High school history class in my youth portrayed the Johnson Impeachment as stemming from petulant Congressional Radicals enraged at the president because he removed Secretary of War Stanton from office. That missed the back story. The Radicals were trying to protect Stanton because he was one of the few members of the administration who was trying to protect the freedpeople’s civil rights. Certainly, President Johnson was not.
Although Andrew Johnson had used the army to liberate thousands of slaves after Lincoln’s death, and he supported the ratification of the 13th Amendment ending slavery, by 1866 he appeared committed to turning the governments of the Southern states over to white-only rule. This alienated first Radicals, and then moderate and even conservative Republicans.
On March 13, 1866 the House of Representatives passed the First Civil Rights bill. It had already been passed by the Senate in February. Johnson vetoed it, he said, because it made “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are declared to be citizens of the United States. This provision comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood. Every individual of these races, born in the United States, is by the bill made a citizen of the United States.” He asked of African Americans, “Can it be reasonably supposed that they possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizenship of the United States?”
Congress reacted immediately by overriding Johnson’s veto.
A year later, on March 2, 1867 President Andrew Johnson vetoed the First Reconstruction Act. The same day both houses of Congress voted to override the veto by 135 to 48 in the House and 38 to 10 in the Senate.
The Reconstruction Act kept the United States army in the former-Confederate states to protect the civil rights of the freedpeople and it threatened to keep soldiers in a state until the state allowed black men to vote with whites on new color-blind state constitutions. Johnson knew his veto would not stand, yet he insisted on antagonizing Republicans who had been outraged by the murders of blacks engineered by the Ku Klux Klan and other white terror groups that Johnson had failed to suppress. In his veto message, Johnson claimed that the Act placed the white men of the South under military despotism. He forgot to mention that the same “victims” of tyranny were denying African Americans the vote and forming armed paramilitary units to terrorize the formerly enslaved peoples of the South.
Johnson’s unwillingness to protect the voting rights of blacks made his impeachment a priority for Radicals concerned that Southern state governments might beat “Mongrel” Republican tickets by violent voter suppression in the November, 1868 elections.
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