Tailor Made Tyrant

PETER: In the early hours of April 15, 1965, Abraham Lincoln succumbed to gunshot wounds from the night before. Within hours, Vice President Andrew Johnson had assumed the presidency. Johnson, a southerner with Democratic Party leanings, had big shoes to fill, but it’s safe to say he fell far short of expectations. You may know that he was the first of only two presidents to be impeached, but you probably don’t know why Congress decided to take Johnson down.

MARK SUMMERS: Well, in large part because Andrew Johnson was– I’m sorry to say– a jerk.

PETER: This is Historian Mark Summers from the University of Kentucky.

MARK SUMMERS: He misled people. He deceived people. He deliberately abused people in public, but beyond that, in large part they were afraid of him. By 1868, we’d even imagined it possible, that he might be preparing a military coup d’etat.

PETER: What gave them that impression? Well, even though the war was over, Johnson invoked his War Powers to sidestep Congress and reconstruct the south on his own terms. Those terms included allowing white southerners who had signed a loyalty oath to vote, and even re-elect former Confederate officials to Congress. What he didn’t want was for the southern states to give voting rights to former slaves.

Congress at that point was dominated by Republicans. Southern Democrats had stormed out at the beginning of the war, and those Republicans had a very different vision of Reconstruction. They wanted to legislate harsher punishments for southerners and voting rights for freed men. In less than a year into Johnson’s presidency, this tense relationship took a turn for the worse.

MARK SUMMERS: By early 1866, he was beginning to do something pretty worrisome. Johnson, essentially, is willing to say that Congress is not necessarily a legal body because southern congressmen and senators aren’t represented in it, and therefore, any laws it passes may be unconstitutional on that basis. He did not refuse to sign their laws. He did not. But he made that hint and suggestions that at some point in the future he might do exactly that. Now if you suddenly have a president beginning to declare that maybe Congress is not legal, that’s a frightening thing.

PETER: So that was the threat of usurpation right there.

MARK SUMMERS: That is where they began to get scared. In the 1866 off-year elections, the congressional elections, a lot of Republicans are saying, if the Democrats get enough congressional seats in the north, they’re going to join together with the southerners that aren’t allowed in Congress yet. They’re going to form a separate congress, and Andrew Johnson, as head of the Army, is going to decide which congress to back and which one to push out with bayonets. Which Congress do you think he’s going to wipe out? But when Andrew Johnson makes moves that can be seen as trying to take over the Army– and we know what that means because once you’ve got the Army, you can put the congress out at bayonet point– that’s when Congress feels it’s got to act, and that is when it moves to impeach.

PETER: Yeah, so now it’s not just a general policy orientation. We’re really talking about breaking laws.

MARK SUMMERS: That’s correct.

PETER: And what were the laws, Mark, and what form did impeachment take?

MARK SUMMERS: The specific law that Johnson broke was called the Tenure of Office Act. Under the Tenure of Office Act, a president cannot fire a cabinet officer that has been chosen during his administration. But one of the most important offices is one largely in charge of the Army, that’s the Secretary of War. Edwin M. Stanton, who had been Lincoln’s Secretary of War, a very bullying, tough, talented, devotedly loyal man, an excellent man, held onto that office. So when Johnson wants to get rid of Stanton, he obeys the Tenure of Office Act. He suspends him from office.

The Senate decided Stanton stays in office. The suspension is denied, whereupon Johnson begins to start taking moves to get him thrown out of office anyway. He orders a general call Lorenzo Thomas to eject Stanton from office. Now the moment the word comes that a military officer is there to try to throw Stanton out of office, it puts both Houses of Congress into an uproar. Radical Thaddeus Stevens moves around the floor saying, didn’t I tell you? What good did you’re moderation do you? If you don’t kill the beast, it will kill you.

And so on Washington’s birthday, or the extended session after Washington’s birthday, Andrew Johnson is impeached. About a month and a 1/2 after the trial begins, the vote comes. And on the vote, on May 16, 1868, Andrew Johnson’s conviction falls one vote short of the 2/3 needed because of seven Republican senators who have decided that on that particular article there’s not enough grounds to convict.

PETER: So as you’ve described it, Mark, people were truly anxious– with good reason– because this would seem like the first step toward lawmaking and law enforcement for usurping power generally. So why by the time of the trial had the fear subsided?

MARK SUMMERS: There’s a number of Republicans uneasy about the evidence in this trial. They’re just uneasy, but they’re scared of Johnson. And what will he do if he’s unleashed? What will he do if he’s acquitted? And so what happens is Johnson, he makes them an offer they cant refuse. What he does is he gathers at a dinner party with a few of them, and he basically lets them know that if they let alone, if he’s not convicted, they’re not going to have any problem. He’s not going to overthrow the laws. He’s going to abide by the law of the land. And he does something else. He basically feels out and says, who would you feel safe with as Secretary of War? And it comes down to a general called John Schofield, who’s a friend of General Grant’s. And General Grant– every Republican wants General Grant. I mean, they’re going to nominate him for president. They really trust him, and they should.

PETER: So the substantive outcome of impeachment was to everybody’s satisfaction, more or less. In terms of preserving the Constitution, the low-risk result was let’s cut a deal.

MARK SUMMERS: The system worked.

PETER: So Mark, when you step back and think about the broader implications of this outcome and of Andrew Johnson’s ultimate failure to impose his policy for reconstruction, what does this tell you about the nature of the presidency and the possibilities for executive overreach? You said the system worked. Does that mean that there are some built in limitations on the executive in the end?

MARK SUMMERS: It seems to me that the built-in limitations get less and less all the time. In an age when the president has virtually no administrators, no bureaucrats that he runs of any kind, his power is a lot less. And with no presidential staff, has a lot less. A president with a much smaller Army, and the Army was being reduced very quickly, has much less power.

It seems to me though that any president that stretches much further from the powers than his predecessor is going to run into trouble. And Andrew Johnson may, compared to Lincoln have looked restrained, but for peacetime presidents, he goes way beyond what any other president had done before. And that was frightening.

I mean, maybe 100 years from now we may live in a presidency where people say, well, the president declared war on his own. He sent troops on his own. He bombed Baskerville and portions of Alabama back into the Stone Age. I mean, what’s the big deal about that? We all do it. But precedent really builds up in increments. What we find acceptable, and what they found acceptable in Johnson’s time was way less than the stuff Johnson did. And no president for the rest of the century is going to act the way he did. They’re going to be a lot more careful, a lot more deferential to Congress.

PETER: Mark Summers is a Historian at the University of Kentucky. He’s the author of The Ordeal of the Reunion, a new history of Reconstruction.

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