Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

It was an ugly scene that left reporters slack-jawed. The president of the United States—a man notoriously short of temper and stubborn in his disregard for polite convention—had addressed a howling throng of political supporters outside the White House. Rambling and incoherent, he managed to refer to himself over 200 times over the course of an otherwise wild, angry screed. He incited the crowd to violence against his political enemies, including prominent member of the House of Representatives. A moderate news outlet critically observed that he was “the first of our Presidents who has descended to the stump, and spoken to the people as if they were a mob.”

Though Donald J. Trump has attempted to situate his presidency in the tradition of Jacksonian populism, it is another Andrew—Andrew Johnson, the man who staged that lowly performance—who provides the more apt comparison. A full-throated white supremacist and rabble-rousing populist, Johnson—who came to power in 1865 after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—offended friends and foes alike with his unrestrained rhetoric and rash exercise of executive authority. As president, he veered from one self-manufactured crisis to another. His political enemies suspected that he colluded closely with enemies of the state.


But it was his impeachment and ensuing Senate trial that offer the best lesson for contemporary observers. If any president deserved removal from office, surely it was Andrew Johnson. And yet he thwarted his opponents’ attempt to drive him from office, however narrowly. His acquittal raised the bar for future generations and makes it unlikely that any president—no matter how widely despised, unsuccessful or objectionable—can be booted from the White House, short of committing a demonstrable crime.



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In his own time, people either loved or hated Johnson. There was no in-between. Horace Greeley, the fickle, cantankerous editor of the New York Tribune, called him an “aching tooth in the national jaw, a screeching infant in a crowded lecture room.” One congressman dismissed him as “an ungrateful, despicable, besotted traitorous man—an incubus.” Others, like Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, viewed Johnson as a worthy heir to Lincoln—one who was uniquely qualified to reunite the North and South. Love him or hate him, Johnson was fundamentally an enigma, even to those who knew him best. He was a bundle of political contradictions. Observers chalked up his complicated character to the Tennessee frontier, where he passed his formative years and emerged from the shadow of poverty to achieve great wealth and prominence.

Johnson was born to a poor North Carolina family in 1808 and apprenticed at age 14 to a local tailor. Illiterate and unschooled, yet desperate to make something of himself, he broke his contract and ran away from Raleigh, a refugee from the law and from his employer, ultimately settling in the small Tennessee town of Greeneville. There, young Andy opened his own tailor shop, courted and married the love of his life, and quickly amassed a small real estate fortune. By candlelight, he taught himself to read and write, and painstakingly mastered the arts of history and rhetoric.

Johnson’s outlook would forever be rooted in the parochial world of the Tennessee frontier. He was an “ultra” Democrat—an egalitarian who opposed banks, corporations, and big government and supported the poor and struggling farmers of his East Tennessee congressional district. But like most Southerners, Johnson’s egalitarianism was lily-white: He was a slaveowner and a racist. Even as those views were widespread, as Johnson climbed the social ladder to respectability, by virtue of his roots, he forever saw himself as an embattled outsider. He accepted this status, and reveled in it.

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Johnson had always been controversial. During the secession crisis of 1861, then-Senator Johnson blazed a trail between Tennessee and Washington, boldly pleading with his friends and constituents not to secede from the Union, and spearheading a futile effort in Congress to forge a compromise that would avert disunion and war.

He was committing political suicide at home, and he knew it.

When the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the Tennessee legislature formally bolted from the Union and demanded that its senior senator do the same. Johnson faced a stark choice: his country, or his home.

When the war came, Johnson forfeited all that he loved in the world—his house, his town, his fortune, his family, his state—for the Union cause. He was the only Southern congressman to stay loyal to the U.S. government. He remained in Washington, D.C., and resumed his seat in the U.S. Senate. In his absence, the Confederates tore apart his tailor shop in Greeneville. His wife, Eliza, was placed under house arrest—liberated only in late 1862, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis allowed her to pass through Union lines. In 1863, their son, Charles, a Union army surgeon, was killed in combat.

When the Confederacy lost its grip on Tennessee in 1863, Johnson returned as military governor and ruled his home state with an iron fist. Though he had once supported slavery, he had come to detest slave owners—particularly the large landowning elites whom he blamed for secession and the Civil War. In this, he was not unlike other onetime slaveowners from border states who came to oppose the institution for political, but not social justice, reasons. From his new office in Nashville, Johnson arrested thousands of his former constituents for treason, signed dozens of death warrants and imposed an unforgiving rule of martial law.

Radical antislavery politicians like Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, now an influential chairman and leader of the Republican House of Representatives, mistook Johnson’s hard-nosed approach in Tennessee, and his newfound opposition to slavery, for a total political conversion. Privately, Johnson remained the same Jacksonian Democrat he had always been: a strict constitutional constructionist and a committed white supremacist. He opposed slavery because he associated the institution with elite owners of large plantations who dominated state politics and who had pushed Tennessee to leave the Union—not because he empathized with the plight of African Americans. But the Republicans in Washington didn’t understand that.

In recognition of his loyalty, and seeking to forge a new bipartisan consensus on the war, they elevated Johnson—a lifelong Democrat—to the vice presidency by supporting him as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864. It was a decision they would come to regret deeply.



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From the moment of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Johnson effected a 180-degree turn from the pro-Republican posture he had struck. Though committed to the abolition of slavery, he ran roughshod over Congress in an effort to bring the Southern states immediately back into the Union without any conditions governing their treatment of the four million freed slaves in their borders, and without any repercussions for the Confederacy’s military and civilian leaders.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1865, white Southern leaders—acting with Johnson’s apparent blessing—held constitutional conventions, reestablished their state governments, repudiated secession and staged congressional and state elections. They also passed a litany of so-called “black codes,” laws restricting the movement, property rights and freedom of black freedmen. In effect, the South was reinstituting slavery in all but name. All the while, Johnson issued thousands of pardons to the Confederacy’s wealthiest and most influential elites. It was as if the prior four years of bloodshed and civil strife had never even happened.

Though Johnson bitterly opposed the “slaveocracy” and its war for Southern independence, he remained, in his politics, a Southern Democrat. He believed that it had been necessary and constitutionally proper to bring the rebels to heel, but after they surrendered, he thought that the federal government had no right to punish American citizens who no longer posed a threat of insurrection. He also reveled in the sight of his former well-heeled political opponents, men who had once scoffed at the tailor-politician but who now groveled before him, hats in hand, begging for immunity from criminal prosecution and restitution of their political rights and property.

Matters came to a head in December 1865, when newly-elected congressmen converged on Washington to take the oath of office. Among those arriving in the nation’s capital were dozens of former high-ranking Confederate military and civilian officials, including Jefferson Davis’ vice president, Alexander Stephens.

Opening sessions of Congress are normally cheerful but well-scripted affairs. Pending the election of a House speaker, the clerk of the preceding Congress presides over the lower chamber, accepting the credentials of the members-elect and reading out their names for the official roll call. In 1865, the clerk of the House was Edward McPherson, a young, dashing son of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, himself a former two-term Republican congressman and, importantly, a protégé of Thaddeus Stevens. Acting on Stevens’ instructions, McPherson omitted the names of Southern congressman from the roll call; his counterpart in the Senate did the same. As far as the Republican Congress was concerned, Johnson’s “reconstructed” state governments were illegitimate. As Stevens and other Radical Republicans saw it, the Confederate states were “conquered provinces,” and their citizens were no longer entitled to congressional representation or constitutional rights.

By early 1866, Stevens was able to muster the two-thirds majorities necessary to override most of Johnson’s vetoes and to pass a series of unprecedented civil rights laws, culminating in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed African Americans full citizenship and due process of law. At every step of the way, Johnson’s moderate supporters urged him to seek compromise with the Republican majority. And at every step of the way, he resisted conciliation and ratcheted up the political tension.

Throughout it all, the isolated and embattled president grew ever more erratic in his public and private conduct. He denounced Stevens as a traitor and even called publicly for his hanging. He reaffirmed his ties to one-time rebel leaders. He grew more strident in his white supremacy. He embarked on a disastrous “swing around the circle” campaign tour from Chicago to Washington, D.C., during which he likened himself to Christ (and Stevens to Judas Iscariot), and faced down increasingly hostile Northern crowds that now regarded him as a pawn of the South. “I know that I have been traduced and abused,” he cried. “I have been slandered, I have been maligned.”

It was a pathetic performance. That fall, the electorate answered Johnson by delivering even stronger Republican super-majorities to Congress.

By 1867, the new Congress passed—again, over the president’s opposition and veto—the Reconstruction Act, formally carving the South into military districts and placing it under indefinite martial law. Now, just two years removed from the end of the Civil War, the rift between Congress and the White House threatened to result in a new constitutional emergency every bit as significant as the secession crisis.



***

Johnson still had a few cards to play. The 1867 Reconstruction Act placed the entire South under martial law pending the former Confederate states’ wholesale embrace of the Fourteenth Amendment and universal manhood suffrage. Importantly, the act empowered military commanders to suspend any official or law that deprived black citizens of their full rights. As the commander-in-chief, Johnson could direct military officers to follow his orders—effectively enabling him to block full implementation of the law. He did just that, removing generals who faithfully enforced the Reconstruction Act, and countermanding the orders that had been issued by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln appointee whose views accorded entirely with those of Stevens and the radical Republicans.

Realizing the dangers inherent in executive interference, Congress passed an ill-advised law—later deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court—that barred the president from removing any cabinet or military official without the approval of the U.S. Senate. The Tenure of Office Act was intended to protect Stanton and other racially progressive military leaders; Johnson understood this and resolved to test the law’s constitutionality. In early 1868, he fired Stanton without the Senate’s consent.

That’s when Stevens convinced his colleagues in the House to impeach the president. Johnson welcomed the final showdown, more certain than ever that his was the proper course to restore the Union. Writing on the eve of Johnson’s Senate trial, a columnist for Harper’s Magazine reported that “every hall and corridor, every stairway and lobby, and every yard of tenable space from the rotunda to the farthest corner of the Senate wing was occupied.” The crowd was “hungry,” “voracious for news.” Now and then, a solitary figure emerged from behind the velvet ropes that cordoned off the august Senate chamber, only to be “at once surrounded by his friends” who “wrenched from his reluctant lips” whatever latest intelligence he was willing to surrender.

A congressman observed that as Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase gaveled the historic assembly into session, “some of the members of the House near me grew pale and sick under the burden of suspense.” Against the dull silence of the upper chamber, Senator Edmund G. Ross could discern “the shuffling of feet, the rustling of silks, the fluttering of fans,” and the low cadences of political intrigue. Near the White House, large crowds gathered outside the Ebbitt House on Fourteenth Street, where members of the national press corps kept their offices. “The sidewalk on Newspaper Row was blockaded during the whole evening by anxious searchers after news,” one reporter wrote. “The crowd became the dispenser of rumors rather than the recipient of facts.”

The articles of impeachment were wide ranging. Johnson stood accused of violating the Tenure of Office Act, but also failing to enforce Reconstruction laws that had been enacted over his veto and for being “unmindful of the high duties of his high office and the dignity and proprieties thereof,” referring specifically to his violent incitements against Stevens and other congressional leaders.

Though a clear majority of senators was prepared to convict and remove Johnson from office, a critical bloc of moderate Republicans opposed so drastic a measure.

Some were genuinely concerned that the House had overreached. They believed that the Tenure of Office Act was probably unconstitutional and thought it was obnoxious, but hardly criminal, for a president to flout that law, or to refuse to enforce others.

Others were loath to elevate Senate President Pro Tempore Benjamin “Bluff” Wade to the presidency (Johnson served without a vice president). A committed racial egalitarian and battle-scarred veteran of the antebellum political wars over slavery, Wade was a profane, polarizing figure. Back in the day, he had famously accepted a Southern congressman’s challenge to a duel and, as the challenged party, selected squirrel rifles at close range as the weapon of choice. His hotheaded opponent balked (he intended to score honor points, not get an enormous hole blown through his chest in front of his colleagues), thus earning Wade his lifelong nickname. Moderates had no intention of placing him in the White House.

Finally, the president relied heavily on Secretary of State William Seward, who raised and dispersed considerable funds to politically connected “lobbyists.” How these lobbyists dispensed their funds, which totaled in the tens of thousands of dollars, is unclear; as in 1865, when he had raised and distributed funds to help secure House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on behalf of Lincoln, Seward maintained a deliberate distance from whatever sordid activities his paid agents undertook. It’s not unlikely that some of them engaged in outright bribery, paying off members of Congress who were on the fence.

In the end, 35 of the 54 senators voted “guilty”—just one shy of the number needed to oust Johnson. Ten Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in voting for acquittal. Some did so out of concern that the president had not technically committed a “high crime or misdemeanor”—the constitutional qualification for removal. Others may have acted out of personal or political motivation.

But Johnson was, by then, a lame duck. He served out the remaining months of his term before leaving the White House in the care of Ulysses S Grant, a stalwart Republican and supporter of Reconstruction.



***

There are striking parallels between Trump and Johnson. Political bomb-throwers, wild and intemperate on the campaign trail, popular with white nationalists, governing in times of great social and demographic change, both men proved (or, in Trump’s case, have thus far proven) inept chief executives—far more skilled at acquiring enemies than governing.

But for Democrats, and some Republicans, who quietly hope for Trump’s impeachment and removal, the case of Johnson offers only cold comfort. In 1868, Congress established a high bar for presidential removal. It’s not enough to be obnoxious or racist, nor to incite violence and mismanage affairs of state, nor even to collude spiritually with enemies of the American government. Precedent establishes that to be removed from office, a president must manifestly violate the law, as was the case with Richard Nixon, whose far-reaching and well-documented efforts to obstruct justice, evade taxes and suborn criminal conspiracy would almost certainly have resulted in impeachment and conviction had he not resigned first.

We’re a long way from that. And Democrats opposed to Trump will have to do what Johnson’s opponents did: rely on the president to undermine his own credibility and capacity to govern, one crazy speech (or tweet), and one ill-considered action, at a time.