Andrew Johnson was the seventeenth President of the United States. Originally Lincoln’s Vice President, chosen to gain more votes for Lincoln, he was sworn in in April, 1865 after Lincoln’s assassination. He was a proponent of states’ rights and a small federal government. A "war" Democrat from Tennessee, he was also the only Southerner in the government to remain loyal to the Union when his state seceded. Because of this and his deep hatred for the slaveholding class in the South, Republicans in Congress felt certain that he would support their policies toward Reconstruction, despite some of his Jacksonian ideals.
The Republicans were disappointed. They saw Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction as "quick and lenient," to quote Harper’s Weekly. On May 29, 1865, President Johnson issued the Proclamation of Amnesty, essentially pardoning those who had once been Confederate officers. Also in direct opposition to the plans of the Radical Republicans, he supported giving landed property to ex-Confederates. And in 1866, he vetoed both the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act, and made known his opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment. For a man who hated slavery, this may seem surprising. However, one must remember that he was in favor of leaving as much to the jurisdiction of the states as possible. He was concerned about infringing on states’ rights—concerned to a fault, in fact.
So far, his actions are understandable, if apparently unusual from a modern perspective. Less pardonable, however, are his actions toward Radical Republican policy when it was passed. For instance, when it was decided that Southern stated were to have military governments instituted in them, Johnson complied, but made sure that the leaders of these governments were conservatives. These men would block major Reconstruction changes, thereby insuring that there was no solid plan for after the war. It ended up being two factions fighting over two sets of ideals. This was made worse by Johnson’s refusal to compromise. Understandably, the fall elections of 1866 went poorly for the President’s supporters.
By 1867, the majority in Congress had decided that it didn’t like Johnson, his policies, or his style of presidency. Some Radical Republicans were already discussing impeachment. Possibly with this in mind, the Legislative branch passed the Tenure of Office Act, which forced the President to get the approval of the Senate before dismissing one of his officers. Johnson, testing this law, fired his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, without asking the Senate first. In February 1868, not only was this action taken , but Stanton was reinstated by Congress, then dismissed again by Johnson in favor of Union general Lorenzo Thomas. Days later, Congress voted for impeachment, accusing the President of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
There are many opinions on this. Michael Les Benedict, a history professor at Ohio State University, believes that it was a proper action to take. Indeed, he says that Johnson was daring them to impeach him; if they hadn’t, it would have given him free reign to dismantle their plan for Reconstruction. Others, such a historian Hans Louis Trefousse, chalk it up to political opportunism. Along this line, United States Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in his 1992 book, Grand Inquests, writes that the inquiry was purely technical, and "bordered on the absurd."
On February 25, 1868, the Senate began proceedings for the impeachment, writing eleven articles. The first eight concerned Johnson’s violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The others stated that he had questioned the constitutionality of laws, and made public speeches against members of Congress. The trial began on March 30, and over it presided Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.
Although the Senate was full of Radical supporters, Johnson had a chance of survival. One of his defenders was Benjamin R. Curtis, a former associate justice. The defense concentrated on the fact that the Tenure of Office Act was clearly unconstitutional, and since that was the only actual law Johnson had broken, this was logical. The prosecution concentrated on the President’s opposition to Republican policy, and said that he was, in fact, subverting the Union victory in the Civil War. In May, votes were taken on the eleventh, second, and third articles of impeachment. On all three, the vote was the same: thirty-five to nineteen, one shy of a two-thirds majority.
The question is, with so many Republicans voting, how was there not a two-thirds majority? There were certainly enough people like Horace Greeley, who believed that any Republican who voted for acquittal was a traitor. On the other hand, there were some senators who felt that party loyalty was not as important as working toward their own personal beliefs. And the belief of many was that the impeachment was ridiculous. And then there was Benjamin Wade. Wade was next in line to be President, should Johnson be thrown out. Several senators were wary of his extreme position on Reconstruction and his obsessive support of Johnson’s impeachment.
If Johnson had been dismissed, it would have been a major victory for the Radical Republicans, but as it is, their moment had ended. More moderate policies were enacted, and the South returned to the hands of the conservatives. Once-Confederates were emboldened to continue their way of life and persecute the recently freed slaves. Despite this, the acquittal set an important precedent, demonstrating that a president cannot be evicted for political reasons. As for the Tenure of Office Act, it was repealed in 1887, and declared unconstitutional in 1926. Thus ended a controversial and still hotly debated event in the history of the United States.
