To carry out this program in the face of determined southern resistance required a degree of singlemindedness over a long period seldom demonstrated by an American legislature. The persistence resulted in part from the suffering and frustrations of the war years. The refusal of the South to accept the spirit of even the mild reconstruction designed by Johnson goaded the North to ever more overbearing efforts to bring the ex-Confederates to heel. President Johnson’s stubbornness also influenced the Republicans. They became obsessed with the need to defeat him. The unsettled times and the large Republican majorities, always threatened by the possibility of a Democratic resurgence if “unreconstructed” southern congressmen were readmitted, sustained their determination.
These considerations led Republicans to attempt a kind of grand revision of the federal government, one that almost destroyed the balance between judicial, executive, and legislative power established in 1789. A series of measures passed between 1866 and 1868 increased the authority of Congress over the army, over the process of amending the Constitution, and over Cabinet members
Thaddeus Stevens is carried to an Andrew Johnson impeachment committee meeting in 1868. Stevens, a Radical Republican, insisted on being buried in a black cemetery. He wrote his own epitaph: ”I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator.”
And lesser appointive officers. Even the Supreme Court was affected. Its size was reduced and its jurisdiction over civil rights cases limited. Finally, in a showdown caused by emotion more than by practical considerations, the Republicans attempted to remove President Johnson from office.
Johnson was a poor president and out of touch with public opinion, but he had done nothing to merit ejection from office. While he had a low opinion of African Americans, his opinion was so widely shared by whites that it is ahistorical to condemn him as a reactionary on this ground. Johnson believed that he was fighting to preserve constitutional government. He was honest and devoted to duty, and his record easily withstood the most searching examination. When Congress passed laws taking away powers granted him by the Constitution, he refused to submit.
The chief issue was the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which prohibited the president from removing officials who had been appointed with the consent of the Senate without first obtaining Senate approval. In February 1868 Johnson “violated” this act by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who had been openly in sympathy with the Radicals for some time. The House, acting under the procedure set up in the Constitution for removing the president, promptly impeached him before the bar of the Senate, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding.
In the trial, Johnson’s lawyers easily established that he had removed Stanton only in an effort to prove the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. They demonstrated that the act did not protect Stanton to begin with, since it gave Cabinet members tenure “during the term of the President by whom they may have been appointed,” and Stanton had been appointed in 1862, during Lincoln’s first term!
Nevertheless the Radicals pressed the charges (eleven separate articles) relentlessly. To the argument that Johnson had committed no crime, the learned Senator Sumner retorted that the proceedings were “political in character” rather than judicial. Thaddeus Stevens, directing the attack on behalf of the House, warned the senators that although “no corrupt or wicked motive” could be attributed to Johnson, they would “be tortured on the gibbet of everlasting obloquy” if they did not convict him. Tremendous pressure was applied to the handful of Republican senators who were unwilling to disregard the evidence. Seven of them resisted to the end, and the Senate failed by a single vote to convict Johnson. This was probably fortunate. The trial weakened the presidency, but if Johnson had been forced from office on such flimsy grounds, the independence of the executive might have been permanently undermined. Then the legislative branch would have become supreme.
World History
