The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (65 page)

Chase leaned down. “The question, General, was whether the President agreed with your concerns, not whether he expressed any of his own.”

“Sir, he agreed.”

Dennard resumed. “Did you make suggestions for improving the situation?”

“I did.”

“Did the President offer any?”

“Objection.”

“Counsel,” said Chase after a moment, “you may ask whether the President made any response. You may not elicit the content, if your intention is to show his state of mind.”

Butler was unsatisfied. “Your Honor, we would ask that the presiding officer inquire of counsel what his intention is.”

Dennard did not wait. “Your Honor, we are simply trying to meet the Managers’ assertion that the President paid no attention to the complaints about some of the difficulties of Reconstruction.”

Chase nodded. “Very well. The objection is overruled. The witness may answer.”

The secretary read back the question.

“Yes,” said Sherman. “Mr. Lincoln very kindly shared his ideas.”

Dennard proceeded carefully. “Did his ideas meet your concerns?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In what way?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

Abigail realized that she was sweating. True, the gallery was stifling, as usual, and the great ladies of the capital were fanning away, but this was different; this was nervousness, bordering on panic. She understood the importance of Sherman’s testimony. She did not understand how the Managers could allege a conspiracy, without any witnesses or documents, and then the Senate could refuse to hear any evidence intended to rebut the allegation.

Unless, of course, the Senators had already made up their minds.

Down in the well, Dennard was again circling toward his goal. Yes, the President answered each of my concerns. Yes, I thought his ideas were good ones. Yes, we talked about—a glance at Butler, but no objection came this time—the level of concern among members of Congress over the problems of Reconstruction. Yes, the President said he believed that he could settle with the congressional leaders and put this episode behind him. No, he did not tell me the terms of the deal. No, I never heard him say anything about ignoring any—

“Objection.”

Perfectly timed. Dennard had just asked whether the President had ever, in the hearing of the witness, disparaged the Congress. Butler’s plan was to leave standing the testimony that the President was concerned about Congress and planned to settle with congressional leaders, without allowing Sherman to explain just what the President meant.

Chase said, “Counsel, you may not use the respondent’s out-of-court statements to establish his state of mind. The objection is sustained.”

Dennard lumbered back to the counsel table and whispered briefly with the other lawyers. “Now, General Sherman,” he said when he was standing before the witness once more, “when you had these conversations with the President, was anything said about the Department of the Atlantic?”

“Yes.”

“Please tell us what was said.”

Butler objected. “We have just argued the point. Counsel may not, through questions to witnesses, place into evidence declarations by the President, at least if those declarations are intended to show the President’s state of mind. If Mr. Lincoln wishes to tell us of his state of mind during the events we are discussing, he is free at any time to come up to the chamber and be sworn.”

Dennard was succinct. “A statement admitted to show state of mind is not hearsay. The principle is well settled.”

Chase took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, the sign that he was having trouble making up his mind. “I think the question is admissible,” he finally said. “The Managers have charged the President with an intent to use the proposed Department of the Atlantic to overthrow the Congress. I do not see how else the respondent can answer the charge but by putting into evidence his contemporaneous statements.”

“Mr. Lincoln can come to this chamber and be sworn,” Butler persisted.

“I have made my ruling, Mr. Butler.” Chase looked around the room, his fine sense of political judgment obviously at work. “Nevertheless, I consider it appropriate to put the question to the Senate.”

Up in the gallery, it was Kate’s turn to stiffen, and Abigail’s to notice. The most prominent of Washington’s ladies was worried. And, given that the only subject that ever worried Kate was her father’s presidential chances, Abigail could only assume that she believed Chase had made an error.

She wondered what it was.

Down below, the secretary of the Senate was reading from the record Dennard’s question to Sherman, and the ensuing argument. Then, the motion not being debatable, the secretary immediately called the roll. Sumner and the votes he controlled tipped the balance, and the tally ran twenty-three to twenty-nine against admitting the question, with Wade again abstaining, and Senator Sherman, the witness’s brother, joining him.

The Chief Justice said, “The question will not be admitted.”

All through the roll call, Dennard and Speed and Sickles had been whispering together, trying to come up with a plan. Now, with the matter settled, Dennard rose to try again.

“General Sherman,” he said, “during these conversations with the President, did you yourself ever make any statements or any inquiries regarding the Department of the Atlantic?”

Butler was again on his feet, insisting that the previous ruling covered this form of the question, too.

“I am not asking for a declaration from the President,” said Dennard. “I am only asking the witness what he himself said.”

“He is asking the question,” said Butler, “in order to elicit information on the state of mind of the President.”

Chase hesitated. “Overruled. The witness will answer.”

“I made no inquiries,” said Sherman, the overprecise answer less helpful than the President’s lawyers might have hoped.

Dennard checked his notes. Plainly, they had worked out several different permutations of the question. “General Sherman, during these conversations with the President, did you receive any written memoranda or orders regarding the Department of the Atlantic?”

Butler objected. Chase was succinct: “The witness may state whether he received memoranda but not what the memoranda said.”

“I received no memoranda,” said Sherman.

“And did you receive any spoken orders regarding the Department of the Atlantic?”

“I received no spoken orders.”

“Did the President ever give you any order of any kind regarding the Department of the Atlantic?”

“He did not.”

“What if anything did the President say to you regarding the Department of the Atlantic?”

“Objection. Same ground.”

“Sustained.”

Dennard kept trying to find a method of phrasing the question that would allow Sherman to say to the Senate what he had said to the President’s lawyers: that at no point had the President said to him a single word about overthrowing the Congress, and that their conversation about the Department of the Atlantic and General Sherman’s role was entirely innocuous, dealing with matters of reducing the cost of the
occupation of the defeated South by reducing the number of separate commands.

Each time, Dennard failed. Either Chase refused to admit the question, or he admitted it and was overruled by the Senate. Finally, Dennard surrendered and moved on to less pressing questions, with no relation to the only matter Sherman had been called to explain. Abigail felt a growing despair. Tomorrow, she knew, the papers would imply that the entire matter of the Department of the Atlantic had been a desperate manipulation on the part of a vengeful madman trying to impose his will on the nation.

II

Butler’s cross was brisk, and to the point.

“Now, General. Do you recall a newspaperman named Thomas Knox, a correspondent for the
New York Herald
?”

Sherman tilted his head away, as if Butler had uttered a vulgarity. “I recall Mr. Knox very well,” he said.

“You ordered his arrest, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Would you please tell the Court why.”

“Sir, Mr. Knox was authoring false dispatches, lying about the situation at the front, stirring up opposition to the war effort, and giving valuable military intelligence to the enemy.”

“And you had him tried by a military court, did you not?”

“I did. The court-martial found Mr. Knox guilty, and expelled him from the front lines. Under the sentence, he would be imprisoned if found in the vicinity.”

“And did Mr. Lincoln become involved in the case?”

“Yes, sir.” For the first time Sherman seemed slightly uncomfortable. “Some other newspapermen appealed to the President. He commuted Mr. Knox’s sentence.”

Butler feigned astonishment. “Let me understand this, General. You warned Mr. Knox to cease his treasonous dispatches—as any of us would have—and when he did not, you turned him over to a court-martial, which convicted him and banned him from the front? And the President overruled you?”

“Sir, he overruled the sentence of the court-martial.”

“Indeed.” Butler made a show of consulting his notes. “And the
Herald
was at the time a pro-Lincoln paper, was it not?”

Chase sustained Dennard’s objection, but everyone saw the point.

Butler, swaggering a bit, returned to the table and picked up a new card. “Now, General, do you recall the case of a certain Presbyterian pastor in Memphis who was turned out of the pulpit by his congregants?”

The entire chamber perked up. Nobody knew what this was about. At the defense table, the lawyers whispered frantically together.

“I do,” said Sherman, unruffled. “The pastor, Dr. Grundy, was a loyal Union man. Most of his congregation were for secession. They expelled him. The new pastor preached treason, so when my army arrived, in 1864, we put the new pastor out and the old one back in.”

Butler was no God man. “Grundy’s theology was sounder?”

Laughter from the audience.

“I did my duty, sir,” said Sherman.

“And did Mr. Lincoln become involved in that case?”

“Sir, he did. The congregants who had put Dr. Grundy out appealed to the President. He overruled me.”

“Mr. Lincoln put the rebel pastor back in?”

“Sir, the President said that, absent military necessity regarding the building itself, we had no business interfering in the operation of the church, and that it was up to the congregation to choose its pastor.”

“And this order had the effect of putting the rebel pastor back?”

“Yes, sir. However—”

“Thank you, General. Now, turning your attention to …”

Butler went on this way for another hour. Someone had plainly been through the War Department signal records quite thoroughly, and picked out half a dozen episodes in which Lincoln, or Sherman’s superiors acting on Lincoln’s behalf, had overruled military decisions made in the field. No doubt a similar search would have discovered similar orders issued to every high-ranking general. Nevertheless, with the President’s men unprepared for rebuttal, the effect was devastating. Few would recall the bits of pro-Lincoln testimony that Dennard had managed to squeeze through the barriers raised by Chase’s bizarre rulings. But everyone would remember that Lincoln had supported the rebels even over the great William Tecumseh Sherman, a general who revered him.

Battered by the combination of Chase’s enmity and Butler’s cleverness, the President’s case was in ruins.

I

“
I SUPPOSE THE
Chief Justice has made up his mind,” said Dinah Berryhill. “He thinks that your Mr. Lincoln is done for. Oh, look. What do you think?”

It was midday Wednesday, three days after Abigail’s resignation. They were visiting a jeweler on the second floor of a building on Seventeenth Street, across from the Old Clubhouse, where William Seward was living, or perhaps dying, seeing nobody other than a few close friends, running the State Department through his son Frederick, the assistant secretary. There were many who thought that, had Seward not been so gravely wounded on the night two years ago, the impeachment would never have reached this point; for his skill at calming political storms was legendary.

“I fancy this one,” said Dinah, fingering a diamond tiara priced in the thousands. Ordinary people, black or white, were not welcomed in the private suites of the city’s finer jewelers; but Dinah was no ordinary person, and spent her father’s money like water. “What do you think?”

“It’s very nice,” said Abigail, hardly looking.

“Pay attention. Tell me what you honestly think.”

“Too showy.”

“Nonsense. It is perfect.” Dinah turned to the jeweler, who was all but rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “How much?”

“Two thousand,” said the delighted man.

“Ridiculous. I will give you twelve hundred.” She began writing out
a draft without waiting to hear whether he agreed. She had been buying from him for some time, and they understood each other.

“Dinah.”

“Wait.”

“Dinah.”

“I want to look at earrings next. Something different this time. Emeralds, perhaps.”