On March 13, 1865, the public saw the legal team defending President Johnson for the first time. The five prominent attorneys included a former Justice of the Supreme Court and the man who had served until recently as President Johnson’s Attorney General.
Henry Stanbery was Andrew Johnson’s Attorney General, stepping down from the cabinet to take on the president’s defense. Stanbery understood that he could not be both the president’s lawyer and the Attorney General.
Bostonian Benjamin Robbins Curtis was appointed to the Supreme Court by Millard Fillmore and was a dissenter in the Dred Scott case. He resigned soon afterwards. During the Civil War, he voted for Democrat George McClellan. He believed that after the war the former Confederate States should be immediately restored to representation in Congress and self-governance without Reconstruction.
William Maxwell Evarts from New York was a distinguished attorney. He had been a founding member of the Republican Party. A friend of Johnson’s Secretary of State William Seward, Evarts was a moderate Republican.
William Slocum Groesbeck was a Cincinnati politician whom Johnson trusted. He had been a Democratic Congressman before the war.
Thomas A.R. Nelson was a Tennessee Unionist who was imprisoned by the Confederates for his beliefs. In spite of his loyalty to the Union he had opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and after the war supported Johnson’s soft Reconstruction policies.
While the defense team members included both Democrats and Republicans from four different states, they all agreed on one thing. The president had to end his habit of going on rants against his opponents that wound up in the newspapers and compromised the defense the lawyers were planning. No lawyer can conduct a defense with a client going off like a loose cannon in public. Henry Stanbery warned Johnson that his off the cuff remarks to the press “injure your case and embarrass your counsel,” and he insisted that the president silence himself.
Johnson would prove to be a difficult client. Convinced that he knew best how his defense should be conducted, he twice threatened to go to the Senate himself to chair his legal team. His lawyers told him that under no circumstances should he appear in the Senate either as a witness of as part of the defense team.
Note: The feature illustration shows Johnson consulting with his lawyers. It appeared in Harper’s Weekly April 4, 1868, page 212.
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