Brenda Wineapple argues that Johnson’s impeachment was driven by his refusal to rid the country of the lingering effects of slavery.Source Illustration from North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy
In 1868, the House of Representatives deemed it appropriate to impeach President Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s Vice-President and assumed the Presidency upon his assassination, was a Democrat from Tennessee, who had opposed secession but went on to thwart Republican plans for Reconstruction. In response, the Republican Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prevented Johnson from removing members of his Cabinet without approval from the Senate; when Johnson defied the new legislation, by firing his Secretary of War, the House voted to impeach the President, though the Senate ultimately chose not to remove him.
As Brenda Wineapple recounts in her new book, “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation,” the impeachment of Johnson has traditionally been seen as an overreach by Congress, with Republican lawmakers privileging partisan considerations over the separation of powers. Wineapple thinks that this argument overlooks House members’ real, stated reasons for impeaching Johnson: that his opposition to basic tenets of Reconstruction, including the enfranchisement of former slaves, and his contempt for Congress, rendered him unfit to be President.
This debate is newly relevant after the release of the Mueller report, with some Democrats arguing that, despite Mueller’s decision not to charge President Trump with obstruction, Trump remains unfit for the office. To discuss how Johnson came to be impeached, I recently spoke by phone with Wineapple. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the similarities between Johnson and Trump, the charges against Johnson, and what history tells us about what impeachment can and cannot accomplish.
You write, “To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.” That is not the version of Johnson’s impeachment that is usually taught. Are you trying to offer a corrective?
I certainly hope it offers a corrective, and more than that I hope it’s convincing. I don’t know how you were taught, but I certainly wasn’t taught much about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. I was taught that it was preposterous. It was engineered by fanatics. Even recently, when I gave a talk, a very literate, intelligent man asked me if the Tenure of Office Act hadn’t been cooked up in order to ensnare Johnson, which I think was a kind of standard view.
But, when I read through the Congressional record, when I went back to newspapers, when I went into old files and letters and archives, it became clear, to my mind, that the cause of it, that what was being debated, was the way in which the country would go forward and not just get rid of slavery, which the Thirteenth Amendment did, but get rid of the lingering effects of the slavery, which were huge.
Why do you think Andrew Johnson was impeached? Was it over the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, or was it a much larger question?
It was both. The reason that the House voted overwhelmingly to impeach, when it finally did, in February of 1868, was that he violated the Tenure of Office Act. Congress felt that, by breaking the law, that particular law, Johnson was thumbing his nose at them and the rule of law. That was the immediate reason.
But it’s also true that there were people in Congress and outside of it, but primarily we’re talking about Congress, who had rejected the direction Johnson was taking the country in and felt that he was squandering the outcome of the war, or what the war promised. So the larger issues were extant.
The Judiciary Committee had been investigating Johnson, but it hadn’t really got to the point of voting for impeachment, because it was floundering on the question of, Should impeachment occur because of broad issues, like abuse of public trust, or should it be for specific violations of law? So it had been going between those two things, and the Constitution doesn’t make clear which is preferable. So that’s why there were two themes or two strands. They come together on the Tenure of Office Act, which was actually passed to protect Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, who was protecting the military, which was protecting the registration of blacks and whites at the polls in the South.
The Tenure of Office Act was later declared unconstitutional, and some of the defenses of Johnson have rested on the idea that he was impeached for violating an Act that was then found unconstitutional—
Exactly. And that’s where I got the person saying, “Well, wasn’t this just sort of cooked up to impeach him?” Well, no, that Act was cooked up to inhibit him, to prevent him from firing Stanton and undoing the Reconstruction Laws. I don’t think Congress really thought he was going to break that law. So they weren’t trying to impeach him at that point. They were just trying to do an end run around him.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute here: if he had been removed from office for violating a law that was then found to be unconstitutional, or that people thought was an undue check on the President’s prerogatives, do you think that that could have had negative consequences?
I understand your question. But there were eleven articles of impeachment, and not all of them dealt with the Tenure of Office Act. The eleventh article, for example, the one that was mostly promoted by Thaddeus Stevens, who really wanted Johnson impeached for much broader issues, was called the Omnibus Article. And, in that sense, what they were trying to do was say, “Look, this is really why he’s impeached.”
If he had been removed from office, then Benjamin Wade [a Radical Republican and the president pro tempore of the Senate] would have come into the Presidency, and then the writing of history, or the writing of Johnson in history, might have been different, because Wade might have dealt with the Presidency and race and the effects of slavery in a whole different way.
So Johnson is impeached, and then he’s not removed. And we know he’s followed very soon after by a new President, Ulysses S. Grant. What else might have been different if his trial in the Senate had gone the other way?
You would have had a different transition period between Johnson’s removal and what probably would have been the election of Grant in any case. But the difference might have been that then Wade would have been a bigger player on the Republican platform going forward, no matter how helpful Grant was in making sure that black men got into office and had the vote and that the military was protected. Wade surely would have had a group of radicals around him, who would, I think, have helped the South rebuild in a way that didn’t allow the Ku Klux Klan and the white supremacists to take over states as powerfully as they did.