The Fifteenth Amendment 411and lesser appointive officers. Even the Supreme
Court was affected. Its size was reduced and its
jurisdiction over civil rights cases limited. Finally, in
a showdown caused by emotion more than by prac-
tical considerations, the Republicans attempted to
remove President Johnson from office.
Johnson was a poor president and out of touch
with public opinion, but he had done nothing to merit
ejection from office. While he had a low opinion of
African Americans, his opinion was so widely shared by
whites that it is ahistorical to condemn him as a reac-
tionary on this ground. Johnson believed that he was
fighting to preserve constitutional government. He
was honest and devoted to duty, and his record easily
withstood the most searching examination. When
Congress passed laws taking away powers granted him
by the Constitution, he refused to submit.
The chief issue was the Tenure of Office Act
of 1867, which prohibited the president from
removing officials who had been appointed with
the consent of the Senate without first obtaining
Senate approval. In February 1868 Johnson
“violated” this act by dismissing Secretary of
War Edwin M. Stanton, who had been openly
in sympathy with the Radicals for some time.
The House, acting under the procedure set up in
the Constitution for removing the president,
promptly impeached him before the bar of the
Senate, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding.
In the trial, Johnson’s lawyers easily estab-
lished that he had removed Stanton only in an
effort to prove the Tenure of Office Act uncon-
stitutional. They demonstrated that the act did
not protect Stanton to begin with, since it gave
Cabinet members tenure “during the term of
the President by whom they may have been
appointed,” and Stanton had been appointed in
1862, during Lincoln’s first term!
Nevertheless the Radicals pressed the
charges (eleven separate articles) relentlessly.
To the argument that Johnson had committed
no crime, the learned Senator Sumner
retorted that the proceedings were “political
in character” rather than judicial. Thaddeus
Stevens, directing the attack on behalf of the
House, warned the senators that although “no
corrupt or wicked motive” could be attributed
to Johnson, they would “be tortured on the
gibbet of everlasting obloquy” if they did not
convict him. Tremendous pressure was applied
to the handful of Republican senators who
were unwilling to disregard the evidence.
Seven of them resisted to the end, and the Senate
failed by a single vote to convict Johnson. This was
probably fortunate. The trial weakened the presi-
dency, but if Johnson had been forced from office on
such flimsy grounds, the independence of the execu-
tive might have been permanently undermined. Then
the legislative branch would have become supreme.The Fifteenth Amendment
The failure of the impeachment did not affect the
course of Reconstruction. The president was acquitted
on May 16, 1868. A few days later, the Republican
National Convention nominated General Ulysses S.
Grant for the presidency. At the Democratic conven-
tion Johnson had considerable support, but the dele-
gates nominated Horatio Seymour, a former governor
of New York. In November Grant won an easy victoryThaddeus Stevens is carried to an Andrew Johnson impeachment committee
meeting in 1868. Stevens, a Radical Republican, insisted on being buried in a black
cemetery. He wrote his own epitaph: “I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not
from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as
to race, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I
advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator.”