Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (40 page)

Citations in the notes to published collections of original papers are as follows:

Grant Papers
: John Y. Simon, ed.,
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant,
Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press (1967–2005).

Johnson Papers
: LeRoy P. Graf and Ralph W. Haskins, eds.,
The Papers of Andrew Johnson,
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press (1967–2000).

Stevens Papers
: Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, eds.,
The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens,
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press (1998).

The following manuscript collections are found in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.:

Other original manuscript collections and their locations:

Alonzo Adams Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California Samuel L. M. Barlow Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California John Armor Bingham Papers, Morgan Library, New York, New York Cooper Family Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee

James F. Joy Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan Samuel Pomeroy Papers, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

The invaluable diary of Colonel William Moore was kept in his personal shorthand, which is difficult to translate. Because different parts of the diary have been translated at different times, the diary is cited in three different forms:

“Moore Diary/AHR” refers to extracts that were translated by Colonel Moore himself and published as “Notes of Colonel W. G. Moore, Private Secretary to President Johnson, 1866–1868,”
American Historical Review
, 19, 98 (1913).


“Moore Diary/AJ” refers to those entries from July 8, 1866, through March 20, 1868, that were kept by Moore in a “small diary,” and are available in the Johnson Papers in the Library of Congress, on Reel 50.


“Moore Diary/Large Diary” refers to a second volume of shorthand notes with entries from March 21, 1868, through January 24, 1871, also available on microfilm Reel 50 in the Johnson Papers in the Library of Congress.

Finally, I have shortened the names of the following sources, as indicated:

House Committee on the Judiciary, “Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson: Various Papers,” National Archives File 40B-A1: Archives,
Impeachment: Various House Papers.

HR 40B-A1—“House Committee on the Judiciary, Impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, 40th Cong., “Various Papers,” Committee’s Journal of Managers (“Managers’ Journal”): Archives,
Managers’ Journal.

Raising of Money to Be Used in Impeachment
, House Report No. 75, 40th Cong., 2d sess. (July 3, 1868):
Impeachment Money.

Impeachment Managers’ Investigation
, H.R. Rep. No. 44, 40th Cong., 2d sess. (May 25, 1868):
Impeachment Investigation.

The impeachment trial record, in
Congressional Globe
, Supplement, 40th Cong., 2d sess. (1868):
Globe
Supp.

PREFACE

[
T
]
his was no ordinary political crisis:
Adam Badeau,
Grant in Peace
, Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton & Co. (1887), p. 86.

1. BAD BEGINNINGS

This Johnson:
Michael Burlingame, ed., Walter B. Stevens,
A Reporter’s Lincoln
, Omaha: University of Nebraska Press (1998), p. 156.

Or it might have been:
Benjamin C. Truman, “Anecdotes of Andrew Johnson,”
Century
85:438 (1913).

On August 23:
Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Team of Rivals
, New York: Simon & Schuster (2005), p. 648. Lincoln could not afford to underestimate the Democrats. Traditionally identified with the South, the Democrats had won twelve out of sixteen presidential elections since 1800. In contrast, Lincoln’s Republican Party, only eight years old, was an amalgamation of Whigs, Know-Nothings, and antislavery Democrats. Also, there was no presumption in 1864 that a president was entitled to a second term. Not since Andrew Jackson in 1832 had a president won reelection.

“I am unwilling”: Cong. Globe
, 36th Cong., 2d sess., p. 117 (December 18, 1860), pp. 1354–56 (March 2, 1861).

Lincoln’s seven-man Cabinet: New York Times
, March 6, 1865.

Hamlin, an antislavery man:
As early as March of 1864, the press reported that Johnson might be the Republican pick for vice president.
New York Times
, March 24, 1864. Four years before, he had been Tennessee’s “favorite son” candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. In the 1860 Democratic Convention, his home state delegation voted for him on thirty-five ballots. Johnson then angled for the Democratic nod for vice president. Hans Trefousse,
Andrew Johnson, A Biography
, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. (1989), pp. 123–24. Now he might have an opportunity to run for the office on the opposing ticket.

Some 600 delegates arrived in Baltimore for the Republican convention on June 7, 1864. Reflecting the strategy of reaching out to Democratic voters, the gathering was called the “National Union Convention,” and the party called itself the “National Union Party.” Three candidates led the field for vice president: Johnson, the incumbent Hamlin, and Daniel Dickinson of New York, a former U.S. senator and a War Democrat. After unanimously choosing Lincoln for president, the convention turned to the second spot. Johnson led in the first balloting with 200 votes to Hamlin’s 150 and Dickinson’s 108. On the second roll call, Johnson won all but a handful of votes.
Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions, 1856, 1860, and 1864,…As Reported by Horace Greeley
, Minneapolis: Charles W. Johnson (1893), pp. 188–89, 198–99, 236–39. Johnson’s opponents suffered fatal defections from delegations that should have supported them. Dickinson commanded only half the votes of his own New York delegation. Those New Yorkers allied with Secretary of State William Seward supported Hamlin at first, then switched to Johnson. Seward, Lincoln’s closest adviser, may have been implementing his boss’s preferences. In so doing, Seward also protected his own job. Under the unwritten political rules of the 1860s, one state could not have two high officials in an administration. If Dickinson became vice president, Seward would have to leave office. Hamlin also came to grief in his home region, New England, when the Massachusetts delegation did not support him. P. J. Staudenraus, ed., Noah Brooks,
Mr. Lincoln’s Washington
, Washington, DC: T. Yosellof (1967), p. 326 (June 7, 1864); James G. Blaine,
Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield
, Norwich, CT: Henry Bill Publishing Co. (1886), vol. 2, pp. 64–69;
Diary of Gideon Welles
, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. (1911), vol. 2, p. 66; Glyndon Van Deusen,
William Henry Seward
, New York: Oxford University Press (1967), p. 433. Charles E. Hamlin,
The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin
, Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press (1899), pp. 464–76, 506; James F. Glonek, “Lincoln, Johnson, and the Baltimore Ticket,”
Abraham Lincoln Quarterly
6:270–71 ( March 1951); Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Making of a Myth: Lincoln and the Vice-Presidential Nomination in 1864,”
Civil War History
41:273 (1995).

Did Lincoln drive Johnson’s selection? Before the convention, Lincoln said several times that he was neutral as to the choice of his running mate, hardly a vote of confidence for Hamlin. Lincoln’s official neutrality probably was a smokescreen. The president likely sought to nudge the party toward Johnson while still appearing to be above the fray. One Republican congressman wrote, “It was understood that the President favored Johnson, though certain I am that he made no open declaration of his wishes.” Albert G. Riddle,
Recollections of War Times: Reminiscences of Men and Events in Washington, 1860–1865
, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (1895), p. 282.

“[K]nowing that Johnson”:
Hamlin, p. 497.

A Supreme Court justice:
Noah Brooks,
Washington in Lincoln’s Time
, Herbert Mitgang, ed., New York: Rinehart & Co. (1958), pp. 211–12. Senator John Sherman of Ohio remembered Johnson’s address similarly, though with different details. John Sherman,
John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet: An Autobiography
, Chicago: Werner Co. (1895), p. 351:

Brandishing it before the crowd:
Brooks, p. 213.

As the tall president:
Staudenraus, ed., p. 425.

A visitor to Johnson’s office:
J. B. Brownlow, quoted in David Bowen,
Andrew Johnson and the Negro
, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press (1989), p. 174 n. 35; Charles A. Dana,
Recollections of the Civil War
, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (1996), p. 106. Numerous other observations confirm these accounts. Harriott S. Turner, “Recollections of Andrew Johnson,”
Harpers Monthly
120:173 (1910); Oliver P. Temple,
Notable Men of Tennessee
, New York: Cosmopolitan Press (1912), p. 366; Garrett Epps,
Democracy Reborn, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America
, New York: Henry Holt & Co. (2006), p. 26; Chauncey M. Depew,
My Memories of Eighty Years
, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1922), p. 48.

“I have known Andy Johnson”:
Hugh McCulloch,
Men and Measures of Half a Century
, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons (1889), p. 373.

“The Vice President Elect”:
Letter of Senator Zachariah Chandler to his wife, quoted in Howard Means,
The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days that Changed the Nation
, New York: Harcourt (2006), p. 92.

A future member: John Sherman’s Recollections
, p. 351; Hamlin, p. 498; Welles Diary, vol. 2, p. 252; Staudenraus, ed., pp. 422–23 (March 12, 1865);
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning
, Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society (1933), vol. 2, p. 9.

All eyes: Times
(London), March 20, 1865.

From that day on: Chicago Tribune
, March 13, 1865; Carl Schurz,
The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz
, New York: McClure Co. (1908), vol. 3, p. 227.

2. PRESIDENT JOHNSON

I am for a white man’s government:
John W. Gorham to Johnson, June 3, 1865, in
Johnson Papers
8:173 (quoting prior statement by Johnson).

Notable among them:
Trefousse,
Andrew Johnson
, p. 208.

Johnson was fastidious:
Truman, p. 435.

After meeting the president:
Quoted in Trefousse,
Andrew Johnson
, p. 346; ibid., pp. 20–24. 15
After long seconds of silence: Life, Speeches, and Services of Andrew Johnson
(T. B. Peterson, 1865), pp. 112–13. 15
One of the president’s few recreations:
W. H. Crook,
Memories of the White House
, Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (1911) (Henry Rood, ed.), pp. 45, 57, 61.

During the White House years:
Frank Cowan,
Andrew Johnson, President of the United States: Reminiscences of his Private Life and Character
, Greenesburgh, PA: Oliver Publishing House (1894), p. 7.

A White House worker:
Nancy Beck Young, “Eliza (McCardle) Johnson,” in Lewis L. Gould, ed.,
American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacy
, New York: Garland Publishing (1996), p. 196.