I was made to read John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage in middle school for history class. The story we talked about in class was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The book’s take, shared by my teacher, on that incident was that one lone Republican senator, Ross from Kansas, heroically saved the country’s balance of powers by voting not to impeach Johnson. Hurrah, the country is saved by one brave man!
Kennedy was full of shit. And Impeached by David O Stewart, does a very good job of showing why.
First, Ross was one of seven Republicans who voted against their party to save Johnson. Second, many of the seven were clearly bribed, Ross most clearly. the good Senator largely controlled several lucrative levers of patronage after Johnson’s acquittal. And finally, Johnson almost certainly knew of and likely participated in the various plans and plots to bribe senators to acquit him. the country wasn’t saved, it was sold. Wholesale.
Impeached does a very good job of laying all of this material out. It uses the words and records of the participants to good effect, letting both the malefactors and heroes of the story drive their own narrative as much as possible without losing the larger contexts. And there were heroes. Every age generally has three types of people — those who are worse than their times, those who are better than their times, and those who are of their times. This tale featured all three.
Johnson, a massive racist who allowed the freedman and their white union supporting supporters to be slaughtered by Southern terrorists and who vetoed every attempt to protect them, was a man worse than his time. Ross, a man who cared more for patronage than principal, was a perfect example of the corruption of the day. And Thadeus Stevens and General Grant, the man who drove impeachment from death’s door and the man who refused to allow Reconstruction to be wholly abandoned, where better than their times. The acquittal of Johnson, then, placed the worst of the country in control of the fate of the freed slaves and their supporters. As a result, Southern terrorists were allowed to prevent freedmen from exercising their rights or even living as free people. One can argue that the regression in the early reconstruction era made it the reimposition of real Reconstruction in Grant’s term almost impossible to achieve.
Impeached also makes the point that the impeachment process was both deeply flawed and a vital safety valve for the country. Flawed in that far too many people believed that impeachment was a criminal process, not a political process. Johnson was impeached for violating a law that even the man who clung to it wasn’t certain was constitutional when his real crime was undermining Reconstruction. Johnson through freed slaves and their supporters to the wolves, easing their murder by his action and allowing foemer Confederates back into positions of power. He also flouted Cogressional rules and stated his opinion that he would defend the Constitution no matter what, usually after Congress had overwritten one of his vetoes.
This language had a very real effect. People talked openly of another Civil War, is time between Congress and the President. There is evidence that militias, Union veteran organizations and Confederate veteran organizations actually took steps to prepare for such a conflict. People certainly believed in the possibility. And here, per Stewart, the genius of Ben Franklin’s impeachment clause came into play.
By giving the country a way to manage unmanageable conflict between the Executive and Legislative branches, impeachment turned the temperature down on the dispute. The mundane process of evidence, testimony, and judgement made the issue normal, if not boring. And normal hardly ever leads to violence.
Except tin this case it did. Johnson did nothing to moderate his anti-Reconstruction actions and freed slaves and their supporters continued ot die. He also pardoned almost all Confederate soldiers and officials, including Jefferson Davis, letting the traitors back into governments. This is the one flaw of the book. While it does not shy away from the consequences of Johnson’s actions, it does not have the voices of those victims at nearly the presence of the voices of their oppressors or supporters. I do not know if that is because of a lack of sources or a choice given the subject matter, but I do think it lessons an otherwise excellent book.
Our country has pretended for too long that Reconstruction, not its defeat, was a blight on American history. That has started to change, and books like Impeached are on reason why. I recommend reading it to fully understand just how unfortunate Johnson’s survival was and how badly informed generations of American children where about their own history.
JFK should have stuck to politics.