The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson: A Century of Writing

THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON: A Century of Writing James E. Sefton One of the by-products of history is the "centennial observance." Three years ago the centennial of the Civil War closed and, with somewhat less attention, that of reconstruction began. Thus far we have had little of pomp and circumstance; but since the centennial of reconstruction will last until 1977 there remains ample time for Yankee ingenuity—or southern, for all that—to devise suitable festivities . We have just passed the centennial of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, which circumstance suggests the utility of evaluating what historians have written on that episode over the past hundred years. During the seventies and eighties impeachment participants labored over memoirs and narrative articles. In 1890 appeared the first significant production by a professional historian. Writing in the quarterly Papers of the infant American Historical Association, William A. Dunning set a tone of antipathy toward the Radical Republicans which he and many of his successors were to maintain.1 He saw impeachment as a logical result of the struggle for hegemony in reconstruction policy-making which executive and legislature had begun in December, 1865. This combat had two dimensions: first, the quarrel over details of reconstruction procedures; second, and of greater import to Dunning, the threat to executive independence manifested in such laws as the Tenure of Office Act. Further, Congress had been the aggressor all along; Johnson had incurred impeachment in his struggle "to tear away the meshes which Congress was so mercilessly weaving about him."2 Dunning considered the crisis an institutional one imperiling the principle of separation of pow1 William A. Dunning, "The Impeachment and Trial of President Johnson," Papers of the American Historical Association, IV (Oct. 1890), 145-177. This article was reprinted in Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1897; repr. 1965), pp. 253-303. 2 Dunning, Essays, p. 261. 120 ers, because to him the central question was whether the President could decline to execute a law he believed unconstitutional. In Dunning 's opinion, the resolution of this question would determine the President's status in the federal government. If he had that power the President's will would ultimately be paramount to the legislature 's; if not, he would be a mere clerk of the dominant group in Congress. John A. Bingham, one of seven congressmen chosen by the House as trial "Managers" or prosecuting attorneys, had pressed this point in his closing argument at the trial. "His appeal to senatorial esprit de corps was very thinly disguised," Dunning thought, and, of course, it failed. Dunning believed that, since only three of the eleven articles of impeachment were voted on, the question of the President's power was never completely determined, but that the result , so far as it went, secured his position. And Dunning was satisfied with that result.3 In 1896 came a volume by a participant which is mentioned here only because it was the first book devoted entirely to the impeachment and trial. Edmund G. Ross, who as a senator from Kansas had cast a crucial vote for acquittal in 1868, wrote this curious, little volume at which modern scholarly reviewers might ungenerously hurl the epithet "non-book." Largely a collage of excerpts from the printed trial proceedings, it spared its contemporary readers the dreariness of the complete record, but for the historian's purposes it suffers from too many long documentary extracts and not enough Ross. Its lean measure of interpretation favored Johnson, thus showing that the author had not changed his mind after thirty years. Ross concluded emphatically that the prosecution was "partisan" but offered little insight into his own motives for voting not guilty. Like Dunning, he detected an institutional threat to the executive branch and expressed his fear that conviction would have set a harmful precedent.4 John W. Burgess, a colleague of Dunning's at Columbia University, found the Radicals' basic purpose—to secure civil rights for black men —"entirely praiseworthy," but was convinced that suddenly making voters of poorly prepared former slaves was an ill-chosen means of accomplishing it. From America's imperialistic dabblings, said Burgess , the country was...