When Ross cast his vote of ‘not guilty’ at the trial of president Johnson,
“At least four other senators were prepared to oppose conviction had their votes been needed–a fact that has been forgotten, maybe, because it doesn’t square with the High Noon portrait of Ross as the man of principle facing down the mob.”
I’d never heard this before, and I’m curious if anyone else has. If the vote was so close, and Ross cast that deciding vote, then weren’t there votes needed? Hadn’t they already cast their guilty votes when Ross cast his? I’m not sure what that sentence is supposed to mean.
I know of no reliable, contemporary source for a statement that any other Senator (much less four) was prepared to vote for acquittal. As a practical matter, you’re correct–then, as now, the Senate voted in alphabetical order, and Ross is toward the end of the alphabet. I’ve never read that Ross disclosed his vote to other Senators beforehand. Even if he had, there was some residual uncertainty over the vote of Van Winkle, so any Senator voting “guilty” in the belief that it wouldn’t matter was taking a heck of a chance on such an important issue.
I thought as much–he doesn’t really give a source for that, he just states it as though it’s something all smart people like him know to be true. The bio at the bottom of the article says this guy writes a column called ‘history lesson’ or something like that on a regular basis. But either he’s full of it, or I’m an idiot because I can’t see how that sentence makes any sense the way it’s written.
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, probably the definitive text on the period, agrees with the Slate article. p.336
Foner’s book is from 1988, so this is not recent revisionism. It’s a nice myth, promulgated by Theodore Sorensen, I mean John Kennedy, in Profiles in Courage, but it doesn’t appear to have much historical substance.
From my POV Johnson should not only have been removed from office but strung up by the heels like Mussolini, so responsibility for his acquittal is a matter of assigning blame, not credit. And I’m not sure about letting Ross off the hook.
The New York Times on the day after the vote wrote:
Leading one to wonder, unless they voted after Ross in the roll call, how could other Senators have been sure their vote wouldn’t be needed?
The most recent book-length study of Johnson’s impeachment, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson by Michael Les Benedict, was written in 1973. Benedict makes no mention of “standby” votes for acquittal and tells the same story as the Times.
Foner’s comment appears to be sourced to either the Plummer or Roske article, both of which are mentioned on Greenberg’s web site. If anybody has access to the Midwest Quarterly (Autumn 1985) or American Historical Review (January 1959), I’d be interested in knowing what Plummer or Roske had to say.
Johnson is nobody’s favorite president, but the charges against him were totally phony, a massive violation of the separation of powers between Congress and the President.
By the time the vote took place, it’s clear that everybody in Washington realized it and the vote was allowed to go through closely enough to humiliate Johnson but keeping him from being removed from office. Foner’s additional comments that those Republicans who voted against conviction were not punished by their party is further proof of this.
Don’t forget that the fateful vote was on the 11th article (or charge) of the impeachment, a catch-all of charges drafted by Thaddeus Stevens that really charges him only of the “crime” of dissing Congress. It can be read in full here along with the others. It was voted on before the others because the leadership determined that it was the one most likely to go through for political reasons. They voted ten days later on the first two articles but those of course failed as well.
I rummaged through my books on the reconstruction era to see what others had to say earlier than Foner. Here’s a stopper. William a Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic 1867-1877. A 1962 reprint of a book first published in 1907.
Henderson was one of the seven Republicans who voted for Johnson.
So, the notion that the vote was fixed ahead of time goes back a full century in the literature. It would be interesting to know exactly who the others were and how the agreement would have worked in practice if Ross lost his nerve, true. But it seems highly likely that the radicals overplayed their hand and that the moderates (or liberals, as they became known) were not going to let the farce go unchallenged.
There is no reason to assume that the vote went strictly alphabetically. Then, as now, senators can request to defer their vote to the end, allowing them to strategically position themselves to make deciding votes. This is usually arranged in advance with the party whips, etc.
That’s fascinating that Dunning attributes the fact of standby Senators to Senator Henderson. Benedict writes the following of Henderson, which he attributes to correspondence of William S. King, then Postmaster of the House of Representatives:
One gets the impression of a Senator who was uncertain of his own mind, and wanted to believe that his vote didn’t matter.
Given that Dunning was a racist who believed that allowing black people to vote was a grievous error, I’m a little surprised that Henderson deflected “credit” from his own vote for acquittal by saying that others would have done so if he didn’t. Dunning was writing and Henderson was reminiscing during the first decade of the Twentieth Century, near the height of the backlash against so-called “radical Reconstruction”.
I will endeavor to track down the Plummer and Roske articles.
The Senate roll is invariably called in alphabetical order. Senators can pass (or be absent) on the first call if they wish to defer their vote, but the Times article makes it clear that every Senator was present and voting on the first pass, as one would expect on a critical vote while the Senate was sitting as a court of impeachment.
The literature on the Civil War until after WWII, which is when the revisionist historians really took hold, is notoriously biased toward - and written by - southerners. No argument there.
Dunning would have reason to support Johnson against the radical Republicans as well, though again, the impeachment itself was an unsupportable farce. However, he does castigate Ross for trying to gain favors for his friends afterward while contrasting him to Fessenden who refused to do so on the grounds that it would expose him to “offensive imputations.”
The one advantage Dunning and the others of his time had was that they could talk to living participants.
The Slate article cites the 1959 Roske article, possibly written as a correction to the Kennedy book, and Plummer’s 1985 article as well as Berwanger’s 1978 article which appears to have been expanded into a book.
The understanding that Johnson would not be convicted seems to be well established in the literature. Perhaps if we knew the names of the other four Senators the question of whether Ross’s vote was necessary or just early would be better answered.
I’m not surprised that there was detail of the voting given; the news was much more complete then. If I may trouble you, what exactly does the Times say about the manner of the vote?
Not sure I’d go that far. It’s true that, for a variety of reasons, Republicans were much less confident in May than they had been in February. In February they had thought that removal would be a slam dunk.
It’s also true that the “pro-removal” position was consistently winning less than a two-thirds majority on preliminary votes. But some Senators were willing to vote for removal but still wanted to bend over backward to give Johnson as full and fair a trial as possible.
And from a “standby” POV, “less confident of conviction” doesn’t equal “completely confident of acquittal”. Given that the only statements attributed to Ross before the vote were that he would vote for conviction, I don’t see how any Senator could have voted “guilty”, knowing that it wouldn’t matter, until after Ross opened his mouth on the roll call. If he revealed his true vote to any other Senator beforehand, that person apparently carried the secret to his grave.
Which leaves Senators whose names came after Ross. Sherman, Sprague, and Willey would be outside possibilities.
It’s extremely detailed:
And so on through the 54 Senators, in alphabetical order.
While I reprinted portions of the NY Times story from 1868, I don’t think you can rely on that account as being 100% accurate. The reporter was no doubt looking for a dramatic angle.
Why shouldn’t we believe that Gen. Thos. Ewing, Jr. said what the article reported him to say on the day before the vote? That would presumably be public info and easily refuted if not true.
Sorry, I didn’t notice BobT’s post the last time I posted.
The Plummer article cites The Impeachment of a President by Hans Trefousse, and Trefousse names names (at last!) and cites primary sources. Here is his discussion, with my paraphrase of his sources in the footnotes:
(1) according to William S. Hawley in a letter to Samuel Tilden, 5/22/1868. Tilden was the Chairman of the NY Democratic Party; I don’t know who Hawley was.
(2) Truman was one of Johnson’s secretaries. He published the letter in Century Magazine in 1913.
(3) Henderson was also quoted in Century Magazine in 1913.
(4) as noted above by Exapno, and in Trumbull’s biography.
(5) John Bigelow was a former ambassador to France who supported Johnson. The comment is from his unpublished diary. Trefousse doesn’t say how he “learned” this.
So what about it? Is the matter settled? Certainly, other Senators could have safely and insincerely voted for conviction if Ross’s vote was widely known on the morning of May 16. But did they?
The common thread in the above sources is that all were opponents of removal. One gets a sense of a football team which won a close game saying, “It wasn’t really that close; we could have scored a couple more touchdowns but we were running out the clock in the fourth quarter.” No Senator ever said that he would have changed his vote if it had mattered; only that others would have done so.
Perhaps this is to be expected. Senators don’t like to advertise that they cast an insincere CYA vote on an important matter. But then, both sides at the time behaved as if Ross’s vote was decisive–plying him with patronage on the one hand, and becoming livid over his “betrayal” on the other.
I think Trefousse should have stuck with the wording of his first two sentences. The last two are an over-statement.
The page alleges a private meeting between the end of testimony and the first vote, with a headcount showing many Republicans not wishing to state their upcoming vote and enough stating they would vote no on specific articles, most
would fail.
