this great prevalence of evil, no 
 one can doubt. Let us therefore have the whole matter in 
 such a shape that there may be every opportunity to inves- 
 tigate, so that all men may see who it is that is wrong, and 
 who it is that is right."* 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 2504-5, 2530. 
 
566 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 The resolution was adopted without a division and 
 sent immediately to the Senate, where it gave rise to a 
 heated discussion as an encroachment upon the preroga- 
 tives of that body and an insult to some of its members. 
 Sumner, however, did not see it in that light. He said : 
 
 "We know from the evidence before us something of the 
 character of the President of the United States; we know 
 how utterly unprincipled and wicked he is ; it is in evidence. 
 We also know what some of his agents and representatives 
 . . . have openly said." 
 
 And the senator read a communication from the 
 New York World to the effect that there were four- 
 teen radical senators whose terms of office expire in 
 1869 (Sumner himself being one of them), eight of 
 whom might certainly be bought for a million apiece; 
 read it as though it was an editorial and the suggestion 
 a serious one, when it was apparent, as the newspaper 
 hastened to explain, that it was an ironical exempli- 
 fication of Sumner's own doctrine that the trial of 
 impeachments was not so much a judicial as a political 
 function, and the vote of a senator on impeachments 
 should be governed by political considerations and his 
 own interest as a member of his party. Sumner *s mo- 
 tion to comply with the request of the House failed 
 for lack of a quorum, and the managers procured the 
 record in some indirect way.* 
 
 This band of seven disappointed partisans had in- 
 augurated a reign of terror in certain quarters of the 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 2520. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 567 
 
 capital. They hardly waited for the authority of the 
 House before they descended upon the telegraph offices 
 of Washington and Baltimore, seizing every despatch 
 which had been sent to or from the city for four or five 
 days preceding the fatal Saturday. They invaded the 
 banks and forced the officers to disclose the accounts 
 of senators and other suspected depositors. They 
 could not wait for the seal of the Speaker or for the 
 lapse of Sunday, but on that day issued a subpoena 
 signed by their chairman, and caused it to be served on 
 one Charles Woolley— a sporting gentleman who had 
 been betting heavily on the President's side, talking 
 loudly in favour of acquittal and telegraphing in cipher 
 in various directions, mysteriously, about large sums 
 of money. Woolley fooled them to the top of their 
 bent; worrying Butler by suddenly disappearing in 
 the direction of New York with the apparent intention 
 of disregarding the process served on Sunday; as 
 suddenly reappearing, just in the nick of time to escape 
 arrest ; and, when at last caught, answering all questions 
 fully and freely up to a certain point when, all at once, 
 he closed up his shell and became ominously silent. 
 The recusant witness was finally ordered into confine- 
 ment ; and, there being no darker dungeon within reach 
 than the cell in the crypt of the capitol where Miss 
 Ream was at work on her statue of Lincoln, the House 
 turned her out of it to make place for the prisoner, not- 
 withstanding her personal protest that to move the 
 model would be its ruin.* 
 
 * For Woolley, see Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 2536-7, 2541, 
 2575-9. For Miss Ream, id., pp. 2672, 2751. 
 
568 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Henderson became a special mark for the managers. 
 They sent him an official letter requesting his pres- 
 ence before them to give his testimony; to which he 
 replied that their inquisition was a direct insult to 
 the Senate and of most dangerous tendency for tbe 
 future; that "if a member of the court can now, be- 
 fore the rendition of the judgment, be withdrawn from 
 consultation, and subjected to the inquisition of the 
 prosecutors, that inquisition may reach all proceedings, 
 and thus subvert the dignity and independence of the 
 Senate." A committee having been appointed, in the 
 meanwhile, at the request of the Democrats backed by 
 the Missouri representatives to investigate the attempt 
 of the latter to intimidate their senator, Henderson 
 appeared before it (on the twentieth) and gave his 
 version of the transaction, answering, as he said, in 
 addition, ' ' all questions propounded in reference to the 
 conduct of Chief Justice Chase, the reported organiza- 
 tion of a new party, the rumors of new Cabinet appoint- 
 ments, reported presidential pledges of protection to 
 what is foolishly termed Conservative Senators, din- 
 ner-table talk with friends and even my own private 
 opinions." And, then, on Thursday (the twenty-first) 
 he laid the managers' letter, his reply and the fore- 
 going information before the Senate for its direction, 
 subjoining that, were he to appear before the managers, 
 he could but repeat what he had already testified to, 
 whereas, on the other hand, he objected to submit to an 
 inquisition so insulting to the Senate and so derogatory 
 to the personal honour of senators and their independ- 
 ence as. judges. Sumner, however, "knowing," as he 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 569 
 
 said, "from public report that it is among the pos- 
 sibilities that a further article of impeachment may be 
 exhibited against the President," thought it "a work 
 of superfluity at least, ' ' which he could not comprehend, 
 that any senator should seek to throw in its way the 
 dignity of the Senate. "Sir," exhorted this model 
 judge, "let justice have a free course and take its way. 
 The way of justice cannot be stopped. Technicalities 
 are out of place ; they do not belong to a case like this:"* 
 The Senate came to no conclusion upon this question; 
 the final determination of the Impeachment depriving 
 it of vitality. 
 
 The managers still kept on swearing witnesses, over- 
 hauling senators, following up false scents of bribery 
 and corruption, and pursuing flying rumours of this or 
 that judge being tampered with. As was inevitable in 
 such a mad game, they did not fail to run across the 
 professional false witness. Their "Conover" proved 
 to be one Legate or Legget, a special Post-Office agent 
 for Kansas and New Mexico appointed by the Post- 
 master-General the year before at the earnest solicita- 
 tion of senator Pomeroy. This creature testified to 
 some vague stuff concerning Eoss and his friends, 
 conclusive of nothing and contradicted point-blank 
 wherever it could be brought to book; but, because of 
 over-anxiety that he might not swear to enough, he 
 went too far and, to the managers' mortification, im- 
 plicated Pomeroy, and that too in the most explicit 
 fashion. According to his testimony, Pomeroy, through 
 his brother-in-law, had been hawking about his own 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 2548-9. 
 
570 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 vote and the votes of three or four of his colleagues, to 
 be cast for acquittal at the aggregate price of forty 
 thousand dollars. And a copy of a letter, dated April 
 16, 1867, purporting to have been written by Pomeroy 
 to Legate just before the latter 's appointment, and 
 shown by Legate to the Postmaster-General— the orig- 
 inal having been taken back but the copy retained and 
 given to the President— was produced by the Post- 
 master-General himself; in which Pomeroy promises 
 that, if the Postmaster-General or the President "get 
 in trouble, even if it be impeachment, they can count 
 on me to aid in getting them out, by word and vote." 
 Pomeroy testified he never wrote such a letter; but 
 Thurlow Weed, also a witness before the managers, 
 stated in the public prints that "Senator Pomeroy 
 either intended to dispose of three votes (his own, 
 Nye's and Tipton's) or he was willing that his friends 
 should use his name to make money; or, as some be- 
 lieve, there was a conspiracy between Butler and 
 Pomeroy to implicate the President, thus obtaining new 
 material for impeachment ' ' ; and the subsequent career 
 of "Subsidy Pom" shows that he was none too pure 
 to have been guilty of any one of these three iniquities.* 
 This managerial investigation was kept on foot even 
 after the final termination of the trial, but merelv to 
 wreak the spite of some of the Board on the men who 
 had disappointed them, by collecting together every 
 little circumstance, incident or saying connected with 
 
 * See Butler's report of managers, pp. 11, 12, ordered printed July 
 3, Globe, p. 3731. Henderson's speech on, id., p. 4463 et seq. Butler in 
 reply, App. p. 471. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 571 
 
 the giving of their votes, which could be tortured into 
 evidence of a change of mind at the last moment from 
 weak or corrupt motives. It gradually degenerated 
 into a farce. One by one the managers became 
 ashamed of it and fell away, so that when Butler, the 
 sole survivor, made a report in July, he could get no 
 one of his colleagues to sign it and was obliged to take 
 the responsibility himself. No action was taken on it 
 — the report, itself in fact neither proposing nor calling 
 for any. An investigating committee appointed by 
 the Senate held two meetings during the session, made 
 no report, was continued at the next session, but did 
 nothing; and at the close of the fortieth Congress, 
 which ended with the administration of President John- 
 son (March 3, 1869), the chairman of the committee 
 announced that there would be no formal report made ; 
 that "neither at the former session nor at the present 
 one has any information been communicated to that com- 
 mittee upon the subject in regard to which they were 
 appointed. From no quarter have we received any in- 
 formation which would even justify us in entering upon 
 any regular investigation, and . . . nothing has ap- 
 peared to justify any imputation upon any member of 
 the Senate."* 
 
 In their desperate effort to capture the one vote they 
 needed, the managers were aided by the national con- 
 vention of their party; indeed, Bingham and Logan 
 were on the spot. Although the platform adopted did 
 not read the recusant senators out of the party, as was 
 first proposed, it denounced Andrew Johnson as a crimi- 
 
 * Globe, 3d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 18C5. 
 
572 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 nal of the deepest dye, declared him to have been "justly 
 impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and 
 properly pronounced guilty thereof by the votes of 
 thirty -five senators. ' ' At meetings of several state dele- 
 gations, speeches were made violently assailing the 
 motives of the acquitting senators ; the resolutions of the 
 convention of soldiers and sailors, held at the same time 
 and place, arraigned "any senator who has voted for 
 acquittal as falling short of the proper discharge of his 
 duty in this hour of the Nation's trial, and as unworthy 
 of the confidence of a brave and loyal people"; and 
 Logan publicly vouched for Grant as having "stood at 
 the back of the managers in Congress during the whole 
 course of the trial. ' ' 
 
 Whatever hope the authors of this system of intimida- 
 tion may have had at the start of coercing others of the 
 recusant senators, circumstances point unmistakably to 
 the particular one they must have centered upon before 
 the close of the week. Fessenden, Trumbull and Grimes 
 were of course out of the question. They had written 
 their opinions upon every article, read them to the Sen- 
 ate, and they were already on file. Of the remaining 
 four, Van "Winkle had never been doubtful on any 
 article but the eleventh, on which he and his colleague, 
 as the latter stated in the press, were driven in opposite 
 directions by the construction given it by the Chief Jus- 
 tice.* Fowler, on the day he voted not guilty on the 
 eleventh article, publicly responded to a telegram in- 
 voking blessings on his head: "I acted for my country 
 
 * Ross' speech at p. 2599 of Globe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 573 
 
 and posterity in obedience to the voice of God. ' '* Hen- 
 derson had delivered his opinion in the Senate against 
 the first eight articles before his vote on the eleventh, 
 and the ninth and tenth articles were hopeless in any 
 event. He stated in open Senate, besides, that he ex- 
 pected to vote on all the articles as he had voted on the 
 eleventh, f But Ross was not committed against any of 
 the remaining articles. In fact, according to his own 
 admission, he had expressed himself as favourable to the 
 first article and as undecided as to the second and third. 
 He was the one single senator who had so conducted 
 himself as to have left open a loop-hole for retreat or 
 recantation. As none could say before the vote was 
 taken how he would vote on the eleventh article, so, now, 
 none could say how he would vote on the remainder. 
 He was, consequently, the main target at which the 
 managers aimed. It is not probable that any of them 
 held a personal conference with him, although it was 
 rumoured that Butler and he had come together. His 
 colleague, as we have seen, threatened him with an in- 
 vestigation on the charge of bribery. His intimate 
 friends and his patrons at the capital were examined 
 and cross-examined. His colleague, his constituents, 
 his fellow-senators, swore to his previous statements 
 favourable to conviction. His Indian office connection ; 
 his visits to the studio of Vinnie Ream; his lodging 
 at her mother's; his association with advocates of the 
 President;— were exploited: the menace that, unless he 
 redeemed himself from his corrupt apostasy, a chain 
 
 * Butler's Report, p. 28. 
 
 t Qlobe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 2494. 
 
574 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 of circumstantial evidence would be fastened about him 
 and he himself pilloried before the nation, flashing like 
 a drawn sword in the background. Those ten days must 
 have been days of torture to him, at the mercy of the 
 venal tongue of any professional witness who might find 
 favour with the managers. He bore the ordeal with the 
 fortitude of a stoic and the inscrutability of a sphinx.* 
 When the High Court re-assembled, there was still 
 room, therefore, for speculation. Ten articles were yet 
 to be voted on; thirty-five votes of 'Guilty' were cer- 
 tain on at least one of them ; but one vote was needed to 
 convict; and out of the nineteen who voted 'Not Guilty' 
 on the eleventh, one senator's mind was not surely 
 known. The Senate Chamber was crowded as before. 
 The House of Eepresentatives, headed by Washburne, 
 who, with many of his fellow members, was fresh from 
 making the next President, appeared, once more, to par- 
 ticipate in an attempt to unmake the present President. 
 The Chief Justice, the object of so much partisan objur- 
 gation, sat quietly in his chair. The holding of a caucus 
 by the majority senators that morning to determine the 
 order of voting on the remaining articles had given rise 
 to the report that there was to be another postponement. 
 But this expectation was speedily dispelled by Williams' 
 offer of a resolution to rescind the previous order of 
 reading and voting on the articles so far as it remained 
 unexecuted. Every senator was in his place; Grimes, 
 who had obtained an indefinite leave of absence on. ac- 
 count of illness and it was hoped might not be able to 
 be present, sitting implacably in his seat. The Chief 
 
 * Butler's report. Ross's speech in vindication, Globe, 2d Sess. 40th 
 Cong., p. 4513. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 575 
 
 Justice ruled the motion to rescind out of order, but he 
 submitted the question to the Senate and the Senate 
 overruled him by 29 to 25;— Eoss, alone of the seven 
 recusant senators, voting with the majority. Conkling 
 then offered as a substitute an order that the voting do 
 now proceed under the rules and the Senate rejected the 
 substitute; Ross, alone of the seven, again voting with 
 the majority. There was another vote on a point of 
 order raised by Trumbull against the proposed change 
 of rule ; and, again, Ross was in the same company. A 
 motion was made by Morrill of Maine to adjourn the 
 court to the twenty-third day of June ; and Ross moved 
 as an amendment the date of the first of September, his 
 amendment obtaining fifteen votes including those of 
 the seven except Grimes. The motion to adjourn to the 
 twenty-third of June was then voted down by a tie vote 
 —27 to 27; every one of the seven senators voting in 
 the negative, except Ross who voted in the affirmative. 
 The motion to rescind was then adopted. The object of 
 this motion was to get rid of the necessity of voting on 
 the first article which everybody knew was certain to 
 fail; and Ross's going with the majority to effect this 
 significant evasion was looked upon by the impeachers 
 as a harbinger of the return of the prodigal. "Williams, 
 still carrying out the decree of the caucus, now moved 
 to proceed to vote on the second article. The second 
 article was read, charging the ad interim appointment 
 of Lorenzo Thomas. The call of the roll proceeded. 
 When the name of Ross was reached there was a sudden 
 accession of the almost insufferable strain of ten days 
 ago. Again, the fate of the President, of the Republican 
 
576 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 party, of the nation, seemed to hang upon the lips of 
 this one man. Again, the Chief Justice asks: "Mr. 
 Senator Ross, how say you, is the respondent, Andrew 
 Johnson, President of the United States, guilty or not 
 guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article 
 of impeachment!" And, again, the Senator calmly lets 
 fall the words ' Not Guilty. ' The President is acquitted 
 on the charge by the same vote as before— 35 to 19. 
 There is to be one more throw. Williams moves a vote 
 on the third article. The third article is read. The roll- 
 call passes with the same result; Ross still answering 
 ' Not Guilty, ' with the promptitude and relentlessness of 
 an automaton. Again 35 to 19. Twice has 'Bluff Ben' 
 Wade— Colfax, his successful competitor, smiling in his 
 face— laid his already stricken honour on the altar of his 
 party, knowing the sacrifice to be vain. The prosecutors 
 dare go no further in the list of articles, lest a worse fate 
 befall them. Williams moves an adjournment without 
 day; every convicting senator votes for it but two who 
 are absent ; the High Court, foregoing the completion of 
 its judgment, dissolves, leaving the first article on which 
 the whole proceeding hung, the conspiracy articles 
 elaborated with such care, the much-vaunted Emory 
 article and Butler 's masterpiece of pleading, to the un- 
 escapable judgment of posterity. 
 
 It was frequently boasted by its advocates, at the 
 time, that the movement was substantially a success 
 because the President was convicted by so large a 
 majority of the Senate and escaped by only one vote. 
 Sumner, as we have seen, found solace in dwelling 
 upon this fact. "The acquittal was only by one 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 577 
 
 vote"; he said, "there is a familiar saying that a 
 man is saved by the skin of his teeth; and so . . . 
 the President was saved by the skin of his teeth. He 
 was saved by one vote. I call it a nominal acquittal. 
 There is ... a moral judgment against him." But 
 this is an altogether mistaken view. It were no great 
 achievement, surely, to secure from the Senate, more 
 than three-fourths of whose members were the political 
 adversaries of the President, a majority to condemn him 
 for his course in obstructing their party policy. In- 
 deed, if a majority had been all that was required, he 
 could have been deposed long before; for a majority, 
 ready to convict on the general ground of political 
 apostasy, was obtainable at any time after the rupture 
 between the President and the Congress became irre- 
 parable. As a matter of fact, out of the thirty-five who 
 voted guilty a sufficient number to make a large majority 
 of the Senate rested their judgment upon no other con- 
 sideration. What the Constitution required, however,. 
 and what the Impeachment advocates started out to* 
 obtain was a two-thirds majority on certain specific 
 charges of crime or misdemeanour. And from this point 
 of view, the Impeachment must be regarded as an 
 ignominious failure. On the chief accusation, without 
 the existence of the subject-matter of which there would 
 have been no impeachment, the Senate never came to a 
 vote at all. The House passed an act to keep Stanton 
 in the Cabinet in spite of the President, and unwittingly 
 so worded it as to leave Stanton standing defenceless 
 outside of its provisions. The Senate, in a pliant hour, 
 openly, in the face of all men, so construed it. The rep- 
 37 
 
578 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 resentatives, shutting their eyes to their own blunder, 
 blindly drove on the prosecution. But certain senators 
 happened to be too deeply committed. They could not 
 bring themselves to perpetrate the unparalleled iniquity 
 of convicting the President for construing a law as 
 they had construed it themselves; and, therefore, the 
 bottom fell out of the case. The eleventh article was 
 essentially meaningless. It was concocted as a refuge 
 for. those senators who could not see their way clear on 
 the specific charge, but hated Andrew Johnson with 
 sufficient vigour to vote him out of office on general 
 grounds. The second and third articles, cut off from 
 the first, were ciphers shorn of their governing integer ; 
 and were hit upon to enable senators, too deeply com- 
 mitted against the Stanton article to vote for it, to keep 
 in line with their party by taking advantage of what 
 might be made to look like a statutory infraction, how- 
 ever harmless. The House of Representatives advanced 
 to the Impeachment with pceans of anticipated triumph 
 and like an army with banners. The Senate beckoned 
 them on by pronouncing judgment of condemnation 
 beforehand. The trial ensued with all the pomp and 
 circumstance befitting so historic an occasion; and, at 
 the end of the procedure, the High Court ran away from 
 the completion of its judgment because a majority of its 
 members were afraid of the central charge. And this 
 humiliating fiasco was a most fortunate event for the 
 Republic. Had this first impeachment eventuated in the 
 removal of the Chief Magistrate, a precedent would 
 have been established of the most fatal character—con- 
 stituting a perpetual menace to the stability of our ex- 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 579 
 
 ecutive, a spreading blight upon our character and 
 credit as a nation, a standing reproach to the republican 
 form of government, and gradually leading to a national 
 habit of capricious political convulsions to put one pres- 
 ident in the place of another such as have disgraced 
 some of the republics of Central and South America. 
 To quote the weighty words of Senator Trumbull at the 
 close of his opinion in this case : 
 
 "Once set the example of impeaching the President, for 
 what, when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided, 
 will be regarded as insufficient causes, as several of those 
 now alleged against the President were decided to be by 
 the House of Representatives only a few months since, and 
 no future President will be safe who happens to differ 
 with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate 
 on any measure deemed by them important, particularly 
 if of a political character. Blinded by partisan zeal, with 
 such an example before them, they will not scruple to re- 
 move out of the way any obstacle to the accomplishment 
 of their purposes, and what then becomes of the checks and 
 balances of the Constitution, so carefully devised and so 
 vital to its perpetuity? They are all gone." 
 
 As it turned out, however, the precedent was de- 
 cisively the other way. Never will the practice of 
 deposing presidents by political impeachment become 
 domiciliated in this republic. Centuries will pass by 
 before another President of the United States can be 
 impeached, unless the offence of which he is accused 
 is clearly non-political and amounts unmistakably to a 
 high crime or misdemeanour. 
 
580 IMPEACHMENT OF PKESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Of the opinions written and filed by senators, some- 
 thing remains to be said. Of the twelve opposition sen- 
 ators, six filed opinions none of which calls for special 
 remark. Of the seven recusant senators, all, except 
 Eoss, filed opinions discussing every article and con- 
 cluding on every one with judgment of acquittal. Of 
 the thirty-five senators voting guilty but eighteen filed 
 opinions ; so that of the judgments of seventeen on all 
 the other articles, except the three voted on, we have 
 no record. Of the eighteen, two pronounced the Presi- 
 dent 'Not Guilty' on the first article (Howe and Sher- 
 man) ; five pronounced him 'Not Guilty 7 on the fourth; 
 three 'Not Guilty 7 on the fifth; five 'Not Guilty' on the 
 sixth; two 'Not Guilty 7 on the seventh; one 'Not Guilty' 
 on the eighth; eight 'Not Guilty 7 on the ninth; and 
 five 'Not Guilty 7 on the tenth. Of the whole eighteen, 
 but two found the President 'Guilty' specifically on 
 every article. Cattel, Harlan, Morrill, of Maine, 
 Stewart, Williams, Wilson and Yates pronounced him 
 guilty generally, but those of them who descended to 
 particulars discussed only the first article and the three 
 actually voted on; Wilson confining himself, wholly, 
 to generalities, and, alone of the senators, expressing 
 his intention to vote, not only for conviction, but un- 
 hesitatingly for the disqualification of the removed 
 President from thereafter holding any office under the 
 United States. Tipton and Howard were for convic- 
 tion on all but the ninth; even on the ninth Howard 
 found the President censurable. But the proud dis- 
 tinction of sustaining, seriatim, each and every count 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 581 
 
 in the indictment— the exploded Emory article and all 
 —was enjoyed by Pomeroy and Sumner alone. 
 
 Sumner, in fact, confessed that he would vote, if he 
 could : ' ' Guilty on all and infinitely more. ' ' His opin- 
 ion is a characteristic production. The longest one of 
 all, filling thirty-four pages of print, carefully elabor- 
 ated in the closet, regimented into sections, labelled with 
 ad captandum headings, accompanied by a voluminous 
 brief against the right of the Chief Justice to rule or 
 vote ; it is saturated with an animosity to the President 
 so bitter and intense that its only natural source would 
 seem to be a rancorous personal spite. This is the way 
 the senator opens a judicial deliverance : 
 
 "This is one of the last great battles with slavery. 
 Driven from these legislative chambers, driven from the 
 field of war, this monstrous power has found a refuge in the 
 Executive Mansion, where, in utter disregard of the Con- 
 stitution and laws, it seeks to exercise its ancient, far- 
 reaching sway. All this is very plain. Nobody can ques- 
 tion it. Andrew Johnson is the impersonation of the 
 tyrannical slave power. In him it lives again. He is the 
 lineal descendant of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis ; 
 and he gathers about him the same supporters. Original 
 partisans of slavery north and south; habitual compro- 
 misers of great principles; maligners of the Declaration of 
 Independence ; politicians without heart ; lawyers for whom 
 a technicality is everything ; and a promiscuous company 
 who at every stage of the battle have set their faces against 
 equal rights; these are his allies. It is the old troop of 
 slavery, with a few recruits, ready as of old for violence- 
 cunning in device and heartless in quibble. With the 
 President at their head, they are now entrenched in the 
 
582 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Executive Mansion. . . . The enormity of his conduct is 
 aggravated by his barefaced treachery. He once declared 
 himself to be the Moses of the colored race. Behold him 
 now the Pharaoh. With such treachery in such a cause 
 there can be no parley. Every sentiment, every conviction, 
 every vow against slavery must now be directed against him. 
 Pharaoh is at the bar of the Senate for judgment." 
 
 In order to gain swinging room for his blows he 
 sweeps away the flimsy barrier of the articles. 
 
 "It is very wrong to try this impeachment merely on the 
 articles. It is unpardonable to higgle over words and 
 phrases when for more than two years the tyrannical pre- 
 tensions of this offender . . . have been manifest in their 
 terrible heart-rending consequences. ' ' 
 
 Impeachment is a political, and not a judicial, pro- 
 ceeding, for the reason, according to this jurist, that the 
 Constitution, having vested the judicial power in the 
 courts, provided, nevertheless, that the Senate should 
 have the sole power to try impeachments. Further, poli- 
 tical offences are impeachable offences. "Show me an 
 act of evil example or influence committed by a President 
 and I show you an impeachable offence. ' ' This tribunal 
 is not to be confined by the ' ' rigid rules of the common 
 law." It has "rules of its own, unknown to ordinary 
 courts." "The precision of history is enough with- 
 out the precision of an indictment." There can be no 
 artificial rules of evidence to shut out the truth. ' ' The 
 ordinary rule of evidence," that the benefit of the 
 doubt must be given to the accused, ' ' is reversed. " "If 
 on any point you entertain doubts, the benefit of those 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 583 
 
 doubts must be given to your country; and this is the 
 supreme law." The President "must show that his 
 longer continuance in office is not inconsistent with the 
 public safety." As Blackstone said with reference to 
 liberty, "we should 'catch at everything' to save the 
 Republic." "What is more, we can take cognizance 
 without special proof on the trial of "whatever ought 
 to be generally known within the limits of the jurisdic- 
 tion, including the history of the country. " "No gate 
 can be closed." 
 
 As we read, we seem to hear Robespierre in the trib- 
 une of the French Convention advocating the condem- 
 nation of Louis XVI without proof and without trial. 
 
 Having thus laid down a mode of procedure lax 
 enough for his purpose, he proceeds to its application. 
 He makes the course of the President up to December, 
 1867, the main matter of his arraignment, without 
 which the later acts charged in the article "would have 
 remained unnoticed, impeachment would not have been 
 ordered ' ' ; and, piling one abusive epithet upon another, 
 branding the accused before the court, the country and 
 the world, as the one "enormous criminal" of his age, 
 he persists in demanding his condemnation for offences 
 for which he not only was not on trial, but for which 
 his constitutional accusers had formally declined to 
 bring him to the bar. Let us listen once more to this 
 upright judge, sworn "to do impartial justice": 
 
 "Applying this rule to the present proceeding, it will 
 be seen at once how it brings before the Senate, without 
 any further evidence, a long catalogue of crime, affecting 
 the character of the President beyond all possibility of 
 
584 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 defence, and serving to explain the latter acts upon which 
 the impeachment is founded. It was in this chamber, in 
 the face of the Senate and the ministers of foreign powers, 
 and surrounded by the gaze of thronged galleries, that 
 Andrew Johnson exhibited himself in a state of beastly- 
 intoxication while he took his oath of office as Vice Presi- 
 dent; and all that he has done since is of record here. 
 Much of it appears on our journals. The rest is in authen- 
 tic documents published by the order of the Senate. Never 
 was a record more complete. 
 
 "Here in the Senate we know officially how he has made 
 himself the attorney of slavery — the usurper of legislative 
 power— the violator, of law — the patron of rebels — the help- 
 ing hand of the rebellion— the kicker from office of good 
 citizens — the open bung-hole of the treasury— the architect 
 of the 'whiskey ring'— the stumbling block to all good laws 
 by wanton vetoes and then by criminal hindrances; all 
 these things are known here beyond question. . . . 
 
 "This is the transcendent crime of Andrew Johnson. For 
 the sake of slavery ... he has set at defiance the Consti- 
 tution and the laws of the land and he has accompanied 
 their unquestionable usurpation by brutalities and inde- 
 cencies in office without precedent unless we go back to the 
 Roman Emperor fiddling or the French monarch dancing 
 among his minions. This usurpation with its brutalities 
 and indecencies became manifest as long ago as the winter 
 of 1866. ... 
 
 "Plainly he ought to have been impeached and expelled 
 at that early day. The case against him was complete. . . . 
 So strong is my conviction of the fatal remissness of the 
 House, that I think the Senate would do a duty ... if it 
 reprimanded the House of Representatives for this delay. 
 . . . Meanwhile the President proceeded with his transgres- 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 585 
 
 sions. There is nothing of usurpation that he has not at- 
 tempted. ... It is difficult to measure the vastness of this 
 usurpation involving as it did a general nullification. 
 Strafford was not bolder when ... he boasted that 'the 
 little finger of prerogative was heavier than the loins of the 
 law.' ... No monarch, no despot, no sultan, could claim 
 more than an American President: for he claimed all." 
 
 The massacres in the South ! It was Andrew John- 
 son "who animated the wicked crew." "He was at 
 the head of the work. " " Fire, Famine and Slaughter 
 shriek forth — 
 
 ' He let me loose, and cried Halloo ! 
 To him alone the praise is due ! ' " 
 
 Referring to the President's speeches, this senator 
 could write down and file for preservation in our na- 
 tional archives, such utterances as these : ' ' From their 
 brutalities and indecencies ' ' they are ' ' in the nature of 
 a 'criminal exposure of his person,' indictable at com- 
 mon law, for which no judgment can be too severe." 
 And 
 
 "They were the utterances of a drunken man; and yet it 
 does not appear that he was drunk. Now it is according 
 to the precedents of our history that a person disqualified 
 by drunkenness shall be removed from office. This was the 
 case of Pickering in 1804. But a sober man, whose con- 
 duct suggests drunkenness, is as bad at least as if he were 
 drunk. Is he not worse? If without the explanation of 
 drunkenness he made such harangues, it seems to me that 
 his unfitness for office becomes more evident, inasmuch as 
 his deplorable condition is natural and not abnormal. The 
 drunken man has lucid intervals; but where is the assur- 
 
586 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ance of a lucid interval for this perpetual offender? De- 
 rangement is with him the normal condition." 
 
 As on all questions where he took a side he was never 
 troubled with a shadow of a doubt, so now he was ab- 
 solutely certain of his cause. ' ' To my vision the path 
 is as clear as day. Never in history was there a great 
 case more free from all doubt. If Andrew Johnson is 
 not guilty, there never was a political offender guilty 
 before; and, if his acquittal is taken as a precedent,, 
 never can a political offender be found guilty again. 
 The proofs are mountainous." 
 
 Fessenden, in his opinion, says with great force and 
 dignity : 
 
 "To the suggestion that popular opinion demands the 
 conviction of the President ... I reply that he is not on 
 trial before the people, but before the Senate. . . . The 
 people have not heard the evidence as we have heard it. 
 The responsibility is not on them, but upon us. They have 
 not taken an oath 'to do impartial justice according to the 
 Constitution and the laws.' I have taken that oath. I 
 cannot render judgment upon their conviction nor can they 
 transfer to themselves my punishment if I violate my own. ' ' 
 
 Sumner, in the peroration he elaborated on the lines 
 of the best models of vituperative oratory, takes a dif- 
 ferent view: 
 
 ' ' Something also has been said of the people, now watch- 
 ing our proceedings with patriotic solicitude, and it has been 
 proclaimed that they are wrong to intrude their judgment. 
 I do not think so. This is a political proceeding, which 
 the people at this moment are as competent to decide as 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 587 
 
 the Senate. They are the multitudinous jury; for., on 
 this impeachment, involving the public safety, the vicinage 
 is the whole country. It is they who have sent us here as 
 their representatives, and in their name to consult for the 
 common weal. In nothing can we escape their judgment, 
 least of all on a question like that now before us. It is a 
 mistake to suppose that the Senate only has heard the evi- 
 dence. The people have heard it also, day by day, as it 
 was delivered, and have carefully considered the case on 
 its merits, properly dismissing all apologetic subtleties. It 
 will be for them to review what has been done. They are 
 above the Senate and will 'rejudge its justice.' . . . 
 
 "The people cannot witness with indifference the aban- 
 donment of the great Secretary, who organized their armies 
 against the rebellion and then organized victory. . . . Nor 
 is it forgotten that the Senate, by two solemn votes of 
 more than two-thirds, has twice instructed him to stay at 
 the "War Department, the President to the contrary not- 
 withstanding. The people will not easily understand on 
 what principle of Constitution, law, or morals, the Senate 
 can twice instruct the Secretary to stay, and then, by an- 
 other vote, deliberately surrender him a prey to Presidential 
 tyranny. Talk of a somersault; talk of self -stultification ; 
 are not both here?" 
 
 The student of our history, who would gain a clear 
 and adequate idea of the kind of man Charles Sumner 
 really was, should not confine his glance to the haloed 
 champion of the negro slave or to the unresisting victim 
 of the blows of Brooks ; he should turn aside from these 
 high altitudes and spend a profitable hour in perusing 
 the opinion of the senator sitting in judgment upon 
 Andrew Johnson. 
 
588 IMPEACHMENT OF PEESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 One more opinion claims a passing notice. John 
 Sherman, the reader already knows, had put himself 
 beyond the possibility of voting the President guilty of 
 a crime in removing the Secretary of War, without 
 an utter loss of self-respect ; and, therefore, in the opin- 
 ion filed he is only the more solemnly emphatic in say- 
 ing so. Referring to the language of the proviso 
 adopted by the conference of which he was a member, 
 he writes: "To hold that the words inserted were in- 
 tended to warn the President not to remove Stanton 
 upon peril of being convicted of a high misdemeanor, is 
 to punish the President as a criminal for the violation 
 of a delphic oracle. ' ' He goes farther : 
 
 "I stated explicitly that the act as reported did not pro- 
 tect from removal the members of the Cabinet appointed 
 by Mr. Lincoln, that President Johnson might remove them 
 at pleasure ; and I named the Secretary of War as one that 
 might be removed. ... I could not conceive a case where 
 the Senate would require the President to perform his 
 great executive office upon the advice and through the heads 
 of departments personally obnoxious to him, and whom he 
 had not appointed, and, therefore, no such case was pro- 
 vided for. . . . This construction of the law, made when 
 these proceedings could not have been contemplated, . . . 
 is binding upon no one but myself. But can I, who made 
 it and declared it to you, and still believe it to be the true 
 and legal interpretation of those words, can I pronounce 
 the President guilty of crime, and by that vote aid to re- 
 move him from his high office for doing what I declared 
 and still believe he had a legal right to do. God forbid. 
 
 "A Roman Emperor attained immortal infamy by post- 
 ing his laws above the reach of the people and then punish- 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 589 
 
 ing their violation as a crime. An American senator would 
 excel this refinement of tyranny, if, when passing a law, 
 he declared an act to be innocent, and then as a judge 
 punished the same act as a crime. For this reason I could 
 hot vote for the resolution of the 21st of February, and 
 cannot say 'guilty' to these articles." 
 
 He, therefore, acquits the President on the charge 
 embodied in the first article; the corner-stone of the 
 impeachment. And, yet, he convicts the President 
 under the second and third that drew their whole 
 validity from the first ; for, if the President might law- 
 fully vacate the War Office, his temporary appointment 
 of Thomas, with or without statutory authority, could 
 work no harm to the body-politic, carried no signi- 
 ficance whatever and was utterly devoid of criminality. 
 Even Sumner acknowledged that the removal of Stan- 
 ton was "the pivot of the Impeachment; so much so 
 that the whole case seems to revolve on this transac- 
 tion." And Fessenden truly said of the ad interim 
 appointment : 
 
 "To hold that an act of such a character, prohibited by 
 no law, having the sanction of long practice, necessary for 
 the transaction of business, and which the President might 
 well be justified in believing authorized by existing law, 
 was a high misdemeanor justifying the removal of the 
 President would in my judgment be, in itself, a monstrous 
 perversion of justice, if not of itself a violation of the 
 Constitution. ' ' 
 
 Sherman struggles to show that the act of 1863 re- 
 pealed the act of 1795 ; as if the technical want of au- 
 
590 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 thority in consequence made any difference whatever on 
 the question of culpability in an ad interim appointment 
 to fill a vacancy he himself acknowledges was lawfully 
 made. He strives to believe that the President "had 
 formed a fixed resolve ... to fill the vacancy without 
 the advice of the Senate " ; and, in the face of the facts 
 that the nomination of Thomas Ewing was sent to the 
 Senate as quickly as possible and the nomination of 
 General Schofield at the moment of his writing lay 
 upon the table of the Senate, he claims that the Presi- 
 dent ' ' might have secured a new Secretary of War by 
 sending a proper nomination to the Senate." 
 
 The eleventh article, according to the construction 
 put upon it by the Chief Justice, made but one sub- 
 stantive charge, viz: an attempt to prevent Stanton 
 from resuming his office after the Senate disapproved 
 his suspension ; a charge of no validity to a senator who 
 believed the President had a right to remove the sus- 
 pended officer altogether. And, yet, the senator votes 
 the President ' guilty ' under it, assigning as a reason 
 that the article ' ' contains many allegations which I re- 
 gard in the nature of inducement, but it includes within 
 it the charge of wilful violation of law more specifically 
 set out in the second, third and eighth articles ; and I 
 shall therefore vote for it." No mention is made of 
 the ad interim appointment of Thomas in the eleventh 
 article; and, according to the reasoning of his opinion, 
 he found the President 'guilty' under it, because the 
 matters, alleged in that article by way of inducement 
 to the commission of an offence of which the senator 
 felt obliged to acquit the President, led up to the com- 
 
iriE ACQUITTAL 591 
 
 mission of an offence, charged in the second article 
 but not mentioned in the eleventh, for which the senator 
 found himself able to convict. In short, the single act, 
 for the doing of which Sherman found the President 
 guilty of a misdemeanour deserving removal from office, 
 consisted, wholly, in the issue of an unexecuted letter 
 of authority to fill temporarily an office vacant, accord- 
 ing to the senator's own opinion, de jure, but, owing 
 to the unlawful and successful resistance of the actual 
 incumbent, never for a moment vacant de facto. 
 
 The truth is that the course of Sherman was calcu- 
 lated and prepared beforehand. He was one of the 
 most prominent senators in the caucuses which were 
 held at every stage of the impeachment. At an early 
 day he must have made known to his associates in the 
 House and the Senate the perplexing predicament in 
 which he stood; and there is very little doubt that the 
 articles were manipulated into the shape they took, as 
 it is certain the order of voting was changed, that he 
 might find standing-room with his party in convicting 
 the President without too ostentatiously convicting 
 himself. The event proved otherwise, however. An- 
 drew Johnson was acquitted. It was John Sherman 
 who was convicted, and convicted by himself. 
 
 In the meantime, what had become of the great War 
 Minister — the bone of this loud contention 1 ? Barricaded 
 in the interior of the War Department; guarded by 
 sentinels within and without; succoured, sustained and 
 solaced by sympathizing senators, representatives and 
 officers of the army ; labouring incessantly through every 
 available channel to compass the removal of the chief 
 
592 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 who had presumed to attempt his own— he bowed to the 
 fmal vote of the Senate and, letting go his hold of the 
 office to which he had so tenaciously clung, dropped 
 from the surface of public affairs deeper than ever 
 plummet sounded. He sent a letter to the President 
 informing him, with quiet insolence, that the Senate, 
 having failed to support its resolution condemnatory of 
 the President's attempt to remove the Secretary of War 
 by a sufficient majority to turn the President himself 
 out of office, he "relinquished charge of the War De- 
 partment"; and, then, he took himself off the scene. 
 The President paid no attention to his letter. The Sen- 
 ate confirmed the nomination of Schofield as his suc- 
 cessor. He received the thanks of both Houses of Con- 
 gress. But it was everywhere felt that he was effaced. 
 He continued to reside in Washington; but the high 
 places of authority, which he so much coveted, knew 
 him no more. We chance to hear of him in the fall 
 orating for General Grant, notwithstanding the nominee 
 seems to have turned a cold shoulder to him. At Cleve- 
 land and Philadelphia and other local centres, he is 
 heard extolling the great soldier as eminently fitted for 
 the high civil office to which he aspired. In a speech 
 made at his native place, he told his former neighbours, 
 among other warm words of praise, that General 
 Grant's "capacity and integrity for civil administra- 
 tion were equally manifest in the vast territory in which 
 he operated. ' ' 
 
 A year passes by ; Grant has been elected and inaugu- 
 rated ; and, in December, 1869, Stanton is lying ill at his 
 residence at Washington. On Friday, the °eventeenth 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 593 
 
 of the month, to senator Chandler who, in company 
 with two friends, calls on him, the sick man ' ' expresses 
 the highest opinion of President Grant both as to his 
 military and civil capacity. ' ' To Wade he also remarks : 
 "The country knows General Grant to be a great war- 
 rior; I know he will prove a great civilian."* That 
 same night the idea occurs to senator Carpenter of Wis- 
 consin, "that something might be done to insure the 
 appointment of Mr. Stanton as judge of the Supreme 
 Court";— an appointment, talked about and expected, 
 but that did not come. The President appeared to be 
 unwilling. Carpenter draws up a letter to the President 
 recommending Stanton for the office, and, taking it 
 around the Chamber, in less than twenty minutes ob- 
 tains thirty-seven signatures of Eepublican senators. 
 The next morning, the senator rides to Mr. Stanton's 
 house and shows him the letter; "and" (to use Carpen- 
 ter's words) "as he glanced over it the tears started 
 down his cheeks. He said not a word." The senator 
 carries the letter to the White House, where Chandler 
 by previous arrangement awaits him. The President 
 seems "delighted to have the letter" which banishes 
 as he says, the last lingering scruple that troubled him 
 over the appointment, and he requests both senators to 
 "go to Stanton 's house and tell him his name would be 
 sent in on Monday morning. ' ' On receiving this mes- 
 sage Stanton exclaims: "The kindness of General 
 Grant— it is perfectly characteristic of him— will do 
 more to cure me than all the skill of the doctors. ' ' On 
 Monday (the twentieth) the nomination of Edwin M. 
 
 * Chandler's speech, Globe, 2d Sess. 42d Cong., pp. 4282, 4283. 
 38 
 
594 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Stanton for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court 
 of the United States, in the place of Justice Grier, is 
 received by the Senate and instantly confirmed.* 
 
 Charles Sumner may now, again, take the floor. In 
 an elaborate philippic against President Grant, de- 
 livered in the Senate May 31, 1872, he cites the "testi- 
 mony of the late Edwin M. Stanton" as follows: 
 
 ' ' On reaching Washington at the opening of Congress in 
 1869, I was pained to hear that Mr. Stanton, lately Secre- 
 tary of War, was in failing health. Full of gratitude for 
 his unsurpassed services, and with a sentiment of friend- 
 ship quickened by common political sympathies, I lost no 
 time in seeing him, and repeated my visits until his death, 
 toward the close of the same month. My last visit was 
 marked by a communication never to be forgotten. As I 
 entered his bed-room where I found him reclining on a 
 sofa, propped uc by pillows, he reached out his hand, al- 
 ready clammy cold, and in reply to my inquiry 'How are 
 you,' answered, 'Waiting for my furlough.' Then at 
 once, with singular solemnity, he said, 'I have something 
 to say to you.' When I was seated he proceeded without 
 one word of introduction: 'I know General Grant better 
 than any other person in the country can know him. It 
 was my duty to study him, and I did so day and night, 
 when I saw him and when I did not see him, and now I 
 tell you what I know, he cannot govern this country.' 
 The intensity of his manner and the positiveness of his 
 judgment surprised me, for though , I was aware that the 
 late Secretary of War did not place the President very 
 high in general capacity, I was not prepared for a judg- 
 ment so strongly couched. At last, after some delay, oe- 
 * Carpenter's Speech, Globe, id., App., p. 560. 
 
THE ACQUITTAL 595 
 
 cupied in meditating his remarkable words, I observed, 
 ' "What you say is very broad. ' ' It is true it is very broad, ' 
 he replied promptly. I added, 'You are tardy; you tell 
 this late; why did you not say it before his nomination?' 
 He answered that he was not consulted about the nomina- 
 tion, and had no opportunity of expressing his opinion 
 upon it, besides being much occupied at the time by his 
 duties as Secretary of "War and his contest with the Presi- 
 dent. I followed by saying, 'But you took part in the 
 Presidential election, and made a succession of speeches 
 for him in Ohio and Pennsylvania.' 'I spoke,' said he, 
 'but I never introduced the name of General Grant. I 
 spoke for the Republican party and the Republican cause.' 
 This was the last time I saw Mr. Stanton. A few days 
 later I followed him to the grave where he now rests.* 
 What shall we say! Was there any real Stanton 
 after all? Senator Carpenter asserted: "If Mr. Stan- 
 ton made that declaration to the Senator from Massa- 
 chusetts under the circumstances detailed by him, if 
 there is a word of substantial truth in that whole para- 
 graph, if it is not an infamous fabrication from first to 
 last, then Mr. Stanton was the most double-faced and 
 dishonest man that ever lived, "t Judge Black, com- 
 menting on the eulogistic testimonials to Stanton's 
 clandestine intercourse with the radicals while fawning 
 on Buchanan— which Henry Wilson thrust upon the 
 public with characteristic unconsciousness of their 
 damning import— comes to the same hypothetical con- 
 clusion: "Surely if these things are true, he was the 
 most marvellous impostor that ever lived or died. "J 
 
 * Globe, 2d Sess. 42d Cong., pp. 4112-3. 
 
 -j- His speech cited as above. 
 
 j Black to Wilson, Galaxy, June, 1S70, February, 1871. 
 
596 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Four days after lie attained the prize which, it is 
 said, before his entrance into the War Office, had been 
 the goal of his ambition— jnst after passing his fifty- 
 fifth year— the news came that Stanton was dead. 
 Despite his illness, his decease came upon his friends, 
 as well as the country, with a shock of surprise. 
 People were at a loss to account for it. Dark rumours, 
 engendered by the mysterious secrecy enshrouding the 
 last hours of the dying, and the obsequies of the dead, 
 man, were soon everywhere afloat, and are not at rest 
 even to this day. It would seem as if the Genius of 
 Duplicity could not forsake so congenial a spirit even 
 in the forecourt of the Undeceivable King. 
 
 [As a matter of fact, Stanton never was a justice of the 
 Supreme Court. He was appointed in place of Judge Grier, 
 whose resignation did not take effect until February the first, 
 1870. His commission, however, was issued to him, he was 
 sworn in hurriedly in the article of death, and a sum equal 
 to one year's salary of the office was appropriated by Congress 
 to his widow and children. See Carpenter's speech ut supra 
 and Globe, 2d Sess. 41st Cong., pp. 1799-1800, 2081.] ■ 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 The Congress sat until the twenty-seventh day of 
 July and, then, with an eye to the result of the cam- 
 paign, adjourned only to the twenty-first of September, 
 on which day, unless otherwise ordered, the two 
 Houses were to further adjourn until the regular day 
 of meeting. But, although the President still kept up 
 the fight over reconstruction with undiminished ardour 
 and with a confidence in the righteousness of his hope- 
 less cause which the process of time proved to be not 
 ill-founded;— vetoing the bills passed for the admis- 
 sion of those of the Southern states which the Con- 
 gress decided to be sufficiently Africanized to vote on 
 the 'loyal' side in the presidential election— no further 
 effort was made to impeach him ; the time drawing nigh 
 when by the expiration of his term the majority would 
 be rid of him, and the fiercest radical having had 
 enough of so cumbrous and costly a remedy. Thaddeus 
 Stevens, indeed, on the seventh day of July, exhibited 
 five additional articles of impeachment, with no intent 
 that they should be considered, but merely to serve as 
 a vehicle for a valedictory tirade, of which the following 
 extract may be fitly called the last words of this re- 
 markable man. 
 
 "After mature reflection and thorough examination of 
 ancient and modern history, I have come to the fixed con- 
 clusion that neither in Europe nor America will the Chief 
 
 697 
 
598 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Executive of a nation be again removed by peaceful means. 
 If he retains the money and the patronage of the Govern- 
 ment it will be found, as it has been found, stronger than 
 the law and impenetrable to the spear of justice. If tyr- 
 anny becomes intolerable, the only resource will be found 
 in the dagger of Brutus. God grant that it may never 
 be used. 
 
 "I can recollect but two men whom I deem absolutely 
 impenetrable to temptation, he of Athens and he of Bethle- 
 hem. The counselor who gives the chief suggestions to 
 our acquitted President did not deem the latter above cor- 
 ruption. He took him to the top of the highest mountain 
 and offered him all the kingdoms of the earth to bow down 
 and worship him. . . . 
 
 "My sands are nearly run and I can only see with the 
 eye of faith. I am fast descending the downhill of life, 
 at the foot of which stands an open grave. But you, sir, 
 are promised length of days and a brilliant career. If 
 you and your compeers can fling away ambition and realize 
 that every human being, however lowly born or degraded 
 by fortune, is your equal, that every inalienable right that 
 belongs to you belongs also to him, truth and righteousness 
 will spread over the land, and you will look down from the 
 top of the Rocky mountains upon an empire -of one hundred 
 million of happy people. 
 
 "Still, we must remember not to place our trust in 
 princes, for we have seen that in the richest heart, in the 
 most cultivated mind, adorned with every literary grace, 
 keen in argument as the Stagerite and fortified with 
 an outward shield of bronzed austerity which seemed to 
 forbid the approach of levity or corruption; this richest 
 composition of human mold may be the abode of malignity, 
 avarice, corroding lust, and uncontrollable ambition, as the 
 
CONCLUSION 599 
 
 owl, the prairie-dog, and rattlesnake nestle together in lov- 
 ing harmony in the richest soil of the prairie. ' ' * 
 
 He remained at his post to the end of the session but 
 he was evidently struggling with death. Daily he was 
 carried up the stairs leading to the House by coloured 
 servants to whom, with that grim humour of his, he 
 would say: "Boys, I wonder who will carry me when 
 you are all dead ! ' 'f He died in Washington two weeks 
 after the adjournment. In his will he directed his 
 body to be buried at a spot chosen by himself in a 
 private cemetery at Lancaster, and the following in- 
 scription, prepared by himself, placed upon his tomb: 
 
 "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any 
 natural preference for solitude, but, finding other ceme- 
 teries limited by charter rules as to race, I have chosen it 
 that I might be enabled to illustrate in my death the prin- 
 ciples which I have advocated through a long life— th& 
 equality of man before his Creator." 
 
 While making no provision for the care of his own 
 grave, he set apart an ample sum for the care of his 
 mother's, ordering "that the sexton keep the grave in 
 good order, and plant roses and other cheerful flowers 
 at each of the four corners of the grave every spring"; 
 and he left a legacy of one thousand dollars to the 
 church of which his mother was a member, adding: 
 
 "I do this out of respect to the memory of my mother, 
 to whom I owe whatever little of prosperity I have had 
 on earth, which, small as it is, I desire emphatically to 
 acknowledge. ' ' 
 
 * Glohe, 2d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 3790-1. 
 
 t Julian's Political Recollections, p. 313. 
 
600 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Sumner, for whom he bore an instinctive antipathy, 
 closed the eulogy he pronounced upon him in the Senate 
 with these eloquent words : 
 
 "I see him now, as I have so often seen him during life. 
 His venerable form moves slowly and with uncertain steps ; 
 but the gathered strength of years is in his countenance 
 and the light of victory on his path. Politician, calculator, 
 time-server, stand aside! A hero-statesman passes to his 
 reward."* 
 
 Here, this history, in accordance with its title, ought 
 to end. But a sketch of the after-career of the man 
 who was the only President of the United States ever 
 impeached and who came within one vote of being con- 
 victed and removed from that high office, seems to us 
 not an inappropriate appendix. 
 
 Before the Democratic national convention that met 
 in the city of New York on the fourth day of July, 1868, 
 Andrew Johnson, without doubt, was the logical candi- 
 date. He had been the protagonist of the opposition to 
 the reconstruction acts. He had made the fight. He 
 represented as no other man could one side of the real 
 issue. But on the other hand he had no distinctive 
 party behind him. His own section he had fought 
 against. The party that had elected him Vice Presi- 
 dent now regarded him with universal hatred. The 
 minority party looked coldly on him as a deserter from 
 its ranks. And, what was most unjust of all, he was 
 
 * Stevens's obsequies, Globe, 3d Sess. 40th Cong., p. 129 et seq. Sum- 
 ner's eulogy, p. 150-1. 
 
CONCLUSION 601 
 
 considered out of the field because he happened to be 
 a citizen of a Southern state. Johnson, himself, made 
 no serious effort to obtain the nomination ; at no time en- 
 tertaining the faintest expectation of receiving it. Two 
 days before the convention met, replying to a letter 
 from ten eminent citizens of the city of New York 
 inquiring whether he would allow his name to be pre- 
 sented to that body, he wrote : 
 
 "I am not ambitious of further service — I may say, 
 indeed, of further endurance in that elevated and re- 
 sponsible position, unless by a call so general and un- 
 equivocal that it would be an endorsement by the people 
 of my endeavors to defend the Constitution and the re- 
 served rights of the several commonwealths composing what 
 was once in fact the Federal Union. Of such approval, 
 in the present temper of parties, I can, perhaps, have no 
 reasonable expectation. 
 
 "All history proves that men who, in official position, 
 oppose for. any reason the cherished schemes devised by 
 factions to acquire power, usually find more determined 
 assailants than open and earnest defenders. Hence, in 
 resisting measures which, although sustained by Congress, 
 I honestly believed to be encroachments upon the Consti- 
 tution, my task has been made arduous and seemingly 
 ungracious by an opposition powerful, well-organized, and 
 possessing a controlling influence in the halls of legislation 
 unprecedented in the history of the country. . . . 
 
 "In the midst of these embarrassments I have not been 
 discouraged, when from the public prints, or from some 
 unusually frank and outspoken friend, I have heard that 
 I 'have no party.' The suggestion has only served to 
 remind me of a memorable remark, uttered when faction 
 
602 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ruled high in Rome, that 'Caesar had a party, and Pompey 
 and Cr.assus each a party, but that the Commonwealth had 
 none.' . . . 
 
 "Constrained, in occupying my position as the Federal 
 Executive, to abide in silence wrongs and encroachments 
 of the most insidious as well as desperate character, or 
 sometimes, when incapable of arresting them, permitted 
 only to employ futile protests; compelled, with only the 
 privilege of remonstrance or the terrible alternative of 
 counter-revolution, to resist revolutionary projects ; obliged 
 to stand in the attitude of a mere spectator, whilst the 
 invaluable time of the nation has been wasted in causeless 
 assaults upon myself and office for the benefit of a party, 
 I cannot complain if the people, while witnessing the scene, 
 have not been able to make my cause thoroughly their 
 own — the defence of the Constitution and laws their own 
 battle." 
 
 He received sixty-five votes on the first ballot, next 
 in number to Pendleton who led with one hundred and 
 five. The nomination was forced on Horatio Seymour 
 whose chances of election were virtually destroyed by 
 the advocacy of the "greenback" heresy in the platform 
 and by an indiscreet letter written by General Blair 
 before he was nominated for Vice President, recom- 
 mending, in substance, armed resistance to congres- 
 sional reconstruction, to be led by the President-elect. 
 Still, when the Houses met, in September, the result 
 was thought so doubtful that a sufficient number of 
 members assembled to make a quorum and resorted to 
 the extraordinary expedient of adjourning until the 
 eleventh of October, the Friday succeeding the state 
 elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana — on that 
 
CONCLUSION 603 
 
 day, unless otherwise ordered, to further adjourn to the 
 tenth day of November— one week after the presi- 
 dential election— and on that day, unless otherwise 
 ordered, to finally adjourn to the regular day of meet- 
 ing. Had the three October states failed them, the 
 majority were prepared, at the first adjourned session, 
 to adopt some revolutionary measures to stem the ris- 
 ing tide of "disloyalty" in the North; and, had they 
 been beaten in the general election, their November 
 session would have been occupied in devising means 
 for doing with Seymour what was done aftewards with 
 Tilden. As it was, the October states were carried by 
 the Republicans but by the narrowest majorities; and, 
 this settling the result, the two adjourned meetings were 
 merely formal. 
 
 "When the Congress met for the regular session, the 
 message of the President interrupted the jubilation of 
 the majority over their triumph. Pleading his con- 
 stitutional duty "from time to time" to "give to the 
 Congress information of the state of the Union and 
 recommend to their consideration such measures as he 
 shall judge necessary and expedient," the President 
 gravely informed the two Houses that their reconstruc- 
 tion acts "after a fair trial" had "substantially failed 
 and proved pernicious in their results and there seems 
 to be no good reason why they should remain longer 
 on the statute-book"; that "the legislator or ruler who 
 has the wisdom and magnanimity to retrace his steps, 
 when convinced of error, will sooner or later be re- 
 warded with the respect and gratitude of an intelligent 
 and patriotic people"; that "legislation producing 
 
604 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 such baneful consequences should be abrogated"; that 
 other acts, such as the " Tenure-of -office bill" and that 
 section of the army appropriation act which interfered 
 with the President's constitutional functions as com- 
 mander-in-chief, had been "passed under the influence 
 of party passion and sectional prejudice" and were 
 "unwarranted by the Constitution"; and that 
 
 "the repeal of all such laws would be accepted by the Amer- 
 ican people as at least a partial return to the fundamental 
 principles of the Government, and an indication that here- 
 after the Constitution is to be made the nation's safe and 
 unerring guide. They can be productive of no permanent 
 benefit to the country, and should not be permitted to stand 
 as so many monuments of the deficient wisdom which has 
 characterized our recent legislation." 
 
 To this language the Senate listened with visible im- 
 patience. But, .when, in the course of an exposition 
 of the financial condition of the government and the 
 unprecedent amount of the public expenditures, the 
 President declared that ' ' one hundred millions annually 
 are expended for the military force, a large portion of 
 which is employed in the execution of laws both un- 
 necessary and unconstitutional"— the majority could 
 bear it no longer. Conness started to his feet, inter- 
 rupted the secretary and moved that the further read- 
 ing of the "offensive document" be dispensed with. 
 Howe thought the Senate not bound to listen to a "lec- 
 ture" so disrespectful in language. Wilson thought it 
 both disrespectful and untruthful, calling the Presi- 
 dent "a disappointed, bad man"; to which character- 
 
CONCLUSION 605 
 
 ization, Cameron subjoined: "he has disgraced the 
 place he holds for nearly four years." It was not 
 until they had slept upon the question that the senators 
 came to the conclusion Morton expressed, that "the 
 refusal to hear it will be regarded as a mere matter of 
 spite, and will do the President less harm than it will 
 do ourselves ' ' ; and the reading of the message was com- 
 pleted. 
 
 The method of treatment adopted by the House was 
 more effective. The message was read through to un- 
 listening ears and then the majority pounced upon an 
 unlucky paragraph suggesting a plan for the extin- 
 guishment of the public debt : 
 
 "Our national credit should be sacredly observed; but 
 in making provision for our creditors we should not for- 
 get what is due to the masses of the people. It may be 
 assumed that the holders of our securities have already 
 received upon their bonds a larger amount than their, orig- 
 inal investment, measured by a gold standard. Upon this 
 statement of facts it would seem but just and equitable 
 that the six per cent, interest now paid by the Government 
 should be applied to the reduction of the principal in semi- 
 annual installments, which in sixteen years and eight 
 months would liquidate the entire national debt. Six per 
 cent, in gold would at the present rates be equal to nine 
 per cent, in currency, and equivalent to the payment of 
 the debt one and a half times in a fraction less than seven- 
 teen years. This, in connection with all the other advan- 
 tages derived from their investment, would afford to the 
 public creditors a fair and liberal compensation for the use 
 of their capital, and with this they should be satisfied. The 
 lessons of the past admonish the lender that it is not well 
 
606 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 to be over-anxious in exacting from the borrower rigid 
 compliance with the letter of the bond." 
 
 This proposition Washburne considered "plain, un- 
 disguised repudiation," and denounced it "as a disgrace 
 to the country and to the Chief Magistrate who has 
 sent in this message. ' ' Schenck called it " a most gross, 
 shameless and infamous proposition." Broomall 
 offered a resolution declaring "all forms and degrees 
 of repudiation of national indebtedness odious to the 
 American people"— which was adopted on the succeed- 
 ing Monday. The Senate, following in the wake of the 
 House, "utterly disapproved and condemned" the 
 proposition, but not until after a denunciatory discus- 
 sion of some days. Several senators worked them- 
 selves into a towering rage over it. Nye shuddered at 
 it ;" it is a great crime to suggest it, ' ' he exclaimed with 
 unwonted seriousness; "it is a crime' to think of it; 
 and a double crime for the Executive to send forth that 
 alarming sentiment to the country." Warner— Ohio's 
 precious gift to Alabama— who gloried, as he said, 
 "in that progressive spirit which made him a carpet- 
 bagger," could not resist the promptings of his honest 
 soul to offer a resolution distinctly stigmatizing it as 
 "dishonest." Howard branded it as a "foul recom- 
 mendation," "a recommendation of piracy and rob- 
 bery. ' ' 
 
 The whole force of these heated epithets rests upon 
 the assumption that the President meant to recommend 
 the plan he outlined as a mode of liquidation compul- 
 sory upon the bondholders. And, read by itself, it. 
 
CONCLUSION 607 
 
 must be acknowledged that the paragraph is susceptible 
 of this construction. But, as was clearly pointed out 
 by senators friendly to the President, when read in 
 connection with the context, the plan suggested, so far 
 from being compulsory, presupposed the consent of the 
 bondholders, who, the President himself conjectures, 
 may not "be averse to a settlement" "which would 
 yield them a fair remuneration. ' '* 
 
 At the close of the message, the President again re- 
 commends the proposal of a constitutional amendment 
 to which he had in vain called the attention of the Con- 
 gress by a special message in July. Its three main pro- 
 visions, (1) the election of the President and Vice 
 President directly by the people, (2) the election of 
 senators in the same manner, (3) the limitation of the 
 term of federal judges to a period of years, had been 
 the subject of his advocacy even in ante- war days. The 
 first two are still subjects of increasing popular agita- 
 tion, but the third has never as yet met with much 
 favour. To these was added a fourth, manifestly the 
 fruit of the Impeachment. He recommends a distinct 
 designation of the person to discharge the duties of 
 President in case of vacancy of both presidency and vice 
 presidency, and the person so designated not to be a 
 member of the legislative department, as heretofore, for 
 the reason, as appears by the special message, that "both 
 are interested in producing a vacancy and . . . are 
 members of the tribunal by whose decree a vacancy may 
 me produced. ' ' On the contrary, the presidency should 
 
 * Globe, 3d Sess. 40th Cong., pp. 28-9, 44 in Senate, pp. 33-4 in 
 "House. Dixon's speech in App., p. 44. 
 
608 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 devolve on the several members of the Cabinet in an 
 order to be named, and thus the successorship be con- 
 fined to the executive department where the vacancies 
 belong. This desirable reform has since (1886) been 
 effected, not by constitutional amendment, but by act of 
 Congress.* 
 
 On Christmas of the year 1868— a season most appro- 
 priate for so beneficent a gift— the President issued his 
 last amnesty proclamation. The three preceding proc- 
 lamations—May, 1865, September, 1867, July, 1868— 
 exhibited- an ever-narrowing range of exceptions, the 
 one of July excepting only those offenders actually 
 under indictment. Now, even this last limit was swept 
 away; and Andrew Johnson enjoyed the enviable 
 privilege of proclaiming, ' ' In the name of the sovereign 
 people of the United States," "unconditionally and 
 without reservation, to all and to every person who 
 directly or indirectly participated in the late insurrec- 
 tion or rebellion, a full pardon and amnesty for the 
 offence of treason against the United States, or of adher- 
 ing to their enemies during the late civil war, with 
 restoration of all rights, privileges and immunities 
 under the Constitution and the laws." The Senate, 
 not approving of this indiscriminate manner of dealing 
 out relief— even to the unrepentant Jefferson Davis— 
 called upon the President for his authority. The Presi- 
 dent replied that his authority was the Federal Con- 
 stitution ' ' understood to be and regarded ' ' by him ' ' as 
 the supreme law of the land, ' ' the second section of the 
 second article of which provided that the President 
 
 * For Message see MePh. Reeon., p. 384. 
 
CONCLUSION 609 
 
 "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons"; 
 and, also, ' ' the precedent established by Washington in 
 1795, and followed by Presidents Adams in 1800, Madi- 
 son in 1815, Lincoln in 1863, ' ' and himself in 1865. 1867, 
 and 1868.* 
 
 The sole achievement of this session was the adoption 
 of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, designed 
 to guarantee manhood suffrage to the negroes through- 
 out the land ; over which it is not our purpose to linger. 
 We cannot refrain, however, from giving a brief account 
 of an attempt at legislation which, though unsuccessful 
 for the time being, is memorable because of the light it 
 reflects on the impeachment and trial of the President. 
 On the eleventh day of January, 1869, not yet a year 
 since the House impeached Andrew Johnson for its 
 alleged violation, Washburne — the fidus Achates of the 
 President-elect who, it was understood on all hands, 
 desired the total repeal of the Tenure-of-office act— in- 
 troduced a bill for that purpose. It was read a first 
 and second time, the 1 main question was ordered, and,, 
 with but a feeble murmur of remonstrance from a 
 single member, the bill was instantly passed ; Boutwell, 
 Bingham, Butler and Wilson, who had lauded it as the 
 palladium of the Republican officeholder and denounced 
 its violation as a sacrilege of the most heinous kind, 
 joining with the Democrats, who had always condemned 
 it as unconstitutional and pernicious, in sweeping the 
 measure from the statute book. In the Senate, however, 
 although the majority were just as eager to effect the 
 repeal, there lingered some sense of shame. The bill, 
 
 * For Proclamation, id., p. 419. 
 39 
 
610 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 on coming from the House, was referred to a committee, 
 and the committee reported it back with an amendment 
 in the form of a substitute amounting to repeal in a 
 disguised form. The principal clause of the first section 
 of the existing act prescribing the tenure of all civil 
 offices (not inferior), was retained but the heart was 
 taken out of it by converting the famous proviso into 
 an unconditional exception of cabinet officers, and by 
 giving the President arbitrary power to suspend any 
 officer during the recess ; thus of course dispensing with 
 the necessity of stating his reasons in his report to the 
 Senate. They left just enough of the old law to save the 
 consistency of such senators as Edmunds and Howe, 
 whose asseverations that the act was not legislation ' ' for 
 to-day, or to-morrow, or the next year, or the next four 
 years, but for the country and the future, ' ' still echoed 
 from the walls of the chamber. Even as it was, some 
 senators with refreshing candour avowed their real de- 
 sire. Said Morton : "I am in favor of the total repeal 
 of the law. I believe it was a mistake from the be- 
 ginning. I do not believe that the country or the Repub- 
 lican party ever derived any benefit from it. . . . This 
 amendment is good so far as it goes in allowing the 
 President to choose the members of his Cabinet . . . ; 
 the idea of ever preventing a President from doing that 
 was absurd, was contrary to the very nature of adminis- 
 tration."* 
 
 The debate was postponed and the subject was not 
 resumed at this session. But, as soon as the new Con- 
 gress assembled, the perfunctory contest between the 
 
 * Globe, 3d Seas. 40th Cong., pp. 936-7 in Senate, pp. 282-3 in House. 
 
CONCLUSION 611 
 
 two Houses was recommenced. President Grant de- 
 mands a free hand. The House again passes a bill of 
 total repeal. The senators would fain accommodate the 
 President, but some of them are still ashamed to stultify 
 themselves so far. At last, the troublesome business is 
 compromised by preserving for decency 's sake two frag- 
 ments of the famous law. One looks substantial— pro- 
 hibiting, apparently, all removals except by the 
 authority making the appointment; but, as is per- 
 ceptible on a closer glance, confining its application to 
 offices having a fixed term and therefore not including 
 the heads of departments. The other makes what might 
 have been so far substantial in the first nugatory by 
 granting to the President an unlimited arbitrary power 
 of suspension in respect to all civil offices during recess 
 until the end of the next session of the Senate ; nomina- 
 tions sent in to be followed in case of disapproval, not 
 by the reinstatement of the displaced officer, but by— 
 another nomination.* 
 
 Meanwhile, the bondsman and intended victim of the 
 statute which its authors are now so diligent in clearing 
 away from the path of his successor is quietly prepar- 
 ing for his exit. The ' ' Plebeian Boy, " as he styled him- 
 self in his inaugural address as Vice President, after 
 having fought his way through every grade of office up 
 to the highest, there to find no rest or respite but, on the 
 contrary, the heaviest fighting of his life, is now putting 
 off his well-worn armour. Beaten at every point, it was 
 only by the merest chance that he has not been degraded 
 and deposed. No administration was ever so utterly 
 
 * Globe, 1st Sess. 41st Cong., pp. 40, 394-5, 402-6. 
 
612 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 thwarted in its substantial aims. No President ever laid 
 down Ms office so bereft of a party. No lifelong public 
 functionary ever retired from the stage of affairs whose 
 lapse into oblivion looked so final. Amid the enthusiasm 
 aroused by the inauguration of 'the Conquering Hero 
 of the Civil War,' the whole world seemed to have 
 turned its back upon him. His sun was not only setting 
 and in clouds and .darkness, but it appeared to have 
 already set— gone down before its appointed time. In 
 the gorgeous pageant with which the incoming President 
 was ushered into his high place, there was no room for 
 him. John Adams absconded from the capital rather 
 than face his successful competitor; and Jefferson, in 
 consequence, rode to his inauguration alone. Jackson 
 shunned all personal intercourse with his predecessor 
 whom he held responsible for the slanders heaped upon 
 his wife in the recent campaign— slanders which he be- 
 lieved had hastened her death; and the second Adams 
 was absent from the inauguration. With these two ex- 
 ceptions, from the foundation of the government, when- 
 ever there was an outgoing as well as an incoming Presi- 
 dent, the two chief figures sat side by side in the same 
 carriage in the procession and stood side by side at the 
 taking of the oath. But, on the present occasion, the 
 figure of Andrew Johnson was conspicuous by its 
 absence. Not because the outgoing President was not 
 ready to discharge his share of the ceremony. Johnson 
 had not a particle of that species of vanity which drives 
 its possessor into foolishness through the chagrin of de- 
 feat ; and he was of too magnanimous a nature to allow 
 his personal disputes to interfere with the proper per- 
 
CONCLUSION 613 
 
 formance of a great public function. But the conqueror 
 of Lee could not get over the question of veracity that 
 had been so nakedly thrust upon him by the President 
 with his Cabinet at his back, and he refused to ride in 
 the same carriage or walk arm-in-arm with a civilian of 
 so militant a disposition. So, with the booming of 
 cannon, the beating of drums, the ringing of bells and 
 the strains of martial music,— the Hero of the hour, 
 sitting alone with his resentment, swept up the Avenue 
 with the shouting multitude at his heels, leaving the 
 despised Apostate behind. 
 
 And he 1 So far from being daunted or discouraged 
 in the slightest degree, the despised Apostate acted as 
 though he believed the real triumph was his own. Up 
 to the last minute of the last hour of that term which 
 his adversaries denied him in theory and of which they 
 tried to deprive him in fact, he remained at his post; 
 and then, as the clock struck noon on the fourth day 
 of March, 1869, while his successor was taking the oath 
 on the portico of the capitol, he stepped out of the front 
 door of the White House, stepped down into the street 
 and took up his place again in the ranks of the common 
 people. Such a thing as final defeat he never for a 
 moment acknowledged. The want of a party he did 
 not feel. Obscurity was his birth-place and had no 
 terrors for him. The unbroken isolation in which he 
 found himself, so far from cowing his spirits, raised 
 them to an unwonted height of self-glorification. At a 
 moment when he seemed buried beneath a popular 
 repudiation almost universal, he thought it no presump- 
 tion to put himself on the same level with the most 
 
614 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 illustrious and the most masterful of his predecessors, 
 and, like Washington and Jackson, speak to the people 
 in the language of a father of his country. Side by 
 side with the Inaugural Address of President Grant— 
 of which all that is memorable now are the declaration 
 that, while feeling ' ' the responsibilities of the position, ' ' 
 he, unlike Washington, "accepted them without fear," 
 and the reflection cast upon the course of his immediate 
 predecessor by the promise to execute all laws whether 
 meeting his approval or not, and to have no policy to 
 enforce against the will of the people— there sped 
 across the country the Farewell Address of ex-Presi- 
 dent Andrew Johnson, vindicating the policy of his ad- 
 ministration in terms of equal self-sufficiency, and re- 
 hearsing "the catalogue of crimes" of the majority in 
 Congress in a style as direct and unsparing as that in 
 which the writer of the Declaration of Independence 
 denounces the usurpations of "Great George, Our 
 King."* In short, after the four years battle, if the 
 multitudinous hosts of the victors were at last taking 
 exclusive possession of the field, it was no less true that 
 the solitary vanquished was retreating with his face 
 to the foe, his flag unlowered, his shield unbroken, pro- 
 claiming with a far-resounding voice his faith in the 
 future triumph of his cause. 
 
 And, when viewed in the light of subsequent events, 
 it must be admitted that is was not the self-assurance of 
 Grant— regarded at the time by some of his worshippers 
 as sublime— but the self-assurance of Johnson— re- 
 garded at the time as ridiculous when not disregarded 
 
 * Published in pamphlet and in newspapers of the period. 
 
CONCLUSION 615 
 
 with, contempt— that rested upon solid grounds. Won- 
 derful as was the career of Andrew Johnson up to his 
 accession to the Presidency, his exploits in the last six 
 years of his life were more wonderful still. Hardly 
 had he struck the bottom of the abyss into which his 
 descent from the topmost pinnacle precipitated him, 
 before he began to gather his scattered forces to begin 
 the slow and toilsome reascent. Not a moment was 
 wasted in supineness, in useless upbraidings of fortune, 
 in unavailing lamentations ; not even an hour spared for 
 much needed rest. In fact, even before the close of his 
 presidency he had signified to his friends in Tennessee 
 his willingness to run for governor at the approaching 
 election, with a view of being sent at once to the Senate 
 of the United States. His own state was set all agog 
 by the heralded return of her once favourite sdn, and 
 his first footfall on her soil shook the hybrid tyranny 
 that defiled her to its very base. 
 
 The Republican state convention of the twentieth 
 of May, 1869, broke up in a fight between the faction 
 that favoured the abandonment of a proscriptive policy 
 against the whites and the faction that still kept up the 
 cry of "No quarter to rebels ! ' ' and the result was two 
 conventions and two tickets. Senter, the speaker of 
 the Senate and, by virtue of that office, governor in the 
 absence of Brownlow, was the candidate of the first 
 faction ; and, strange to say, he was favoured by Brown- 
 low himself— the fiercest foe of Johnson— sitting now 
 in the recent seat of Johnson's son-in-law in the Senate 
 of the United States. Col. William B. Stokes was the 
 candidate of the second. The opportunity afforded by 
 
616 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 this split the ex-President did not let slip. He advised 
 his friends and the conservatives at large to throw their 
 united force in favour of the candidate who would open 
 the avenue which led to their normal supremacy. As 
 for himself, the Senate of the United States was the 
 goal on which he had fixed his eye; he longed for a 
 return to that chamber which had witnessed his trial 
 for high crimes and misdemeanours. Accordingly, his 
 part in the ensuing canvass was to traverse the state, 
 endeavour by speaking as of yore to the people to re- 
 gain his former position and power, to help elect a con- 
 servative governor and, above all, to secure a legisla- 
 ture hostile to the radicals and friendly to his national 
 policy and to the redemption of his fame. Before the 
 campaign began, he was prostrated by an attack of a 
 painful disease to which he was subject. During the 
 campaign, he was summoned from a speaking tour by 
 the untimely and sudden death of his son. But nothing 
 could stay him — neither life nor death, principalities 
 nor powers. He held right on to the end. The elec- 
 tion took place in August, and the triumph of the 
 whites was overwhelming. Senter was elected gov- 
 ernor by fifty thousand majority, and the conservatives 
 captured both houses of the legislature, reducing the 
 ultra-radicals to a mere handful. As Tennessee was 
 the first of the seceding states to undergo the yoke of 
 carpet-bag Africanization, so Tennessee was the first 
 to throw it off. The lower House rejected the fifteenth 
 amendment by nays 57 to yeas 12, and the upper House 
 did not deign to report it for action. And this sudden 
 revolution was, to a great extent, due to the mere pres- 
 
CONCLUSION 617 
 
 ence of Andrew Johnson within the borders of the 
 state. Immediately after the election, it was taken for 
 granted all over the country that the ex-President's 
 return to the Senate was assured, and that, on the 
 fourth of March, 1871, the defendant in the great Im- 
 peachment Trial, taking the seat of the much-abused 
 Fowler, would beard the judges who condemned him in 
 their own chamber. 
 
 But this exquisite piece of retributive justice was 
 not to be accomplished yet. Johnson was not to re- 
 mount the car that climbs the capitol by so speedy a 
 process. As fortune was shaping events, his struggle 
 for retrieval was but beginning. The peculiar and 
 disheartening weakness of the ex-President's present 
 position was the same that had pursued him during the 
 whole course of his administration;— he did not, 
 strictly, belong to either of the parties into which the 
 country was divided. His lifelong connection with the 
 Democratic party, he severed when its Southern wing 
 went over into secession. His shortlived connection 
 with the Republican party dissolved of itself when that 
 party began to subordinate the restoration of the Union 
 to the prolongation of its power. The consequence 
 was that, for the time being, he hovered between the 
 two. The Democrats turned a cold shoulder on him 
 because of his alliance with the Republicans in a 
 cardinal moment, while the Republicans banished him 
 to what they considered the congenial company of his 
 former friends. Neither could see that while it was 
 they that moved, it was he that remained stationary. 
 While he was doing battle for a Union such as he was 
 
618 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 brought up to believe the Constitution made perpetual, 
 his state was overrun in the name of the Congress by 
 enfranchised negroes led by a few whites; and this 
 dominant faction, depending for its very existence upon 
 the opponents of his policy in the nation, could cherish 
 for him nothing less than the most deadly animosity. 
 During the progress of the long fight, many of his ad- 
 herents of former days were lured into the camp ,of the 
 radicals by the potent consideration that the radicals 
 were patronized by the party dominant in the United 
 States. So that by the time he retired from the presi- 
 dency, there were comparatively few Johnson Republi- 
 cans in all wide Tennessee. This doleful prospect, the 
 recent victory of conservative principles might have 
 been expected to brighten. But that victory did not 
 create a Johnson party; it accrued to the benefit of the 
 Democratic party; and the Democratic party adopted 
 the Johnson policy without altogether adopting John- 
 son. The leaders were ready to applaud him for his 
 gallant stand while President on the question of recon- 
 struction, but there were many who could not forget, 
 even if they could forgive, his desertion of his section 
 at the outbreak of the war or his iron rule as military 
 governor over his prostrate state. 
 
 The newly elected legislature met in October; a ma- 
 jority of the members having been chosen to elect John- 
 son United States senator. But, because of the influences 
 we have just indicated, that majority was somewhat 
 heterogeneous and unreliable. Of the Democrats, 
 many were lukewarm, to say the least, in the support 
 of the old Unionist. Among the Eepublicans who 
 
CONCLUSION 619 
 
 shared in the Senter revolt, some yielded to the frantic 
 expostulations of Brownlow who could brook the devil 
 for a colleague rather than the ' ' dead dog of the White 
 House." According to the 'Parson's' own admission, 
 money was freely used by himself and by the party of 
 the administration to elect any other candidate. They 
 made secret alliances with the more inveterate seces- 
 sionists. They preferred a "red-handed rebel" to the 
 indomitable "Andy." Notwithstanding these efforts 
 of his adversaries, the genuine supporters of the ex- 
 President would have maintained their majority, had 
 it not been for an unexpected defection among their 
 own number. It was the immemorial custom to choose 
 the two senators alternately from different sections of 
 the state, and the choice of Johnson as the successor of 
 Fowler would throw both senators into the eastern 
 quarter. Plying the wavering members with this argu- 
 ment, Brownlow, at last, offered to throw the votes of 
 his followers to Henry Cooper who lived in the middle 
 part of the state and was the brother of Edmund 
 Cooper— for a time, private secretary of President 
 Johnson, at this crisis a member of the legislature and 
 one of the stanchest and most influential of Johnson's 
 supporters. This maneuvre put an end to the con- 
 test; Edmund and his following being won over and 
 Johnson defeated by one vote. The successful candi- 
 date, although elected by the help of Brownlow, after 
 taking his seat in the Senate adhered without wavering 
 to the opposition to President Grant's administration. 
 The victory was won over Johnson in person but not 
 over Johnson's policy. 
 
620 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 Forced to be content with this one-sided triumph, 
 Johnson retired from the field to await the next op- 
 portunity to achieve the object of his ambition. The 
 senatorial term of the one man who had done so much 
 to deprive him of the prize of the recent contest would 
 expire in a few years, and he bent his eye upon the 
 succession. During the years that must elapse he set 
 to work organizing, solidifying and disciplining a party 
 behind him. Standing midway between the ex-seces- 
 sionists on the one hand and the reunited radicals on 
 the other, he drew from the former those who could 
 bring themselves to forget the wounds of the war in 
 order to defeat the policy of the federal administration 
 and swing the state into line with the steadfast De- 
 mocracy of the North ; and he drew from the latter the 
 white men whom events day by day were convincing 
 that prosperity would only return with the return of 
 the intelligence, the industry and the honesty of the 
 people to the government of the state. The gospel he 
 preached was the necessity of securing the ascendency 
 of the whites, and the folly of throwing the manage- 
 ment of political affairs into the hands of the extreme 
 Democrats; a course which could only result in the 
 state being forced back into bondage by the federal 
 authorities. The first term of Grant drew near its 
 close; the condition of the reconstructed states under 
 the treatment of his administration had already dis- 
 gusted into open revolt many of the most high-minded 
 members of his party in the North. Tennessee having 
 been assigned another representative in Congress, 
 because of the want of time to reapportion the state, 
 
CONCLUSION 621 
 
 the additional member was to be elected by the 
 people at large in 1872. The Democrats nomi- 
 nated the ex-confederate general Cheatham, and the 
 Republicans Horace Maynard, for the place. At the 
 call of his friends, Johnson consented to anticipate 
 the time he had set for his own rehabilitation, and for 
 the sake of his middle party to shift his aim from the 
 more striking triumph of a reentrance to the Senate to 
 a seat in the House as the representative of the entire 
 state. The campaign was bitterly fought. The three 
 candidates appealed personally to the people; John- 
 son, the common mark of the other two on the right 
 hand and on the left. Again, his course at the out- 
 break and during the war served to draw from his sup- 
 port the old-time Democrats, while its singular heroism 
 was lost upon the radicals who applauded it so loudly 
 at the time. "Traitor to his state and tyrant to his 
 race ' ' were the charges flung at him from one quarter— 
 "Apostate from his party and ally of Jefferson Davis," 
 from the other. Again, the Republican being elected,, 
 he suffered defeat, but only to fall back upon his orig- 
 inal plan— the goal of which was the United States 
 Senate. 
 
 From that time all his energies were strained to gain 
 for himself a faithful majority in the legislature whiqh 
 was to elect the successor of Brownlow. The task 
 seemed hopeless to every one but himself. The con- 
 test of 1872— both presidential and state— had resulted 
 in throwing Tennessee back into the hands of the federal 
 administration and reuniting the radicals for the shar- 
 ing of the spoils. The Democratic opposition waxed 
 
622 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 more bitter; the heart-burnings of the war rekindled 
 and to the more inveterate secessionists Johnson grew 
 more and more distasteful. At the beginning of the 
 campaign of 1874, however, a reaction had set in so 
 powerful that the Republicans, despairing of electing 
 a senator of their own party, were reduced to the ex- 
 pedient of making coalitions with the Johnson men 
 in most of the counties and senatorial districts. The 
 contest before the people, therefore, was narrowed 
 down to one between Andrew Johnson, on the one hand, 
 and the only other prominent avowed candidates— 
 William B. Bate (the present U. S. senator) and John 
 C. Brown, both democrats, on the other. When the 
 legislature met in joint-meeting (January 20, 1875) 
 Brownlow, who the day before in the House had but 
 two votes, and Hawkins, who had but one— these two 
 being the only Republican candidates— got none; so 
 that the struggle continued before the legislature, as it 
 had raged in the campaign, between Johnson and the 
 Democrats proper. The first ballot stood Johnson 36, 
 Bate 19, Brown 18, and others scattering — necessary 
 to a choice 51. The balloting continued every day, 
 until the twenty-sixth, with varying fortunes. The 
 thirty-fourth ballot stood Johnson 34, Brown 32, Bate 
 10, when Brown was withdrawn ; and, on the next ballot, 
 the vote stood Johnson 33, Bate 24, Stephens 21, others 
 scattering. On the last ballot taken on the twenty-fifth, 
 the vote stood Bate 46, Johnson 44, Ewing 8, Sneed 
 1 ; when Brown was again put in nomination and Bate 
 withdrawn. The next day, Brown having declined, the 
 final and fifty-fifth ballot stood Johnson 52, Stephens 
 
CONCLUSION 623 
 
 25, others scattering ; and Johnson was declared elected. 
 A harder-won, better-deserved and more signal 
 triumph does not adorn the annals of time. As was 
 truly said on the floor of the Senate, after his death : 
 
 "His last election to a seat on this floor as Senator was 
 the work of his own hands, brought about by his own in- 
 domitable will and pluck, the reward of a long and terrible 
 contest, continuing for seven years, unsuccessful for a time, 
 and appearing to all the world beside himself as utterly 
 hopeless; nevertheless, finally, he was triumphant. Prom 
 what I have learned from those who are familiar with this, 
 his last contest, he exhibited more openly his true and 
 peculiar nature, than at any other period of his life — 
 which was to fight with all his might and all his ability, 
 asking no quarter, and granting none ; and although like 
 bloody Richard now and then unhorsed, still to fight and 
 never surrender, until victory perched upon his. banner. ' '* 
 
 On Thursday, the fourth day of March, 1875, just six 
 years from the day when, as retiring President, he was 
 conspicuous by his absence from the side of the Presi- 
 dent-elect: — Andrew Johnson reappeared on the floor of 
 the Senate and was greeted by a spontaneous outburst 
 of applause from the crowds assembled in gallery and 
 corridor to do him honour: The next day, when the 
 Senate organized in special session, at the call of his 
 name, his sturdy figure, clad in old-fashioned black, 
 marches down the aisle to take the oath. He stands be- 
 fore that desk where once was read the foul telegram of 
 Brownlow, whom he has now pushed from his stool. He 
 
 * Speech of sen. Bogy at obsequies of Johnson. Globe, 1st 
 44th Cong., p. 340. 
 
624 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 looks into the uneasy eye of Henry Wilson, who once 
 pronounced him "a violator of the Constitution, a 
 violator of the laws, and a violator of his oath," and 
 expressed a desire to disqualify him from office forever ; 
 hut who now as Vice President is constrained to tender 
 him the book. Sumner— once so fond of calling him "a 
 wicked man " ; "an enemy to his country " ; " the lineal 
 successor of Jefferson Davis"— is gone. But Boutwell, 
 who discovered the "hole in the sky" into which "to 
 project this enemy of two races of men" sits there in the 
 place of Wilson, meditating, perhaps, on that "mys- 
 terious Providence" which so fatefully arranged the 
 figures in Carpenter's painting. As the new senator 
 goes hack to his desk which his admirers have covered 
 with flowers, his colleagues flock around him with con- 
 gratulations—even senators who had voted him guilty. 
 Egotistic, as it was so often said he was, he wears his 
 hard-won laurels with the utmost modesty. He seems to 
 have harboured no grudges. Said Morton: "After I 
 had voted for his impeachment, and met him acci- 
 dentally, he wore the same kindly smile as in times be- 
 fore and offered me his hand. I thought that showed 
 nobility of soul. There were not many men who could 
 have done that!"* But, although all display of his 
 emotions was suppressed, there can be no doubt but, as 
 another senator said : ' ' That was a grand occasion for 
 him and his heart was glad. " " This last triumph must 
 have given him more sincere and deeply felt gratifica- 
 tion than any other of his life. ' ' The first ex-President 
 
 * Globe., 1st Sess. 44th Cong., p. 338. 
 
CONCLUSION 625 
 
 of the United States who ever became a senator, Andrew 
 Johnson is also the last. 
 
 But great as was his personal triumph, the triumph of 
 his policy was still more significant. Six years of con- 
 gressional reconstruction proved enough to bedim even 
 the glory of the hero of Appomattox. The House of 
 Representatives that once impeached Andrew Johnson 
 by so overwhelming a majority is now in the hands of 
 the Democrats. The two-thirds majority in the Senate, 
 notwithstanding the reinforcements from ten dragooned 
 states, has dwindled away. One by one, the Africanized 
 rotten boroughs, despite the support of the federal ad- 
 ministration and the United States army, have fallen or 
 are falling. Soon no relic will remain of that hybrid 
 empire, except South Carolina wallowing in the black 
 mire Of anarchy and corruption ; Louisiana writhing in 
 the forced embrace of a Kellogg; and a stray negro 
 illustrating the equality of men by misrepresenting his 
 state in the Senate or his district in the House; and 
 these unhealthy survivals, even the colossal fraud of 1876 
 cannot keep alive. Everywhere throughout that region, 
 the so-called "rebel element" is in the ascendent— and 
 in the ascendent, too, by the connivance, if not by the -in- 
 vitation, of its original denouncers, themselves appalled 
 by the intolerable miseries their own plan has entailed. 
 Every measure forced through with all the violence of 
 revolution to make sure the supremacy of the Repub- 
 lican party in the restored Union— the fourteenth 
 amendment, the reconstruction acts with their martial 
 law, their negro conventions, their negro elections and 
 their negro constitutions— have proved worse than 
 40 
 
626 IMPEACHMENT OP PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 fruitless. To the much abused policy of Andrew John- 
 son, his adversaries are driven to come round at last. 
 Nought remains of congressional reconstruction but un- 
 qualified negro suffrage, and that surviving achieve- 
 ment is more and more distinctly recognized as a curse 
 to both races, as a stumbling block to good government 
 and a deadly taint to the social order, which even the 
 fifteenth amendment should be suffered no longer to per- 
 petuate. 
 
 The special session was devoted to the consideration 
 of the deplorable situation of public affairs in Louisiana 
 and to the question of the admission, as one of her sena- 
 tors, of a mulatto rejoicing in the high-sounding name 
 of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. On Monday, 
 the twenty-second day of March, Andrew Johnson 
 addressed the Senate. Great was the curiosity to" hear 
 the once-impeached President, before a tribunal many 
 of whose members had pronounced him guilty of high 
 crimes and misdemeanours, impeach, in his turn, the 
 conduct of his successor. Once again, as in 1861, 
 Andrew Johnson of Tennessee on the floor of the Senate 
 was the hero of the hour. These were his opening 
 words: 
 
 "TVEr. President, notwithstanding I have been in the habit 
 of speaking in public for a number of years, sometimes in 
 deliberative bodies and sometimes before the people, I 
 confess that I appear, before the Senate this morning under 
 great embarrassment. I fear that the fact of my having 
 obtained the floor on Saturday night and notice having 
 been given that I would address the Senate to-day may 
 have created an expectation with some that cannot be 
 
CONCLUSION 627 
 
 realized, and especially so with those who are not ac- 
 quainted with me. If any such expectation has been cre- 
 ated in the minds of any of those here present, I trust 
 and hope that they will let themselves down, for they will 
 be greatly disappointed on this occasion." 
 
 The same peculiarities of style and diction, the same 
 traits of character, the same habit of keeping the people 
 ever in his eye, that marked the first, mark this his last 
 speech in the Senate. His personal self-sufficiency, his 
 unbounded confidence in the rectitude of his public acts, 
 the steady fire of his combativeness, and the determina- 
 tion to yield not an inch to opponents or betrayers— are 
 all there. He handled the conduct of the Grant adminis- 
 tration without gloves. Not without a suspicion of mis- 
 chievous irony, he went so far as to maintain that the 
 present President had the less excuse for his high- 
 handed treatment of the Louisiana legislature because 
 as general of the army under President Johnson he 
 had before him a bright precedent in the refusal of that 
 administration to aid governor Brownlow in dragoon- 
 ing the legislature of Tennessee. He struck directly at 
 the two vulnerable spots in the President's armour;— 
 his ambition for a third term and his frequent ac- 
 ceptance of gifts ; in condemnation of the latter narrat- 
 ing in full the ignominious punishment Sir John 
 Trevor, speaker of the House of Commons, was forced 
 to inflict upon himself ' ' for receiving a gratuity of one 
 thousand guineas from the City of London." He once 
 again employed his favourite quotation : ' ' Upon what 
 meat does our Caesar feed that he has grown so great?" 
 He warned his countrymen against the advent of 
 
628 IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 
 
 ' ' Stratocracy, ' ' a word, the etymology of which he char- 
 acteristically is careful to give, and he wound up his 
 speech by a studied exposition of the distinctive features 
 of that form of government and the signs of its ap- 
 proach.* 
 
 On the next day but one, the Senate adjourned 
 sine die and Andrew Johnson went home. If not with 
 the northern section of his country nor altogether with 
 his contemporaries in his own, with posterity he had 
 vindicated his character both public and private. For 
 him a new day seemed to have dawned. Before him a 
 second senatorial career opened as glorious as the first. 
 He was in the sixty-seventh year of his age, but, despite 
 repeated attacks of a painful disorder which clung 
 about him, time seemed to have dealt mercifully 
 with him. His step was vigorous, his eye bright, his 
 form erect, his spirits high. But all these symptoms 
 were fallacious. In reality, his work was done. His re- 
 turn to the Senate, as it constituted the unique triumph 
 of his career, was to be its last. He spent the 
 spring and early summer at his home in Greenville in 
 quiet. In the last days of July, he started on a visit to 
 a daughter then living a few miles away, apparently 
 in the best of nealth. There, on the twenty-ninth, 
 he was stricken with paralysis, and after linger- 
 ing in a state of semi-unconsciousness until the thirty- 
 first, on that day he died. As befitted his character and 
 career, his funeral was plain and unostentatious — with- 
 out ecclesiastical ceremonial or the pageantry of woe; 
 but, as was said by one of his fellow-senators, ' ' the hills 
 
 * Globe, special session of Senate, March, 1875, p. 121. 
 
CONCLUSION 629 
 
 and the valleys and the mountains and the rivers sent 
 forth their thousands to testify to the general grief at 
 the irreparable loss. ' ' From his modest brick dwelling 
 standing flush with the street, his remains were first 
 borne to the court house, where, wrapped in the flag of 
 the Union, they lay two days in state ; and thence to the 
 summit of a conical hill just south of the village— the 
 place selected by himself for his burial. A tall, grace- 
 ful shaft of white granite, erected by the pious efforts of 
 his most devoted daughter and visible for miles around, 
 now marks the spot— on its top an eagle in act to swoop, 
 near its base the inscription: "Andrew Johnson, 
 seventeenth President of the United States. His faith in 
 the people never wavered. ' ' In the distance, a grand out- 
 lying mountain-block, its hither side carved as it were 
 in undulating folds of purple, keeps its everlasting 
 watch. There, surrounded by his kindred dead, after 
 his lifelong battle, rests, at last, the stubbornest fighter 
 in civil affairs among the self-made champions of the 
 modern democracy. 
 
 End. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Alabama, 18 ; bill to admit reported to 
 
 House, 521. 
 Alta Vela matter, history of, 397 ; 
 
 Nelson's explanation of, 470. 
 Amendment, Fourteenth , first form re- 
 ported, 44 ; passed House, 45 ; de- 
 feated in Senate, 60 ; second form 
 reported, 91, 92 ; amended in 
 Senate, 94 ; adopted by Senate, 
 95 ; by House, 97 ; ratified by. 
 Conn, and N. H. id.; by Tenn., 
 99. 
 Fifteenth, 609. 
 Anthony, Henry B., senator from 
 Rhode Island, favors Stockton's 
 title, 73 ; inquires as to intent of 
 Nelson, 487 ; his intimacy with 
 Chase, 516 ; reported sound, 522 ; his 
 vote of " Guilty," 551. 
 Arkansas, 3, 10 ; bill to admit reported, 
 518 ; senate refuses to take it up, 563. 
 Army Appropriation Bill, section 
 added to, depriving President of 
 functions as commander-in-chief, 
 201 ; protest of President, 202 ; his- 
 tory of, 202 n. 
 Ashley, James M., rep. "from Ohio, 
 offers impeachment resolution, 152; 
 his connection with Conover ; his be- 
 lief in complicity of A. J. in murder 
 of Lincoln, 147, 154 ; his connection 
 with Baker, 155 ; remarks in favor 
 of continuing impeachment, 210 ; 
 brings Baker to com. 234 ; recom- 
 mends Conover's pardon, 279 ; com- 
 munications with him, 281 ; last ex- 
 amination before Imp. Com. 291 et 
 seq.; his theory as to the assassina- 
 
 tion, 292 ; remarks in debate on final 
 impeachment, 361. 
 " Assassination Committee," House 
 appoints, 237. 
 
 Baker, LaFayette C, his testimony be- 
 fore Imp. Inv. committee in re 
 Adamson letter, 155-6 ; also as to 
 Mrs. Harris, and Booth's diary, 234 ; 
 does not appear and House issues 
 warrant for, 238 ; re-examined, 290. 
 Binckley, John M., his report on Con- 
 over'spardonas acting Atty.-Gen., 278 
 Bingham, John A., rep. from Ohio, at- 
 tack on Raymond, 41 ; tilt with But- 
 ler, 213 ; remarks on final impeach- 
 ment, 360, 369 ; appointed on com- 
 mittee to notify Senate, 374 ; remarks 
 on the notion that Johnson was not 
 President, 380 ; selected as one of the 
 managers, 385 ; reports article XI, 
 386 ; counter-signs Butler's Alta 
 Vela letter, 399 ; protests against de- 
 lay, 401 ; argument on proviso of 
 Tenure Act, 449, 451 ; makes closing 
 argument, 505 ; style of speaker, 506 ; 
 peroration, 512-3 ; remarks on right 
 of House to investigate senators, 564 ; 
 at Chicago convention, 571. 
 Black, Jeremiah S., writes veto mes- 
 sage on reconstruction act, 203 ; char- 
 acter of as a writer, 204 ; relations 
 with Stanton, 244, 247-8-9 ; relation 
 of Stanton to Buchanan's Ad., 252 ; 
 to Lincoln's, 264 ; named as one of 
 the counsel of the President, 396 ; 
 withdraws, 397 ; hypothetical de- 
 nouncement of Stanton, 595. 
 
 631 
 
632 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Blaine, James G., rep. from Maine, re- 
 marks on Nebraska proviso, 166 ; 
 opposes impeachment, 217 ; tilt with 
 Stevens, 217-8 ; counter-signs But- 
 ler's Alta Vela letter, 399. 
 
 Blair, Montgomery, letter of Johnson 
 to, 9. 
 
 Bogy, Lewis V., sen. from Mo., remark 
 at obsequies of Johnson, 623. 
 
 Boutwell, George S., rep. from Mass., 
 leads negro-suffragists in House, 42 ; 
 remarks of, on Dist. Col. suffrage bill, 
 43 ; pursues Jeff. Davis on charge of 
 complicity in Lincoln's assassina- 
 tion, 138 ; prepares report on, 141 ; 
 his investigation on delay of Sur- 
 ratt's arrest, his report thereon, 143-6; 
 moves final amendment to Nebraska 
 and Colorado bills, 167 ; writes sec- 
 tion to army bill, 202 n.; remarks of, 
 on veto message on second supple- 
 mentary act, 227 ; what he would 
 have done with Jeff. Davis, 232 ; 
 Stanley Matthews te'stimony, effect 
 of, on, 236 ; interrogates Grant, 238 
 and n ; extracts from speech of, on 
 first impeachment, 296 ; on Johnson's 
 remark concerning Dem. party, 301 ; 
 on his ability, 303 ; prophecy of, 
 312 ; remark of, on second impeach- 
 ment, 335 ; remarks of, on final im- 
 peachment, 360, 362, 368 ; that John- 
 son is only Vice President, 380 ; 
 selected manager, 385 ; his argument 
 on the question whether Stanton was 
 within the Tenure act, 448, 451 ; opens 
 the final arguments, 457 ; analysis of 
 his, 458-467 ; his allusion to Carpen- 
 ter's painting, 461 ; his invective 
 against the President, 465 ; the hole 
 in the sky, 467 ; U. S. senator, 
 624. 
 
 Bradley, Joseph P., counsel for Sur- 
 ratt, his statement as to petition for 
 mercy, 274. 
 
 Brooks, James, rep. from N. Y., calls 
 for last letter of Johnson in corre- 
 spondence with Grant, 332 ; remarks 
 of, on final impeachment, 370. 
 
 Brownlow, "Parson," gov. of Tenn., 
 letter of, to Speaker, 44; character 
 and career, 97-8 : forces ratification 
 of 14th Amd., 98-9 ; his telegram to 
 Forney, 100 ; succeeds Patterson, 615 ; 
 uses money to defeat Johnson, 619 : 
 Johnson succeeds him, 623. 
 
 Browning, Orville H., Sec. of Interior, 
 108; letter corroboratory of President 
 vs. Grant, 334. 
 
 Buckalew, Charles R., sen. from Penn., 
 argument on tenure-of-office bill, 
 187-9 ; argues that power to call 
 Congress together is with President, 
 221 ; rebukes Sumner for abusing 
 President, 230 ; remarks on Johnson- 
 Grant correspondence, 338 ; criticism 
 of article XI, 388 ; makes report of 
 committee to investigate senators, 
 571. 
 
 Burleigh, Walter A., Dakota delegate, 
 pumps Thomas, 350 ; witness on trial, 
 417. 
 
 Butler, Benjamin F., in convention of 
 private soldiers, 128 ; believes in the 
 complicity of Johnson in murder of 
 Lincoln, 147 ; personal appearance 
 and character of, 208 ; remarks of, on 
 impeachment, 211 ; quarrel with 
 Bingham; 213-4 ; remarks of, on 
 Mrs. Surratt and Booth's diary, 215- 
 6 ; objects to adjournment, 217 ; dis- 
 covers pardon of deserters, 222 ; re- 
 marks of, on impeachment, 228 ; 
 chairman of "assassination com.," 
 237 ; remarks of on final impeach- 
 ment, 362 ; on articles, 378 ; on his 
 own article, 384 ; selected manager, 
 385 ; ludicrous incident on trial, 395; 
 remarks of, on delay, 396 ; his letter 
 on Alta Vela, 398 ; opens trial, 404 : 
 
INDEX 
 
 633 
 
 argument of, 408-416; contrasted 
 with Curtis's, 422 ; protests against 
 delay, 442 ; falls foul of Kelson about 
 Alta Vela, 486 ; his telegram to N. 
 H. Eep. Conv., 515 ; panic of, 521 ; 
 his manager's report, 571. 
 
 Cameron, Simon, sen. from Penn., his 
 statement concerning Stanton, 2P4- 
 5; his eagerness to vote " Guilty," 
 551. 
 
 Campaign of 1866, real issue of, 109 ; 
 falsified, 110 ; result of, 132-3. 
 of 1867, result of, 288. 
 of 1868, result of, 603. 
 
 Carpenter, Matthew H.,sen. from Mich, 
 in 4lst Cong., efforts of to procure for 
 Stanton his appointment to Supreme 
 Court, 593; his hypothetical de- 
 nouncement of, 595. 
 
 Chandler, Zach., sen. from Mich., 
 meets Stanton, 265 ; his form of reso- 
 lution condemning removal of Stan- 
 ton, 348; relates conversation with 
 Stanton, 593. 
 
 Chase, Salmon P., chief justice, before 
 Imp. com., 233; his opinion that 
 Senate on trial of impeachments is a 
 court disregarded, 389 ; President at- 
 tends his reception, id.; takes chair 
 and oath on trial, 390; adverse rul- 
 ings, 390, 391, 393 ; his right to de- 
 cide questions of evidence in first 
 instance affirmed, also his right to 
 vote in case of tie, 417 ; overruled by 
 Senate, 418, 419, 440, 442, 445, 446; 
 reads views on article XI, 518 ; his 
 dinner incident magnified, 524 ; de- 
 cides motion to adjourn while voting 
 on articles out of order and is over- 
 ruled, 554; same on motion to re- 
 scind, 575. 
 
 Civil Eights Bill, introduced in Senate, 
 42; passes Senate and House, 60; 
 veto of, 80 ; passed over veto, 82-83 ; 
 
 an epoch in our constitutional his 
 tory, 84-86. 
 Clark, Daniel, sen. from N. JEL, leads 
 in the ejection of Stockton, 66, 67, 
 70, 76-78. 
 Clark, Horace F., bail for Jeff. Davis, 
 
 233. 
 Churchill, John C, rep. from N. Y., 
 changes his vote on Imp. com., 290. 
 Colfax, Schuyler, consults with Stan- 
 ton, 15 ; votes on overriding veto of 
 Civil Rights Bill, 83; for impeach- 
 ment, 373 ; nominee for Vice Presi- 
 dent, present at last voting of court 
 of impeachment, 576. 
 Colorado, territory of, votes on reject- 
 ing and adopting constitution, 65 ; 
 bill to admit introduced in Senate, 
 65 ; defeated, 65-6 ; revived by Wil- 
 son, 89 ; passed, 90 ; passed House, 
 id.; letter and interviews of senators- 
 elect, 91 ; vetoed, id.; Wade intro- 
 duces fresh bill, 158 ; passes Senate 
 with proviso, 164 ; House rejects pro- 
 viso, 166; Boutwell's amendment 
 adopted and bill passes both Houses, 
 167-9 ; veto message exposes change 
 in phraseology, 171 ; bill laid aside, 
 173 ; called up, id.;, caucus on, 178 ; 
 final attempt to pass foiled, 179. 
 Conkling, Roscoe, succeeds Harris as 
 sen. from N. Y., 207; has the word 
 " court " stricken out of the rules for 
 trial of impeachment, 377 ; his silent 
 course on trial, 532. 
 Congress, the thirty-ninth, number of 
 members, 22 ; counter-plan of re- 
 construction of, 27 ; short session, 
 135 ; designs of majority, 135-6 ; 
 bill fixing meetings on March 
 4th, 149 ; loth to die, 2Q7. 
 the fortieth, personnel of, 207; 
 passes supplementary reconstruc- 
 tion act, 212 ; July meeting, 22S ; 
 reverses Atty-Gen., 225 ; adjourns 
 
634 
 
 INDEX 
 
 to Sept., 597 ; adjourns until after 
 Oct. election and then after pres- 
 idential, 602. 
 Conness, John, sen. from Cal., resents 
 idea that Stanton seeks protection 
 under tenure bill, 192 ; interrupts 
 reading of last message of President, 
 604. 
 Conover, Sanford (alias Charles A. 
 Dunham), professional witness on 
 trial of assassins, 138 ; suborns wit- 
 nesses who swear he fabricated their 
 depositions, 138-9 ; disappears, 139 ; 
 arrested, tried for perjury, convicted 
 and sentenced, 142 ; applies for par- 
 don, 154, 155 ; his two petitions for 
 pardon, 278-281 ; pardoned, id. n. 
 Convention, National Union at Phila., 
 call for, 99 ; meets, 111-12 ; com- 
 mittee of, waits on President, 112. 
 " Jack Hamilton," 126. 
 Cleveland, " soldiers and sailors," 
 
 127. 
 Butler's, 128. 
 
 Republican National of 1868, 
 called, 315 ; meets, 571 ; action 
 against President and recusant 
 senators, 572. 
 Democratic (1868), in New York, 
 July 4th, 600; nominates Sey- 
 mour and Blair, 602. 
 Cooper, Edmund, rep. in Cong, from 
 Tenn. and private secretary of Presi- 
 dent, negotiates with Colorado sena- 
 tors-elect, 90-91 ; elects his brother as 
 against Johnson, U. S. sen., 619. 
 Cooper, Henry, defeats Johnson for U. 
 
 S. sen., 619. 
 Couch, Major-General, heads Mass. 
 
 delegation in Phila. Conv., 112. 
 Covode, John, rep. from Pa., men- 
 tioned, 267 ; introduces impeachment 
 resolution, 346. 
 Cowan, Edgar, sen. from Pa., 23, 38 ; 
 votes to sustain veto of Fr. Bur. bill, 
 
 49 ; remark of, on ' ' Central Direct- 
 ory," 58; mentioned, 63; presents 
 protest in Stockton's case, 66 ; re- 
 mark of, on Brownlow's telegram, 
 100; reports resolutions of Phila. 
 Conv. , 112 ; denies report of his ap- 
 pointment as Sec. of War, 192. 
 
 Cox, Samuel S., visits Henderson and 
 writes telegram, 528. 
 
 Cox, Walter S., employed to defend 
 Lorenzo Thomas, 376; witness on 
 trial of President, 441. 
 
 Curtis, Benj. R., President's counsel, 
 395 ; reads answer to first article, 
 400; contrasted with Butler, 422; 
 opening of, for defence, 424-438. 
 
 Davis, Garrett, sen. from Ky., startling 
 proposition of, 57. 
 
 Davis, Henry Winter, 24 ; obsequies of 
 in House, 50. 
 
 Davis, Jefferson, captured, 136-7 ; in- 
 dicted for treason and charged with 
 complicity in assassination, 137; 
 found guilty by the military com- 
 mission, id.; depositions against 
 falsified, 138-9 ; Boutwell keeps him 
 in prison, 140 ; bailed, 232-3 ; trial of 
 postponed, 407. 
 
 Dawes, Henry L., rep. from Mass., 
 consults privately with Stanton, 15 ; 
 remark on Nebraska bill, 166; tes- 
 timony concerning Stanton, 249, 255, 
 
 Dennison, William, Postmaster-Gene- 
 ral, 16 ; addresses meeting in N. Y. 
 on Feb. 22d, 50 ; doubtful about Con- 
 gress' reconstruction plan, 94; re- 
 signs, 99, 108. 
 
 District of Columbia, bill conferring 
 suffrage on negroes in passes House, 
 and laid aside in Senate, 43 ; called 
 up and passed, 150 ; vetoed and passed 
 over veto, 150, 152. 
 
 Dix, Gen. John A., temporary presi- 
 dent of Phila. Conv., 112. 
 
INDEX 
 
 635 
 
 Dixon, James, sen. from Conu., 23 : 
 remark of on Pres. message, 31 ; votes 
 in favor of F. Bur. and civil rights 
 bills, 43 ; interview of with Presi- 
 dent, 45 ; votes to sustain veto of Fr. 
 Bur., 49 ; mentioned, 63 ; absent be- 
 cause of illness in Stockton's case, 
 77-8 ; also on vote overriding yeto of 
 civil rights bill, 81 ; remark of, on 
 plan of joint committee, 93 ; remarks 
 of on right of Arkansas senators to sit 
 in court of impeachment, 562. 
 
 Doolittle, James R., sen. from Wis., 
 23 ; votes for Fr. Bur. and civil rights 
 bills, 43 ; votes to sustain veto, 49 ; 
 mentioned, 63 ; permanent chairman 
 of Phila. Conv., 112 ; remarks of on 
 Colorado bill, 165 ; expostulates 
 against taking it up, 178 ; on tenure 
 bill proviso, 197; on committee to 
 which Stanton's suspension is re- 
 ferred, 315. 
 
 Drake, Charles D., sen. from Mo., pro- 
 poses resolution censuring President, 
 311 ; challenges right of Chief Justice 
 to rule on questions of evidence, 417. 
 
 Dunham, Charles A., see Conover 
 (Sanford). 
 
 Edmunds, George F., succeeds Foot as 
 sen. from Vt., 80; votes to override 
 veto of civil rights bill, 82 ; votes 
 against Colorado, 90 ; proviso of to 
 Nebraska and Colorado bills, 164 
 opposes Boutwell's amendment, 168 
 votes to sustain Colorado veto, 179 
 remarks of on tenure-of-office bill, 
 184, 189, 190; argues that power to 
 call Congress together lies exclusively 
 in President, 221 ; offers resolution 
 on rules of impeachment, 321; moves 
 resolution disapproving Stanton's re- 
 moval, 348; reported to be for first 
 article, 520; moves to proceed to 
 judgment, 550. 
 
 Emory, Gen. W'. H., interview with 
 President, 357, 359; sworn on trial, 
 418. 
 
 Evarts, William M., counsel for U. S. 
 in case against Davis, 233 ; before 
 Imp. Com., id.; counsel for president 
 on trial, 396 ; reads answer to articles 
 X. and XI., 401 ; replies to Butler, 
 443 ; his argument on the proviso of 
 tenure act, 451 ; on the designation of 
 Thomas, 454-6 ; character and career 
 of, 488 ; his argument, analysis of, 
 489 et seq.; extracts: what has the 
 President done ? 490 ; old lady's total 
 depravity, id. ; is this a court? 491; 
 Chinese method of discussion, 492 ; all 
 political, 493-1; Boutwell's hole in 
 the sky, 495 ; power of removal, 496 
 et seq.; charge not suitable for judi- 
 cial cognizance, 498 et seq.; on article 
 X, 500; a delightful turn, id.; close 
 of on Andrew Johnson, 501. 
 
 Farnsworth, John F., rep. from 111., 
 remark of on the Johnson-Grant cor- 
 respondence, 335 ; remarks of in de- 
 bate on final impeachment, 360 ; his 
 abuse of President, 363. 
 
 Farragut, Admiral, accompanies Presi- 
 dent on tour, 114. 
 
 Fenton, Gov., his chilling reception of 
 the President, 115. 
 
 Ferry, Thomas W., rep. from Mich., 
 takes notes of encounter between 
 Stanton and Thomas, 354; witness 
 on trial, 418. 
 
 Fessenden, William P., sen. from Me., 
 culls flowers from Sumner's speech, 
 60 ; urges Morrill to vote in Stock- 
 ton's case, 74, 75 ; votes against Col- 
 orado twice, 90 ; not voting on second 
 Nebraska and Colorado bills, 165 ; 
 candidate of conservatives for pres. 
 pro tem., character of, 175-6 ; votes 
 to sustain veto of Colorado bill, 179 ; 
 
636 
 
 INDEX 
 
 votes for non-concurrence in suspen- 
 sion of Stanton, 321 ; not voting on 
 resolution condemning his removal, 
 349 ; reported favorable to President, 
 520 ; begs for time for Grimes, 551 ; 
 his vote of "Not Guilty," 551; re- 
 mark of on right of Arkansas sena- 
 tors to sit in court of impeachment, 
 562 ; extract from opinion of, 586. 
 
 Fillmore, Ex-President, welcomes 
 President, 115. 
 
 Florida, 18. 
 
 Foot, Solomon, sen. from Vt., absent 
 from illness, 63 ; dying, 72 ; dies, 80. 
 
 Foster, LaFayette S., sen. from Conn., 
 president pro tern, of senate, 49 ; fa- 
 vor's Stockton's title, 73 ; pairs with 
 Morrill, 78; votes against Colorado, 
 90 ; votes against Nebraska and Col- 
 orado, 165 ; character of as presiding 
 officer, 174-5 ; Wade succeeds, 177-9 ; 
 votes to sustain Colorado veto, 179. 
 
 Fowler, Joseph F., sworn in as sen. 
 from Tenn., 103 ; announces vic- 
 tory of negro suffrage in Tenn., 
 173 ; non-concurs in Stanton's sus- 
 pension, 321 ; claimed by both sides, 
 516 ; almost given over, 521 ; his 
 career, 534 ; publication of Kelley's 
 report of his remarks on impeach- 
 ment, 535 ; his denial, id.; attempt 
 to poll his vote, 536 ; his vindication, 
 id.; his vote of "Not Guilty," 551; 
 his telegram concerning his vote, 572. 
 
 Freedman's Bureau, bill enlarging 
 powers of, 42 ; passes Senate and 
 House, 45 ; vetoed, 47 ; veto sustained 
 in Senate, 49 ; second bill passed, ve- 
 toed and passed over veto, 96. 
 
 Frelinghuysen, Fred. T., appointed 
 to fill vacancy caused by death of 
 Wright as sen. from N. J., 158. 
 
 Garfield, James A., rep. from Ohio, re- 
 mark of on Nebraska proviso, 166 ; 
 
 on failure of first impeachment, 314 ; 
 anxious to avoid delay but quieted 
 by Butler, 386 ; countersigns But- 
 ler's Alta Vela letter, 398. 
 
 Gayle, George W., pardon of, 305. 
 
 Georgia, 18 ; bill to admit reported to 
 House, 521. 
 
 Grant, Ulysses S., his report on condi- 
 tion of South, 37; stands at right 
 hand of President at reception of 
 committee of Phila. Conv., 113 ; ac- 
 companies President on tour, 114; 
 refuses to go to Mexico, 129-30; 
 testimony before Imp. Com., 238; 
 characterizes Stanton, 266 ; his letter 
 to President remonstrating against 
 removal of Stanton and Sheridan, 
 272 ; accepts appointment of Sec. of 
 War ad interim in place of Stanton, 
 and letter of, to latter, 283 ; interview 
 with President on the suspension, 
 284-5 ; letter against Sheridan's trans- 
 fer, 285-6 ; looked to as presidential 
 candidate, 289, 315 ; his understand- 
 ing of his promise to President and 
 action thereon, 318 ; vacates War 
 Office, 323 ; colloquy with President 
 in cabinet, 324 ; the first hostile 
 move of, 327 ; first letter of, to Presi- 
 dent in quarrel, 328; second, 329; 
 his third, 335 ; present at first inter- 
 view between Stanton and Thomas, 
 345 ; of opinion that President ought 
 to be removed, 532 ; inaugurated 
 President, 612; his inaugural ad- 
 dress, 614. 
 
 Greeley, Horace, bail for J. Davis, 233 ; 
 before Imp. Com., 233. 
 
 Groesbeck, William S., President's 
 counsel on trial in place of Black, 
 400; career and character of, 471 ; his 
 argument, exordium, 472; three de- 
 partments of government independ- 
 ent, 473 ; right of President to refuse 
 to execute unconstitutional law 474 • 
 
INDEX 
 
 637 
 
 constitutional interpretation, 475-7 ; 
 his treatment of article X, 477 ; per- 
 oration, 478. 
 Grimes, James W., sen. from la., votes 
 twice against Colorado, 90; votes 
 against Nebraska and Colorado bills, 
 165 ; votes to sustain veto of latter, 
 179 ; not voting on resolution censur- 
 ing Stanton's removal, 349 ; reported 
 favorable to President, 520; meets 
 President at Reverdy Johnson's 
 house, 546; borne into chamber to 
 vote, 551; votes "Not Guilty," 552. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, opinions of on 
 power of removal cited, 186. 
 
 Hancock, Winfield S., appointed in 
 place of Sheridan, 286; celebrated 
 order of, 287 ; transferred to new 
 military division of the Atlantic, 
 342. 
 
 Harlan, James, sec. of int., 12, 16, 18, 
 59 ; reticent on Congress reconstruc- 
 tion plan, 94 ; resigns, 108. 
 
 Harris, Ira, sen. from N. Y., favors 
 Stockton's title, 73 ; votes against 
 Colorado twice, 90 ; votes to sustain 
 veto, 179 ; succeeded by Conkling, 
 207. 
 
 Henderson, John B., sen. from Mo., 49 ; 
 votes in favor of Stockton, 73 ; only 
 Republican to vote against section to 
 army bill, 202 ; paired in favor of 
 non-concurrence in Stanton's sus- 
 pension, 321 ; not voting on resolu- 
 tion censuring his removal, 349 ; 
 claimed by both sides, 516 ; speaks 
 against first eight articles, 521 ; dines 
 with Chase, 521, 524; career of, 522; 
 attack on him by rep. from Mo., 
 524-5; proposes to resign, id.; their 
 letter to him, 526 ; their second inter- 
 view, id.; Fox's telegram, 528 ; visit 
 of S. S. Cox, telegram in reply, final 
 letter, id.; votes " Not Guilty," 552; 
 
 moves court adjourn to July 1st, 554 ; 
 testifies before House com. of investi- 
 gation, 568 ; refuses to go before man- 
 agers and lays his correspondence be- 
 fore Senate, id.; statement of as to 
 his vote on trial, 573. 
 
 Hendricks, Thomas F., sen. from Ind., 
 argument of on legality of Stockton's 
 election, 71 ; on the pair of Morrill 
 with Wright, 75, 76; inquires the 
 reason of new Colorado bill, 159 : re- 
 marks of on alteration of Colorado 
 bill, 172-3 ; protests against Wade 
 swearing in as member of court of 
 impeachment, 390. 
 
 Hoffman, John T., mayor of N. Y., 
 welcomes Johnson, 114. 
 
 Impeachment, the first resolution of- 
 fered, 152; first passed House in- 
 structing committee to investigate, 
 153 ; testimony before of Baker, 
 155-6 ; of others, 156-7 ; reports of 
 majority and minority, 157 ; passed 
 over to 40th Cong., 157-8 ; testimony 
 before, 221-2; of Baker concerning 
 Mrs. Harris and Booth's diary, 234 ; 
 of reporters concerning President's 
 tour, 235 ; first vote on of committee, 
 235 ; case reopened, 235 ; testimony 
 of Anna Surrat, 236; of Stanley Mat- 
 thews, 236 ; of Speed, 237 ; Booth's 
 letter to an actor, 237 ; Grant's testi- 
 mony, 238 ; first decision reversed, 
 290 ; Conover's mem. produced, 292 ; 
 three reports of committee analyzed, 
 293 et seq.; defeat of, 313 ; second at- 
 tempt at, 327 ; Johnson-Grant corre- 
 spondence referred, 332 ; debate on in 
 committee and attempt voted down, 
 335-6 ; Covode introduces resolution 
 for third, 346 ; reported by committee 
 and debate thereon, 359 et seq.; vote 
 on, 373 ; senate notified, 376 ; debate 
 in senate on rules, 377 ; articles re- 
 
638 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ported to House, 379 ; revised version 
 reported,;382 ; Jenckes's article voted 
 down, 383; Butler's article voted 
 down, 384; seven managers selected, 
 385; Butler's article adopted, 386; 
 article XI added, 386, 388; articles 
 presented to Senate, 389 ; senate or- 
 ganized as a court, id.; President 
 summoned, 393 ; Senate assumes ap- 
 pearance of court and President 
 called, 395 ; his counsel appear, 
 granted ten days to answer, 397; 
 answer filed, 400 ; day fixed for trial, 
 402. 
 Ingersoll, Ebon C, rep. from 111.; re- 
 mark of in debate on final impeach- 
 ment, 360. 
 
 Jenckes, Thomas A., rep. from R. I., 
 his article of impeachment, 382 
 voted down, 383. 
 
 Johnson, Andrew, in Senate, 2 ; Mil. 
 Gov. of Tenn., id.; accedes to Presi- 
 dency, under cloud, 5 ; his letter to 
 Montgomery Blair, 9 ; his plan of re- 
 construction for N. C, 16; his first 
 message, 29 ; interviews with Dixon, 
 with colored delegation, with com- 
 mittee of legislature of Va., 45, 46 ; 
 first veto, 47 ; Feb. 22d speech, 51 ; 
 abuse of, in House, 62 ; extract from 
 N. Y. World on, 63; vetoes civil 
 rights bill, 80; characteristic utter- 
 ance in Senate, 1861, 87 ; issues proc- 
 lamation of peace, id.; words to 
 soldiers and sailors, id., 88; begins to 
 turn out officers, 88 ; vetoes Colorado 
 bill, 91 ; attitude towards reconstruc- 
 tion plan of joint-com., 93; vetoes 
 second Freedmen's Bureau bill, 96 ; 
 intends to execute civil rights bill, 
 id.; message of, on admission of Tenn. 
 quoted, 102 ; his speech in the East 
 Boom to the Committee of the Phil. 
 Conv., 112-3; his tour "round the 
 
 circle, " 113 ; at Phil., 114; at New 
 York, id.; at Albany and Buffalo, 
 115; speech at Cleveland, 115-118; 
 speech at St. Louis, 118-123 ; riot at 
 Indianapolis on his return, 123 ; 
 speeches injured him, 124 ; injustice 
 of this, 125 ; effort to send Grant to 
 Mexico, 129 ; affair of Baltimore 
 Police Comrs., 130-131 ; ignores act 
 repealing section giving Pres. power 
 to proclaim amnesty, 136; annual 
 message of Dec. 1866, 148; veto of 
 Dist. Col. negro suffrage bill, 150; 
 extracts from message, 151 ; resolu- 
 tions to impeach, 152, 153; second 
 veto of Colorado bill, 169-171 ; vetoes 
 Tenure bill by advice of Cabinet in- 
 cluding Stanton, 202 ; signs Army 
 bill with protest against section de- 
 priving him of his functions as com- 
 mander-] n-ehief, 202 ; vetoes main 
 Reconstruction bill, 203 ; extracts 
 from message, 205-7; vetoes supple- 
 mentary bill, 216 ; appoints military 
 commanders, 223 ; sends instructions, 
 224 ; vetoes second supplementary 
 bill, extracts from message, 226 ; re- 
 solves to be com. -in-chief, 239 et seq.; 
 resolves to get rid of Stanton, 272 ; 
 sends for record of assassins' trial, 274; 
 discovers petition, 275 ; note to Stan- 
 ton to resign, 277 ; suspends Stanton 
 and appoints Grant ad interim, 283; 
 understanding with, 285 ; removes 
 Sheridan and appoints Hancock, 286 ; 
 speech on elections of 1867, 289 ; an- 
 nual message of 1867, 309 ; extracts, 
 310 ; sends to Senate reasons for Stan- 
 ton's suspension, 314; recommends 
 thanks to Hancock, 315 ; condemned 
 by House for removing Sheiidan, 
 316; his understanding of Grant's 
 promise, 320 ; colloquy with Grant, 
 324 ; gives Grant instructions to obey 
 no orders of Stanton, 326; first letter 
 
INDEX 
 
 639 
 
 of, in quarrel with Grant, 329 ; his 
 skill in epistolary correspondence, 
 329 ; second letter, 332 ; with letters 
 of five cabinet officers, 334 ; prepares 
 to remove Stanton, 339 ; offers post to 
 Gen. Sherman, 340-1 ; creates mili- 
 tary division of Atlantic with Gen. 
 Sherman in command and nominates 
 him brevet general ; on his declina- 
 tion nominates Thomas, 342; removes 
 Stanton and appoints Lorenzo Thom- 
 as ad interim, 344 ; informs Cabinet 
 and Senate, 346 ; sends Ewing's nomi- 
 nation to Senate, 356 ; has interview 
 with Emory, 357 ; protests against 
 action of Senate condemnatory of 
 his removal of Stanton (extract), 
 374-5 ; impeached, 373, 376 ; attends 
 Chase's reception, 389 ; is summoned, 
 393 ; vetoes bill cutting off right of 
 appeal in McCardle case, 402 ; trial 
 of, 404; his telegrams to Pro. Gov. 
 Parsons put in evidence, 419; his 
 speeches put in evidence, 419 ; charge 
 of intemperance exploded, 420; de- 
 nunciation of, by Boutwell, 465-7 ; 
 eulogy upon, by Nelson, 468-9, 470 ; 
 by Groesbeck, 478 ; denunciation of, 
 by Williams, 484-5 ; eulogy upon, by 
 Evarts, 501 ; by Stanbury, 503-5 ; his 
 main offence stated by Bingham, 509, 
 512 ; meets Grimes, 546 ; nominates 
 Schofield sec. of war, 548 ; acquitted 
 on Art. XI, 554; his demeanor dur- 
 ing trial, 555 ; indifferent to result, 
 556 ; his probable course in case of 
 conviction, 557 ; logical candidate for 
 President, 600; his letter to New 
 York citizens, 601 ; receives 65 votes, 
 602 ; his fourth annual message stirs 
 up both Houses, 603 ; his plan for 
 extinguishing national debt, 605 ; his 
 proposed constitutional amendment, 
 607 ; his proclamation of universal 
 amnesty, 608; his isolation, 611; ab- 
 
 sent from Grant's inauguration, 612 ; 
 his "Farewell Address," 614; his 
 fight for the Senate, 615 ; his peculiar 
 position, 617 ; defeated by one vote, 
 619 ; defeated for representative at 
 large, 621 ; elected U. S. Senate, 622 ; 
 sworn in, 623 ; triumph of his policy, 
 625 ; his speech at special session, 
 626 ; his death and burial, 628. 
 
 Johnson-Grant Correspondence, The, 
 337 ; remarks of Buckalew on, 338 ; 
 two letters of introduced in evidence, 
 418 ; letters of cabinet excluded, 419. 
 
 Johnson, Beverdy, sen. from Md., re- 
 mark of on ineligibility clause of 
 14th Amd., 95 ; presents committee of 
 seventy to President, 112 ; argument 
 of on tenure of office bill, 186 ; re- 
 marks of on Sumner's abuse of Presi- 
 dent, 191 ; on tenure proviso, 194 ; 
 urges President to nominate Gov. Cox 
 sec. of war, 322 ; brings about meet- 
 ing between Grimes and President, 
 546; announces Grimes at final vot- 
 ing, 551. 
 
 Julian, George W., rep. from Ind., re- 
 marks of in debate on final impeach- 
 ment, 362 ; interview with Vinnie 
 Beam, 540. 
 
 Karsner, George W., witness before 
 managers, 394 ; before Senate, 418. 
 
 Kelley, William D., rep. from Pa., one 
 of Stanton's body-guard, 353; re- 
 marks of on final impeachment, 361 ; 
 his report of Fowler's remarks on 
 impeachment, 535. 
 
 Lane, James H., sen. from Kan., 43; 
 votes to overrule veto of Fr. Bur. bill, 
 49 ; mentioned, 63 ; advocates bill to 
 admit Colorado, 65 ; votes for it, 66 ; 
 commits suicide, 537. 
 
 Lawrence, William, rep. from Ohio, 
 concedes that attempt to remove 
 
640 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Stanton is not within the tenure law, 
 366; compiles brief for Butler, 409. 
 
 Legate, witness before managers against 
 Boss implicates Pomeroy, 569. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, his plan of recon- 
 struction, 2, 3 ; speech of 11th April, 
 1865, 4 ; last meeting of cabinet, 11 ; 
 letter of to Gov. Hahn, 21. 
 
 Loan, Benj. F., rep. from Mo., offers 
 first resolution to impeach, 152. 
 
 Logan, John A., rep. from 111., remark 
 of on Jeff. Davis, 232 ; abuses Presi- 
 dent, 363 ; selected manager, 385 ; 
 counter-signs Butler's Alta Vela let- 
 ter, 398 ; files his argument on trial, 
 448 ; remark of on date of Butler let- 
 ter, 487; reports that Grant wants 
 Johnson out, 532; at Chicago con- 
 vention, 571 ; vouches for Grant, 572. 
 
 Louisiana, 2, 3, 10; bill to admit re- 
 ported to House, 521. 
 
 Madison, James, opinions of on power 
 of removal cited, 188, 189 ; his history 
 of impeachment clause in constitu- 
 tion, 297. 
 
 Managers, Board of, selected by House, 
 385; examine Karsner and Thomas, 
 394 ; organize an inquisition against 
 doubtful senators, 531 ; authorized by 
 House to investigate, 563 ; effort of 
 minority to obtain representation 
 voted down, 564; inaugurate reign 
 of terror, 567 ; imprison Woolley in 
 Miss Beam's studio, 561 ; summon 
 Henderson, 568 ; meet their ' Con- 
 over ' in Legate, 569 ; investigation 
 kept on foot after trial ; Butler only 
 makes report ; no action on, 571. 
 
 Matthews, Stanley, testifies to a remark 
 of Vice President Johnson, 237. 
 
 McCardle, Case, history of, 403, note. 
 
 McCreery, Thomas C, sen. from Ky., 
 moves the court of impeachment ad- 
 journ without day, 554. 
 
 MeDougall, James A., sen. from Cal., 
 corrects Sumner on Hoyle, 72. 
 
 McCulloch, Hugh, sec. of Treas., 16 ; 
 sustains President, 94 ; letter of cor- 
 roboratory of President vs. Grant, 334. 
 
 Merrick, Bichard T., counsel for John 
 H. Surratt, his statement concerning 
 petition for mercy, 273 ; employed to 
 defend Thomas, 376 ; witness on trial, 
 441. 
 
 Methodist Church, conference of prays 
 that senators stand firm for Presi- 
 dent's conviction, 530; the African 
 branch follows suit, 531. 
 
 Mississippi, 18, 19, 20, 21. 
 
 Moorhead, James K., rep. from Pa., 
 one of Stanton's body-guard takes 
 notes, 354; counter-signs Butler's 
 Alta Vela letter, 399 ; sworn on trial, 
 417. 
 
 Morgan, Edwin D., sen. from N. Y., 
 votes to sustain first veto, 49 ; men- 
 tioned, 63 ; in favor of Stockton's 
 title, 73 ; votes to override veto of 
 Civil Bights Bill, 82 ; votes against 
 Colorado, 90 ; votes against Nebraska 
 and Colorado again, 165 ; votes to sus- 
 tain veto of Colorado bill, 179. 
 
 Morrill, Lot M., sen. from Me., writes 
 to Stockton about pair with Wright, 
 approves Stockton's telegram, 72 ; 
 breaks his pair, 74 ; pairs with Fos- 
 ter, 78. 
 
 Morton, Oliver P., sen. from Ind., re- 
 mark of on repeal of tenure act, 
 610 ; at obsequies of Johnson, 624. 
 
 Nebraska, territory of, bill to admit 
 pressed forward, opposed by Sumner, 
 merits of, 105; passes Senate and 
 House but fails to become a law, 106 ; 
 Wade moves another bill, 158 ; de- 
 bate on, 160-4; Edmunds proviso, 
 164 ; passes Senate, id.; House rejects 
 proviso, 166 ; Boutwell's amendment 
 
INDEX 
 
 641 
 
 accepted by House, 167 ; and Senate, 
 169 ; veto, 169 ; passes over veto, 173 ; 
 admitted, 174. 
 
 Nelson, Samuel, associate justice of U. 
 S. Sup. Ct., adininistersoath to Chase, 
 390. 
 
 Nelson, Thomas A. R., counsel for the 
 President on trial, 395 ; his final ar- 
 gument, 467; characterizes President, 
 468 ; gives account of Alta Vela mat- 
 ter, 470 ; his rejoinder to Butler, 486 ; 
 files Butler's letter and addenda, 
 487 ; reply of as to intent to chal- 
 lenge, 487 ; congratulates President 
 on acquittal, 555. 
 
 Nesmith, James W., sen. from Oregon, 
 49. 
 
 New Orleans riot, 110 ; suppression of 
 Baird telegram by Stanton, 110. 
 
 North Carolina, 11 ; plan of recon- 
 struction of, 16 ; bill to admit re- 
 ported to House, 521. 
 
 Norton, Daniel S., sen. from Minn., 
 23 ; 63. 
 
 Nye, James W., sen. from Nev., urges 
 Morrill to vote in Stockton's case, 
 74 ; blurts out motive for opposing 
 delay, 76 ; remark of on President's 
 message, 217 ; warns Senate against 
 Supreme Court, 218 ; would hang 
 Jeff. Davis, 232 ; favors passing 
 Arkansas Bill, 561. 
 
 O'Conor, Charles, counsel for Jeff. 
 Davis, 232. 
 
 Ord, Edward O. C, commands in 
 fourth District, 223 ; relieved by Mc- 
 Dowell, 286. 
 
 Orr, James L., heads South Carolina 
 delegation in Phila. Con., 112. 
 
 Patterson, David T., credentials as 
 sen. from Tenn. presented, 103 ; son- 
 in-law of President, career of as 
 a Union man, 103-4; opposition of I 
 
 Sumner, 104 ; report of committee in 
 favor of, 106 ; sworn in, 107. 
 
 Perrin, Edwin O., witness on trial, 441. 
 
 Pickering, Timothy, his removal by 
 President Adams proved on trial, 
 421. 
 
 Pierpont, Francis, gov. of Va., 13. 
 
 Pierrepont, Edwards, counsel for U. 
 S., on Surratt trial, his statments as 
 to petition for mercy, 274, 276. 
 
 Pile, William A., rep. from Mo., car- 
 ries warrant for arrest of Thomas to 
 clerk and marshal, 352 ; introduces 
 bill to abolish office of Adj.-Gen., 358. 
 
 Poland, Luke P., sen. from Vt., favors 
 Stockton's title, 73, 77 ; votes against 
 admission of Colorado, 90. 
 
 Pomeroy, Samuel C, sen. from Kan., 
 delegated by caucus to force Ross 
 to speak, 540-1 ; first attack, 541 ; 
 second, 542, third, 543 ; threatens 
 Ross, 543 ; implicated by Legate. 
 569 ; his letter to Legate, 570 ; Thur- 
 low Weed's statement about, id.; he 
 and Sumner the only two senators 
 finding President guilty on all the 
 articles, 580. 
 
 Pope, John, commands in third dis" 
 trict; 223 ; relieved by Meade, 289. 
 
 Randall, Alex. W., succeeds as Post- 
 master-General, 99, 108 ; calls Phila. 
 conv. to order, 112; accompanies 
 President on tour, 114 ; letter of cor- 
 robatory of President vs. Grant, 334 ; 
 witness on trial, 446. 
 
 Randall, Samuel J., rep. from Pa., re- 
 mark of on impeachment, 228. 
 
 Raymond, Henry J., rep. from N. Y., 
 speech of, 40 ; reads address to peo- 
 ple at Phila. conv., 112; remark of 
 on Nebraska bill, 168. 
 
 Ream, Vinnie, modeling statue of Lin- 
 coln, 539 ; suspected of using her in- 
 fluence with Ross, 540 ; denies Ross 
 
642 
 
 INDEX 
 
 to Sickles, 544 ; her .protest against 
 being turned out of studio, 567. 
 
 Reconstruction. Lincoln's plan, 2,3; 
 theories of, 6, 7 ; Stevens', 8 ; Sum- 
 ner's, 8-9; plan of joint-committee, 92; 
 supplementary bills of, not passed, 96. 
 
 Reconstruction Acts. Main act in 
 House, 199 ; substitute of Senate, 
 200 ; amendment of House, 201 ; 
 passed both Houses, id. ; vetoed, 
 message written by Black, 203; 
 passed over veto, 207; first supple- 
 mentary act passed, 212 ; second 
 passed, 225. 
 
 Removals from office, 108, 
 
 Riddle, A. G., counsel for U. S., on 
 Surratt trial, writes to President in 
 favor of Conover's pardon, 279. 
 
 Rogers, Andrew J., rep. from N. J., 
 recommends Conover's pardon, 154. 
 
 Ross, Edmund G., sen. from Kan., not 
 voting on non-concurrence in Stan- 
 ton's suspension, 321 ; votes for reso- 
 lution condemning removal, 349 ; 
 claimed by both sides, 516 ; still 
 silent, 521 ; career of, 537 ; remark 
 of, to Sumner, 538 ; confession of, to 
 Senate, id. ; his behavior under fire, 
 539 ; acquaintances of, id. ; visits 
 Miss Ream's studio, id. ; Pomeroy's 
 attempts to force him to speak, 541 
 defines his position, 542 ; second at- 
 tempt, 543 ; the Anthony telegram 
 543; Sickles' attempt, 544; Pome 
 roy's threat, id. ; his reply to An 
 thony telegram, id. ; rejoinder, 545 
 casts decisive vote on article XI 
 552-3; set of managers upon him. 
 573; his inscrutability, 574; votes 
 with the impeachers on motions, 575 
 votes "Not Guilty" on second and 
 third articles, 576. 
 
 Schenck, Robert C, rep. from Ohio, 
 remark of on bill fixing meeting of 
 
 Congress on March 4th, 149 ; on im- 
 peachment, 228; aids J. F. Wilson 
 in the McCardle case trick, 403 n.; 
 chairman of Union Cong. Com., 521 ; 
 sends out telegrams to coerce waver- 
 ing senators, 530. 
 
 Schofield, John M., commands in Va., 
 223 ; Grant's statement to him, n. to 
 272, 326 ; interview with Evarts con- 
 cerning his nomination as sec. of war, 
 547 ; nominated, 548. 
 
 Scovell, James M., president of N. J. 
 senate, 79; blocks election of suc- 
 cessor to Stockton, id. ; reconverted, 
 158. 
 
 Senate, U. S., two methods of recruit- 
 ing of, 64; action of on Stanton's 
 removal, 347 ; votes on, 349, 350 n. 
 
 Seward, William H, sec. of state, 7, 
 16; addresses meeting in N. Y., on 
 Feb.' 22, 50; mentioned, 59; sustains 
 President, 93 ; accompanies him on 
 tour, 114 ; in Governor's Room, City 
 Hall, N. Y., 114-5 ; writes veto mes- 
 sage on Tenure bill, 203 ; testimony 
 of as to Jeff. Davis, 234 ; as to Stan- 
 ton,253 ; letter corroboratory of Presi- 
 dent vs. Grant, 334. 
 
 Sharkey, William M., telegram of 
 Johnson to, 20. 
 
 Shea, George, counsel for Jeff. Davis, 
 232. 
 
 Sheridan, Philip H., in command of 
 fifth district, 223 ; remark of on 
 Atty-Gen.'s opinion, 224 ; his course 
 against President, 272 ; removed, 286. 
 
 Sherman, John, sen. from Ohio, speech 
 of for the President, 54 ; remarks of 
 in favor of exception of cabinet offi- 
 cers from Tenure bill , 194-5 ; remarks 
 on conference report, 197, 198-9; on 
 whether presiding officers can call 
 houses together, 221 ; on denouncing 
 the President, 230; not voting on 
 Stanton's suspension, 322; nor on 
 
INDEX 
 
 643 
 
 resolution censuring removal, 349 ; 
 votes guilty on eleventh, second and 
 third articles, 553, 576 ; extracts from 
 his opinion, 588, 589, 590; articles 
 manipulated for him, 591. 
 
 Sherman, William T., convention of 
 with Gen. Johnston, 8 ; letter of to 
 President on Stanton, 325; declines 
 see.-of-war-ship and brevet-general- 
 ship, 341, 342 ; present at trial, 422 ; 
 witness on trial, 439-440. 
 
 Sickles, Daniel E., commands in second 
 district, 223 ; trial of, 243 ; super- 
 seded by Canby, 286 ; seeks Ross at 
 Miss Ream's, 544. 
 
 Speed, James, atty.-gen., 16 ; resigns, 
 99, 108 ; before Imp. Com., 237. 
 
 Sprague, William, sen. from R. I., 
 suspected because son-in-law of 
 Chase, 516 ; reported sound, 522. 
 
 South Carolina, 18 ; bill to admit re- 
 ported to House, 521. 
 
 Stanbery, Henry, succeeds as atty.- 
 gen., 99, 108; opinions of on recon- 
 struction acts, 224 ; testimony before 
 Imp. Com., 234; resigns to be 
 counsel for President on trial, 395; 
 reads answer to article II down to 
 IX, 400; falls ill, 440; reappears. 
 502 ; opening sentence of his argu- 
 ment, id.; peroration, 503 ; congrat- 
 ulates President on acquittal, 555. 
 
 Stanton, Edwin M., sec. of war, 10 ; 
 project of to reconstruct Va., and N. 
 C, divided, 11, 12 ; for Va., 13 ; for 
 N. C, 14; colloguing with Sumner. 
 Dawes and Colfax, 15; negro suf- 
 frage clause, id. ; vote in Cabinet, 
 16 ; testimony of before Imp. Com. 
 18 ; mentioned, 59 ; on side of Presi 
 dent, 94 ; suppresses N. O. telegram 
 111 ; aids Seward in writing veto mes- 
 sage on Tenure bill, 203 ; dictates 
 section to Army bill, 202 n. ; testi- 
 mony of as to Jeff. Davis, 234 ; char- 
 
 acter and career of, 241 et aeg. ; 
 Buchanan appoints him atty.-gen., 
 251 ; early relations with aboli- 
 tionists, 245 et seq. ; with Sumner, 
 248 ; letters to Buchanan, 257-263 ; 
 becomes sec. of war, 265 ; speech to 
 Johnson Club, 268 ; throws off mask, 
 270-1 ; refuses to resign, 277 ; sus- 
 pended, 283 ; reenters war office, 
 323 ; sends correspondence to House, 
 330-1 ; receives order of removal, 
 345 ; makes affidavit to arrest 
 Thomas, 351 ; encounter with 
 Thomas, 354-5|; gets Karsner as wit- 
 ness, 394 ; at work to convict Presi- 
 dent, 531 ; relinquishes charge, 592 ; 
 orates for Grant, 592 ; interview with 
 Chandler and Wade on sick bed, 
 593; Carpenter obtains his appoint- 
 ment as associate justice, 593-4 ; his 
 statement to Sumner, id.; remarks 
 of Carpenter and Black, 595. 
 Stevens, Thaddeus, rep. from Pa., 
 calls Johnson an alien, 3 ; his theory 
 of state suicide, 8 ; remarks of, 11, 
 23, 32, 50 ; character of, 24 ; speech 
 abusing President, 62-3 ; tilt with 
 Blaine, 217; remarks of on impeach- 
 ment, 223, 227, 228 ; on Jeff. Davis, 
 232 ; on second attempt to impeach 
 336-7 ; presents report on final im- 
 peachment, 359 ; remarks of, closing 
 the debate, 372 ; appointed on com- 
 mittee to notify Senate, 374 ; speech 
 of on offering his own article, 381 ; 
 selected as one of the managers, 385 ; 
 counter-signs Butler's Alta Vela let- 
 ter, 399; remark of on Groesbeck's 
 peroration, 481 ; his final argument, 
 481 ; threatens senators, 483 ; re- 
 mark of on bill to admit Arkansas, 
 518 ; reports bill to admit N. C, S. 
 C, La., Geo., and Ala., 521; inco- 
 herent remarks of, 565 ; valedictory 
 of, 597 ; his death and will, 599. 
 
644 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Stewart, William M., seD. from Nev., 
 speech of for President, 38 ; votes 
 to sustain first veto, 49 ; mentioned, 
 63; introduces bill to admit Col- 
 orado, 65; in favor of Stockton's 
 title, 73 ; disappears on vote, 78, 79 ; 
 last effort at independence, 80. 
 Stockton, John P., sen. from N. J., 
 takes his seat, 66; report of Jud. 
 Com. in favor of, id., 70; protest 
 against, 67; election of, 67-9; de- 
 bate on, 70-2; first vote on, 73; 
 second, id.; disgraceful scene, 74; 
 votes himself, id.; debate on, 75 ; 
 withdraws vote, 76 ; pleas for delay, 
 76, 77, 78 ; last speech of, 78 ; final 
 vote on case, 79; his empty chair, 
 id.; successor to elected, 158; sent 
 back, 288. 
 Sumner, Charles, sen. from Mass., 
 sneer of at Va. legislature, 1 ; de- 
 feats admission of Ark. and La., 4 ; 
 his solution of reconstruction prob- 
 lem, 8 ; consults Stanton in private, 
 15; character of, 32; speech of in 
 Mass. Con v., 36 ; remarks of at obse- 
 quies of Collamer, 36 ; on President's 
 message, 37; speech of against first 
 form of 14thAmd.,46; second speech 
 against, 60 ; opposes admission 
 of Colorado, 65 ; quotes Hoyle in 
 Stockton case, 71 ; urges Morrill to 
 vote, 74; argues against Stockton's 
 right to vote, 75 ; opposes all delay, 
 76, 77; opposes Colorado again, 89; 
 offers amendment to bill supple- 
 mentary to 14th Ami, 96; opposes 
 admission of Patterson, 104; opposes 
 Nebraska bill, 105, 160 ; remarks of 
 on Dist. Col. negro suffrage bill, 150 ; 
 votes for Nebraska and Colorado 
 bills, 165 ; moves amendment to 
 Tenure bill, 189 ; abuse of President, 
 190-1, 219, 229; forensic habit, 
 221 ; claims right to denounce ' 
 
 President, 229; testimony of con- 
 cerning Stanton, 248, 254 ; denounces 
 message, 311 ; sends message to Stan- 
 ton, 347 ; sensitive about doing busi- 
 ness with President, 394 ; objects to 
 credentials of Vickers, id.; denies 
 right of chief justice to vote, 417 ; 
 his resolution to admit all testimony, 
 440 ; not voting on admission of 
 cabinet testimony, 446 ; his order 
 censuring Nelson, 487 ; his rule as to 
 punishment of President, 519 ; testi- 
 fies before managers, 537, 538 ; favors 
 adjournment for the first time, 560 ; 
 maintains that Arkansas senators 
 can sit in court of impeachment, 562 ; 
 remarks of on investigation of sena- 
 tors, 566, 568 ; he alone with Pomeroy 
 finds President guilty on every 
 article, 581 ; extracts from opinion, 
 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586 ; his nar- 
 rative of conversation with Stanton 
 concerning Grant, 594 ; his eulogy on 
 Stevens, 600. 
 
 Supreme Court of U. S., decisions of, 
 135 ; scheme to deprive it of power 
 to pronounce act of Congress invalid, 
 136 ; act cutting off right of appeal 
 to, 402. 
 
 Surratt, John H., fled, 143 ; in Liver- 
 pool, London, Paris, Eome, 143-4 ; 
 betrayed, id. ; escaped, 145 ; retaken 
 and sent to Washington, 146; trial, 
 273, 274, 276. 
 
 Tennessee, 2, 10 ; Brownlow's letter to 
 speaker in favor of admission of, 44 ; 
 resolution to admit amended in Sen- 
 ate and passed, 100-1 ; not to be pre- 
 cedent, 102 ; message of President on, 
 id. ; members sworn in, 103, 107 ; re- 
 deemed by Johnson, 616. 
 
 Tenure-of-Office Act. Bill introduced, 
 183 ; House votes to except cabinet 
 officers, id. ; passes Senate, 193 ; 
 
INDEX 
 
 645 
 
 House strikes out exception, 194; 
 conference reports proviso, 195 ; con- 
 struction of, in House, 196; in Sen- 
 ate, 196-9 ; adopted, 199 ; vetoed and 
 passed over veto, 202-3 ; virtually re- 
 pealed, 609-11. 
 
 Texas, 18. 
 
 Thayer, John M., takes seat as senator 
 from Nebraska, 174 ; votes " Guilty " 
 on trial, 553. 
 
 Thomas, George H., declines nomina- 
 tions for brevet lieut.-general and 
 brevet general, 342. 
 
 Thomas, Lorenzo, career of, 343 ; re- 
 stored to office, id. ; addresses his 
 clerks, 344 ; appointed sec. of war ad 
 interim, 344; interviews with Stan- 
 ton and President, 345 ; loose talk of, 
 350 ; arrest of, 352 ; encounter with 
 Stanton, 354-5; proceedings against 
 in court and discharge of, 376; be- 
 fore committee on articles, 379; before 
 managers, 394; witness on trial, 438. 
 
 Tipton, Thomas W., admitted sen. from 
 Nebraska, 174; votes "Guilty" on 
 trial, 553. 
 
 Trial of the President, opening scene, 
 404-7 ; close of case for prosecution, 
 421-2 ; effect of first week of, 421 ; 
 defence opened, 422 ; close of testi- 
 mony, 447 ; length of, id. ; analysis 
 of arguments, 448 et seq. ; galleries 
 cleared at close, 514 ; conduct of 
 senators and representatives on, 517 ; 
 secret deliberation, 519; postpone- 
 ment of vote, 526 ; propriety of im- 
 portuning senators, 545-9 ; order of 
 voting changed, 550; scene at first vot- 
 ing, 551-4 ; court adjourns ten days, 
 554 ; reassembles, 574 ; votes on sec- 
 ond and third articles, 576 ; adjourns 
 sine die, id. ; failure of impeachment 
 a fortunate event, 576-8. 
 
 Trumbull, Lyman, sen. from 111., in- 
 troduces Freedmen's Bureau and 
 
 Civil Bights Bills, 42; reports in 
 favor of Stockton, 66 ; votes for non- 
 concurrence in Stanton suspension, 
 321 ; and for resolution censuring his 
 removal, 349; reported favorable to 
 President, 520; proposed attack on 
 him by reps., 529; votes "Not 
 Guilty" on trial, 553; extract from 
 opinion of, 579. 
 
 Usher, John P., sec. of interior, 12, 16. 
 
 Van Horn, Burt, rep. from N. Y., one 
 of Stanton's body-guard, takes notes, 
 354 ; testifies before committee on ar- 
 ticles, 378 ; sworn on trial, 417. 
 
 Van Winkle, Peter G., sen. from W. 
 Va., votes to sustain first veto, 49; 
 mentioned, 63 ; votes to sustain veto 
 of Civil Bights bill, 82 ; paired in 
 favor of nonconcurrence in Stanton's 
 suspension, 321 ; votes for resolution 
 of censure, 349 ; doubtful on impeach- 
 ment, 516 ; reported against article I, 
 520 ; reported favorable to President, 
 533 ; tells Pomeroy he is for convic- 
 tion, id. n.; votes " Not Guilty " on 
 trial, 553. 
 
 Vickers, George, sen. from Md., sworn 
 in, 394. 
 
 Virginia, 2, 10, 12. 
 
 Wade, Benjamin F., remark of to 
 Johnson on his accession, 6 ; protest 
 of against delay on Civil Bights bill 
 veto, 81 ; calls up Nebraska bill, 
 105 ; his course on Nebraska and 
 Colorado bills, 158-9 ; strange remark 
 of on Colorado, 159 ; tilt with Sum- 
 ner, 160; on necessity of reinforce- 
 ments, 161-2-3 ; forces both biUs 
 through, 169 ; silent on trick in Col- 
 orado bill, 172 ; radical candidate for 
 president pro tem., 175; selected in 
 caucus, 177 ; final attempt to get Col- 
 orado in, 177-9 ; meets Stanton, 265 ; 
 swears in as member of court of im- 
 
646 
 
 INDEX 
 
 peachment, 391 ; impropriety of the 
 act, 392-3; does not vote during 
 taking of testimony, 516; his first 
 vote, 550; votes " Guilty," 553, 576 ; 
 statement of Stanton to on Grant, 593 
 
 Wallace, George W., Col. witness on 
 trial, 419. 
 
 Washburne, Elihu B., rep. from 111., 
 remark of on Nebraska proviso, 166 . 
 changes front on impeachment, 316 ; 
 abuses President, 363 ; his telegram 
 to N. H. rep. conv., 515; fierce for 
 President's conviction, 532. 
 
 Welles, Gideon, sec. of navy, his 
 "Lincoln and Johnson" cited, 12, 
 16 ; sustains the President, 94 ; ac- 
 companies him on tour, 114 ; his let- 
 ter corroboratory of President agai nst 
 Grant, 334 ; witness on trial, 443 ; 
 testimony of excluded, 445-6. 
 
 West Virginia deserters, pardon of de- 
 tailed, 305. 
 
 Wilkeson, Samuel, pumps Thomas, 
 350 ; witness on trial, 418. 
 
 Willey, Waitman T., sen. from W. 
 Va., votes to sustain first veto, 49 ; 
 mentioned, 63 ; votes to override veto 
 of Civil Rights bill, 82 ; doubtful on 
 impeachment, 516 ; reported to be 
 against article I but for article II, 
 520 ; Methodist Church had him in 
 view, 533 ; votes against changing 
 order of voting, 550 ; votes " Guilty," 
 553 ; statement of as to construction 
 of article XI by chief justice, 572. 
 
 Williams, George H., sen. from Oregon, 
 argument on Tenure of Office bill, 
 186; remarks of on conference reporti 
 196 ; on adjournment, 219 ; mouth" 
 piece of caucus to change order of 
 voting on articles, 550, 574 ; and to 
 take recess, to adjourn ten days and 
 to adjourn without day, 554, 576. 
 
 Williams,, Thomas, rep. from Pa., re- 
 marks of on Tenure bill, 182 ; on im- 
 
 peachment, 228 ; selected manager, 
 385; argument of on proviso of Tenure 
 Act, 449-450 ; final argument of, the 
 most ornate, 483 ; and abusive of the 
 President, 484; scorns Cabinet, id., 
 extract from, 485. 
 
 Wilson, Henry, sen. from Mass., char- 
 acter of, 39 ; speech of on cruelties in 
 South, id.; eulogy of Hep. party, 57; 
 revives Colorado bill, 89 ; remarks of, 
 on Dist. Col. negro suffrage bill, 150; 
 on Nebraska, 162 ; testimony of con- 
 cerning Stanton, 245-247-248 ; moves 
 resolution censuring removal of 
 Stanton, 348 ; opposes adjournment 
 over Chicago convention, 560; ex- 
 presses intention to vote for disquali- 
 fication in his opinion, 580 ; swears 
 in Johnson as senator, 624. 
 
 Wilson, James F., rep. from la., writes 
 minority report on first impeach- 
 ment, 302 et. seq. ; replies to Bout- 
 well, 301-3, 312; selected manager, 
 385 ; author of trick in McCardle 
 case, 403 n.; introduces the evidence 
 on trial, 417 ; his question of verac- 
 ity, 439 ; argument of to exclude the 
 cabinet testimony, 444. 
 
 Woodward, George C, rep. from Pa., 
 speech of in debate on final impeach- 
 ment extracts from, 366-8, 370-2. 
 
 Woolley, Charles W., imprisoned by 
 board of managers, 567. 
 
 Wright, William, sen. from N. J., 
 home ill, 64 ; pairs with Morrill on 
 Stockton's case, 72 ; telegrams to and 
 from, 72, 77, 79; present to vote on 
 veto of civil rights bill, 82 ; death of, 
 158. 
 
 Yates, Richard, sen. from 111., re- 
 marks of on adjourment and Presi- 
 dent, 218 ; his form of resolution 
 censuring Stanton's removal, 348 ; 
 in favor of sending Arkansas bill to 
 the President, 561. 
 
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