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

pronounced him “all right on the negro question.”
    Republicans in Congress reacted swiftly. Senator Trumbull felt betrayed. He had sought the president’s views on the legislation, and Johnson had raised no objection. Now the president vetoed the bill outright. Without the legislation, Trumbull insisted, the freedmen “will be tyrannized over, abused, and virtually reenslaved.” Nevertheless, the Senate failed on February 20 to muster the two-thirds majority required to pass the bill over Johnson’s veto.
    Without any attempt at compromise or negotiation, Johnson had won the first round with Congress. For a bull-headed politician like him, the successful veto and the angry cries of his opponents meant only one thing—that he should step up his attack against Stevens and the Radicals. Attack had been his style for almost forty years in public life, and he was not about to change.
    Johnson did not wait long. On the night of Washington’s Birthday, February 22, political supporters congregated outside the White House and called for remarks honoring the first president. They got a full dose of Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.
    At times enraged, at times self-pitying, for an hour and ten minutes the president complained that “an irresponsible central directory”—that is, the Joint Committee of Fifteen—was assuming “nearly all the powers of Congress,” thereby “concentrat[ing] the powers of the government in the hands of the few.” To the penitent South, he extended “the right hand of fellowship.” No such hand reached out to those “men—I care not by what name you call them—still opposed to the Union.” When the crowd called upon him to name those “other” men who were enemies of the nation, Johnson was ready:
    Suppose I should name to you those whom I look upon as being opposed to the fundamental principles of this Government, and as now laboring to destroy them. I say Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania. I say Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts. I say Wendell Phillips [the abolitionist], of Massachusetts.
     

     
    President Johnson addressing Washington’s Birthday crowd at the White House, 1866.
     
    The president thus embraced the former rebels as patriots and denounced the Radicals as traitors. But he was not done. Johnson went on to imply that those named Radicals not only were enemies of the government, but actually were plotting his murder: “I have no doubt [their] intention was to incite assassination.” He offered himself as a willing sacrifice, asking only that “when I am beheaded I want the American people to be the witness.” Stirred by his looming martyrdom, Johnson asked to be laid on an altar to the Union so “the blood that now warms and animates my existence shall be poured out as a fit libation to the Union of these States.” A grisly libation, to be sure.
    Johnson had misplayed his hand. Rather than acting the statesman who wished to unify the nation, he behaved like a political brawler with a grandiose self-image. Many deplored the speech, particularly what a moderate Republican recalled as its “low tone, its vulgar abuse.” Others suspected that it was the product of hard drinking. His own secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, called it a “very imprudent speech” that “turned not only the Republican party but the general public sentiment of the Northern States against him.” A Johnson ally estimated that the speech cost the Democrats 200,000 votes in the fall elections.
    Johnson’s divisiveness—his unrelenting us-versus-them attitude—drove away those who might have supported him. Fessenden, chair of the Joint Committee of Fifteen and Johnson’s best hope for an ally among leading Republicans, found “relief” in the president’s “folly and wickedness.” The Maine senator wrote in a private letter that “[t]he long agony is over. He has broken the faith, betrayed his trust, and must sink from detestation into contempt.”
    The criticism caused