After Generals Thomas and Sherman testified in the Impeachment Trial of Andrew Johnson, the president’s lead counsel Henry Stanbery took ill. The defense requested a delay in the trial to allow him time to recover. Lead prosecutor Ben Butler objected to further delay. He believed that the president must be removed as soon as possible because of increasing violence from the Ku Klux Klan while the impeachment was going on. Klan and other white supremacist violence reached a high point in 1868, with former slaves and Republican Southerners being their targets. Butler said that Johnson refused to take action to protect the right of African Americans to vote, or even to guarantee the lives and safety of these men and women.
Butler said, “Far be it from me not to desire to be courteous, and not to desire that we should have our absent and sick friend here to take part with us; but the interests of the people are greater than the interests of any one individual.” He pointed out that the Impeachment Trial had already dragged on for over a month, largely due to defense delay, “We have been here in the Senate for thirty-three working days, twenty-one of them given over to delays—and four early adjournments, all to accommodate the defense. The government was practically shut down. Nothing can be done, and the whole country waits upon us and our action.”
Moving the case forward to the removal of Johnson was imperative, he argued, because “While we are waiting for the Attorney General to get well, numbers of our fellow-citizens are being murdered day by day. There is not a man here who does not know that the moment justice is done on this great criminal, the murders will cease…. While we are being courteous, the true Union men of the south are being murdered, and on our heads and on our skirts is this blood if we remain any longer idle…. I want these things to stop.” Butler said he worried that the lives sacrificed by 300,000 Union soldiers during the Civil War would be given in vain if the accomplishments of the war were allowed to be erased by Johnson’s complicity in the reestablishment of former-Confederate control of the South.
Butler personalized the peril of Union men by directly addressing Chief Justice Salmon Chase and telling him that General Spencer, who had been appointed Federal Bankruptcy Register for Alabama by Chase himself, “is driven today from his duties and his home by the Ku-Klux-Klan, upon fear of his life.” Butler concluded, “for the safety of the true and loyal men, black and white” the Senate trial must proceed.
Butler said that he knew he was perceived as having argued this matter with “considerable warmth,” but that this emotion came from his knowledge of the violence sweeping the South. He told the Senate that every day he received in the mail “an account from the South of some murder or worse of some friend of the country. I want these things to stop. Many a man I have known standing by my side for the Union I can hear now only as laid in the cold grave by the assassin’s hand.”
Source: The Trial of Andrew Johnson pp. 428-432.
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