Master of the Senate (9 page)

Contrasting the Senate with the “vulgar demeanor” of the House of Representatives, de Tocqueville, after his tour of the United States in 1831, was to comment that “The Senate contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.” De Tocqueville was not the only foreign observer deeply impressed. The Victorian historian Sir Henry Maine said that the Senate was “the only thoroughly successful institution which has been established since the tide of modern democracy began to run.” Prime Minister William Gladstone called it “the most remarkable of all the inventions of modern politics.”

O
N
J
ANUARY 21
, 1861, Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis rose at his desk to end the forty-year Senate effort to preserve the Union by telling his northern colleagues, “It only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.” Then he and four
other southerners strode out of the Chamber. In the next weeks all but one of the twenty-two southern senators followed suit, leaving the Senate as their states were leaving the Union. (Only Andrew Johnson of Tennessee elected to remain loyal.) Three months later, with a Confederate force on the south side of the Potomac menacing Washington and breastworks of iron plates braced on the Capitol’s porticoes, rifles were propped among the desks and soldiers sprawled in the red leather armchairs; the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, hurriedly summoned by the newly elected President Lincoln to defend Washington (thirty-one of the regiment had been wounded in a battle en route), was quartered in the Senate Chamber; one soldier angrily hacked at Jefferson Davis’ desk with his bayonet.

Lincoln had insisted that construction on the Capitol go forward (“If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on”), and all through the war the great dome continued to rise above Washington as if to symbolize the growth of a great new nation—and all through that war, in its new Chamber, a Senate freed at last by the departure of the southerners enacted laws that knit together a mighty continent, filled it with people, and educated those people—Acts that spurred the creation of a transcontinental railroad that bound at last the continent’s far Pacific shore to its Atlantic and made possible the development of its Great Plains; that encouraged its settlement by promising a family 160 acres of the public domain for its enterprise and courage in settling it; and that provided for the sale of public lands to fund the creation of colleges. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862; the Homestead Act of 1862; the Land Grant College Act of 1862—it became very clear as these passed the Senate how the South had for so long shackled the Union.

A
FTER THE WAR
, among those desks in the new Senate Chamber, there was another moment of glory—as phrases in the Constitution (“When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside …”) came to life. Four years of struggle between a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans determined to solidify the equality of races and humble the Confederacy and a President more interested in reconciliation than in revenge—four years in which legislation, of doubtful constitutionality, was passed (over Andrew Johnson’s vetoes) forbidding the President to remove federal officials, or to interfere with General Ulysses S. Grant’s command of the army without the Senate’s consent—was ended when the House, under the leadership of Representative Thaddeus Stevens (“Andrew Johnson must learn … that as Congress shall order he must obey”), voted by an overwhelming margin to impeach the President, and send the articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial.

On that trial hung great issues. “Johnson’s opponents wanted to save a Reconstruction based on racial justice,” an historian says. “But his supporters had an honorable motive too. They wanted to save the presidency.” At first, conviction seemed all but certain, so overwhelmingly did public opinion in the
North demand it. As one observer wrote on the eve of the trial, “The condition of the public mind was not unlike that preceding a great battle. The dominant part of the nation seemed to occupy the position of public prosecutor, and it was scarcely in the mood to brook delay for trial or to hear defense. Washington … swarmed with representatives of every state of the Union, demanding in a practically united voice the deposition of the President.” Representative Stevens had coldly warned both houses: “Let me see the recreant who would vote to let such a criminal escape. Point me to one who will do it and I will show you one who will dare the infamy of posterity.” And the House of Representatives had taken the warning: every Republican had voted for impeachment. In the Senate, with the eleven Confederate states still excluded, there were only fifty-four senators. Thirty-six votes were therefore required for conviction—and forty-two senators were Republicans. As the trial opened with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding and administering to each senator, as he rose at his desk, an oath “to do impartial justice,” Benjamin Wade, president pro
tempore
of the Senate and therefore next in line for the Presidency, was confident that he would soon be in the White House.

One of the Republicans, however, was Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. Trumbull hated Johnson, and hated Johnson’s stand on Reconstruction; he was, in fact, the author of much of the Reconstruction legislation that the President had vetoed. But now Trumbull said:

Another Republican was William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, known for his “reverence” for the Constitution, and for his independence. “His level gaze, high-bridged nose, and firm lips and chin identified a man who would be intimidated by none,” an historian wrote. Like Trumbull, Fessenden despised Johnson—not long before, he had said of the President: “He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust and must sink from detestation to contempt”—but none of those crimes were among those enumerated in the Constitution to justify impeachment, and now Fessenden wrote a friend that while “The country has so bad an opinion of the President, which he fully deserves, that it expects his condemnation…. I will not decide the question against my own judgment…. Make up your mind, if need be, to hear me denounced a traitor and perhaps hanged in effigy. The public, when roused and excited by passions and prejudices, is little better than a wild beast.”

When it became known that seven Republican senators might be planning
to vote against impeachment—the exact number necessary to prevent conviction of the President—the GOP was convulsed by rage. The seven were deluged by what the
Philadelphia Press
called “a fearful avalanche of telegrams from every section of the country,” representing “a great surge of public opinion.” In Illinois, where for decades Trumbull had been a revered public figure, a Republican convention resolved that “any senator elected by … Republicans, who at this time blenches and betrays, is infamous and should be dishonored and execrated.” James W. Grimes of Iowa was also refusing to go along with impeachment. So vicious were the abuse he was exposed to and the physical threats against him that they were blamed for a stroke he suffered two days before the vote was to be taken on the first article of impeachment. It was expected that he would not be able to attend the vote—or, as one chronicler sneered, “would plead that his illness prevented him from attending to cast the vote that would end his career”—and that the absence of his vote might give victory to the impeachers. On the day of the vote, however, the doors in the rear of the Chamber opened, and four men appeared, carrying Grimes to his seat. (Fessenden grasped his hand and gave him a smile.) Although senators stood to cast their impeachment votes, the Chief Justice said Grimes could vote while sitting, but when his name was reached in the balloting, he struggled to his feet, to say “Not guilty.” The Chief Justice asked each senator individually, “Mr. Senator, how say you?” and seven Republicans voted not guilty, making the vote 35 to 19, one vote short of the necessary two-thirds. Immense pressure was then put on every Republican to vote guilty on the other ten articles. But on each vote, at least seven rose among the desks of the Senate and said “Not guilty.” Sixty-four years before, in the trial of Samuel Chase, the Senate had saved the judiciary. Now it saved the presidency.

In political terms, their “not guilty” votes cost the seven senators dearly. The fate Fessenden had foreseen for himself came true for all of them. All were denounced as traitors, not merely to their party but to their country (“We have had Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis, and now we have James W. Grimes,” Horace Greeley sneered in the
New York Tribune)
, all were hung in effigy, and all were renounced by the party organizations of their respective states; not one of them was re-elected. But there were other terms. Shortly before he died, Grimes told a friend, “I shall ever thank God that in that troubled hour of trial, when many privately confessed that they had sacrificed their judgment and their conscience at the behests of party newspapers and party hate, I had the courage to be true to my oath and my conscience.” And he remembered Fessenden’s smile. “I would not today exchange that recollection for the highest distinction of life.” And in broader terms, the votes of those seven senators preserved the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. The removal of a President by Congress solely because of a dispute over policy could have transformed the entire American political system.

The “excitement of the hour”—the “great surge of public opinion”—had
demanded a President’s head. But only one house of Congress had bowed to that demand. The other had not. The Founding Fathers had created the Senate to stand against the “excitement of the hour.”

Once again, the Senate had stood.

B
UT THAT MOMENT
of glory was only a moment. After the Civil War, the Senate’s Golden Age was over, and the institution began to turn into the Senate that Lyndon Johnson was to find when he arrived in it more than three quarters of a century later.

The Senate’s power wasn’t over—far from it. Reconstruction was crafted not in the White House but on Capitol Hill. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 became law and the Freedmen’s Bureau a fact over presidential vetoes. It was Congress, not the President, that divided the South into military districts as if it had been conquered Gaul and placed over each district a commander with powers as broad as those of a Roman proconsul. And although Reconstruction policy was created by the Senate in tandem with the House of Representatives, and on the Joint House-Senate Committee the dominant figure was Representative Stevens, during the period after Reconstruction, beginning with the inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant as President in March, 1869, the power of the House declined, and the power of the Senate grew, and grew again.

The expansion of senatorial power was to some extent a coefficient of the House’s weakness. There were 293 representatives in 1870, 332 in 1880—and the House, without strong leaders after Stevens’ death in 1868, became the place of din and confusion that was to be described as “one of the most disorderly and inefficient legislative bodies in the world.” With the majority switching back and forth between Democrats and Republicans virtually every two years, it seemed to be in a continuous state of reorganization, symbolized by the bitter, time-consuming biennial battles over selection of the Speaker and committee chairmen and members. In the Senate, however, the two parties had agreed in December, 1845, on a new procedure for choosing committee chairmen and members. No longer would they be elected by secret ballot of the whole Senate—a method which had given senators considerable independence from party control. Henceforth, they would be nominated in party conferences, or caucuses; the Senate as a whole would vote on the nominees, and since the vote would almost always follow party lines, it would simply ratify the majority party’s selections. This gave party leadership new power, enabling it to impose a degree of party discipline, and discipline was also increased—and Senate proceedings made more efficient—because party “steering committees” were given more power over the flow of legislation to the floor. In addition, the Senate was armored against the shifts in public opinion that led to continual transfers of power in the House, and senators were still chosen by state legislatures often dominated by Republicans; the GOP controlled the Senate in fourteen
of the sixteen Congresses between 1869 and 1901. Senate committee chairmen stayed in their posts—building up, year after year, power that made them figures to be reckoned with in Washington. Also increasing the Senate’s power in relation to the House was another development: the hardening of the custom under which the Senate would not consent to a presidential nomination if either senator from the nominee’s home state objected. This “senatorial courtesy” gave a senator almost a veto power over patronage.