If Andrew Johnson survived impeachment, anyone can — even Trump

Bookmakers in London and elsewhere have been taking bets on the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency by impeachment or resignation. Of late the line has favored removal, though it shifts with each round of testimony, leaks and tweets. 

Bookies and bettors tend to be forward looking, but in this instance they could benefit from a glance back, at America’s nearest approach to a successful impeachment. Never were the odds so strongly in favor of a constitutional ouster as in the 1868 case of Andrew Johnson. Yet those who bought the odds took a bath.

{mosads}Everything about Johnson was wrong, in the eyes of those who sought his removal. Johnson of the wrong party, a Democrat added to the Republican ticket in 1864 to lend a veneer of national unity to Abraham Lincoln’s reelection campaign. The tactic served its purpose, and Lincoln was returned to office, but the Republicans, who controlled Congress as well as the executive branch, made no effort to disguise their aim of governing the country without further help from Johnson or any other Democrats.

Johnson was of the wrong place, a southerner from Tennessee at a time when the North had just won a bitter and bloody war against the South. Lincoln had projected a lenient peace, but after his death the Republicans (in particular their ascendant ultra wing, the Radical Republicans) were bent on punishing the South for the crime of secession and the costs of the war.

Johnson was of the wrong temperament in all the ways that mattered. He blustered against the Radical Republicans, who claimed to be the conscience of the Union war effort. He railed against former slaves, whom the Radicals had taken under their wing, even while he toadied to the white Southern elites who had tried so hard to tear the Union apart.

And he held the wrong office. No one — no Republican, no Democrat — had intended that Johnson should become president. If not for the assassination of Lincoln, Johnson would have been retired to Tennessee at the end of one term as vice president.

As soon as it became clear that Johnson would not defer to the Republican leadership in Congress, the Radicals and most of the rest of the party plotted his downfall. They overrode his veto on legislation that imposed military rule on the defeated South. When he tried to circumvent the law by replacing a Radical Republican serving as secretary of war with his own man, Congress approved the Tenure of Office Act, mandating Senate approval of cabinet firings. Johnson vetoed this measure, too. His veto was again overridden.

The House brought impeachment charges. Conviction in the Senate should have been straightforward. In overriding Johnson’s vetoes, the Senate had several times mustered a two-thirds majority, the margin required for conviction. The Republicans controlled more than 80 percent of the seats in the Senate; they required no votes from the Democrats and could afford to lose some of their own.

Two additional elements further stacked the deck against Johnson. The vice presidency was vacant, and so the next in line to the presidency was the president pro tem of the Senate, Radical Republican Benjamin Wade of Ohio. The framers had not envisioned that the person who would benefit most directly from the conviction of a president on impeachment charges might sit on the jury — but there Wade was. And he declined to recuse himself.

Lastly, congressional politics was notoriously corrupt in this era. The most infamous scandal, named for the Credit Mobilier construction company, involved the bribery of dozens of members of Congress. The scheme involved federal funding for the transcontinental railroad.

In the Johnson case, the Republicans were widely reported to be offering enticements to wavering senators. Benjamin Butler, a Radical Republican from Massachusetts and a member of the prosecution team, at a crucial point in the proceedings relayed a message to one of the undecided jurors: “Tell the damned scoundrel that if he wants money, there is a bushel of it here to be had!”

Yet even with all this, the prosecution failed. Thirty-six votes (of the 54 total senators at the time) were required for conviction. On a first tally, the prosecution garnered 35 votes. All nine Democrats voted to acquit. They were joined by eight Republicans.

The prosecution called for a recess. Ten days were allowed for the jurors to reflect; in the meantime Butler persuaded the House to demand an investigation of the jurors, lest any had succumbed to bribery in voting to acquit. The strong-arming failed to change any votes, and on a second polling the result was the same.

John F. Kennedy later singled out Sen. Edmund Ross of Kansas, one of the Republican acquitters, for a chapter in Profiles in Courage. Ross might indeed have acted from principle — the principle that the conviction of Johnson would have gravely damaged the separation of powers mandated by the Constitution. Ross’s critics claimed he was bribed by Johnson’s friends. In any event, though the margin of acquittal was one vote, Ross’s vote counted no more than any of the others against conviction.

The lesson for today is that removal of a president via impeachment is nearly impossible. If Johnson, lacking the legitimacy of election, possessing no following in the country at large and facing an overwhelming majority of the other party in Congress, couldn’t be convicted — almost no one can.

Trump — better placed than Johnson in all these respects — isn’t likely to be the first. Absent major new revelations of wrongdoing, smart money will ride on him through 2020.

H.W. Brands is a presidential historian and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of various books on American history, including New York Times bestseller “The General vs. the President.” Follow him on Twitter @hwbrands. 

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