Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president of the United States of America, was the first president in our nation’s history to be impeached. This historical drama played itself out during incredible times. The events leading up to it, and the players involved, together added up to an event that was more than the sum of its parts. It can be fairly said that had President Johnson not remained in office by just one vote, the delicate balance of powers between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of our government – the very core of our stability and longevity – would have been forever changed.
The Character Issue
President Andrew Johnson’s character played a large part in framing the dilemma that was about to take place, and it is important to understand the man, as well as the times, when analyzing the situation.
Andrew Johnson was born December 29, 1808 in Raleigh, North Carolina. His early years were spent in poverty, and he was raised by his mother, and later a stepfather, when his father died trying to save two friends from drowning in the year 1812. Without a formal education, he started an apprenticeship with a tailor at the age of fourteen. He became a self-taught, self-made man who was able to start with nothing and open his own tailor shop in Tennessee in the year 1827. It was during this time that he met and married Eliza McCardle, a woman with more education than he, who was able to help him further his studies in reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was from these humble beginnings that Andrew Johnson started his political career.
By this time in his life, through his experiences, Andrew Johnson’s character was set, and carved in unyielding stone. He was known as unfailingly honest, honorable, able, and very ambitious. However, underlying these positive attributes, was a fundamentally insecure man. His feelings of unworthiness stemmed most likely from his poor childhood and lack of a formal education, and this negative aspect of his character presented itself in his boastfulness and bulldog-stubbornness. These conflicting aspects produced a man of deep convictions and iron-willed independence. He was a man that was not afraid to cut against the political grain.
His independence in political life was evident by his sometimes unpopular and apparently contradictory stands. Although he ran for various government positions in Tennessee, a typical southern state run by rich land owners, Johnson very effectively played a kind of class warfare by positioning himself as a protector of the lowly farmer against the "stuck-up aristocrats". And despite his strong belief in state’s rights and his defense of slavery, Andrew Johnson was the only southern senator to vote against secession, and he remained with the Union. This made him a hero to the North, and reviled in his home territory.
The Politics of the Time
The year was 1864 and a presidential election was near, as was the end of the Civil War. By now it was apparent that the South had lost, the North had won, and the question of how to re-unite the two bitter opponents into one nation again was at hand.
The Republican Party controlled the congress, and "radicals" within this party had a great deal of influence. Representative Thaddeus Stevens (PA) in the House of Representatives and Charles Sumner (R-MA) and Benjamin Wade (R-OH) in the Senate led these "Radical Republicans". The radicals viewed the South has a "conquered province", the defeated people of the South should be treated as traitors, and their land seized by the government and given to the ex-slaves. They were also strongly in favor of granting equal, or near equal rights to the freedmen, such as the right to vote and the right to bare witness in court.
President Lincoln, although a Republican himself, wanted to treat the South with more conciliatory measures. The president’s Reconstruction Plan was designed to expedite the reinstatement of the southern populace into the Union. Called the "Ten Percent Plan", it only required a loyalty oath. When ten percent of the number of people who voted in the 1860 election within a state took the oath, a new state government could then be established. President Lincoln, as well as President Johnson after him, viewed the South not as a conquered province, but as states that had never really left the Union, and their voting rights should be returned as soon as they submitted to federal authority.
This posed several problems for the Radical Republicans. First, on principal, was that President Lincoln’s plan made little mention of the process for emancipating the slaves, or their rights as freedmen. Second, politically, southern states voting again meant more Southern Democrats to deal with in congress, disrupting the Republican hold on power.
It was in this political maelstrom that President Lincoln chose as his running mate Andrew Johnson. Johnson’s tirades against secessionists, his refusal to join the Confederacy, and the fact that he was a southerner and had the support of poor white farmers had made him a popular choice.
Road to Impeachment
Vice President Andrew Johnson took the oath of office in March 1865. As with most vice presidents, his office and duty was considered politically symbolic, a way of shoring up the president’s political base. It is doubtful anyone could have foreseen the assassination of President Lincoln a month later, and the ascension of Andrew Johnson, the boisterous tailor from Tennessee, a southerner in a time when being from the South was not politically correct, to the presidency. It was at this time that the road to impeachment really began.
It is interesting to speculate how a President Lincoln would have handled the quagmire of reconstruction. His own party, which dominated congress, wanted severe sanctions on the South, but President Lincoln’s Reconstruction Plan was in fact less demanding than the plan President Johnson would later devise. My guess is that President Lincoln’s plan would have gone into effect, not because of the slight differences in the plans, but because of the differences in the two men. Not only was President Lincoln from the North, sharing northern sensibilities, but he was considered by many to be a conquering hero – and history has shown that the best peacemakers are the most respected warriors. His words and deeds carried weight, because he more than anyone else had to carry the responsibility of the war. His motives for fighting the war, and thus his motives for waging peace, could not be easily questioned.
President Johnson was a different matter entirely. His motivations for conciliatory handling of the South was more than likely his very long held belief in state’s rights, and disdain for a powerful federal government. But the fact was that he was from the South and had defended slavery, and it wasn’t hard for his political enemies to characterize the motivation for his posture as trying to undo all that had been fought for. President Johnson’s intransigence and verbal combativeness didn’t help him.
President Johnson wielded his veto pen 29 times in less than four years, and more than half of these vetoes were overturned by congress. Among his vetoes that were overturned was his veto of the 14th Amendment, which granted blacks the right of citizenship, and other vetoes of such rights designed to protect the ex-slaves, which President Johnson considered "unconstitutional". Such political decisions served to embolden his enemies, and situations for him became worse in the 1866 congressional elections when Republicans had gained a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate.
It was during this time that the congress started passing laws to restrain presidential powers. One of these laws, the Tenure of Office Act, required the president to first obtain the Senate’s consent before removing any federal appointees from office. The Tenure of Office Act was to become the catalyst for the impeachment proceedings.
President Johnson felt, and history has proven him right, that the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional. His veto of the act was overridden, but he was not afraid to challenge it. In 1868, President Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, A Radical Republican "hold-over" from Lincoln’s administration within Johnson’s cabinet. The battle lines had been drawn, and the House adopted a resolution to impeach on February 24, 1868 with a 126-47 vote.
The reason for impeachment was pure politics. President Johnson was charged with eleven articles of impeachment, eight of which for sacking Stanton, and one article was even for criticizing congress too forcefully. The Senate trial started in early March of that year and lasted until May, and only three of the impeachment articles were ultimately voted on. The president did not attend the proceedings, which was probably wise considering his combative nature. Instead, lawyers who argued that President Johnson’s purpose for dismissing Stanton was to challenge the Tenure of Office Act represented him.
On May 16, 1868, the Senate took its first vote on an article of impeachment. The result was 35-19 for impeachment, one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to remove the president from office. Within the next ten days, two other articles were voted on with similar results. The Radical Republicans gave up on impeachment, and President Johnson was able to complete his term.
Conclusion
President Andrew Johnson’s time in office was tragic for both himself and our nation. It is quite possible that no one man could have found the middle ground, the great big answer, between the various and heated factions tearing at this country. But President Johnson started out with disadvantages that a better man than he might not have been able to face. As a southerner, he was at the head of a nation that saw him as having sympathies for the losing side of the Civil War. He was a president that never won an election to that office, but instead became president by tragic fate. He succeeded a great president, Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated just as the near impossible task of reconstruction was getting started. And he was ambivalent, at best, to the plight of the ex-slaves – an attitude that was at odds with the views of a great number of those in the North, as well as congress.
There have been times in history when great people arrived at just the right time to do incredible deeds. The United States of America needed such a person as president in 1865; a president that was firm in his convictions and confident of his ability to lead, but also able to yield to political reality. Andrew Johnson was not up to the task. His hidden insecurity, truculence, and defiance of congress, combined with the political and social divisions of the time nearly ended his presidency, and forced this country into a constitutional crisis at a critical moment in history.
By Matthew R. King
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Loy, Wesley. "Andrew Johnson, Impeachment, and President Clinton". Nando Times News. On-Line. Internet. October 1, 1998.
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