LRB, Vol. 42 No. 18 · 24 September 2020
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Worst President in History
Eric Foner
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The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation
byBrenda Wineapple
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/search-results?search=Brenda%20Wineapple>.
/Ballantine, 592 pp., £12.99, May,978 0 8129 8791 1/
It seems like ages have passed, not just nine months, since the
all-consuming public issue in the United States was the impeachment of
Donald Trump. The trial was a giant anticlimax, of course, its
proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump
remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of
unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for office.
Apart from a cumbersome process outlined in the constitution’s
25thAmendment, whereby the vice president and a majority of the cabinet
can oust a president who becomes physically or mentally incapacitated,
the only mode of removal – other than an election – is impeachment.
The constitution provides that a majority of the House of
Representatives may impeach (that is, indict) the president for
‘treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours’. A trial then
takes place in the Senate, where conviction and removal requires a
two-thirds vote. As on numerous other matters, the constitution is
frustratingly opaque when it comes to details. Most people think they
can recognise treason and bribery when they see them, but what
constitutes a high crime or a misdemeanour? In the/Federalist Papers/,
Alexander Hamilton described impeachment as a political process, not a
criminal one – a way of punishing ‘an abuse or violation of some public
trust’. But generally, Congress has assumed that impeachment requires
the president to have violated a specific law. The constitution says
nothing about the way an impeachment trial is to be conducted, other
than that the chief justice of the Supreme Court presides. History shows
that impeachment is a blunt instrument. The threat of it led Richard
Nixon to resign, but all three presidents tried before the Senate have
been acquitted.
In contrast to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, which arose from
a sexual escapade, that of Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier involved
some of the most intractable problems in American history. How should
the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American
citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four
million emancipated slaves? As Brenda Wineapple shows in/The
Impeachers/, Johnson’s problem was his failure to rise to the challenge
of Reconstruction after the Civil War.
When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, Johnson, the vice
president, succeeded him. Like his predecessor, Johnson started out at
the bottom of the social ladder. As a young man he was an indentured
servant. But while in Lincoln early deprivation sparked open-mindedness,
political dexterity and fellow feeling for the downtrodden, including
slaves, Johnson was not only stubborn and self-absorbed, but
incorrigibly racist. During the Civil War he came to embrace
emancipation, but mostly because he believed it would liberate poorer
white farmers from the tyranny of wealthy planters, whom he called the
slaveocracy. His sympathy didn’t extend to the slaves themselves.
Johnson didn’t lack for personal courage. As a senator from Tennessee he
remained loyal to the Union and continued to occupy his seat after his
state seceded in 1861. Appointed military governor by Lincoln, he won
plaudits in the North for denouncing secessionists as traitors and
taking vigorous action against them, jailing local officials and
newspaper editors. The Republican Party nominated him as Lincoln’s
running mate in 1864 in the hope of attracting a large cadre of white
Southerners who opposed secession.
When Johnson became president, Congress was not in session – in the
peculiar political calendar of the 19thcentury, a Congress did not meet
until more than a year after it was elected – and for several months he
had a free hand in developing Reconstruction policy. He seized the
opportunity to set up new governments in the South controlled entirely
by whites. These abolished slavery – they had no choice – but enacted a
series of laws called the Black Codes to define the freedom African
Americans now enjoyed. They had virtually no civil or political rights,
and all adult black men were required to sign a labour contract with a
white employer at the beginning of each year or be deemed a vagrant and
sold to anyone who would pay the fine. Abandoning his hatred of the
slaveocracy, Johnson handed out pardons indiscriminately to wealthy
Confederates and ordered that land the federal government had allocated
to former slaves be restored to the previous owners.
Johnson’s policies alarmed the Republican Party, which controlled
Congress, leading it to think that the South was trying to restore
slavery in all but name. Early in 1866 lawmakers enacted measures to
extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency charged with
overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom, and passed the first
Civil Rights Act in American history, which extended citizenship and
basic legal rights to blacks, overturning the/Dred Scott/Supreme Court
decision of 1857 which had insisted that only white persons could be
citizens of the United States. Johnson vetoed both bills. This was the
start of an increasingly acrimonious conflict with Congress, in which,
Wineapple writes, Johnson succeeded in ‘unifying the entire Republican
Party against him’. Meanwhile anti-black violence erupted across the
South, including racial massacres in Memphis and New Orleans by mobs
composed, in part, of white policemen (there is nothing new about the
forces of law and order committing atrocities against blacks). In
mid-1866, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment, which
constitutionalised the principle that virtually anyone born in the
United States, regardless of race, is a citizen, entitled to the equal
protection of the laws. Johnson denounced the measure and embarked on
the ‘Swing around the Circle’, a speaking tour of the Northern states to
drum up votes for congressional candidates who opposed Republican
reconstruction policy. When Republicans won a sweeping victory in the
congressional elections, they moved to replace Johnson’s Southern
governments with ones in which black men enjoyed the right to vote and
hold office. This inaugurated the era of Radical Reconstruction, a
remarkable experiment in interracial democracy.
For many decades, historians viewed Reconstruction as the lowest point
in the saga of American democracy, a period, allegedly, of corruption
and misgovernment imposed on the South by vindictive Radical Republicans
in Congress once they overturned Johnson’s supposedly more statesmanlike
white supremacist Reconstruction policies. The cardinal error was
granting suffrage to black men, said to be by their nature incapable of
exercising democratic rights intelligently. This interpretation formed
part of the intellectual legitimation of the Jim Crow South, which in
the late 19thcentury began abrogating the rights blacks had gained
during Reconstruction. The supposed horrors of Reconstruction offered a
stark warning of what would happen if Southern blacks were able to
exercise their right to vote. But after the civil rights revolution
(sometimes called the Second Reconstruction), a wholesale shift in
historical outlook took place. Today, Reconstruction is seen as a noble
effort to create the foundation of racial justice in the aftermath of
slavery. The tragedy is not that it was attempted, but that it failed.
Johnson’s reputation has fluctuated along with historians’ views of
Reconstruction. Long celebrated as a heroic defender of the constitution
against the Radicals, he is today a leading contender for worst
president in American history, condemned both for his utter inability to
work with Congress and his intense racism. It is difficult to think of a
president who voiced his prejudices in starker language. Johnson told
one reporter that under the Reconstruction Acts the white population of
the South would be ‘trodden under foot to protect niggers’. In his
annual message to Congress of 1867, he declared that blacks had ‘shown
less capacity for government than any other race of people’. They had
never produced any civilisation and when left to themselves relapsed
into ‘barbarism’.
Wineapple fully shares current historians’ disdain for Johnson and
sympathy for the Radical Republicans, especially their leader in the
House of Representatives, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Born with a
club foot, Stevens was depicted by earlier historians as ‘the crippled,
fanatical personification’, in John F. Kennedy’s words, ‘of the extremes
of the Radical Republican movement’. Today, he is admired for his fierce
commitment to racial equality, which long preceded the Civil War. As a
delegate to the 1837 Pennsylvania constitutional convention, Stevens
refused to sign the final document because it stripped the state’s free
black community of voting rights. During Reconstruction, he advocated
confiscating the land of Confederate planters and distributing it to the
emancipated slaves. Stevens fully grasped the gravity of the moment,
with its rare opportunity to remake American institutions. ‘If we fail
in this great duty now, when we have the power,’ he proclaimed, ‘we
shall deserve and receive the execration of history.’
Wineapple’s other books include lives of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Gertrude
Stein and her brother Leo, and a study of the relationship between Emily
Dickinson and the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson./The
Impeachers/is structured around brief, insightful sketches of the key
actors in the titanic struggle over Reconstruction. It begins with the
43 ‘dramatis personae’, including high officials in the administration
and Congress, journalists, and lawyers for and against the president.
Mini-biographies of these and other figures are scattered through the text.
Very few of them are household names today and Wineapple deserves praise
for raising them from obscurity. Yet, perhaps inevitably, her sketches
focus on those who occupied prominent positions in Washington. Only two
of the 43 are black – Frederick Douglass and the restaurateur and
political activist George T. Downing. This is a problem, as
Reconstruction was a national crisis, not one restricted to the capital.
Current scholarship emphasises that grassroots black activism, including
public meetings and mass demonstrations throughout the South in favour
of equal rights, helped to shape the political agenda and set the stage
for Johnson’s impeachment. Yet blacks play almost no role in Wineapple’s
narrative.
By 1867, most Republicans in Congress had concluded that Johnson was
intransigent, incompetent and racist, and doing all he could to obstruct
the implementation of Reconstruction policy. But a majority remained
convinced that a clear violation of the law was required for
impeachment, and the House rejected a number of efforts to move towards
it without one.
The events that finally overcame their doubts arose from a peculiarity
of the Reconstruction programme Congress enacted in 1867. The South had
been placed temporarily under the control of military commanders, to
oversee the registration of black voters and the establishment of new
state governments. But the president is commander-in-chief of the
military, and Johnson used this power to relieve of command any military
officials who worked too diligently to register black voters. To protect
the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, the leading Radical in the
cabinet, from the risk of being removed, Congress enacted the Tenure of
Office Act, mandating that cabinet members remain in office for the term
of the president who appointed them, unless the Senate approved their
replacement. When Congress was out of session, taking advantage of a
provision that allowed appointees to be temporarily replaced, Johnson
suspended Stanton, in the autumn of 1867. The following January, the
Senate, having reassembled, overruled this action. Johnson then fired
Stanton and replaced him with the weak-willed General Lorenzo Thomas,
whom he assumed would do his bidding. In response, the House voted
overwhelmingly to impeach the president.
The trial took place in May 1868. Wineapple’s account of it fully
displays her talents as a storyteller: she keeps the suspense alive to
the very last Senate vote. She also illuminates the complex motives in
play. The chief justice who presided, Salmon P. Chase, was hoping to
capture a nomination for president – from either party; it made no
difference to him. (There was an election due in November.) Many
Republicans who would ordinarily have been happy to be rid of Johnson
hesitated because he would be succeeded by Senator Benjamin F. Wade of
Ohio, the president pro tem of the Senate. Wade, among other things,
favoured votes for women and the issuance of paper currency to stimulate
the economy, both anathema to many Republicans. In 1867 he had delivered
a speech declaring that with the battle between slavery and freedom
decided, the next fight would pit labour against capital. (Marx quoted
Wade in the first volume of/Capital/, published that year, to illustrate
the growing awareness of the class struggle.) Some Republicans felt that
a few more months of Johnson would be preferable to Wade assuming the
presidency, being re-elected, and serving four years.
Wineapple points out that the House-appointed impeachment managers and
the president’s attorneys seemed to swap strategies as the trial went
on. All but two of the 11 articles of impeachment approved by the House
dealt with the removal of Stanton (the last two accused Johnson of abuse
of power and disgracing the office of president through vituperative
speeches). The managers, who were expected to focus on the big picture
of Johnson’s failed Reconstruction policy and the political crisis over
black rights, instead spent most of their time on his violation of the
Tenure of Office Act, seemingly accepting the idea that only a criminal
offence, not political malfeasance, justified conviction. The defence
seemed unable to decide whether to admit that Johnson had violated the
Tenure of Office Act. They argued both that he dismissed Stanton in
order to test the act’s constitutionality, and that it did not apply to
him anyway, as Stanton had originally been appointed by Lincoln. Mainly,
rather than sticking to narrow legal arguments, as expected, they
emphasised the broader claim that conviction would upset the
constitutional balance between Congress and the presidency. In the end,
the Senate failed by a single vote to muster the two-thirds necessary
for conviction. Seven Republicans supported the president. Johnson
remained in office until 1869, when Ulysses S. Grant moved into the
White House after winning the Republican nomination during Johnson’s
impeachment trial and then the election in November 1868. In a somewhat
surreal postscript to his presidency, Johnson reappeared in Washington
in 1875 as a senator from Tennessee. He died from a stroke after serving
for five months. Characteristically, he used his brief term to castigate
Grant as a military dictator.
Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the last Southern state fell under
the control of white supremacist Democrats. As time went on, the
impeachment of Andrew Johnson was all but forgotten, or recalled simply
as a bizarre episode. In the 1950s it enjoyed a brief resurgence in
public consciousness when John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from
Massachusetts, included a chapter on Edmund G. Ross, one of the seven
Republicans who voted to acquit Johnson, in his book/Profiles in
Courage/. Most of the volume was drafted by Kennedy’s speechwriter
Theodore Sorensen and edited by the historian Allan Nevins. This did not
stop Kennedy being awarded the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography,
doubtless the only author to receive the honour who contributed next to
nothing to the actual text.
The chapter on Ross in/Profiles in Courage/repeated many of the myths
about Reconstruction then prevalent in historical scholarship. Among
other things, it claimed that no state ‘suffered more’ during
Reconstruction than Mississippi under Adelbert Ames, a Union army
general who owed his election as governor to the state’s black voters.
Kennedy didn’t know it but Ames’s daughter, Blanche Ames Ames – an
artist and women’s rights activist who married a man with the same
surname – was still alive. She bombarded Kennedy with demands to revise
the disparaging treatment of her father. Her grandson was the writer,
actor and man about town George Plimpton. At a White House dinner, the
president pulled an astonished Plimpton aside with the words: ‘George,
I’d like to talk to you about your grandmother.’ He implored Plimpton to
persuade Ames Ames to stop besieging him with letters about her father.
Kennedy never revised/Profiles in Courage/, but he did change his mind
about Reconstruction. In 1962, when two people were killed during
rioting at the University of Mississippi after the enrolment of James
Meredith as its first black student, Kennedy remarked: ‘It makes me
wonder whether everything I heard about the evils of Reconstruction is
really true.’ Southern resistance to integration, he added, gave him a
new appreciation of Thaddeus Stevens.
Senator Ross’s reputation, like Johnson’s, has fallen precipitously.
According to Wineapple, he distinguished himself in the Senate only by
the way he parlayed his vote for acquittal into government jobs for his
cronies. Less than two weeks after the trial ended, Ross requested that
Johnson install a friend in the lucrative position of Southern
superintendent of Indian affairs. There followed numerous other
patronage appointments, including his brother as a special mail agent in
Florida, a political ally as an internal revenue commissioner, and a
friend as surveyor general of Kansas.
Donald Trump does not appear in/The Impeachers/. As Wineapple explained
at a book launch at the City University of New York, she became
interested in Johnson’s impeachment long before the current president
arrived on the political scene. Yet in some ways Trump is a lineal
descendant of Andrew Johnson. Johnson repeatedly referred to his
approach to Reconstruction as ‘My Policy’, as if no one else was
involved in its inception or implementation. Trump insists ‘I alone’ can
solve the nation’s problems. Johnson’s speeches during the ‘Swing around
the Circle’, Wineapple writes, contained ‘a startling chain of venomous
epithets’ for his enemies; the same can be said of Trump in his campaign
rallies and Twitter posts. Most important, Johnson was a pioneer of the
white nationalist politics today exemplified by Trump. Johnson’s comment
that blacks have never produced civilisation has its counterpart in
Trump’s description of African nations as ‘shit-hole countries’. In the
repeated claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States,
which first made Trump a national political figure, there is an echo of
Johnson’s rejection of black citizenship. More than a century and a half
since his impeachment, the ghost of Andrew Johnson still haunts our
discussions of race.
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