Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

and who might even have been complicit “in the assassination plot.” But the new committee had no more desire to challenge the president than its predecessor had, and in June the impeachment proposal was dropped again, by a 5–4 vote.74

Emboldened by these failures, Johnson struggled to regain the initiative—and undercut the Reconstruction Acts—by denying military commanders in the five districts the power to invalidate fraudulent registration and voting procedures. This, in effect, liberated Southern civil authorities to create fanciful voting requirements that would invariably disqualify black voters. This was so transparent a maneuver that even some of the military district commandants balked, and when Philip Sheridan, the commander for Texas and Louisiana, ignored an opinion criticizing military intervention in voter registration from Johnson’s compliant attorney general, Henry Stanbery, Johnson dismissed Sheridan on July 31, 1867. This cost Johnson the patience of Ulysses S. Grant, who had regarded Sheridan as a protégé, and who in his role as general in chief advised military commanders that Stanbery’s opinion had neither “language or manner entitling it to the force of an order.” Sheridan’s dismissal set off a new flurry of impeachment demands, this time from Thaddeus Stevens and the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. But once again, no one in Congress could produce any hard evidence that Johnson had broken a law.75

On the other hand, the dismissal of Sheridan was not nearly enough of a victory to sustain the longer reach of Johnson’s counterattack. In July 1867, the Radicals passed a Third Reconstruction Act that transferred all powers of “suspension, removal, appointment, and detail” of the Southern military district commanders into the hands of “the General of the army of the United States.” This was a military counterpart to the Tenure of Office Act, and it made clear that the district military commanders (such as Sheridan) would have all the power they needed to oversee voter registration and “ascertain, upon such facts or information as they can obtain, whether such person is entitled to be registered under said act,” without presidential meddling.76

If Grant was now to inherit most of the military powers that Johnson thought properly belonged to himself, Johnson was determined to control Grant, and to that end he proposed evicting the current secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and installing Grant in his place. Grant’s reaction was evasive, and with good reason, since Stanton was a friend of the Radicals and such a move would bring Johnson into collision with the Tenure of Office Act. But Johnson had decided that by now he had nothing to lose; besides, the Tenure of Office Act did permit him the power to make, and unmake, appointments during a congressional recess. On August 5, just days after Congress adjourned for its 1867 summer recess, Johnson tartly informed Stanton that “public considerations of a high character constrain me to say that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.” Stanton (who had been secretly warned by Grant of Johnson’s plans) just as tartly refused: “Public considerations of a high character, which alone have induced me to continue at the head of this Department, constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.” This Johnson classified as “not merely a disinclination of compliance with the request for his resignation; it was a defiance, and something more.”77

On August 12 Johnson announced that Stanton was now “suspended” and Grant would function as the interim secretary of war. There matters hung until December, while Johnson hoped that the situation could be diverted into the courts, where he could rely on the Supreme Court to rule the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. But Congress moved first, and on January 13 the Senate refused to approve Stanton’s removal from office and ordered him back to his post. Grant, who prudently declined an order from Johnson to defy the Senate, obligingly vacated the War Department the next day, allowing Stanton to move back in and barricade himself in his old chamber. Johnson frantically began casting around for a more willing replacement for Stanton, considering George McClellan, William Sherman, and even a War Department clerk by turns. He finally prevailed on Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to take the job, and on February 21 Johnson officially dismissed Stanton from office.78

The uproar in Congress over this fresh assault on its authority was immediate, and two days later the House voted to impeach Johnson by a landslide vote of 126 to 47. On March 5 the Senate convened itself as a court to begin hearing the testimony that would lead to Johnson’s conviction. The trial itself turned out to be a wearisome affair—Johnson refused to appear personally and carried out his defense through his lawyers, and most of the arguments turned on the constitutional niceties of the Tenure of Office Act and other congressional legislation. Nearly all of the spectators who daily crowded the Senate galleries knew that the decision would be settled by politics rather than evidence. When the Senate at last voted on Johnson’s guilt on May 16, 1868, a critical group of moderate Republicans headed by William Pitt Fessenden pulled shy of condemning the president, and Johnson was saved from conviction by a single vote.79

The victory, however, proved an empty one for Andrew Johnson. Two weeks later, the Republican National Convention met in Chicago and nominated Ulysses S. Grant as the Republican candidate for president. Johnson tried to stimulate some interest among his former Democratic friends about getting the Democratic nomination, but the Democrats wanted no more to do with Johnson than did the Republicans. Instead they nominated Horatio Seymour, the wartime governor of New York who had egged on the draft rioters in 1863. Grant won handily, and the South was made safe for Reconstruction.

The sound and the fury in Washington was only one part of the Reconstruction struggle. An equally critical part was being played out in the South, where the congressional Reconstruction governments were already stripping away whatever they could of the economic