April 15, 1865, just over a month after his inauguration, Lincoln died after the first presidential assassination in American history, and Johnson became the most accidental of presidents. In the wake of Lincoln’s death, Johnson showed a humility of the moment never seen in Donald Trump, commenting, “I feel incompetent to perform duties so important and responsible as those which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.” But Johnson’s humility did not last. His more enduring character traits inclined him to stubbornness, hasty action, disdain for cautious advice, and ill-tempered retorts against critics.13
Johnson loved the Union but not the black people it had liberated from slavery. Although later in life a moderately wealthy slaveholder, Johnson rose from the lower ranks of white society, what some at the time called “mudsills,” the humble white farmers, laborers, tradesmen, and mechanics that, like Trump, he had championed in his political campaigns. He saw mudsills as threatened both by aristocrats from above and aspiring black people from below. At an outdoor rally, he told a crowd of cheering white men that he was their Moses who would lead “the emancipation of the white man” from their slavery under postwar Reconstruction. Johnson, declared the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass euphemistically, is “no friend of our race.”14
Johnson was an odd man in his time. He was an apostate Democrat assuming the incumbency of a Republican president. He lacked allies in either party and prided himself as an outsider untethered to a capital city that he called “12 square miles bordered by reality.” By opposing efforts to reconstruct the nation and integrate newly freed slaves into American life, Johnson quickly fell afoul of a Congress controlled by Republicans with southern states still in limbo. He pardoned from the consequences of rebellion thousands of wealthy planters, some of whom with their wives had wined and dined him in Washington. With his humble roots and his penchant for spouting populism but privileging the rich, Johnson foreshadowed Trump.
Johnson pushed to restore southern states swiftly to the Union with no controls on race relations. He lambasted the “Radical Congress” for giving blacks privileges “torn from white men.” In a comment eerily similar to Trump’s denigration of a “so-called judge,” Johnson decried Congress as “a body called or which assumes to be the Congress of the United States.” He proclaimed to be protecting America, not from ex-Confederates, but from radical Republicans and their Negro allies. He forced Congress to override his vetoes on legislation aimed at protecting black rights and safety in the South and exploited his powers as president to evade and obstruct the enforcement of these laws.15
Johnson’s conduct had tragic consequences for black people in the South. He restored to power, political and economic, much of the old slaveholding elite, who proceeded to keep their former slaves poor, controlled, and powerless. He forced his successor president and Congress to essentially begin anew much of the process of Reconstruction. Ultimately Reconstruction failed. The South remained mired in poverty, and the white supremacists who regained full control of southern governments imposed on African Americans the Jim Crow system of segregation and discrimination that endured for nearly a century. The failure of Reconstruction, “to a large degree,” wrote the historian Michael Les Benedict, “could be blamed alone on President Johnson’s abuse of his discretionary powers.”16
In 1867, murmurings of impeachment began to circulate among exasperated, radical Republicans in Congress. In March, they had enacted over Johnson’s veto the Tenure of Office Act, a law that cut into his powers by prohibiting the president from replacing without consent of the Senate any federal official who had previously won Senate approval. To bait an impeachment trap, Congress inserted a clause that said any violation constituted a “high crime and misdemeanor.” And then, they waited.17
JOHNSON STANDS HIS GROUND
Johnson was at the defining moment of his presidency. His response to Congress’s challenge would decide his own fate as president, with profound implications for every successor in the White House. He could battle Congress and risk impeachment or withdraw from the fray and count down passively the final days of his presidency. Or he could change his ways and reach an accord with the Reconstruction Congress.
Johnson stayed true to his notoriously pugnacious character and chose to fight. He taunted Congress by deliberately violating the Tenure of Office Act. “I have been advised by every member of my Cabinet that the entire Tenure-of-Office Act is unconstitutional,” he later said.18
The House of Representatives struck back, by voting along party lines to approve articles of impeachment tied to Johnson’s violation of the act. “He is not Napoleon,” said Republican representative Tobias A. Plants of Ohio, “there will be no coup d’état!” To keep open all options for the Senate, members voted for eleven verbose and repetitive articles, totaling some forty-five hundred words.19
In the fixation on the dubious Tenure of Office violation, lost were the potentially more serious charges that Johnson had abused presidential power to obstruct Reconstruction and delegitimize another branch of government. Embedded within the garrulous articles was the charge that his conduct was “denying and intending to deny, that the legislation of said Congress was valid or obligatory.” The articles charged him with saying that Congress was not a legitimate body “authorized by the Constitution to exercise legislative power.” The articles further charged that he had willfully schemed to “prevent the execution” of legislation vital to congressional Reconstruction.20
Johnson’s last chance to fight for his survival in the Senate had arrived. The Senate trial dragged on for nearly three months, with House prosecutors and defense lawyers clashing on issues that cut to the heart of the meaning of impeachment and the scope of presidential authority.
IMPEACHMENT’S BIG ISSUES
America’s founders, insisted the prosecutors, placed no restrictions on what qualifies as an impeachable offense. Impeachment is not meant solely “for the punishment of crime,” argued the chief prosecutor, Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts. A president should be impeached and convicted if he “imperils the public safety” and shows himself “unfit to occupy official position.” Wrong, said Johnson’s defense attorney Benjamin Curtis. Impeachment, he argued, requires a violation of law and not just of any law, but of “only high criminal offenses against the United States.” The Senate cannot sit “as some nameless tribunal with unbounded and illimitable jurisdiction.”21
Prosecutors claimed that Johnson had no absolute authority to disobey the law, and that his discretion begins and ends with his veto power. The right “to judge upon any supposed conflict of an act of Congress with the Constitution is exhausted when he has examined a bill sent to him and returned it with his objections,” Butler said. After that, he “must execute the law, whether in fact constitutional or not.” Otherwise, “the government is the government of one man.”22
The House’s constriction of presidential power “does offend every principle of justice,” responded another presidential lawyer, William Evarts. “If an act be unconstitutional [the president] had a right to obey the Constitution,” and “to raise a question between the Constitution and the law.” The prosecutors, he warned, had proposed a subversive doctrine that “constitutional laws and unconstitutional laws are all alike in this country,” and the president must obey both equally.23
In their final bold argument against excessive presidential authority, prosecutors said that the laws of Congress restricted the president’s powers to remove federal officials. “If we concede such royal power to a president,” said Representative John A. Logan of Illinois, “he is henceforth the government.” Americans must ask, “Will you have Andrew Johnson as President or King?” Johnson’s attorney general, Henry Stanbery, who rose from
