Andrew Johnson’s impeachment killed the idea for a century

We have had 2.5 presidential impeachments in our history. The first occurred 151 years ago and the other one and a half came along in the past 45 years. 

Most recent was the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999 when a Republican Senate couldn’t come close to getting the two thirds majority needed to find him guilty of perjury or obstruction of justice.  

Clinton’s exoneration came 25 years after the impeachment of Richard Nixon abruptly ended when he resigned for the best of reasons. He knew the House would impeach him and the Senate would convict him of obstruction of justice. (The Constitution gives the House the power to impeach—or charge—the president with “Treason, Bribery or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The trial of the person charged by the House is conducted by the Senate.)  

None of the 2.5 impeachments went as planned but the first was so messy, it discouraged Congress from having another for more than a hundred years.

That first presidential impeachment ended in May 1868 with the acquittal, by one vote, of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor, Andrew Johnson. It is remembered today for making a terrible case for impeaching a terrible president.

The story of the Johnson impeachment, like the biography of the man, has been often distorted by the tellers, among them respected historians, a Pulitzer Prize winning future president and even a movie.   

I first learned about the Johnson impeachment by watching that movie, “Tennessee Johnson,” as a child. It accurately portrayed Johnson as the only Southern senator who chose to stand with the Union when Tennessee and the 10 other Southern states seceded after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln in 1861. When Lincoln ran for a second term during the Civil War, he chose Democrat Johnson as his vice president.

In the 1942 movie, Johnson, as Lincoln’s successor, courageously tried to carry out the assassinated president’s conciliatory reconstruction policies after the Civil War and was nearly convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors for his effort. But that was only part of the story, told, not only in the movie, but by many historians.

Johnson did want to welcome the South back into the Union but for all the wrong reasons. He was a racist who vetoed bills aimed at protecting newly freed slaves and opposed the 14th Amendment, which made the slaves citizens. He enraged the North by pardoning most of the military and civilian leaders of the Confederacy, including President Jefferson Davis.  

But Johnson was actually impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act, a constitutionally questionable law passed in 1867 to prevent the president from firing a Cabinet member without the Senate’s consent. It was a law solely designed to keep Democrat Johnson from firing members of Republican Lincoln’s Cabinet, especially Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, whom he did fire.

With a two-thirds Senate vote required for conviction, the Republicans failed to stop seven of their members from voting to acquit the president. The last of the seven to vote, Edmund Ross of Kansas, was expected to support conviction and his not guilty vote made him a hero to those who thought the impeachment was not justified.

One amateur historian who cast Ross in the hero role was Sen. John Kennedy of Massachusetts, who featured the Kansan in his “Profiles in Courage,” portraits of eight senators who followed their consciences in casting unpopular votes, many of them, like Ross’s, career ending.

Kennedy neglected to note that Ross was suspected then and now of following, not his conscience, but the money. If Johnson had been convicted and left office, he would have been succeeded by the Senate president, Ben Wade, a Radical Republican who supported revolutionary ideas like equality for black people and votes for women. 

To some powerful Republicans, acquitting Johnson was preferable to a President Wade and bribes were offered and accepted to keep Johnson in office for the few months left in Lincoln’s second term. Ross is strongly suspected of being part of this corrupt bargain and it worked.  Johnson remained a powerless president for a few months, was denied renomination and Ulysses Grant was elected that November.  

Finally, Kennedy claimed Ross was eventually vindicated by the Supreme Court when it declared the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional.

Well, not exactly. The Court never considered the law, which was repealed in 1887, but it did rule on the constitutionality of a law allowing presidents to fire postmasters and mentioned in passing that the repealed Tenure of Office Act was likely unconstitutional.   

The Court’s “vindication” occurred in 1926 when Ross had been dead for 19 years.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.