19th Century Impeachment Viewed as Lesson for Clinton Case

Both were from poor Southern states and got to be president against great odds. Both acquired a determined collection of political foes, bent on driving them out of office. Both faced impeachment on narrow legal grounds that many argue were proxies for political disagreements.

But scholars say the case of President Andrew Johnson, who in 1868 became the only chief executive in U.S. history to face a trial in the Senate after being impeached by the House, contains an even broader parallel--and a serious lesson--for the deliberations in Congress over the fate of Bill Clinton.

To succeed in removing a president from office, the scholars contend, opponents must present clear evidence that he has committed a profound offense to hurt the country or its political system, not merely that he has done things that have angered Congress or sparked revulsion among voters around the country.

Johnson was acquitted despite a widespread belief that he was sabotaging the entire post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Johnson scholar Albert Castel noted: “We came as close as you can get with Johnson, but it was not close enough to remove him from office.”

On one level, comparing the two cases is like looking back into history and seeing the present:

* Johnson had long been under fire from a group of fierce partisans who plainly despised him and everything he did. One, Rep. James M. Ashley (R-Ohio), even suggested that Johnson, as vice president, had been involved in the plot to assassinate President Lincoln, just so he could succeed him.

* Congress and the administration wrangled continually over legal issues during the impeachment process, from whether the president could be forced to testify before the House Judiciary Committee or the full Senate to whether lawmakers were entitled to see records of confidential White House messages.

* As in the Clinton controversy, testimony by Secret Service agents also was an issue, though in Johnson’s case, Lafayette C. Baker, the agency’s chief, openly sought to hurt him by passing lawmakers spurious reports about an alleged presidential affair with a woman seeking to obtain pardons for former Confederates.

* The press became embroiled in a feeding frenzy. In Johnson’s case, it continued straight through his trial. When the public printer delivered impeachment documents to the Capitol building in 1868, a crowd of reporters rushed him, shoved him into the hearing room and ran off with the papers.

But there also were some profound differences:

* Although both men were accused of violating the law, the real rap against Johnson--not contained in the formal charges--grew out of a fundamental policy dispute over how to deal with the defeated Confederacy. Clinton’s difficulties, of course, stemmed from a sex scandal.

“The impeachment of Johnson was about the struggle over the future of the Republic, on the very foundations of our Constitution,” said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale University historian who has written extensively on the issue. Ackerman called the Clinton scandal “a tempest in a teapot” by comparison.

* Unlike Clinton, Johnson did not enjoy continued strong popularity among voters in the face of the impeachment effort. If anything, many Americans were critical that the president was capitulating to the South, a policy that they thought would make the bloodshed of the Civil War all for naught.

“Much of the country was for impeachment because people thought [Johnson] was playing footsie with the Southerners,” said Hans L. Trefousse, a Brooklyn College historian and Johnson scholar. “Many people wanted to go along” with impeaching him.

* Unlike Clinton, who has been circumspect--albeit at times misleading--in his public comment on the scandal plaguing him, Johnson did not heed the advice of his lawyers, who warned him to shun public statements and press interviews. Instead, he was defiant--even embarking on a nationwide tour to defend himself. In the process, he worsened his public image.

Despite such disparities, and a 130-year gap, Johnson’s story is worth revisiting, not only because of its implications for the Clinton impeachment process but also as a fascinating tale in its own right.

Born in Raleigh, N.C., Johnson spent his childhood in poverty. His father died when Johnson was 3, leaving his mother penniless. Apprenticed to a local tailor when he was 9, he ran away to Tennessee at 15 to strike out on his own.

He became a well-established tailor in tiny Greenville, Tenn., and his shop was a gathering place for political debate. Ever-improving as an orator, he soon became an alderman and later served as mayor and a member of the state Legislature. In politics for good, he never looked back. After 10 years as a congressman, he spent two terms as governor of Tennessee and successfully ran for the U.S. Senate, where he was serving when the Civil War broke out.

A slaveholder and unabashed racist, Johnson nevertheless strongly opposed Southern secession and remained loyal to the Union--the only Southerner who refused to resign from the U.S. Senate when the Confederacy was formed.

His stance bore quick rewards. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee--a post that he would hold for the remainder of the war. Though nominally a Southern Democrat, he was tapped to become Lincoln’s GOP vice presidential running mate in 1864. Party leaders regarded him as a hero who could help rally Democratic votes.

A year later, when Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson succeeded him as president. It was then that his troubles began.

With images of the Civil War’s bloodshed still fresh in their minds, hard-liners in Congress demanded stiff requirements for Southern states to rejoin the Union. Former slaves were to be given full voting rights. Property of key rebels was to be confiscated. Confederates were to be barred from holding public office.

But the Southerner Johnson went his own way, pursuing a more tolerant Reconstruction program that, ironically, had been outlined by Lincoln. He pardoned hundreds of Confederates, restored rebel property and balked at forcing the states to let blacks vote. All Southern states had to do was to abolish slavery and come back into the fold.

There were three separate efforts to impeach Johnson. The first two fell flat after House committees failed to find the necessary evidence to force a trial in the Senate.

But Johnson’s effort to purge the military--by getting rid of key district commanders and firing Lincoln appointee Edwin M. Stanton as his secretary of War--was more than congressional hard-liners could stand. (Stanton, a close ally of Johnson’s congressional adversaries, had bitterly opposed Johnson’s Reconstruction policies.)

Anticipating a Johnson effort to jettison some Republican holdovers, lawmakers had passed the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from dismissing a Cabinet officer without approval of the Senate. Johnson’s action violated this statute and Congress seized on the incident to begin impeachment proceedings.

Both House consideration of the charges and the Senate’s trial a few weeks later were emotionally charged and in some ways a 19th century precursor of what Clinton has been facing in the wake of the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal.

For their part, Johnson’s lawyers sought to portray the dispute as a partisan attack made to look like a legal proceeding. His opponents insisted that the president had abused his powers and flouted the will of Congress. The House agreed, voting, 126 to 47, to impeach Johnson on 11 separate articles and send the case to the Senate for trial.

During the trial, which began in March 1868 and ended in mid-May, the president and his lieutenants were able to broker enough support to acquit the chief executive.

The final count on three of the articles of impeachment was 35 to 19: just one vote short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. Lawmakers dismissed the other eight articles out of hand.

Fifty-eight years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Tenure of Office Act unconstitutional. The Constitution requires Senate confirmation of presidential appointments, the court said, but it does not require that the chief executive obtain Congress’ permission to fire anyone.

Johnson served out the rest of his partial term, but his career essentially had ended. Damaged by the impeachment imbroglio, he was unable to win nomination for the 1868 presidential race. He won election eight years later as a U.S. senator from Tennessee but died six months later.

Although historians initially portrayed Johnson as a hero who had been persecuted by Republican radicals, that view has been changing. Some believe that a more aggressive effort by Johnson during Reconstruction could have advanced the cause of civil rights by decades.

At Johnson’s trial in the Senate, Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.), a longtime foe of Johnson’s who ended up voting not guilty, warned that if the Johnson case were permitted to serve as a precedent, “no future president will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed to be important.”

“What then becomes of the checks and balances of the Constitution, so carefully devised and so vital to its perpetuity?” he asked.

“They are all gone.”