Eleven articles of impeachment against United States President Andrew Johnson were adopted by the United States House of Representatives on March 2 and 3, 1868 as part of the impeachment of Johnson. An impeachment resolution had previously been adopted by the House on February 24, 1868. Each of the articles were a separate charge which Johnson would be tried for in his subsequent impeachment trial before the United States Senate.
The primary matter addressed by the articles of impeachment was President Johnson's effort to, in disregard for the Tenure of Office Act, dismiss Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and appoint Lorenzo Thomas as ad interim secretary of war. This effort had been the direct event which triggered Johnson's impeachment. However, several other allegations were also included in the eleven articles of impeachment, including an alleged violation by Johnson of the Command of Army Act and an allegation that Johnson attempted "to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States."
In the impeachment trial, Senators voted on May 16, 1868, on their verdict for article eleven. Thirty-five senators found Johnson guilty and nineteen finding him not guilty. This meant that the Senate acquitted Johnson, failing by a single vote to reach the two-thirds majority required to convict. On May 26, 1868, the Senate voted with identical results on articles two and three. The Senate then voted to adjourn sine die, ending the trial without voting on the remaining eight articles.
Background Andrew Johnson ascended to the United States presidency after the 1865 assassination of Republican president Abraham Lincoln. Johnson, a Southern Democrat, had been elected vice president in 1864 on a unity ticket with Lincoln. As president, Johnson held open disagreements with the Republican majority of United States House and Senate (the two chambers of the United States Congress).
In 1861 and 1862, the Conspiracies Acts of 1861 and 1862 had been passed. The first of these acts, passed in 1861, would later be cited in some of the articles of impeachment against Johnson.
In the late summer of 1866, President Johnson embarked his national "Swing Around the Circle" speaking tour, in part to campaign for Democrats ahead of the 1866 United States elections. The tour backfired on Johnson, resulting in damaging reports in newspapers across the nation of his undisciplined and vitriolic speeches as well as ill-advised confrontations with hecklers. Contrary to Johnson's hopes, the 1866 elections produced veto-proof Republican Party majorities in both houses of the United States Congress. As a result, Radicals were able to take control of Reconstruction, passing a series of Reconstruction Acts—each one over the president's veto—addressing requirements for Southern states to be fully restored to the Union. The first of these acts divided those states, excluding Johnson's home state of Tennessee, into five military districts, and each state's government was put under the control of the U.S. military. Additionally, these states were required to enact new constitutions, ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and guarantee voting rights for black males.
In March 1867, despite taking formal issue with the Command of Army Act, arguing that it is unconstitutional, President Johnson signed the appropriations bill containing the act. An alleged violation of act would later be the subject of the ninth article of impeachment that was adopted against Johnson.
Early efforts to impeach Johnson
Johnson's conflict with the Republican-controlled Congress led to a number of efforts being taken since 1866, particularly by Radical Republicans, to impeach Johnson. On January 7, 1867, the House of Representatives voted to launch of an impeachment inquiry run by the House Committee on the Judiciary, which resulted in a November 25, 1867 5–4 vote by the committee to recommend impeachment. However, on December 7, 1867, vote, the full House rejected impeachment by a 108–57 vote. On January 22, 1868, the House approved by a vote of 103–37 a resolution launching a second impeachment inquiry run by House Select Committee on Reconstruction.
Tenure of Office Act and Johnson’s effort to dismiss Edwin Stanton In 1867, the Congress had passed the Tenure of Office Act and enacted it by successfully overriding Johnson's veto. The law was written with the intent of both curbing Johnson's power and protecting United States Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from being removed from his office unilaterally by Johnson. Stanton was a strongly aligned with the Radical Republicans, and acted as an executive branch ally to the Reconstruction policies of the congressional Radical Republicans. The Tenure of Office Act restricted the power of the United States president to suspend Senate-confirmed federal branch officers while the Senate was not in session. The Tenure of Office Act was put in place to prevent the president from dismissing an officer that had been previously appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate without the Senate's approval to remove them.Tenure of Office Act, March 2, 1867, 14 Stat. 430, ch. 154; https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112200623595;view=1up;seq=474 Per the law, if the president dismissed such an officer when the Senate was in recess, and the Senate voted upon reconvening against ratifying the removal, the president would be required to reinstate the individual. Johnson, during a Senate recess in August 1867, suspended Stanton pending the next session of the Senate and appointed Ulysses S. Grant as acting secretary of war. When the Senate convened on January 13, 1868, it refused to ratify the removal by a vote of 35–6. However, disregarding this vote, on February 21, 1868, President Johnson attempted to replace Stanton with Lorenzo Thomas in an apparent violation of the Tenure of Office Act.
The Tenure of Office Act was officially titled "an act regulating the tenure of certain civil office", and was referred to by such name in the articles of impeachment that were adopted in Johnson's impeachment.
House passage of the impeachment resolution
The same day that Johnson attempted to replace Stanton with Thomas, a one sentence resolution to impeach Johnson, written by John Covode, was referred to the House Select Committee on Reconstruction (which was running the second impeachment inquiry against Johnson). On February 22, the House Select Committee on Reconstruction released a report which recommended Johnson be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and also reported an amended version of the impeachment resolution. On February 24, the House of Representatives voted 126–47 to impeach Johnson for "high crimes and misdemeanors". Johnson's impeachment the first of a United States president. It was also only the sixth federal impeachment in American history.
Drafting of the articles
After the passage of the impeachment resolution, the House's attention turned to the adoption of articles of impeachment which the Senate would try Johnson on. The approach of having the vote to impeach be an entirely separate vote from the adoption of article(s) of impeachment differs from the approach that has been practiced in more recent United States federal impeachments, in which impeachment has occurred directly through the adoption of article(s) of impeachment. However, the manner in which Johnson was impeached appears to have been the standard order of procedure for nineteenth century federal impeachments in the United States, as each of the five previous impeachments of federal officials that had led to a Senate trial had been conducted the same way, with votes to impeach occurring before votes on articles of impeachment.
After the vote to impeach Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens submitted a pair of resolutions that both created a two-person committee tasked with presenting to the Senate bar the impeachment resolution that had been passed and informing the Senate that the House would "in due time" exhibit specific articles of impeachment, and which also created a seven-person committee to prepare and report articles of impeachment. The resolutions gave that seven-person committee the power to subpoena people, papers, and records, and to record sworn testimony. After procedural votes, the House approved both of Stevens' resolutions in a single 124–42 vote. No members of the Republican Party voted against it, while no members of the Democratic Party voted for it. Before the House adjourned for the evening, Speaker Schuyler Colfax appointed John Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens to the two-person committee tasked with informing the Senate of Johnson's impeachment, and also appointed John Bingham, George S. Boutwell, and Thaddeus Stevens (all of whom had been members of the House Select Committee on Reconstruction) along with George Washington Julian, House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman James F. Wilson, John A. Logan, and Hamilton Ward to the seven-person committee tasked with writing the articles of impeachment. The committee held their first meeting later that day.
The committee held their meetings in the room in the United States Capitol that was usually utilized by the House Judiciary Committee. They set a quick timetable for themselves in which they intended to release articles of impeachment within two days and have them approved by the House and presented to the Senate within six days.
Thaddeus Stevens would at the time, in an interview, describe the subcommittee's approach as reflective of its members' egotism. Stevens characterized the process as having seen each member first individually write their own articles of impeachment, with the committee then sorting through the resulting proposed articles and aggregating them together. Stevens was concerned that this process could lead the committee to disagree over which articles to adopt, with members playing favorites to ones that they had written.
Part of the process the committee took was also collecting evidence and taking testimony. On February 26, 1868, the committee took testimony from Lorenzo Thomas, William H. Emory (the head of the Washington garrison), and from Emory's own second-in-command.
It was decided by the committee members to not include any of the charges that had been recommended by the majority report of the House Judiciary Committee in November 1867 at the end of the first impeachment inquiry against Johnson. The New York Times reported that inclusion of those claims would be seen as fatally harming the, "moral and legal effect of the prosecution." The articles ultimately produced by the committee were narrow in their focus and were legalistic and modeled on criminal indictment.Rehnquist, p.218 This was likely in direct reaction to the failure of broad scope of the allegations cited in the failed 1867 effort to impeach Johnson.
The committee reached disagreement on how many articles of impeachment to adopt. Some wanted as few as three, while others wanted as many as six. However, pressures ultimately prevailed in favor of creating a larger number of articles, and eight articles were ultimately created. This was a possible misstep, as the articles, which all focused on Johnson's actions regarding Secretary Stanton, overlapped with one another creating unneeded complexity, as a single impeachment article could have sufficed. Eight concerned the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, while the ninth accused him of violating the Command of Army Act by pressuring General William H. Emory to ignore Acting Secretary of War Grant and to instead take orders directly from Johnson.