Monday, June 10, 2019

Andrew Johnson and the First Presidential Impeachment Trial of America


      In 1868, the United States of America was still a young country. The battle of Appomattox was over and the Confederacy had surrendered, finishing the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated. The conflict over the future course of the nation had moved from the battlefields to the Capitol in Washington. While slavery had been abolished, the government was still undecided as to what should be done with the emancipated slaves. Andrew Johnson, then president of the United States, stood in the middle of the political battle without many friends.
     The Abolitionist Republican Abraham Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson to run with him for Vice President in an effort to make amends with the southern Confederate states which still had not been legally allowed back into the union. Johnson was a moderate Democrat from Tennessee who took sides with the Unionists during the Civil War. When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, Johnson ascended to the presidency. Very few people liked Johnson. He was known to be a hard drinking alcoholic with a violent temper, prone to fits of rage. He belittled the people who worked with him and got a reputation as a nasty bully because he verbally abused opponents during the election cycle. His views on civil rights and enfranchisement led him into a head-on collision with the Abolitionists in the Republican Party soon after being sworn in.
     The Executive and Legislative branches of the government were on their way to a showdown when Johnson took office. Lincoln essentially led the Unionists to victory in the Civil War by strengthening the powers of the presidential office at the expense of Congress; this trend of expanding presidential power has continued up to the present day. Meanwhile, the Republican Party controlled Congress; they had split into two competing factions: the moderate wing and the Radical Republican splinter group that advocated strongly in favor of equal rights for African-Americans in the U.S.A. When the Radical Republicans passed bills for slavery reparations and the enfranchisement of freed slaves through the House and Senate, Johnson vetoed the bills. Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, aligned himself with the Radical Republicans. Fearing that the president would dismiss Stanton, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, thereby preventing the president from firing the Secretary of War without congressional approval. Johnson did try to fire Stanton but Congress vetoed his bill. Later in 1867 when Congress was out of session, Johnson secretly fired Stanton and replaced him with Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, however, fearing legal repercussions, resigned and Congress reinstated Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. Grant and Johnson are known to have had some fiery shouting sessions over this incident with Johnson calling Grant a coward and Grant calling Johnson a criminal among many other names.
Andrew Johnson decided to go over the heads of Congress and appointed General Lorenzo Thomas to take over Stanton’s position. Johnson sent Thomas to Stanton’s office with a letter of dismissal but Stanton barricaded himself in his office and refused to leave. Lorenzo Thomas was arrested and put in jail for seven days but Edwin Stanton dropped all charges against him because he feared the Tenure of Office Act would be overturned for being unconstitutional. Congress, however, decided they had had enough of Johnson’s childish behavior and quickly drew up eleven articles of impeachment against him.
     In January of 1868, the House of Representatives passed a resolution to accept the eleven articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson. In March 1868, they passed the articles to the upper congressional house of the Senate for approval. They accepted the articles of impeachment and both sides began preparation for the trial. Congress, who normally operated behind closed doors, opened the trial to the public. This caused quite a sensation as large crowds showed up to witness American’s first impeachment proceedings against a sitting American president. The trial began at the end of March; for the sake of brevity it can be said that neither the prosecution nor the defense came up with any compelling arguments. The potentially explosive trial turned out to be a dud.
     According to Constitutional Law, the Senate needs a 2/3 majority vote to impeach a president. At first, the first three articles of impeachment were put to the vote. The verdict on all three was 35 in favor of conviction and 19 in favor of acquittal. 36 votes for conviction were necessary to remove Johnson from office. The Radical Republicans had lost. Before continuing on with the vote, Congress was suspended for ten days. An investigation committee was set up to find out what happened. When the Senators returned, the last eight articles were put up for voting. The results were the same with 35-19 in favor of acquittal. Andrew Johnson remained in the presidential office until the end of his term.
     Something was not right, though. Not only all the Democrats in the Senate but also some of the Republicans voted not guilty in Johnson’s favor. The investigating committee later produced evidence that members of the Democratic party had offered quid pro quo bribes to Republican senators; in exchange for voting in Johnson’s favor, they would receive large sums of money and be appointed to prestigious and lucrative governmental offices. But when this evidence was brought to the public’s attention, the Democrats produced evidence that the Republicans had offered the same types of bribes to Democrat Senators. The Republicans tried to bring the matter to the Supreme Court but the case was thrown out since both sides nullified each other by committing the same crime. The bribes really did not matter anyways. The Senators who found Johnson not guilty admitted that he had broken the law but they were of the opinion that no harm had actually been done to the country and breaking that particular law was not serious enough to convict Johnson of high crimes and misdemeanors.
     Eventually the Supreme Court overruled the Tenure of Office Act, declaring it unconstitutional because it interfered with the political system’s checks and balances, giving the Executive branch less power than the Legislative branch. Although sometimes embroiled in contentious debates, the Congress and the president, as well as Democrats and Republicans, worked together quite effectively as America entered into its greatest period of economic, military, and political power ever. Even the proposed impeachment of Richard Nixon received bipartisan support with then-Senator and future president George H.W. Bush leading the Senate’s impeachment committee against him. This cooperation of powers would last until the 1990s when a new round of partisan bickering began tearing the nation apart again.


Reference

 Kelly, Alfred H. and Harbison, Winfred A. The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development. W.W. Norton and Company, 1946.

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