Free Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy by David O. Stewart

citizens.”
    The Freedmen’s Bureau bill was first to reach the president for his signature, and it presented a critical decision for Johnson. Until this point, his party identity had been clouded. Though a Southern Democrat for his whole life, he was elected on the Republican ticket and retained Lincoln’s Republican Cabinet. The legislation came from a Congress in which Republicans enjoyed two-thirds majorities in both houses. This could be an opportunity for Johnson to work with Congress and also to demonstrate his compassion for the freedmen. He would be joining the effort to do justice for those who labored in bondage for so long.

     
    Johnson vetoes the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.
     
    The president saw the occasion differently. For him, the bill presented an opportunity to stop the Radicals in their tracks and to protect the states from federal power. He confided to a Cabinet member his concerns about “the extraordinary intrigue which he understood was going on in Congress,” which aimed at “nothing short of a subversion or change in the structure of the government.” Thad Stevens and his allies, the president believed, intended “to take the government into their own hands,…and to get rid of him.” Andrew Johnson would never back down from a challenge to his authority.
    Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill with a message calculated to infuriate Republicans. Turning a blind eye to racial violence in the South and the abject condition of the freed slaves, Johnson could not “discern in the condition of the country anything to justify” the powers proposed for the Bureau. The freedman, he assured the nation, is “not so exposed as may at first be imagined”; and if he thinks he is, he “possesses a perfect right to change his place of abode.” Nothing could justify the expense of the Freedmen’s Bureau, he concluded, or the expansion of federal powers at the expense of the states, or the bill’s substitution of military trials for the right of Southern whites to trial by jury in their own courts. The president’s concern for Southern whites, and his indifference to the former slaves, led a Radical newspaper to describe his approach as one that “ties up the children so that they shall not bite the rabid dog, and turns loose the rabid dog so that he can protect the children.”
    The veto message ended with a crescendo of defiance, a passage written by Johnson himself. He chastised Congress for enacting legislation for the South after refusing to seat the Southern representatives. He claimed the right to press this critique because, as president, he was “chosen by the people of all the States.” Yet Johnson ignored the impact of the war on his own election in 1864. The citizens of the Confederacy had not voted for him any more than they voted for the congressmen and senators then seated in the Capitol. By his own logic, he could claim no greater legitimacy than could Congress. Indeed, Johnson’s challenge to Congress only emphasized his own shaky political foundation. Selected for the Republican ticket as a symbol of unity between North and South, and then elected with Republican votes, he now chose to obstruct the policies of that party. Most Republicans insisted that voters chose Abraham Lincoln, not Johnson, and that he violated his obligation to those voters by opposing the party’s legislation.
    Johnson’s veto met with groans and anger across the North. An Iowa newspaper declared him “the most deliberately bad man out of prison in the republic.” The Pittsburgh Commercial urged the president’s friends “to tell him plainly that persistence in the path he has taken must lead to fatal estrangements,” a view echoed by the Radical Chicago Tribune, which declared that Johnson “has severed himself from the loyal [Republican] party and united with its enemies, North and South.” Southern newspapers, in contrast, applauded the president’s courage and determination. One