Female Announcer: From the Library of Congress (Library),
in Washington, DC Jeff Flannery: Good afternoon.
My name is Jeff Flannery, the head of the Reference
and Readers Services Section in the Manuscript Division.
And today it's my pleasure to welcome you here to the Library
on behalf of the Manuscript Division and our sister division,
the Humanities and Social Sciences Division.
We're here today to listen to David Stewart talk about his recent book,
"Impeached: The Trial of Andrew Johnson
and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy."
The Manuscript Division is home to the Andrew Johnson papers as well
as many of Johnson's contemporaries
such as Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Grant.
And we're very pleased and delighted to cosponsor this event.
At this point, I'd like to introduce my colleague, Emily Howie,
reference librarian and American history specialist in the Humanities
and Social Sciences Division.
Emily? Emily Howie: Hello, it's nice to see all of you.
Again, my name is Emily Howie, I'm a reference librarian and one
of the American history specialists in the Main Reading Room.
That is the Humanities and Social Sciences Division here
at the Library of Congress.
I want to welcome you to this program, sponsored by Humanities
and Social Sciences, and our sister division, the Manuscript Division.
Our talk features author, lawyer, historian David O. Stewart,
and he will be discussing his book, "Impeached:
The Trial of President Andrew Johnson
and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy."   Let me take a minute just to say
that our division has talks periodically, or on a regular basis,
and we have some sheets over on the side there, if you want to sign up
and be on a mailing list,
so that you can be notified about future talks.
Also, before we proceed, I would like to thank my colleague
from the Main Reading Room -- Abby Yochelson, and Janice Ruth
and Jeff Flannery of the Manuscript Division,
for their assistance with this program.
This event is being videotaped for subsequent broadcast
on the Library's website and other media.
The audience is encouraged to offer comments
and raise questions during the formal question-and-answer period,
but please be advised that your voice and image may be recorded
and later broadcast as part of the event.
By participating
in the question-and-answer period you are consenting
to the Library's possible reproduction
and transmission of your remarks.
Also, a book signing will follow the program.
Mr. Stewart's book is for sale in the foyer, and when we finish,
if you just give us a few minutes, we'll set him up here,
and then he will be delighted to sign your books.
[break] Much.
I am very pleased to introduce David O. Stewart to us,
who will be speaking to us today.
Mr. Stewart is the author of the highly acclaimed
and best-selling book, "The Summer of 1787:
The Men Who Invented the Constitution,"
which was published in 2007.
John Meacham, who's editor of "Newsweek" magazine and is author
of the acclaimed and best-selling recent biography "American Lion:
Andrew Jackson in the White House," said of "The Summer of 1787,"
and this is a quote, "in this engaging story of the momentous
but little-understood summer that gave us the Constitution,
David Stewart deftly reminds us what a close-run thing America was
and still is."   I love that quote.
Stewart's is an important work, written with insight and verve.
Mr. Stewart is also a lawyer, who has practiced law in Washington,
D.C., for more than 25 years, and has argued appeals all the way
to the U.S. Supreme Court.
He was a law clerk to Justice Lewis Powell,
and he developed a fascination with impeachment when he served
as principal defense counsel during the Senate impeachment trial
of Judge Walter L. Nixon Jr. of Mississippi in 1989.
This interest in the impeachment process was the impetus
for his new book, which focuses on the impeachment
of President Andrew Johnson.
In his book, he discusses how Johnson squandered Abraham Lincoln's
political legacy of equality and fairness,
thus failing to become Lincoln's political heir.
In addition, he explores the considerable
and long-ignored evidence that senators were bribed
to vote in favor of Johnson.
As you know, Johnson escaped conviction
in the U.S. Senate by one vote.
Mr. Stewart arrived at these conclusions
after careful examination of the papers of Andrew Johnson.
Rep. Ben Butler, Republican from Massachusetts, and other key figures
that are in the collections of the Library
of Congress Manuscript Division.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David O. Stewart.
[applause] David Stewart: Thank you very much, Emily and Jeff.
And thank you all for being here.
This is -- has become, in recent years,
sort of my home away from home.
Not this room, but the buildings of the Library of Congress.
I spend a lot of time here,
and there are familiar faces, to be sure.
And it's such a luxury for me to be local,
and have access to the collections here.
I don't know, actually, how history writers do it
when they don't live in this area.
In any event, what I'd like to do in talking about the book is,
of course, I spend a couple of years up in the attic working on it,
and I come out into -- blinking into the light of day,
and I have so much I want to tell you, so, and we don't have time
for that, and you couldn't stand it anyway, so I'm just going to try
to confine myself to, really, three subjects,
and we'll see if we make it in the timeframe.
First, to sort of set the stage, why was there an impeachment trial,
what was there in the air and in the water in America, in Washington,
in 1868 that caused there to be an impeachment?
We've had unfortunate presidents before,
and since who didn't get impeached.
So there's something else was going on; something special.
Second, I want to talk about what surprised me in this story,
and the Library, as Emily has suggested, plays a role in that.
It is a major player.
And then finally, just a moment's reflection
on how the Constitution fared.
I really came to this topic because I decided after doing "The Summer
of 1787," I wanted to do the next constitutional crisis in America.
And, of course, I looked at the next real crisis [which] was the Civil
War, and the Constitution failed terribly in the Civil War;
did not prevent that from happening.
And the Reconstruction amendments were a fundamental re-thinking
of the Constitution, which was very important but not terribly dramatic.
It really didn't have a crisis feel to it.
And I discovered that right under my nose, as an impeachment lawyer,
was the Johnson case, which really was a crisis in terms
of the entire nation being electrified, being on edge,
being anxious that there might even be a second civil war.
And the central issues were constitutional as well as political.
When Andrew Johnson became president it was five weeks
into Abraham Lincoln's second term,
Lincoln of course had just been killed by John Wilkes Booth,
and those people in the country who knew who Andrew Johnson was,
and I'm guessing it wasn't universal,
pretty much knew two things about him.
First they knew that he had stood by the Union.
He was the only Southern senator or congressman
who did not leave Washington when his state seceded.
Johnson stayed at his post, was then appointed military governor
of Tennessee.
So that was a courageous act, no doubt.
He faced real danger back in Tennessee throughout the war.
That's really why he was selected to be Lincoln's running mate.
The second thing most people knew about him, or a lot of people knew
about him, is that he had been drunk at his inauguration.
And it was an appalling moment.
It seems he had an attack of nerves, or a combination of nerves
and hangover and perhaps a lingering fever from weeks earlier.
But when he got to the Capitol, he really felt the need
of a few snorts, and he put down, according to eyewitnesses,
three tumblers full of whiskey.
And he went out and gave an inaugural address
that was variously described as incoherent,
humiliating and embarrassing.
He left town for a couple of weeks, went out to the Blair's estate
in Silver Spring to hole up and sort of get his act together.
So this is not entirely auspicious,
and it really did undermine his credibility as president.
For several years thereafter,
whenever something controversial happened
and he did controversial things, he said controversial things,
it was often said, "Well, Andy's just drinking again."
This is not the best place for a president to be starting from.
Now, he was chosen as vice president as part
of what we could call today, a move to the middle.
Lincoln knew he was going to carry the abolition vote,
he was going to carry New England,
he was going to carry the abolitionist Midwest,
but he wanted to reach out to Democrats, we wanted to reach
out to border state people.
He wanted a Southern Democrat, a war Democrat,
and there was pretty much only one.   And that was Johnson.
There's no evidence they really knew each other.
They had both served in Congress at the same time
for two years, in the 1840's.
And as military governor, Johnson reported
to Lincoln but he was in Tennessee.
There's no particular evidence of a relationship.
They had some similarities.
They were both very poor boys, they were about the same age.
We've, of course, been bathing in the Lincoln bicentennial.
Relatively few people know that last year was Andrew
Johnson's bicentennial.
[laughter] But I've been honoring it.
There are actually -- in Greenville, Tenn., his home town,
the local baseball team handed out, had an Andrew Johnson night
for the bicentennial, and handed
out bobble heads, and I do have a couple.
But, he was, Johnson was at least as poor
as Lincoln had been, perhaps more.
Johnson never attended a day of school in his life.
He was entirely a self-made man, which is the source of a great quip
by Thaddeus Stevens when he was told that Johnson was a self-made man,
Stevens said, "Well, that's good to hear.
Otherwise the Almighty had a lot to answer for."
[laughter] But he had been elected pretty much every office you could
be elected, beginning at age 21, as mayor of his little town, alderman,
state senator, congressman, senator,
and of course Lincoln had served one term
in Congress before he become president.
But there were some big differences.
Lincoln was a Whig before he became a Republican.
When he became a Republican, it was an anti-slavery party.
Lincoln was not very aggressive abolitionist by any means,
but he has aligned himself with the party that was known
as the anti-slavery party.   Johnson would never do that.
He was a Democrat.   He owned slaves.
He never questioned the morality of slavery.
Lincoln was capable of saying,"
if anything is wrong, slavery is wrong."
Johnson was not.
Indeed, he often, or occasionally, I should say,
expressed really very virulent racist views.
The one that startled me most was when he was president.
He gave a State of the Union message,
where he said that having the freed slaves vote
in the South was the worst, the greatest danger
that the Republic had ever faced.
It was greater than the Civil War, greater than slavery itself.
And he said the real risk was that we would Africanize the South.
Another big difference between them was just as human beings.
We know Lincoln really threw his self-deprecating humor,
his wonderful stories, usually had a message and a meaning
in them, but were charming.
They're still charming, 150 years later.
And I look really hard, but there are no Andrew Johnson jokes.
[laughter] There are no Andrew Johnson anecdotes.
He wasn't a funny guy.   He was a dignified, serious guy.
I don't think he was a lot of fun to spend the night with, although,
I guess he could get a few snorts in him.
But, he was, he lacked a certain charm, which I think,
for a politician, is a tough thing.
He had always been a legislator, really,
until he became a military governor of Tennessee.
I should correct myself.
He was also governor of Tennessee for a while.
But he had trouble working with other people.
He was much more of an aggressive guy,
and his bodyguard described him once as,
"he was the best hater I ever knew."
Okay, so what was the country he was going to lead?
About 620,000 men had been killed in the war;
three million men had been under arms.
Everybody knew somebody who had been killed.
Many knew lots who had been killed.
But it wasn't just the loss of life, the devastation
through the border states in the South was real.
The poverty was grinding --
women, children, old people, had suffered terribly.
I recently was reading about Harry Truman's mother, who,
they were slaveholders in Missouri, and they were rounded
up by Union troops and effectively kept in concentration camps
for several months, because the guerilla warfare in Missouri,
they didn't trust any of these slave owners.
She was angry about it 80 years later.
She refused to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom.
On top of this, this terrible devastation of the war,
there was a social convulsion, really a revolution,
which was the freeing of the slaves.
Four million people who had been in chains were now supposed to be free,
and we had to figure out what that meant.
They were almost all uneducated, they were almost all unskilled,
they didn't have resources, they didn't have weapons,
which they needed, and it was a terrific inversion,
and Southern whites viewed it as an inversion.
And it broke down into very basic questions, when white people
and black people passed each other on the street,
how did they greet each other?   What did they say to each other?
How do you disagree with somebody who used to be your slave?
How do you brook this disagreement from that person?
The freed slaves knew they were free.
They wanted that to be meaningful.   Many of them just took off.
They wanted to go find family members who'd been sold off,
they just wanted to see what was on the other side of the hill.
They hadn't been able to leave the plantation.
This terrified the whites,
these black people walking around everywhere.
Also, there were Union troops occupying the South.
And as there was a de-mobilization after the war,
most of the white troops went home.
They had homes they wanted to go to, but we had almost 200,000 black men
in Union uniforms, many of them left the service, but many stayed.
They didn't really have a lot to go back to.
They were freed slaves in many instances,
or they had self-emancipated, as the phrase goes.
So, now you not only have black people walking around, free,
terrifying, but some of them are wearing uniforms
and they have guns and they can arrest you.
Johnson, in just the first month or two after the war,
asked a Union general named Carl Schurz to go to the South
and view conditions, and report to him.
And I'm sure he was sorry he had asked Schurz.
He tried to cover up the report afterwards, and Congress had
to formally request to get it released.
And Schurz reported, and I'm just going to read a short passage,
that during his tour, he saw "...
negroes in hospitals whose ears had been cut off
or whose bodies were slashed with knives or bruised with whips
or bludgeoned, or punctured with shot wounds.
Dead negroes were found in considerable number
in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death,
or strung on limbs of trees.
In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright,
and whites almost in an insane state of irritation."
That phrase really resonates with me, to describe the situation,
"an insane state of irritation."   And the violence was brutal.
We don't have any good statistics, nobody kept track of everybody
who was killed, they were just freed slaves, after all, that was the view
in many instances, and it was hard to keep track of them.
But it was a terrible time.
So, out of this explosive environment how do we end
up with the Congress and the president at each other's throats?
Because that's what happens;
there were two issues that really caused that.
First was, what governments would the Southern states have?
Andrew Johnson was a Southern states man.
He believed that the states were sovereign,
the states created the Union,
the states existed before the Union they would exist after the Union.
They were more important than the Union.
So, he basically said to the Southern states,
please set up your governments.   He appointed a provisional governor
to start the ball rolling, in each Southern state.
And he followed a plan that Lincoln had actually developed.
But the plan quickly went off the rails,
from the view of most Northerners,
because the Southerners chose former Confederates
to run their governments.
And, in November of 1865, Congress is about to reconvene,
and these new Southern states have chosen their congressmen
and senators.
And they have picked, among others, the former vice president
of the Confederacy, Alexander Stevens, who is a senator
from Georgia about a half-dozen former congressmen,
members of the Confederate Congress,
a couple of dozen former Confederate army officers,
and the Northern congressmen are appalled.
Who, after all, won the war?   What was this for?
Did we have all these people die,
simply to have the same power structure restored in the South?
It was appalling.
And Thaddeus Stevens, who, in some respects, is --
I found a fascinating and compelling character, and if there's a hero
in the book, he's the closest we get.
He stage managed one of the great legislative moments, where,
on the first day of the House of Representatives convening,
the clerk called the roll.
And he just left out all of the names
of the Southern representatives.
So as soon as he finished, the Southerners stood up and said,
"But you didn't call my name!   I want to be recognized!"
and Stevens, who controlled the agenda, turned to them and said,
if your name wasn't called, we can't recognize you.
And they went home.   Now that enraged Johnson.
Johnson thought that Congress was illegitimate
without Southern congressmen and senators.
And that legislation enacted by Congress was illegitimate.
So this was a square confrontation.
The second issue was, of course, how to deal with the freed slaves.
The Southern state governments that had been set
up under Johnson's stewardship, under his nurturing,
adopted Black Codes denying black people the right to serve on juries,
the right to give testimony, the right to vote, but also,
really a straightforward in many states of slavery.
They required annual labor contracts.
Black people had to have annual labor contracts, starting January 1
and running until December 31.
And if you didn't have one, you were subject to arrest for vagrancy.
And once you were arrested, you would be jailed
until you could pay your fine.   Well, couldn't pay a fine.
So, you would simply be loaned out to the local plantation owner,
or the local farmer, to work off your fine -- slavery.
This, again, enraged the Northerners.
And I'm using language like enrage a lot,
because it was an extremely angry time.
Johnson was not disturbed by this.
His view was, this was how the Southern people were establishing
their new labor relations, something new had to be done
to replace slavery -- this was up to the states to figure out how to do.
Congress did not take such a laissez-faire view,
and began enacting legislation, Freedmen's Bureau laws,
civil rights laws, they actually extended the vote to black people
in the District of Columbia, and then in 1867,
all of the Reconstruction laws which required a whole new set
of state governments to be created, with participation by black people.
Johnson, essentially, vetoed every one of those laws.
And Congress overrode his veto each time, and it got to be
such a rote exercise that they often Congress would override his veto the
same day.   Because without any Southerners
in the Congress, he had no constituency.
It was the Congress was three quarters Northern Republicans.
It got to the stage where Congress was stripping away his powers,
in ways that I have to confess,
are just pretty constitutionally dubious.
But one step was, a vacancy came up on the Supreme Court,
and Congress was terrified that Johnson would fill it.
So they shrank the size of the Supreme Court.
But there was risk, because in those days, Congress was out of session
for six months at a time.
So, he could make a recess appointment
if a vacancy came open while Congress was not in session.
So in order to avoid that they eliminated two seats
so if somebody should resign in the future or die,
Johnson would not be able to fill that one, either.
They also adopted a statute that required him
to give all military orders to a single person.
He could only give a military order to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant,
who was general in chief of the Army, the great hero
of the war, to the North.
He could not give an order to any other person
in uniform in the United States.
The third law was the tenure of office act,
which led to the impeachment most directly.
After about a year in office, Johnson realized
that he wasn't going to be able to live with the Republicans.
Things were getting pretty nasty.
So, although he had kept on a lot of, essentially all
of the Lincoln people, he now started purging his administration,
so three of the seven cabinet members were forced out,
and he started replacing a lot of the patronage employees,
whom in those days, there were only patronage employees.
There were no civil service jobs.
So postmasters and tax collectors were all being turned over.
Not all at once, but Democrats were being given good jobs, which,
it's one thing to not take care of the freed slaves.
But to deny Republicans jobs when they won the election?
This was disturbing.
[laughter] So, they adopted this statute
that addressed a wonderful ellipsis in the Constitution.
The Constitution is very clear
about how the president appoints these individuals.
He appoints them and the Senate confirms them.
But it doesn't say anything about how you get rid of them.
So, when Congress was first dealing with this
in the 1790's they adopted a statute saying the president can fire
whomever he needs to fire.
Well, in 1867, they weren't feeling so good about that,
so they changed it, and they said,
now the president can fire whoever he needs to fire,
And this was a significant reduction in his power.
The real issue - the issue came to a head over Edwin Stanton,
who was secretary of war, he was a holdover from Lincoln,
an extremely difficult man, arrogant, brash, abrasive,
very competent, Lincoln and he somehow worked out what appears
to have been a very effective relationship,
but he and Johnson did not get on at all.
And he actively undermined Johnson.
When Johnson would announce policies for the South, Stanton and Grant,
who turns out to be a more subtle political player
than he's often given credit for,
would issue confidential instructions to the Union commanders
in the South saying, well actually you don't actually need
to follow that rule.
You can ignore what the attorney general just issued as his opinion.
Ultimately, Johnson just couldn't stand having this fellow
in his administration, who was undermining him at every turn.
So he fired him.   The question went to the Senate,
and the Senate refused to confirm the firing.
Now, at this point, Johnson had choices.
He could have appointed a replacement for Stanton,
who the Senate would have been able to confirm.
But Johnson was angry, he was up on his high horse,
and he just wouldn't do that,
he said they'd never confirm anyone I'd want,
so he appointed an interim secretary of war.
He chose this quite ineffective general named Lorenzo Thomas,
whose principal virtue to Johnson appeared to be
that Edwin Stanton hated him, and he appointed an interim secretary
of war, and sent him across, not across the street, down the street,
the War Department was where the Executive Office Building is now,
and said, take over the office there.
Well, he had underestimated Edwin Stanton.
Thomas shows up, says I'm the new Secretary of War,
and Stanton says "no, you're not."
They have a little set to, Stanton refuses to leave, so Thomas leaves.
Stanton thereupon barricaded himself
in the War Department for the next 90 days.
And there's a wonderful story from the first night,
when after all there's been senators in and out and congressmen
and all sorts of whoop-de-doo, and he realizes that, well,
he's getting hungry, and he's going to have to put on some clothes
in the morning, so he sends a sergeant back to his house
to get some clothes, and some food for dinner.
And the sergeant confronts Mrs. Stanton, and she says "No,
I'm not going to give you anything, and you tell my husband
to resign and come home."
[laughter] She had dealt with Edwin Stanton for a long time.
And so they cooked dinner that night in the fireplace, actually, he a --
the effect of this nationwide was just galvanic.
There was, it was like a lightning bolt, there was talk
of whether there was a coup going on in Washington, Congress was taking
over for the president, the president was taking
over from Congress, within days the House
of Representatives had impeached, approved articles of impeachment,
and the case then moved to the Senate, which was more deliberative,
it took almost 90 days for the impeachment trial itself.
I don't have time to go through the trial.
It was rather like watching a train wreck.
It was a truly botched case, and, but,
the impeachment process itself can be a baffling one at times.
And I'll talk about that towards the end.
And as was indicated, and as you know,
What I -- and it's that vote I wanted to talk about,
because that was the subject
that really surprised me most in this story.
And it was a moment, here in the Library,
or over in the Jefferson Building, when I was going over my to-do list
as to the things I still had to look at.
And there was some congressional hearing listed there that I didn't,
I hadn't looked at, so I called it up on some database
that Tom Mann instructed me on how to find,
and I started reading this report of an investigation
into corruption in the impeachment vote.
And I did a lot of white-collar criminal defense work as a lawyer.
And so I've dealt with the rascals a bit.
And sometimes clients, sometimes not, and I was really struck.
There was evidence here.
It wasn't conclusive, but he had some real stuff here.
This was very interesting.
So, suddenly, all the other things I was going to do receded,
and I had to try to figure out who these people were who were running
around Washington with piles of greenbacks
in their pockets, trying to bribe people.
And then it turned out there were senators
who were trying to be bribed.
So, I went back to the Manuscript [Reading] Room,
and to the [National] Archives.
It's very frustrating because the Congress
in the 19th century didn't keep committee records.
So there are some records over in the Archives,
but they don't have hearing records of the testimony they took.
But, the Manuscript Room has Ben Butler's personal papers.
And Butler, who was not the most ethical guy in the world
and a very controversial figure, Radical Republican,
former Union general, had apparently hung on to a few depositions.
He was the guy who had signed the report;
he'd been the life force behind the investigation.
So he kept some of the transcripts, which was a gold mine.
It didn't appear to me that anybody had actually looked at them.
And in particular there was a wonderful deposition
of a postal agent named James Leggett [spelled phonetically]
from Kansas, who had been brought, the coincidences are just too much
to describe, he had been brought to Washington at the beginning
of the impeachment season, by the head of the Indian office,
who just happened to be from Andrew Johnson's home district.
And he was called to this man's office, and told, well, you know,
it doesn't really matter what the legal arguments are,
as long as the president has enough force.
So Leggett was a bright fellow, and he understood what force meant,
and he then spent the next 90 days trying to bribe senators
in conjunction with a number of senior officials
in the Johnson administration.
My favorite character in all of this is a fellow named Perry Fuller.
And Kansas, I'm an east coast guy, I think of Kansas as a place
where the people are nice, and everybody's sort of straightforward
and honest and true, and I'm sure that's true now,
but in 1868, it wasn't.
[laughter] It was the frontier, and it was actually,
if you think about it, it's 10 years before they cleaned up Dodge City,
so it's a pretty wild place.
And Perry Fuller was an Indian trader, and he made his money,
by stealing timber from Indian lands, by stealing livestock
from Indian lands, and actually selling it to the government
at Indian supply contracts to the tribes.
By cheating the government on Indian supply contracts.
He was notorious at a level that, I don't know,
he's not the [Bernie] Madoff of his day,
but he's a very conspicuous sort
of ne'er-do-well, which is a little mild.
In any event, he had purchased the two senators from Kansas.
In 1866, when the legislature still picked senators,
and Kansas had legislative hearings on the subject,
and there was testimony on this, that he paid $42,000
to buy enough legislative votes to have Samuel Pomeroy
and Edmund G. Ross selected as senators.
He also owned a senator in Nebraska,
but that doesn't figure into the story.
Edmund G. Ross turns out to be the key character,
and if any of you have read "Profiles in Courage"
by John Kennedy, let's do a show of hands.
Who's read "Profiles?"   Yeah, ah, that's it.
As a kid I loved that book, and I probably read it five or six times.
Kennedy gives Ross the honor, which many historians have,
of being the vote that saved Johnson.
And Kennedy describes it as the most heroic act in American history
which is, that's an interesting award.
So, when you investigated it, it turns out that Ross said,
there were 90 days, roughly,
while the impeachment was pending before the Senate.
For approximately 89 days, Ross said he was going to vote to convict,
because Johnson ought to be removed, he was a blot on the nation.
In the last day, during which he spent a lot of time
with Perry Fuller, with a fellow named Thomas Ewing Jr.,
who was another fixer from Kansas,
by the next morning he had changed his vote.
And he was the vote.
Now, what's wonderful about this sequence is, then, within a couple
of weeks after the vote, he writes a letter to President Johnson,
and he says, "I want to be sure that you'll go
through with appointing Perry Fuller
as commissioner of internal revenue."
Now this was an era when our revenue service was the most corrupt part
of the government.
Our whiskey taxes, our customs imposed were all just a sink
of corruption.   And for Perry Fuller this had
to be the most mouth-watering possible prospect.
And he had been agitating to be commissioner of internal revenue
for almost seven months now.
At that point, Johnson appoints Fuller.
The Senate, however, sent the appointment back.
The committee refused to even look at it.
So Congress goes out of session, and while they're out of session,
Johnson appoints Fuller to be collector of revenue
for the Port of New Orleans.
He's only got nine months to work because Johnson's term is going
to end, so he gets down to New Orleans, he fires the 90 Republicans
that are there, and he hires 150 Democrats.
I'm sure they were more productive, that's why they needed more.
And he steals the estimates are, about t $3 million.
He has to leave office when Grant is elected, and he then,
authorizes a prosecution of Perry Fuller.
Fuller is arrested, he's indicted and arrested, has to post bail,
and Edmund G. Ross posted bail for him.
I don't think it was a coincidence.   There are many more details.
There were three cabinet members, including William Henry Seward,
Hugh McCullough, the Secretary of the Treasury and Postmaster General
who raised an acquittal fund of $150,000, in excess of $2 million
in today's dollars, to win the case.   Now, the lawyers got paid $11,000
so that leaves $139,000 for other purposes.
Much of this money was raised by tithing from government officials,
government employees in custom houses across the country.
Some of it was just kicked in by interested people.
We know of at least two official overtures from senators.
To be paid $30,000 or $40,000 would buy you three
or four Senate votes depending on different estimates,
and one of the bewitching parts of this is that at the end of the case,
after it was over, there were some accusations
that several senators were actually paid,
but voted to convict Johnson anyway because they were below Ross
in the alphabet, so they could see once Ross went
over that they didn't need his votes, so they just kept the money
and voted to convict him.
[laughter] Let's step back from sort of the grimy part of this story
and ask about the Constitution, just finally.
The conversations and the debates at the time
about the Impeachment Clause were very familiar to those of us
who have -- I dealt with it in 1889 [sic], excuse me 1989,
the Clinton case in 1999, the same issues were being litigated
or argued over, what is "a high crime and misdemeanor?"
It's a very opaque phrase.
It comes from British usage of the Middle Ages, frankly.
American impeachments have included acts that were crimes
and acts that weren't crimes.
The best I've ever been able to do with it is to say that it needs
to be an abuse of office, but that's not a terribly crisp definition.
One person's abuse of office is another person's stalwart defense
of some principle or another.
So, it remains an extremely slippery concept.
Another problem you see in every impeachment is it is both a
political and a judicial process.   It looks like a trial.
We take evidence, we have the Senate vote, we have accusations,
and certainly back in 1868, it was very much done like a classic trial.
Ben Butler was the lead prosecutor, and he said "I'm just going
to try this like, try Andrew Johnson effectively like a horse thief."
But it's not a trial.   It's a political act.
It's one branch of government decapitating the other branch.
It's the ultimate collision within our government.
And I'm pretty sure that of the 54 senators who voted in 1868,
almost all of them voted for political reasons.
The evidence, one way or the other, didn't matter.
What mattered was what they thought was good for the country,
what they thought was the risk of having Ben Wade,
who was president pro tem of the Senate, who would become president
if Johnson were removed, was he going to be a risk
or wasn't he going to be a risk?
And did Johnson really deserve this or not?
Although I found myself rooting for Johnson to be removed,
I think he earned it in many ways, I do think we have to recognize
that the impeachment process performed a great function
at the time, which was to let people step back
from the abyss, from the brink.
In late February in early March when the impeachment crisis first struck,
there was tremendous fear, and anger and real risk
of violence around the country.   By the time of the vote, in mid-May,
people were getting a little tired of the subject.
And all things considered, that was okay.
The nation needed to go on.
One of the senators, Republicans who crossed the aisle, essentially,
to vote for Johnson's acquittal, and no one's ever suggested he got paid,
James Grimes of Iowa, wrote in a private letter, you know,
the Republic will survive even another two years of Andrew Johnson.
And they were only looking at another ten months.
But I also think the Impeachment Clause provides a great safety
clause for the nation.
Ben Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention said, well,
we need something like impeachment; otherwise we would have
to kill a bad president to get rid of him --
[laughter] -- a practical man.
It's not a pretty story in any respect,
but it's a compelling story, and a wonderful one,
and I hope you get a chance to study it more,
and I'd be glad to take any questions.
[applause] The question is, there were, let me restate it a bit.
I appreciate the question very much.
The Radical Republicans tried to, and that phrase,
Radical Republicans, strikes the modern era oddly,
but that's what they were known as.
Started hearings on impeaching Johnson as early as January of 1867,
a year before, or 13 months before he finally tried to fire Stanton
and cause the impeachment crisis that did lead to the impeachment.
And one of the things they looked
at was whether Johnson was somehow implicated with the assassination
of Lincoln, or, he was a Southerner, he must have been
in cahoots with Jefferson Davis.
And they had some really scandalous testimony by, one that stood
out to me was Lafayette Baker, who was the great detective
who had tracked down John Wilkes Booth, gave testimony
that he remembered taking a message from Johnson to Jefferson Davis.
He couldn't remember when, he couldn't remember where,
and he couldn't remember what the message was.
It was pretty hateful.
And Johnson was understandably very unhappy with that.
There really was never a shred of evidence that tied him to that,
and he was supposed to be assassinated also that night.
Atzerodt, George Atzerodt who was the fellow who was assigned
to kill him, was the weakest member of the Booth team,
and he apparently had a couple of drinks at the bar at the hotel
that was, I forget, it was something House.
And thought better of it, and hightailed it up to Gaithersburg
and hung out there while Booth did his dirty deed.
So, no. There's no real evidence.
Yes, sir. The question is about Ulysses Grant and his role,
what he was doing during this time, again, I'm very grateful
for the question, something I wanted to talk
about but didn't have time to.
Grant was the presumptive next president of the country.
He was going to be the Republican nominee.
The Democrats would have nominated him if he would be a Democrat.
He was going to win.
And he ended up, and he didn't start out this way in 1865,
he ended up very -- having a very contemptible view of Johnson.
And he was very hostile to Johnson, and he had a major dispute
with Johnson in public in the month before the Stanton firing happened.
Which in many ways laid the groundwork,
and so Grant's position was actually, I think,
quite essential to the impeachers.
When Johnson had arranged to get rid of, was planning to get rid
of Stanton, he thought he had a deal with Grant that Grant would sort
of help him, and would take over the office physically.
It seems to be as simple as getting the key to the office.
It's sort of a silly thing, but, he expected Grant to do that for him,
and from all the evidence, it seems like maybe Grant agreed.
It's possible.
But when it happened, Grant wouldn't do it.
And there's again speculation that Stanton actually explained to Grant
that this would make him look like an idiot.
He would be Andrew Johnson's toady.
So Grant refused to do it, said he never promised to do it,
and basically left Johnson out there to dangle over this question
of getting rid of Stanton.
And they called each other liars in letters which were released
to the public just before the final Stanton episode.
So, that sort of collision, you have the great hero of the war,
and you have our drunken president.
Now, of course, as Johnson liked to say,
it's not like Grant didn't drink, either.
But, you did have this battle of credibility
that Johnson couldn't win.
He was always going to lose to Grant in the public eye.
And I think Grant was in a central part of the impeachment.
Without Grant's support --
and finally in the final votes Grant lobbied senators
to vote to convict Johnson.
I see it as, really, Grant's transition
to a military [sic] to a political leader.
Yes, sir. It's hard to imagine
that there weren't people who could do it better.
Johnson's political style was so aggressive, was so confrontational.
There's a wonderful episode where Lyman Trumbull of Illinois is trying
to put together a civil rights act that Johnson will support.
So he goes to meet with Johnson.
And he lays it out for him and says, "This is what I want to do."
And Johnson doesn't say anything.
So, Trumbull thinks Johnson agrees with him.
It's enacted, and Johnson vetoes it.
Now, it's hard to know what Johnson was thinking at the time.
Did he change his mind?   I don't know.
But episodes like that left him in a position
with essentially, almost no support.
It was a brutal problem -- reintegration after a civil war.
We've seen this in Vietnam, after the war over there, you can see it
in Iraq, when you get a society
where people have been killing each other,
to have them come together again is by no means simple.
But Johnson did such a poor job of it.
And the whole issue of Lincoln's legacy,
I try to be very straight about this.
Johnson's first steps were what Lincoln meant to do.
Lincoln said, "When you beat a man, you let him up easy."
But I don't believe that Lincoln would have just said,
when the Black Codes were enacted, "Oh, that's okay."
Or he would have said, when there was terrible violence
against black people in the south,
he would have said, "Well that's all right.
Let's get the troops out of there they're getting in the way."
I think he would have been engaged.
I think he would have changed things down there.
I think he might well have come to grief in some respects,
I think it was such a hard problem.
But, I think Johnson really was a calamity.
Yes, ma'am.
The question is, of the seven recusants?
I always called it recusants.   Do you know the?
Okay. There were 12 votes that were solid for Johnson.
He needed 19, and so he had to get seven Republican votes.
And three of them are clean, in my judgment, completely clean: Trumbull
and Grimes, and Fessenden of Maine.
Nobody's ever really questioned them,
and their contemporaries didn't question them.
The other four in different levels, are subject to question.
Ross, I think, most, John Henderson probably second most,
a fellow named Fowler from Tennessee who didn't seem like a corrupt guy,
frankly, so probably not, and there was Van-something
from West Virginia, Van Winkle, who was sufficiently low profile
that nobody really knows.
So there's not too much evidence for the last two.
Henderson had a pretty odd series of episodes around his change in vote.
He did change his vote.   And then after the acquittal,
Johnson appointed Henderson's father-in-law to be commissioner
of patents, which is, you know, something you kind of notice.
So, Yes sir.   Female Speaker: [inaudible] Sure.
Ben Wade was a very cantankerous abolition-minded fellow from Ohio.
He was, he was viewed with horror by many people,
he actually believed in women's suffrage.
He, when Charles Sumner was beaten in the 1850's in the Senate,
he was caned in the Senate, Wade came into the Senate a couple
of weeks later with guns, and basically made a statement saying,
if anybody wants to take me on, I'm ready.
He was a pretty cantankerous fellow in his own right.
And one newspaper statement after the acquittal was,
"Andrew Johnson is still president
because Ben Wade would have been his successor."
So he was a controversial guy.   Just in the back, last question.
Well, I can't tell you how many officers went.
What Johnson did with his first round of pardons,
and he had about four rounds of pardons,
he ended up finally pardoning Jefferson Davis before he left
office which was funny, because when he first took office,
he announced that he though treason should be punished,
and was very vindictive in his public statements.
But he changed.
His first round of pardons he extended to many Southerners
and Southern soldiers, but no one who had more than $20,000.
So if you had more than $20,000 you had to come
and kiss up to Andy Johnson.
So for about six months in the second half of 1865,
he spent most of his time meeting rich Southern people
who wanted pardons.
And I don't know how many were officers or not.
And they all did get pardons.
And for Republicans this was a nightmare in many respects.
Basically they were concerned that he was being co-opted.
He had, as a Southerner he had actually always been sort of hostile
to the Southern aristocracy.   He was a poor boy who had made good.
And he didn't like the plantation people.
But he spent six months with them.
And there was a feeling that he had essentially been captured by them.
It's hard to know how much weight to give that, but it is absolutely true
that he spent probably a foolish amount
of his time on this enterprise.   Thank you very much.
[applause] Female Announcer: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]