Andrew Johnson's Impeachment as Prelude (February/March 1999 | Volume: 50, Issue: 1)

Andrew Johnson's Impeachment as Prelude

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Authors: Bernard A. Weisberger

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

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February/March 1999 | Volume 50, Issue 1

When the 105th Congress took a pre-election recess last October, the House of Representatives had already made itself a place in the record books by resolving, for the second time in a quarter of a century and only the third in the nation’s experience, to hold hearings on the possible impeachment and trial of a president.

I was reluctant to add to the millions of words already saturating the media. By now, any reasonably conscious American should know plenty, even about such un-intimate matters as the Constitution’s definition of impeachable crimes and the 1868 case of Andrew Johnson. Can any further and non-redundant historical framework be supplied?

I make the answer a tentative yes if we think in terms of aftermath. Let us start with a statement and a question. The statement is this: There are those who argue that Clinton’s own behavior brought on the crisis and raises constitutional issues worthy of examination; and there are those who see him as essentially the victim of a vendetta by partisan opponents. The question is: Which view is likely to be the judgment of history? On that, the Johnson story is potentially instructive.

To get the core facts into as brief a compass as possible, Johnson was an accidental President in more ways than one. He was a rarity, a Southern Democrat — a senator from Tennessee in 1861 — who opposed secession and refused to follow his state out of the Union. In 1864, in order to woo Northern and Western Democrats, the Republicans put him on the ticket as Lincoln’s running mate. But Johnson remained basically a Democrat, and Booth’s bullet put him in the White House in April 1865, confronting a Republican Congress—which, however, was not slated to meet until December.

In the interim, Johnson took charge of Reconstruction. He followed a proposed Lincoln plan of allowing a state to re-enter the Union, provided that 10 percent of its 1860 voters sign an oath of loyalty; that it ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery; and that it repudiate its ordinance of secession and debts incurred under the Confederacy. By year’s end all the seceded states had done so. Not surprisingly, their voters then elected governors and congressmen who had been Confederate heroes and state lawmakers who enacted black codes, which regulated the behavior and opportunities of the emancipated blacks so stringently that while not precisely returned to slavery, they were left disenfranchised and far from free.

It was not surprising either that these developments did not sit well with a Northern public that had just lost more than 350,000 of its sons in a war against what was perceived as a Southern oligarchy bent on demeaning and destroying free labor and all the educational and industrial progress that went with it. Nor did they please a Congress unwilling to be shut out of the Reconstruction process.

When that body reconvened, its Republican majority was fairly well united behind the idea of giving the freedmen