Stephanie McCurry, the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University, has an article on the effects of the failed prosecution of Andrew Johnson in this week’s Nation magazine. Here is an excerpt:
There is one more conclusion we can draw about 1868: Johnson may not have been convicted by the Senate, but his Republican impeachers nonetheless did win the battle over Reconstruction, and in this way impeachment was a success. After Johnson was acquitted, Republicans passed their most radical acts yet, holding their coalition together long enough to enact the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed adult male citizens the right to vote regardless of race, and the Enforcement Acts, by which they successfully used federal power to suppress the Ku Klux Klan. They also saw the election of Grant as president in 1868 and managed to hold off the Democratic white supremacist overthrow of radical Reconstruction into the 1870s. These were no mean achievements, and Wineapple’s The Impeachers helps us to see how Republicans won in the end, even though they failed to remove the president.
In The Wars of Watergate, Stanley Kutler writes that “impeachment was perceived as analogous to nuclear weapons: available, yet too dangerous to use,” which, if true, also means that invoking the power to impeach is itself a meaningful act. Impeachment is not likely to become a routine tool of partisan warfare. To date, it has been used only four times (including against Nixon, who resigned before articles of impeachment were voted on). In the wars over Reconstruction, when the questions on the table were as fundamental to democracy as they come, the decision to impeach Johnson was a critical demonstration of political will. Impeachment might not have been the most dramatic or important of the Republicans’ actions. But as a tool to constrain executive abuse of power and as a way to publicize dissent on matters of policy and principle, it suggests that impeachment itself is the measure of success, however remote the likelihood of conviction.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
