History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, President of the United States Part 4

The following is General Grant's Report transmitted to Congress with the foregoing Message:

Headquarters Armies of the United States, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., Dec. 18, 1865.

Sir:--In reply to your note of the 16th inst., requesting a report from me giving such information as I may be possessed, coming within the scope of the inquiries made by the Senate of the United States, in their resolution of the 12th inst., I have the honor to submit the following:

With your approval, and also that of the Honorable Secretary of War, I left Was.h.i.+ngton City on the 27th of last month for the purpose of making a tour of inspection through some of the Southern States, or States lately in rebellion, and to see what changes were necessary to be made in the disposition of the Military forces of the country; how these forces could be reduced and expenses curtailed, etc., and to learn as far as possible, the feelings and intentions of the citizens of those States towards the General Government.

The State of Virginia being so accessible to Was.h.i.+ngton City, and information from this quarter therefore being readily obtained, I hastened through the State without conversing or meeting with any of its citizens. In Raleigh, North Carolina, I spent one day; in Charleston, South Carolina, I spent two days; Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, each one day. Both in traveling and while stopping, I saw much and conversed freely with the citizens of those States, as well as with officers of the Army who have been stationed among them. The following are the conclusions come to by me:

I am satisfied that the ma.s.s of the thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have heretofore divided the sentiments of the people of the two sections--Slavery and State Rights, or the right of a State to secede from the Union--they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal--arms--that man can resort to. I was pleased to learn from the leading men whom I met, that they not only accepted the decision arrived at, as final, but that now, when the smoke of battle has cleared away, and time has been given for reflection, this decision has been a fortunate one for the whole country, they receiving like benefits from it with those who opposed them in the field and in council.

Four years of war, during which law was executed only at the point of the bayonet throughout the States in rebellion, have left the people possibly in a condition not to yield that ready obedience to civil authority the American people have been in the habit of generally yielding. This would render the presence of small garrisons throughout those States necessary until such time as labor returns to its proper channels and civil authority is fully established. I did not meet anyone, either those holding places under the Government or citizens of the Southern States, who think it practicable to withdraw the Military from the South at present. The white and black mutually require the protection of the General Government. There is such universal acquiescence in the authority of the General Government throughout the portions of the country visited by me, that the mere presence of a military force, without regard to numbers, is sufficient to maintain order. The good of the country and economy require that the force kept in the interior where there are many freedmen (elsewhere in the Southern States than at forts upon the sea coast, no more is necessary,) should all be white troops. The reasons for this are obvious without mentioning any of them. The presence of black troops, lately slaves, demoralizes labor both by their advice and by furnis.h.i.+ng in their camps a resort for freedmen for long distances around. White troops generally excite no opposition, and therefore a small number of them can maintain order in a given district. Colored troops must be kept in bodies sufficient to defend themselves. It is not thinking men who would use violence towards any cla.s.s of troops sent among them by the General Government, but the ignorant in some cases might, and the late slave seems to be imbued with the idea that the property of his late master should of right belong to him, or at least should have no protection from the colored soldiers.

There is danger of collision being brought on by such causes.

My observations lead me to the conclusion that the citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return to self government within the Union as soon as possible; that while reconstructing they want and require protection from the Government; that they are in earnest in wis.h.i.+ng to do what they think is required by the Government, not humiliating to them as citizens, and that if such is pointed out they would pursue it in good faith. It is to be regretted that there cannot be a greater commingling at this time between the citizens of the two sections, and particularly with THOSE ENTRUSTED WITH THE LAWMAKING POWER.

I did not give, the operation of the Freedmen's Bureau that attention I would have done if more time had been at my disposal. Conversations on the subject, however, with officers connected with the Bureau, led me to think that in some of the States its affairs have not been conducted with good judgment and economy, and that the belief, widely spread among the freedmen of the Southern States, that the land of their former masters will, at least in part, be divided among them, has come from the agents of this Bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts for the coming year. In some form the Freedmen's Bureau is an absolute necessity until civil law is established and enforced, securing to the freedmen their rights and full protection. At present, however, it is independent of the Military establishment of the country, and seems to be operated by the different agents of the Bureau according to their individual notions, every where.

Gen. Howard, the able head of the Bureau, made friends by the just and fair instructions and advice he gave; but the complaint in South Carolina was that, when he left, things went on as before. Many, perhaps the majority of the agents of the Bureau, advised the freedmen that by their industry they must expect to live. To this end they endeavor to secure employment for them: to see that both contracting parties comply with their agreements. In some instances; I am sorry to say, the freedman's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that a freedman has a right to live without care or provision for the future.

The effect of the belief in the division of lands is idleness and acc.u.mulation in camps, towns, and cities. In such cases, I think it will be found that vice and disease will tend to the extermination, or great reduction of the colored race. It cannot be expected that the opinions held by men at the South can be changed in a day, and therefore the freedmen require for a few years not only laws to protect them, but the fostering care of those who will give them good counsel and in whom they can rely.

U. S. Grant, Lieutenant General.

This report was at once vigorously denounced in and out of Congress, by the extremists. Mr. Sumner characterized it in the Senate, as a "whitewas.h.i.+ng report." The standing of General Grant in the country at large, however, was such that few had the indiscretion to attack him openly.

The controlling element of the party which had elected Lincoln and Johnson, had acquiesced for a time in the plan of reconstruction foreshadowed by Mr. Lincoln and adopted by Mr. Johnson, but during the summer of 1865, frictions developed between Mr. Johnson and those who on Mr. Lincoln's death had a.s.sumed the leaders.h.i.+p in the work of reconstruction and other matters of administration, came to take the opposite ground, from the first occupied by Sumner and other extremists in Congress--that the States lately in rebellion had destroyed themselves by their own act of war, and had thereby forfeited all the rights of Statehood and were but conquered provinces, subject solely to the will of the conqueror.

From that point their ways parted and widened from month to month, till bitter hostility, political and personal, came to mark even their official intercourse.

Mr. Johnson was practically unknown to the great ma.s.s of the people of the North till he succeeded to the Presidency. He was in no sense regarded as or a.s.sumed to be the leader of the dominant party; while those who on Mr. Lincoln's death became leaders of the dominant party in opposition to Mr. Johnson's administration and policies, were widely known and of long public experience, and had correspondingly the confidence of their party.

So, in the strife that ensued, as it became embittered with the lapse of time, Mr. Johnson was at great disadvantage, and made little or no headway, but rather lost ground as the controversy progressed. His moderate, conservative views, radically expressed, in regard to what should be the methods of reconstruction and the restoration of the Union, found little favor with the ma.s.s of the veterans of the Union armies who had but lately returned from the victorious fields of the South, their blood not yet cooled after the fury and heat of the strife while to many, who had witnessed the horrors of war at a safe distance, with the cessation of hostilities in the field, to which they had been only anxious spectators, became suddenly enthused over issues that others had fought out in battle, and vigorously vicious towards Mr.

Johnson for presuming to treat the conquered people of the South as American citizens and ent.i.tled to the rights of such, after having laid down their arms and peacefully returned to their homes and their respective callings.

This temper, permeating, as it did, the dominant party of practically every Northern State, was not unstintingly reflected upon the National Capitol in the return to Congress of a large majority in both Houses, of men who sympathized with and reflected back again upon their const.i.tuents the most extreme views as to what should be the policy of the Government towards the South.

These views characterized the legislation of the time. Partisan rancor was unbridled, and found expression not only in coercive legislation of various grades of severity, but in placing the Southern States generally under almost absolute military control, and in the practical abrogation of the common rights of American citizens.h.i.+p in most of them.

Quite every act of this sort of legislation was pa.s.sed over the official protest of the President, and each of these protests seemed but to add emphasis to each succeeding act of Congress in that line, till it seemed that there could be no end to the strife, so long as Mr. Johnson remained in the Presidential office.

The ostensible basis of the disagreement which in a few months after the accession of Mr. Johnson to the Presidency began to develop between himself and the Republican leaders in Congress, was the plan of reconstruction put in operation by him during the recess of Congress that year, 1865, and outlined in his North Carolina Proclamation. It availed not, that that plan had been adopted originally by Mr. Lincoln a few days before his death--that it had been concurred in by his entire Cabinet and would undoubtedly have been carried out successfully by him had he lived that plan was made the ground of criticism of Mr. Johnson by the extreme party element in control of Congress, which persistently accused him of having abandoned the plan initiated by Mr. Lincoln, and of setting up another of his own, for purely personal and ambitious purposes, and to the detriment of the peace of the country.

Mr. Johnson may have been opinionated and headstrong, a characteristic of a great many people of strong convictions of duty and purpose; while the overwhelming numerical strength of the dominant party in and out of Congress made it seemingly indifferent, reckless and inconsiderate of the convictions, as of the rights and prerogatives of the Chief Executive treating him more as a clerk whose sole duty it was to register without suggestion the decrees of Congress.

That Mr. Lincoln, had he lived, would have pursued much the same policy of reconstruction, is clearly indicated by the established fact that he had determined to adopt precisely the initial measures thereto which Mr. Johnson did inaugurate and attempt to carry out. But Mr. Lincoln's superior ability in statecraft, his rare tact and knowledge of men, and his capacity for moulding and directing public opinion, seeming to follow where he actually led, would doubtless have secured a more favorable result. And more than all else, it can scarcely be doubted, that the unbounded confidence of the people in his patriotism and capacity to direct public affairs, would have enabled him to dictate terms of reconstruction strictly on the lines he had marked out, and would have commanded the general support of the country, regardless of partisan divisions, notwithstanding the well known fact that at the time of his death there were unmistakable indications of alienation from him of the extreme element of his party because of his conservative views as to the proper methods of reconstruction.

Meantime, in the effort to hamper the President, as far as it was possible for Congress to do, the Tenure-of-Office Act was pa.s.sed, early in 1867. The ostensible purpose of that Act was to restrict the authority of the President in the selection of his Cabinet advisers, and his power over appointments generally. Its specific purpose, at least so far as the House of Representatives was concerned, and measurably so in the Senate, was to prevent his removal of the Secretary of War, Mr.

Stanton, with the manifest if not avowed intent, as the sequel shows, to make that Secretary not only independent of his chief, but also to make him the immediate instrument of Congress in whatever disposition of the Army, or of military affairs generally relating to the government of the Southern States, the majority of Congress might dictate. In a word, the Congress, in that Act, virtually a.s.sumed, or attempted to a.s.sume, that control of the Army which the Const.i.tution vests on the President.

The first effort to impeach the President, in 1867, was based upon a general accusation of high crimes and misdemeanors without literal specification. The second, in 1868, was based upon his alleged violation of the Tenure-of-Office Act, in the removal of Mr. Stanton.

While it is undoubted, as already shown, that Mr. Lincoln and Mr.

Johnson were in accord as to the methods to be adopted for the restoration of the revolted States, it was Mr. Johnson's misfortune that he had not Mr. Lincoln's capacity for so great and so peculiar a task; though a gentleman of proven patriotism, ability, of a kindly, genial nature, and with record of valuable public service. Hampered by his lack of political finesse and intricate knowledge of state-craft, and in view of the conditions of that time, and the people with whom he had to deal, it was obvious from the outset that the result of the controversy could hardly be otherwise than disastrous to him. Mr. Lincoln would undoubtedly have been met by the same character of opposition, and from the same source. But there would have been the appearance at least of mutual concession, and while the APPEARANCE of concession would have been on Mr. Lincoln's side, the actual concession, so far as essentials were involved, would have been on the other.

Mr. Johnson was a Democrat of p.r.o.nounced type and profound convictions, and in no sense did he depart from his faith. He belonged to the school of Jackson and Jefferson. He had not the electric intuitions and impetuous will of the former, nor the culture and genius of the latter.

He adhered more religiously to the letter of the Const.i.tution than either. To him it was the one law of supreme obligation, that never ceased its guarantees. As fittingly expressed by one of his Counsel, Mr.

Groesbeck, in the trial: "He was not learned and scholarly--not a man of many ideas or of much speculation--but the Const.i.tution had been the study of his life, and by a law of the mind he was only the truer to that which he did know."

As had Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Johnson keenly appreciated the importance of the people of the South returning at once to the Union, free and independent American citizens, clothed with all the rights, privileges and obligations common to such. In his Cabinet Councils, and to a degree supreme in that board sat William H. Seward, as he had throughout Mr.

Lincoln's administration, than whom the Republic has produced no wiser, more sagacious, or patriotic statesman. He gave the subject his intense devotion in the maturity of his great powers.

There too, sat Secretary Welles, another of Mr. Lincoln's advisers, and a devoted friend of the Const.i.tution and the sanct.i.ty of the Union. Each of these men, thoroughly patriotic, and efficient, and untiring in the administration of their respective Departments, had commenced with the deluge of blood, and they now hoped to crown their official careers by a triumphant peace that would Honor their lives and glorify the Nation.

These men had a salutary influence over Mr. Johnson, and greatly modified the asperities of his disposition.

Mr. Johnson believed, as did Mr. Lincoln, that the revolted States were still States of the Union--that all the pretended acts of secession were null and void, and that the loyal people therein had the right to reconstruct their State Governments on the basis proposed to them first by Mr. Lincoln, and after him by Mr. Johnson, and thus the right to representation in the General Government.

It was upon this question that parties divided during the reconstruction period. Mr. Lincoln, foreseeing danger in such a division, was anxious to bring those States into such relation that the people generally would consider them as virtually in the Union, without reference to the abstract question. It was with this view, undoubtedly, that he advocated the admission of Members and Senators whenever one-tenth of the voting population of 1860 should organize State Governments and ask for readmission. He would not only not countenance, but repelled the doctrine of "State Suicide," as it was called, and which came to characterize the methods of reconstruction subsequently adopted.

It is true, that on many occasions Mr. Johnson charged that the Congress was only a Congress of part of the States, and that its acts were therefore without validity. Yet he continued to execute those laws, and what to him was a very unpleasant duty, the law which set aside the State Governments organized under his own direction, so that notwithstanding his violent denunciations of the acts of Congress, and his personal opinions, he did not presume to act upon them. Angry and undignified language was uttered on both sides. Many of his speeches were violent and in bad taste and temper. So were a great many speeches uttered by senators and members of the House, and those bodies too often acted upon them.

It is therefore but repeating recorded history to say that Mr. Johnson was earnestly seeking to carry out Mr. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, which was upon consultation with his entire Cabinet, more especially with Mr. Stanton, adopted by him as the basis for the restoration of the revolted States.

Yet, with these facts of record, that action was afterwards a.s.sailed by the Republican leaders in and out of Congress, who a.s.sumed to have become Mr. Lincoln's executors in the work of reconstruction, as not only an abandonment of the plan inst.i.tuted by him, but a surrender of the issues fought out and the results accomplished by the war just closed notwithstanding very many of these critics of Mr. Johnson had but a few months before criticised Mr. Lincoln with quite equal severity for his suggestion of this same method of restoration.

Nor will it suffice to say that, though professing submission and loyalty, the people of the South were still hostile to the Union, and that there was no safety there for Union men. It is true that there came to be violence and disorder there upon the rejection by Congress of Mr.

Johnson's plan of restoration.

These were the inevitable results of the conditions. There would also have been disorder and violence in the North and to a far greater degree, had the results of the war been reversed--an arbitrary and tyrannical system of restoration insisted upon--the established order of things destroyed homes broken up the people impoverished, and hordes of unscrupulous adventurers swarmed up from the South and overrun the country in pursuit of schemes of political chicanery and personal ambition, peculation and plunder, as was the South after the close of the war.

But when the fight was on, an overwhelmingly partisan House, as a last resort, in the hope of at once ending, by removal, all opposition on the part of the President to the views and aims of the dominant party in Congress, resorted to the first project of impeachment set out in the succeeding chapter.

CHAPTER IV. -- FIRST ATTEMPT TO IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT.

THE ASHLEY INDICTMENT.

The initiation of formal proceedings for the impeachment and removal of President Johnson occurred in the House of Representatives on January 7th, 1867, in the introduction of three separate resolutions for his impeachment, by Messrs. Loan and Kelso, of Missouri, and Mr. Ashley of Ohio. As Mr. Ashley's Resolution was the only one acted on by the House, only the proceedings had thereon are here given, as follows:

Mr. Speaker:--I rise to perform a painful but, nevertheless, to me, an imperative duty; a duty which I think ought not longer to be postponed, and which cannot, without criminality on our part, be neglected. I had hoped, sir, that this duty would have devolved upon an older and more experienced member of this House than myself. Prior to our adjournment I asked a number of gentlemen to offer the resolution which I introduced, but upon which I failed to obtain a suspension of the rules.

Confident, sir, that the loyal people of this country demand the adoption of some such proposition as I am about to submit, I am determined that no effort on my part shall be wanting to see that their expectations are not disappointed. * * * On my responsibility as a Representative, and in the presence of this House, and before the American people, I charge Andrew Johnson, Vice President and acting President of the United States, with the commission of acts which in contemplation of the Const.i.tution, are high crimes and misdemeanors, for which, in my judgment, he ought to be impeached. I therefore submit the following:

I do impeach Andrew Johnson, Vice President and acting President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors:

I charge him with a usurpation of power and violation of law:

In that he has corruptly used the appointing power;