Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy (35 page)

John Bingham of Ohio stayed in the House until 1872, when President Grant appointed him ambassador to Japan, a post that Bingham held through three presidential terms, retiring in 1885. He lived long enough to see a distant cousin, William McKinley, elected president in 1896. George Boutwell of Massachusetts served in the Grant Administration as secretary of the treasury, then was chosen senator from his home state. In his final years, Boutwell led the Anti-Imperialist League in opposing the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of overseas colonies. John Logan, serving in the House and then the Senate until his death, was the Republican candidate for vice president in 1884. As head of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ group, Logan led the movement to create Memorial Day to honor the nation’s war dead.

Fewer honors awaited the president’s defense team. Johnson tried to appoint Benjamin Curtis as his attorney general, but Curtis turned down the position. The president then picked Henry Stanberry. Showing more than a little spite, the Senate rejected him. One more time, William Evarts benefited from Stanberry’s bad luck. Johnson nominated Evarts and the Senate confirmed him. Despite his loyal service to Johnson, Evarts later was welcomed back into the Republican Party. In 1876, his legal work was critical during the months-long dispute over the presidential election. Evarts’s client, Rutherford Hayes, rewarded Evarts by making him secretary of state. Evarts later was a senator from New York. Stanberry returned to private law practice, becoming a leading courtroom defender of the Ku Klux Klan.

Edwin Stanton left the War Office in miserable health, his asthma tormenting him. He tried to resume his law practice in Washington City. President Grant nominated him for the Supreme Court, and the Senate confirmed Stanton in December 1869. Four days later, on Christmas Eve, Stanton died after taking the oath of office in bed. Ben Wade’s Senate term expired in early 1869. He stayed in Washington as a lobbyist. Grant appointed him to the board of the Union Pacific Railroad and sent him as a special envoy in unsuccessful negotiations to acquire the Caribbean land of Santo Domingo.

One of the enduring myths of the Johnson impeachment involves the fates of the seven Republican defectors who supposedly chose principle over party, sacrifice over self-advancement. Each of them, according to the myth, ended his life a broken man, crushed by vindictive Radical Republicans. “Not a single one of them escaped the terrible torture,” wrote John F. Kennedy in
Profiles in Courage
, “of vicious criticism engendered by their vote to acquit.” It is a myth.

All seven defectors supported Grant’s candidacy in the fall of 1868. Grimes of Iowa, despite his stroke in May, returned to the Senate the following year. He pronounced that his influence in the new Congress was greater than it had been before the impeachment. Poor health forced his resignation at the end of 1869. Only a few months earlier, Fessenden of Maine died during a summer recess, still in office. Peter Van Winkle of West Virginia reported in July 1868 that the “stir” over his impeachment vote “died away very suddenly.” Soon, he found, “I am invited to and attend all the Republican caucuses.” He retired from the Senate in 1869, as he had intended. None was a victim of postimpeachment retribution. Indeed, their careers were not wildly different from those of the thirty-five senators who voted to convict Andrew Johnson: only seventeen of those senators won reelection as Republicans, while one crossed the aisle and won with support from Liberal Republicans and Democrats.

Missouri’s John Henderson did not seek reelection to the Senate when his term expired in 1869, but he stayed true to the Republicans, and they to him. In 1872, he was the Republican candidate for governor of Missouri, and for senator the next year, though his impeachment vote still could draw negative comment. Failing in both campaigns, Henderson secured appointment as United States attorney in Missouri, where he prosecuted alleged members of the Whiskey Ring. In the most formal recognition of Henderson’s good standing among Republicans, he was the presiding officer at the party’s national convention in 1884. He moved to Washington a few years later and built a thirty-room mansion on Meridian Hill, a platform from which his wife startled the city with her advanced social views. In the early twentieth century, Mary Foote Henderson mounted vegetarian and nonalcoholic dinner parties, as well as weekly dancing classes in the style of Isadora Duncan. On a memorable evening in 1906, Mrs. Henderson and her temperance ladies pillaged her husband’s wine cellar, smashing into the gutters of Sixteenth Street more than a thousand bottles of wine, brandy, and whiskey.

Three of the defecting senators did move away from the Republican Party, though at different speeds. Of the three, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois lingered the longest. Following Grant’s election, he continued to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee and still received Republican Party honors. Like many other Republicans, Trumbull soured on the Grant Administration. In 1872, he campaigned for reelection on the Liberal Republican ticket, but lost. He later ran for governor of Illinois as a Democrat, losing that race, too.

Fowler of Tennessee chafed at criticism of his acquittal vote. In the days following the trial, he moved his seat permanently to the Democratic side of the Senate to escape “Radical whisperings.” He lost his committee assignments the following year. Fowler did not seek reelection, anticipating that Tennessee Republicans would not support him. In 1872, he campaigned against Grant, then largely retired from public life.

Between his impeachment vote and his deals with Johnson, Edmund Ross’s prospects were poor when the Grant Administration arrived in March 1869. Only weeks later, Grant threw the Kansas senator out of the White House after a heated argument over patronage. Ross claimed he told the new president to “go to hell.” Ross sought a full term in the Senate from the Kansas legislature in 1871. Fittingly, the legislators chose a rival who paid them $60,000 in bribes, even more than Perry Fuller paid for Ross’s seat in 1867. The bribery was so blatant this time that his successor was forced to resign in 1873. Ross started two Kansas newspapers that failed, then in 1880 ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for governor. Two years later, Ross moved to New Mexico, where he ran a printing business. When the Democrats won the White House in 1884, President Grover Cleveland named Ross the territorial governor of New Mexico. In his final years, Ross was the major source of the legend of the seven martyrs, defending his impeachment vote in correspondence, magazines, and a book.

Thus, of the seven defectors, five either retired from the Senate voluntarily, died in office, or left because of health. Henderson remained a Republican in good standing for the rest of his life. Trumbull chose to leave the party years later, while Ross remade himself as a Democrat. Hardly the trail of suffering and despair that has been depicted.

Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas ended his Senate career in disgrace. In January 1873, he paid a $7,000 bribe to a Kansas state legislator to support his bid for a new term. The legislator marched into the state Capitol building, denounced Pomeroy’s bribery, and delivered the cash to the legislative clerk so it could be used to educate the children of Kansas. A state investigation found Pomeroy guilty of bribery; but the United States Senate found insufficient evidence to reach that conclusion. Pomeroy retired to Washington, then Massachusetts. He ran for president in 1884 for the American Prohibition Party.

The Astor House group and its allies showed remarkable resilience, though Perry Fuller was not the only one to collide with the law. Postal agent James Legate of Kansas was appointed governor of the Washington Territory in 1872. Within a year, he was under investigation for his time as a Kansas state legislator, this time for taking a bribe to vote for Ross’s successor in the Senate. A decade later, reports claimed that Legate paid $25,000 to dissuade a Kansas governor from running for president for the Prohibition Party. Eight years after that, Legate was mired in another scandal, this one involving the use of Whiskey Ring money to buy the votes of Kansas legislators to support a lottery.

Sheridan Shook, the New York tax official and right-hand man of Thurlow Weed, was indicted in September 1869 on charges of mishandling public funds. After winning dismissal of the charges, Shook became a prominent theater and brewery owner, remaining active in Republican politics until his death in 1899.

Shortly after President Grant ousted Henry Smythe as collector of customs in New York, an investigation found longstanding frauds in that operation. Smythe argued that the fraudulent practices started before he took office, adding that the Johnson Administration had been too distracted by the impeachment to combat the frauds. Smythe again escaped formal charges. Only low-level employees were prosecuted.

After the impeachment trial, Charles Woolley of Cincinnati worked closely with Democratic leaders, then ran into controversy following the bitter Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. According to charges trumpeted by the
New York Tribune
, Woolley was part of a Democratic program that paid $50,000 in bribes to Florida election officials. Coded telegrams between Woolley in Florida and senior New York Democrats were splashed across front pages with sinister-sounding translations. Woolley, who was then president of the National Trotting Association, was never charged with any crime.

Sam Ward gave up lobbying by the middle of the 1870s and returned to the financial world of New York, where he handled—among others—the accounts of William Evarts. Unable to meet margin calls several years later, Ward fled to Europe to escape his creditors. In his remaining years, he befriended Oscar Wilde, published a book of poems, and settled in Italy, where he died.

Only one of the dark men of the impeachment season lost his resilience; indeed, he suffered a form of capital punishment for his inveterate scheming. In November 1890, Willis Gaylord, Senator Pomeroy’s brother-in-law and business agent, landed in a Philadelphia jail, charged with swindling an investor in a Southern railroad. Confined for weeks to cell 143 of Moyamensing Prison, Gaylord hanged himself from the bars over the cell window.

Ulysses Grant’s victory in the 1868 election was not as overwhelming as Republicans had hoped. Though his margin in the electoral college was wide (214 to 80), he won only 52.7 percent of the popular vote, a 300,000 vote cushion out of almost 6 million votes cast. At forty-six, the president-elect was the youngest man yet to win the office.

Southern participation in the election was spotty. Three states (Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia) were not yet readmitted to the Union and were excluded from the canvass. Florida had no popular election, so its legislature cast that state’s electoral votes. Grant lost Georgia and Louisiana, where terrorist attacks by white Democrats kept freedmen from the polls. In St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, Grant received not a single vote even though the Republican candidate for governor had won 2,500 votes there a year earlier. As many as 300 blacks were murdered around New Orleans, and a like number in Caddo Parish, where Grant received one vote out of 2,000 recorded. The Grant voter in that parish was then killed, according to a witness, “for voting the Grant ticket.” One hundred sixty-two blacks were killed in riots in Bossier Parish. Of 1,500 eligible blacks in Americus, Georgia, only 137 voted.

Grant’s campaign slogan was “Let us have peace,” but there was no peace between the outgoing and incoming presidents. Rather than attend Johnson’s White House reception on New Year’s Day, Grant found business to attend to in Philadelphia. Johnson appointed a new minister to Mexico knowing that Grant detested the man. Grant struck back by helping to scuttle an agreement with Great Britain over shipping losses inflicted by Confederate privateers that had been outfitted in British ports.

With the approach of Inauguration Day, March 4, Johnson began to consider his final thrust against the hated Grant. On the cold, rainy morning of Grant’s inauguration, Johnson’s Cabinet assembled at the White House. They expected to travel together to the Capitol for the ceremony. Johnson sat at his desk, reviewing and signing legislation recently passed by Congress. Attorney General Evarts, anxious to move on to the Capitol, kept his overcoat on. Secretary of State Seward smoked a cigar. Johnson kept working. Grant arrived downstairs in his carriage, but Johnson did not stir. Grant’s carriage left. At a few minutes past noon, Johnson shook hands with each Cabinet member and joined his family in his own carriage. He was the last president, and the only one not named Adams, to boycott the inauguration of his successor.

The ex-president took his lacerated feelings back home to Greeneville, Tennessee, but he had no thought of a quiet retirement. His ambition, now yoked to a powerful craving for vindication, drove him straight back into politics. When Senator Joseph Fowler announced he would not seek reelection, Johnson immediately began to angle for the post. The contest would not be easy. The ex-president had done something to anger every part of the Tennessee electorate. Democrats remembered that he stood with the Union while his state seceded, then ran on a ticket with Lincoln. Republicans resented his lax Reconstruction policies. Then there was the stigma of escaping removal from office by a single vote. Just as Johnson began his push for the Senate seat, his son Robert committed suicide. The ex-president did not relent.

In October 1869, the Tennessee legislature met to choose the state’s next senator. Johnson stood first after the initial ballot. Edmund Cooper, now a member of the State Senate, led Johnson’s forces. After more ballots, the ex-president crept to within two votes of the majority needed for victory. Cooper told Johnson he had the two votes, but they would cost $1,000 apiece. Johnson supposedly refused to approve the payment. Johnson’s rivals then combined to support none other than Cooper’s brother, Henry, who won the seat. It was Johnson’s first electoral loss since 1837. He never forgave either of the Coopers.