Let's Talk about Presidential Impeachment

By Matt Doran

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, as with all of the Reconstruction Era, provides a good lens for the study of historiography—the history of historical writing/interpretations. How have historians answered the question: Was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson’s justified? 

Early American history texts presented the Johnson impeachment as an outrageous overreach—part of a broader interpretation in the era of Jim Crow that portrayed Reconstruction as too radical. 

From David Saville Muzzey, A History of Our Country (1943)

Not content with reducing President Johnson to political impotence, the radicals were determined to drive him out of the White House. On the same day (March 2, 1867) that it destroyed the President’s governments in the South by the Reconstruction Act, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which took from him the privilege, exercised by every President since Washington’s day, of dismissing the members of his own cabinet at his pleasure. It was an outrageous measure, designed merely as a trap to catch Johnson in a “violation” of the law and hence furnish a reason for bringing an accusation against him. When, therefore, the President dismissed his Secretary of War Stanton, who was a virtual spy in the cabinet in close alliance with the radicals in Congress, the House of Representatives impeached Johnson of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Senate tried the case from March 30 to May 26, 1868; but in spite of the frantic efforts the radicals to secure a conviction, seven Republican Senators were honorable enough to place justice before partisan hatred and vote with the twelve Democrats for the President’s acquittal, making the vote (35 to 19) fall one short of the two thirds necessary for conviction. By this narrow margin the country was saved from the disgrace of using a clause of the Constitution as a weapon of personal and political vengeance against the highest officer of the land. 

​From Samuel Eliot Morrison, The Oxford History of the American People (1965)

The Radical leaders of the Republican party, not content with establishing party ascendancy in the South, aimed at capturing the federal government under the guise of putting the presidency under wraps. By a series of usurpations they intended to make the majority in Congress the ultimate judge of its own powers, and the President a mere chairmen of a cabinet responsible to Congress, as the British cabinet is to the House of Commons. An opening move in this game was the Tenure of Office Act of March 1867 which made it impossible for the President to control his administration, by requiring him to obtain the advice and consent of the Senate for removals as well as appointments to office. The next move to dispose of John by impeachment, so that Radical Ben Wade, president pro-tem of the Senate, would succeed to his office and title. 

Johnson, convinced the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional—an attitude later vindicated by the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States—countered in August 1867 by ordering Secretary Stanton, who had long been playing with the Radicals to resign. Stanton refused and barricaded himself in the war department. On 24 February 1868 the House of Representatives impeached the President before the Senate, “for high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution provides. Ten of the eleven articles of impeachment rang changes on the removal of Stanton, the other consisted of garbled newspaper reports of the President’s speeches. 

Although a monstrous charge preferred by George S. Boutwell, that Johnson was accessory to the murder of Lincoln, was not included, the impeach of Johnson was one of the most disgraceful episodes in our history. . . .

No valid grounds, legal or otherwise, existed for impeachment. Yet the Radicals would have succeeded in their object but for Chief Justice Chases’ insistence on legal procedure, and for seven courageous Republican senators who sacrificed their political future by voting for acquittal. . . . One more affirmative vote, and Ben Wade, president of the Senate, would have been installed in the White House. Then, in all probability, the Supreme Court would have been battered into submission and the Radicals would have triumphed over the Constitution as completely as over the South.

In the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, historians challenged traditional Reconstruction interpretations. Writing during the height of the Watergate investigation in 1973, Michael Les Benedict argued that impeachment was a legitimate response to Johnson’s efforts to undermine Reconstruction.

From Michael Les Benedict, "The Impeachment Precedent," New York Times (1973)

Andrew Johnson, however, was not nearly so innocent a victim. After the war, he arrogated to himself the entire responsibility for restoring civil government in the South—under his inherent war powers as Commander in Chief, he claimed—and denied that Congress had any authority in the premises. . . .

Johnson allowed—even encouraged—his Cabinet members when making appointments in the South to ignore the Congressional act requiring appointees to take an oath that they had never aided the rebellion. He and his Attorney General refused to enforce the Confiscation Act passed by Congress during the war, returning property which had been confiscated or abandoned by rebel former owners, taking it away from freed slaves to whom it had been promised and from charitable organizations which were using it for schools and orphanages. At the same time Johnson resisted with all his power efforts to guarantee equality before the law for Southern blacks.

When Congress, after long attempts to reach a compromise, finally set Johnson's Reconstruction program aside in 1867 and authorized military commanders in the South to supervise a new one, Johnson used his power as President to obstruct it, encouraging Southern resistance, ordering commanders to operate in such a way as to frustrate the law, and removing those commanders whom he could not control.

The Republican response, contrary to established opinion, was uncertain and hesitating. Some of the more extreme Radical Republicans favored impeachment and removal by the summer of 1866, but others claimed that the President could be impeached only if he actually violated a law. Despite his obstruction of some laws and his refusal to enforce others, they insisted, he had not yet done that. . . . Not until February, 1868, as the President seemed on the verge of making a shambles of Congress Reconstruction policy, did the House finally impeach him—and then only after he at last seemed to have violated a law, ominously removing the Secretary of War without waiting.

​Like Benedict, Eric Foner has shown little sympathy for Andrew Johnson in his four decades of writing on Reconstruction.

From Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010).  

Andrew Johnson was self-absorbed, insensitive to the opinions of others, unwilling to compromise, and unalterably racist. If anyone was responsible for the downfall of his presidency it was Johnson himself. With Congress out of session until December 1865, Johnson took it upon himself to bring about Reconstruction, establishing new governments in the South in which blacks had no voice whatever. When these governments sought to reduce the freedpeople to a situation reminiscent of slavery, he refused to heed the rising tide of Northern concern or to budge from his policy. As a result, Congress, after attempting to work with the President, felt it had no choice but to sweep aside Johnson's Reconstruction plan and to enact some of the most momentous measures in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which accorded blacks equality before the law; the 14th Amendment, which put the principle of equality unbounded by race into the Constitution; the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which mandated the establishment of new governments in the South with black men, for the first time in our history, enjoying a share of political power. Johnson did everything in his power to obstruct their implementation in 1868. Fed up with his intransigence and incompetence, the House of Representatives impeached Johnson and he came within one vote of conviction by the Senate.