Behind the current Clinton scandal stands the specter of Watergate. That it should be there is understandable. The bungled burglary at the Democratic Party national headquarters occurred twenty-six years ago this past summer. Next August will see the twenty-fifth anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as President of the United States. Watergate then is still very much a part of living memory, and living memory is the type of history most relevant to the general public because it is the history with which they are most familiar.
Consequently, Watergate has come to exert a powerful influence on the terms of reference by which people understand the Clinton scandal. Some analogies to Watergate are admittedly quite apt. Monica Lewinsky’s stained cocktail dress was a “smoking gun,” providing definitive proof the President lied in denying a sexual relationship with the intern. Clinton’s August 17 confession also was a quintessential “modified limited hangout. ” However, much of the use of Watergate analogies distorts the meaning and significance of the Clinton case. Some of the distortion is merely irritating.
For instance, a lot of journalists and politicians seem to have the ambition of becoming the Howard Baker of the scandal. Lately, there have appeared too many strained variations on his classic line, “What did the President know, and when did he know it? ” However, the Watergate-isms forced on the Clinton scandal are not all the product of awkward attempts to paraphrase Howard Baker or the temporal proximity of Watergate. There also has been a conscious attempt by some Clinton opponents to emphasize Watergate in order to make Bill Clinton’s misdeeds seem more serious than they are in reality.
While these efforts are understandable politically, they are questionable historically. Of greater disappointment to this historian has been the temporal myopia in the search for insight into the Clinton scandal. Watergate was not the first serious attempt to impeach a president. Seldom mentioned in the discussion of the troubles of William Jefferson Clinton is the impeachment of his fellow Southerner, Andrew Johnson. In May 1868, Johnson came closer than any president did in American history to involuntary removal from office. At his trial in the U. S. Senate that spring, he avoided conviction by only one vote.
The neglect of the case of Andrew Johnson is unfortunate. Johnson’s impeachment provides more insight into the current travails of Bill Clinton than Watergate, and suggests the ultimate resolution of the impeachment proceedings soon to get underway in the U. S. House of Representatives. However, since the Johnson’s impeachment exists outside living memory, it will be necessary to discuss the background of the case at some length. Andrew Johnson became President of the United States after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. As a Southerner and a Democrat, Johnson was an unlikely president in 1865.
He owed his nomination as Vice-President to wartime politics. As Lincoln struggled for reelection in the tight 1864 campaign, he was forced to reach out to marginal constituencies. Such minor voting blocs included white Southerners who had stayed loyal to the United States after the formation of the Confederacy. Lincoln also hoped to gain the votes of Democrats who favored a continuation of the Civil War. (Lincoln’s Democratic opponent, George McClellan, called for an armistice and convention of the states to restore the Union by peaceful means. ) Prominent among these Southern unionists and War Democrats was Andrew Johnson.
Johnson was the only U. S. Senator from a seceded state that did not resign and join the Confederacy at the beginning of the Civil War. During the conflict, he served as the governor of Union-occupied Tennessee, his home state. Hence, Johnson owed his nomination as Vice-President in 1864 to Lincoln’s effort to persuade Southern unionists and War Democrats to vote for his reelection. Indeed, bringing Johnson aboard the ticket required Lincoln to repackage the Republicans that year as the “National Union” party because his running mate was a Democrat. Johnson became President as the Civil War was rapidly coming to a close.
Hence, the issue on the mind of the nation as the Tennessean entered the White House was not the conduct of the war, but the status of the postwar South. Johnson, like his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, favored a lenient peace in which all but the highest-ranking Confederates would be restored to their full rights as U. S. citizens, and normal state government quickly reestablished in the South. Johnson demanded only two substantial concessions before the Southern states regained their full status within the union: that they repudiate Confederate government debts and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.
S. Constitution, which ended slavery. The Southern states quickly acceded, and by the end of 1865, Johnson believed that the process of reconstruction essentially was complete. However, in his rapid reintegration of the South into the union, Johnson made enemies of an influential faction in the Republican Party, the Radicals. The Radicals believed that Johnson had thrown away a golden opportunity to impose fundamental reforms on Southern society. In particular, the Radicals wanted African Americans to be accorded full citizenship and black men given the right to vote.
When Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights bill in early 1866 that provided for the citizenship of African Americans the Radicals began to advocate openly his impeachment. They believed that unless the President could be removed from office, he would be in a position to frustrate their ambitions for interracial government in the South. Moderate and conservative Republicans initially resisted the calls for impeachment. Moderate Republicans had joined the Radicals in supporting the Civil Rights bill because they recognized that black citizenship and suffrage were the only means of sustaining a politically viable Republican Party in the South.
Having provided a basis for a Southern Republican Party moderates felt they could compromise with the President on other Reconstruction-related legislation. However, Andrew Johnson imprudently rejected their overtures. For example, Johnson refused a compromise on the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, which sought to extend the life of the federal agency assisting former slaves in the transition to freedom. Many Republicans also were offended by the extreme generosity with which Johnson issued pardons to former high-ranking Confederates.
Still, while Johnson’s actions alienated moderate and conservative Republicans and forced them to cooperate with the Radicals in the formulation of Reconstruction policy, impeachment was too extreme a measure for non-Radicals to support in 1866. Over time though, Andrew Johnson’s character defects played into the hands of his Radical Republican enemies. He was not undermined by an unchecked libido, but by an uncompromising self-righteousness. When Johnson became convinced that he was right and his enemies were wrong nothing could persuade him to accommodate the beliefs of his opponents.
The President was especially unyielding on one particular issue. Like virtually all white Southerners in the 1860s, Johnson took for granted that black people were an inferior race and, consequently, he strongly supported white supremacy. Hence, he had vetoed the Civil Rights bill because Johnson believed that the settlement of racial issues in the South should be left to white Southerners, without federal interference. Johnson supported the Black Codes passed by southern legislatures following the war, which severely restricted the activities of African Americans and reduced their status to a state of quasi-slavery.
In short, on the issue of white supremacy and the ability of white Southerners to decide alone the nature of Southern society after the war, Johnson would not budge. It was the intransigence of the President about white supremacy that ultimately resulted in his downfall. Like the Clinton saga, congressional elections played a notable role in the outcome of Johnson’s case. The Republican Party scored a smashing success in the congressional elections of November 1866, winning a two-thirds majority in the House and a three-quarters majority in the Senate. This put them in a position to override Andrew Johnson’s vetoes at will.
Congress did not wait long after the election to take control of Reconstruction policy from the President. Over the Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 early that year. This legislation set up a mechanism for replacing the state governments created under Johnson’s lenient policies and put the South under military authority, pending state constitutional conventions that would organize new civilian governments, in which African Americans would have full rights of suffrage and political participation. Still, despite the enormous Republican majority in Congress, Johnson remained defiant.
He vetoed congressional actions that he opposed and was regularly overridden. His intransigence played into the hands of the Radicals, spurring moderate and even conservative Republican support for the Radical vision of Reconstruction. Yet he remained a thorn in the side of the Radicals. His executive authority allowed him to interfere in the application of congressional reconstruction in the field. Particularly troublesome was Johnson’s position as commander-in-chief of the military. As it was the army that implemented congressional policies in the South, the President was still in an excellent position to obstruct the Radicals.
Of special concern to Congress was Johnson’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. Stanton was a holdover from the Lincoln administration, and had over time shifted politically toward the Radical wing of the Republican Party. While most Republicans had quit Johnson’s cabinet by 1867, Stanton remained and was the most powerful and influential Radical in the executive branch. Understandably, the decision of Congress in early 1867 to take over Reconstruction policy made the Secretary of War vulnerable. Johnson knew that he could not expect Stanton’s support in hamstringing the implementation of congressional reconstruction.
For those same reasons, congressional Republicans, especially the Radicals wanted to keep Stanton as Secretary of War. He would be an excellent agent of Congress in bypassing the President. To keep Stanton in office and protect other congressional supporters still in the executive branch, Congress passed, in March 1867, the Tenure of Office Act. This legislation extended the power of the U. S. Senate in its role to “advise and consent. ” Heretofore, the Senate had had the authority to accept or reject presidential appointments.
The Tenure of Office Act expanded that power by giving the Senate the right to accept or to reject the dismissal of presidential appointees. Under this law, the president could not remove incumbents in the executive branch while the Senate was in session without a majority vote in favor of the action. When the Senate was not in session, the president could suspend an official and appoint a temporary replacement. However, the new officeholder’s job would not become permanent until the Senate returned and confirmed the replacement. If it declined to do so, the old officeholder returned to their post.
Johnson vetoed the Tenure of Office Act when the bill initially reached his desk, believing it to be an unconstitutional invasion of presidential powers. The Republican super-majority in Congress quickly overrode the veto. If the Tenure of Office Act was meant to cow Andrew Johnson, it was not a success–although the President did not immediately challenge the law. Instead, he made the utmost use of his remaining executive authority. During the summer of 1867, while Congress was in recess, Johnson suspended Edwin M. Stanton under the provisions of the Tenure of Office Act, replacing him with the commanding general of the U.
S. army, Ulysses S. Grant. He also removed from their commands, army generals like Phillip Sheridan and Daniel Sickles, who sympathized with the Radicals. Still, the suspension of Stanton and the removal of Sheridan and Sickles did not precipitate an immediate crisis. While Johnson’s actions angered the Radicals even further, they still could not get other Republicans to agree to recall Congress for impeachment proceedings because Johnson had not violated the Tenure of Office Act and he had been entirely within his authority as commander-in-chief to relieve army officers.
Non-Radicals also resisted calls for impeachment because Johnson remained useful to them on political issues unrelated to Reconstruction. In particular, many Non-Radical Republicans found common ground with Johnson on such important matters as monetary and fiscal policy. The final impeachment crisis began with the state and local elections in the fall of 1867. Democrats reduced Republican majorities in the state legislatures throughout the North. Johnson interpreted these election results and the defeat of drives to give African Americans suffrage in the Northern states as a popular mandate to increase his resistance to the Radicals.
The decisive failure of an impeachment vote forced by the Radicals on the House of Representatives in December 1867 by a vote of 57 to 108 also encouraged the President to be more defiant. He resumed replacing generals in the South whom he perceived as being too supportive of Congress. Still, because Johnson was commander-in-chief, moderate and conservative Republicans continued to refuse to change their mind about impeachment despite the additional removals. It was Ulysses S. Grant who, in January 1868, finally prompted Andrew Johnson to go too far in his attempts to obstruct congressional reconstruction.
Grant, the leading Northern Civil War general, had served Johnson as acting Secretary of War since the suspension of Stanton in August of the previous year. General Grant also was the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1868. However, to win the presidency, he would need to unite the Republican Party and gain the support of the Radicals, many of whom opposed his candidacy. Having accepted Johnson’s appointment out of a sense of loyalty to the nation rather than the President personally, on January 13, 1868, Grant resigned as acting Secretary of War.
Instead of surrendering his post to Johnson, in act calculated to win the gratitude of the Radicals, Grant surrendered it to Stanton. Bolstering Grant’s decision to surrender his office to Stanton was a Senate resolution made the previous month (December) that rejected Johnson’s suspension of Stanton and demanded his reinstatement. The prospect of having Stanton back as Secretary of War proved intolerable to Andrew Johnson. He dithered for a month over whether to suspend Stanton again and find a replacement that Congress would accept, or dismiss Stanton outright.
Encouraged by the second failure of the Radicals to push through an impeachment bill on February 14, a week later, on February 21, 1868, Johnson formally fired Edwin M. Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act. Stanton’s dismissal led to a bizarre standoff that the current twenty-four hour media would have loved to cover. After Grant’s resignation, Stanton had reoccupied his old office. Upon receiving his termination notice from Johnson, he refused to recognize its legality. However, Stanton became afraid that if he left his office that he might never be able to get back in.
Hence, the Secretary of War literally camped out at the War Department building from February 21 until mid-April, when he finally felt secure enough to go home at night. Andrew Johnson had not meant to prompt his own impeachment when he fired Edwin M. Stanton. Rather, Johnson felt he was finally in a secure enough position to challenge what he perceived was a blatantly unconstitutional law. In sacking the Secretary of War, the President believed he was merely asserting his constitutional authority against an illegal attempt by Congress to invade the prerogatives of the executive branch.
Johnson wanted to initiate a Supreme Court case and not impeachment proceedings. There also was uncertainty whether the Tenure of Office Act covered Stanton since Lincoln had appointed him Secretary of War years before its passage. In dismissing Stanton, however, the President seriously miscalculated the response of Congress. Not only the Radicals, but also moderate and conservative Republicans believed Johnson’s action to be a blatant challenge to Congress’ legitimate authority to make laws.
Hence, the result of Stanton’s firing was a third and successful impeachment vote in the House. On February 24, 1868, Johnson was impeached by a vote of 128 to 47 (with fifteen members abstaining). The vote was strictly on party lines. After the successful impeachment vote, Johnson’s case was bound over for trial in the Senate. In the haste to impeach Johnson, the eleven articles of impeachment were drafted only after the impeachment vote in the House. The articles dealt with his violation of the Tenure of Office and related events.
The trial of the President in the Senate commenced in March 1868, and positions of the prosecution and defense were predictable. U. S. Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, acting as the chief prosecutor, presented the evidence that Johnson had violated the Tenure of Office Act. Former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis, representing the President, emphasized that Andrew Johnson had been within his rights under the Constitution in firing Stanton and questioned whether Stanton was even covered under the statute.
The basic implication of Curtis was that Johnson could not be removed because he had not committed a crime. Radicals in the Senate countered that even if Johnson had not committed criminal acts he could still be removed for political reasons. With delays caused by the illness of some of the important participants, the trial dragged on for eleven weeks into May 1868. It was not until May 16, 1868, that the Senate began voting on the eleven articles of impeachment.
With thirty-five senators voting for guilt, Johnson failed to be removed by one vote, thirty-six votes–a two-thirds majority–being needed to convict. Twelve Democrats and seven Republicans voted for acquittal. Scholars agree that Andrew Johnson was safe from conviction from the start. Enough Senate Republicans had pledged they would vote to acquit if necessary to prevent the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction because they feared that removing a president over what was essentially a policy disagreement would set a dangerous precedent for the future.
