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

413 Pages·2010·3.02 MB·English

by  David O. Stewart

ALSO BY DAVID O. STEWART

The Summer of 1787
The Trial of
PRESIDENT
ANDREW
JOHNSON
and the
FIGHT FOR
LINCOLN’S
LEGACY
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Copyright © 2009 by David O. Stewart
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, David O.
Impeached: the trial of President Andrew Johnson and the fight for Lincoln’s
legacy / by David O. Stewart.—First Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Johnson, Andrew, 1808–1875—Impeachment. 2. United States—
Politics and government—1865–1869. 3. Lincoln, Abraham,
1809–1865—Influence. I. Title.
E666.S84 2009
973.8'1092—dc22 2009003346
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-6332-0
ISBN-10: 1-4391-6332-4
All illustrations are courtesy of Library of Congress except photo of James
Legate on Chapter 15, which is courtesy of The Kansas State Historical Society.
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To My Mother
CONTENTS

Preface
1 Bad Beginnings: Spring 1865
2 President Johnson: April 1865
3 Land of Revolution: November 1865
4 The Opposition Gathers: December 1865
5 A Government Divided Against Itself: January–June 1866
6 Political War: July–November 1866
7 False Start on Impeachment: December 1866–June 1867
8 The Dangerous Sphinx: August–November 1867
9 Impeachment, Round Two: December 1867
10 Impeachment, Round Three: December 12, 1867–February 15,
1868
11 Showdown on Seventeenth Street: February 15–21, 1868
12 The Dam Bursts: February 22–24, 1868
13 The Waterloo Struggle: February 24–March 4, 1868
14 Send in the Lawyers: March 5–29, 1868
15 Influence and Edmund Cooper: March 1868
16 Ben Butler’s Horse Case: March 30–April 8, 1868
17 Defending the President: April 9–20, 1868
18 Counting to Seven: April 1868
19 An Avalanche of Talk: April 22–May 6, 1868
20 The Dark Men: May 5–9, 1868
21 Scrambling for Votes: May 6–12, 1868
22 Desperate Days: May 12–15, 1868
23 Free Again: May 16–26, 1868
24 Searching for Scandal: May 17–July 5, 1868
25 The Caravan Moves On: January 1, 1869–
26 The Rorschach Blot
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: The Impeachment Provisions in the Constitution
Appendix 2: The Tenure of Office Act
Appendix 3: Impeachment Articles
Appendix 4: The Senate Votes
Notes
IMPEACHED
PREFACE

[T]his was no ordinary political crisis. It was not a struggle for office, or a
contest about a tariff…, but a dispute that followed hard on a terrible civil
war. It was the reconstruction of the Union that was at issue.
GENERAL ADAM BADEAU, 1887

A
FTER FINISHING The Summer of 1787 about the writing of the
Constitution, I wanted to pick up the Constitution’s story at its next critical
moment. To form a union from thirteen quarreling states, the Philadelphia
Convention patched together a number of rough compromises, prominent among
them agreements about slavery and the allocation of power between the federal
and state governments. Those political bargains held up for seventy years.
During those decades, a web of accommodation and mutual forbearance bound
the nation together. Three times, painful compromises over slavery kept the
states united. Arguments over the powers of the sovereign states flared and
subsided and flared anew. By 1861, contention over slavery and state powers
overwhelmed the constitutional structure. Eleven Southern states seceded and
fought a savage four-year war to be no part of the United States.
That war exposed fundamental flaws in the founding document. Slavery
could no longer be papered over. It had to be abolished. The national
government’s power over the states had to be reinforced. A commitment to
equality and the right to vote had to be embraced. From 1865 to 1870, the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments remade the Constitution in
those ways.
Yet the central constitutional drama of this critical era was not the prolonged
battle over the new amendments. Rather, the nation came closest to tearing itself