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Epilogue: 1868-1869 William Pitt Fessenden was seldom given to bouts of self-pity. Greatly discomfited by the debilitating bowel condition that would eventually kill him and by the intense criticism directed against him for his anti-impeachment vote, he retained his indomitable sense of purpose until the end of his life. Although some Republicans tried to expel him from the party, he resisted the urge to decamp and soon began to reassert his influence within the organization. He was still a force to be reckoned with just days before his death in the fall of 1869 and contemporaries, shocked by his sudden demise, rightly paid tribute to him as one of the most influential political figures of the Civil War generation. At first it seemed that Fessenden might be overwhelmed by the ferocity of his opponents in May 1868. Even his political allies struggled to defend him. The editor of the Portland Press, normally one of the senator’s strongest supporters, felt obliged to print a number of censorious articles to defend his own position before the court of local opinion. One described Fessenden’s “whole mental constitution” as “conservative ” and asked rhetorically if he had not sympathized with the reactionary wing of the Republican Party since the beginning of the Civil War. More convincingly , it disparaged Fessenden’s claims that his stance had been determined solely by high principle. The anonymous writer noted the senator’s patronage demands on the discredited president and concluded damningly that “His motives, like those of most of his compeers, are probably of average human purity, with a fair share of prejudice, personal dislike and interest present and prospective, while, like the rest of us he fancies that he is acting on the elevated plane of pure reason and in the atmosphere of judicial impartiality and disinterestedness.”1 Stung by these attacks, Fessenden tried to fight back, pressing the editor to defend his course and insert more positive copy from Horace White’s Chicago Tribune. It was an uphill struggle. A majority of Republicans had favored impeachment and concurred with Charles Sumner that Fessenden and his fellow “quibblers” had voted for acquittal on specious legal grounds and for their own base reasons.2 Most of Fessenden ’s northern defenders were relatively conservative organs such as the New 237 epilogue: 1868–1869 York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Springfield Republican. Congratulatory letters tended to come from New England lawyers and bankers who lauded him for putting country above party.3 Fessenden was fortunate that wise heads in the Republican organization calculated that any attempt to expel the “recusants” would undermine party unity ahead of the presidential election. The Boston businessman John Murray Forbes bemoaned the failure to convict Johnson but thought it would be “sheer madness to add to this great disaster the risk of splitting up the Republican party, now the only bulwark of freedom. We owe it to the living and to the dead to keep together until we have absolutely secured the fruits of our dearly bought victories.”4 When the Republican national convention met at the Chicago Opera House shortly after the critical impeachment vote, hopes ran high that the seven senators would be dealt with, in the words of the New-York Tribune, as “deserters.”5 The fiery Radical general, John A. Logan, and Lincoln’s old ally, Norman Judd, demanded their expulsion in speeches to the Illinois and southern delegations and a resolution calculated to achieve that end was drafted by the national council of the Union League. The expulsion efforts were thwarted, however, by non-Radicals like Carl Schurz and the final platform contained no explicit criticism of the anti-impeachers. Fessenden was still “sick at heart” over his friends’ failure to laud his conduct but he was cheered by Grant’s nomination and relieved that the convention had not caved into pressure from his enemies. “It now remains for us to decide whether we choose to stay in,” he told Frank haughtily. “If the party desires to swap me off for Ben. Butler, I shall enter no protest. I owe the party nothing, and have no favours to ask.”6 Apparent confirmation that he had done the right thing came when a group of wealthy Boston businessmen and Brahmins, including Edward Atkinson, Francis Parkman, and Charles Francis Adams, Jr., thankful that the government had not been “Mexicanized” by impeachment or delivered into the hands of men committed to what they...

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