Andrew Johnson, one of our worst presidents, has rarely gotten as much press as he is receiving right now. With an impeachment inquiry under way as I write this, the first president to be impeached is being referenced in the media scores of times each day.
Because Donald Trump is likely to both be impeached by the House and not be convicted in his Senate trial, the Johnson impeachment seems to offer a parallel to our presidential crisis. Johnson was overwhelmingly impeached by the House of Representatives, but the Senate failed to convict by one vote.
I had originally planned on doing a Johnson Impeachment series next year, but the moment is now for this information. I will not be discussing the Trump situation in most posts, even though my timing is obviously tied to his predicament. I will post one article each week on the first presidential impeachment.
I think that the Johnson removal is little understood today, with most of us having been taught that it centered on the removal of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton by the president in defiance of the likely-unconstitutional Tenure of Office Act passed by Congress to clip Johnson’s wings. I want to explore the Johnson Impeachment through primary sources and the opinions of historians on its own terms. I also want to look at the process of impeachment that Congress in 1868 had inhereted from the Framers of the Constitution and from a tiny handful of earlier impeachment efforts.
While I will not be discussing the Trump Impeachment, I wanted to start off this series by quoting an article from Politico by David Priess on how the Johnson Impeachment might hold lessons for us today:
The president of the United States was both a racist and a very difficult man to get along with.
He routinely called blacks inferior. He bluntly stated that no matter how much progress they made, they must remain so. He openly called critics disloyal, even treasonous. He liberally threw insults like candy during public speeches. He rudely ignored answers he didn’t like. He regularly put other people into positions they didn’t want to be in, then blamed them when things went sour. His own bodyguard later called him “destined to conflict,” a man who “found it impossible to conciliate or temporize.”
But the nation’s politicians simply had to interact with Andrew Johnson, for he had become the legitimate, constitutionally ordained chief executive upon Abraham Lincoln’s death by assassination.
Their path for managing this choleric man reveals that a president need not be kicked out of office to be removed from holding a firm grip on the reins of power. It also shows that people around the president, from Congress to the Cabinet, have many more tools at their disposal than, say, writing an anonymous New York Times op-ed to stop a leader they consider reckless or dangerous…
The failure of the Radical Republicans to convict him in the Senate (by one vote) and thus remove him from office didn’t stop Congress from keeping Johnson boxed in. He remained something short of a full chief executive during his final 10 months in office, with effective restrictions on his power, like the Tenure of Office Act, locked in. General Grant, by this time a candidate for the presidential election that November, believed that “Johnson had been taught a lesson which he would not forget.” Johnson’s leading biographer Hans Trefousse calls him, for the remainder of his time as chief executive, a “president in limbo.”
We will look at whether David Priess is right, or whether other views that the Johnson Impeachment was a stain on American history should hold sway.
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