Irving Wallace - The Man

“Like what?” asked Dilman, fingering the manuscript.

“Like-well-to be quick about it-when Booth’s derringer pistol killed Lincoln, it was Vice-President Andrew Johnson who became President in 1865, when he was fifty-seven. It makes me laugh, Doug, when I read those columnists who say you weren’t prepared for the Presidency. You were ten times better prepared for it than half our past heads of state, and a hundred times better prepared than Andrew Johnson. He’d been a tailor in North and South Carolina, and owned a tailorshop in eastern Tennessee. He’d never had a single day’s formal education. So he went into politics, and made the United States Senate. Lincoln took to him because, even though Johnson owned slaves and was a Southern Democrat, he fought against secession. Well, anyway, by the time Johnson became President, he had few friends left. The Southern Democrats considered him a traitor. The Northern Republicans considered him an untrustworthy rebel-lover. He was lonely as hell in the White House. He had a wife, but she was invalided by tuberculosis, and I believe she made just one public appearance beside him in four years.”

Dilman nodded. His heart went out to that vilified President who had been treated like some sort of white nigger. “I never knew any of that,” he said.

“Oh, there’s more,” Abrahams said, “but to get to the crux of it, his impeachment. Why was he impeached? Basically because the Northern Republicans, who controlled Congress, wanted to treat the defeated states as a conquered and occupied country, wanted to keep the South disenfranchised and in bondage. President Johnson, on the other hand, following Lincoln’s policy, wanted to heal the wounds of war, conciliate the Southern states, bring them back into the Union. So that was a bad breach. Almost every time Congress passed some bill of reprisal keeping the South under the military heel, giving freed slaves control there, Johnson would veto it, and then Congress would override him. Finally, it resolved itself into a fight for power between the executive and legislative branches of government. Congress felt that it should run the Reconstruction of the South, and the President felt that this task belonged to him. There were endless secondary factors against Johnson, also. He was hated as a man who was neither fish nor fowl, neither true Southerner nor Northerner. He was resented for going soft on the ex-rebels, when they were being blamed for Lincoln’s assassination. He was feared by the Republicans, who didn’t want him to bring the Southern Democrats back into power on the Hill by admitting the Southern states back into the Union. So the House decided to get rid of him. They started impeachment proceedings against him, not once but three times, and the third time they succeeded in getting their impeachment. And on March 5, 1868, his case went on trial before the Senate.”

“There were eleven Articles charged against him, weren’t there?” Dilman asked.

“That’s right,” said Abrahams. “Most of them, like most of the charges against you, were pure stuff and nonsense. Andrew Johnson was charged with using foul language, with drinking intoxicants, with ridiculing Congress in his public speeches. But the whole thing came down to the three Articles accusing Johnson of breaking the law by defying the Tenure of Office Act. That was the grandfather of the New Succession Act that you defied by firing Eaton. The tenure act handcuffed Johnson to his Senate, told him he could remove no one in the Cabinet he had inherited from Lincoln without the approval of the Senate. Well, the President saw that his Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, was performing not as his adviser but as his enemy and as a spy for his opposition in Congress, and so he asked Stanton to resign. Stanton refused. So the President, in effect, threw him out without consent of the Senate, arguing that Stanton didn’t come under the tenure act since Johnson hadn’t appointed him, and insisting the tenure act was unconstitutional anyway and the Senate had no right to tell him who to keep and who to fire. Shades of you and Eaton, Doug.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“It was a nasty eleven-and-a-half-week trial, the House’s seven managers pitted against the President’s five attorneys. But there was considerably more that went on than oratory and cross-examination of witnesses. The majority of the Senate was determined to get Johnson, whether the charges against him were proved or not. They arranged to have witnesses favorable to him kept out of court. There were attempts at bribery. And as for sitting as an impartial body of jurors-listen to this, Doug-the President pro tempore of that Senate was Benjamin Wade, who hated Johnson, and who was next in line to become President if Johnson was found guilty, and yet he was allowed to sit and vote on Johnson’s impeachment. In fact, Wade was so sure he and his friends would convict Johnson, and that he himself would be the new President, that he picked his Cabinet before the trial was over and before he had cast his vote!”

“Incredible,” said Dilman.

“Yes, it was incredible. Of course, while you don’t have a President pro tempore eligible to succeed you, sitting in judgment of you, you do have some senators-notably Hoyt Watson because of his personal involvement, Bruce Hankins because of his regional prejudices, John Selander because of his affection for T. C.-already committed against you. But, to get back to precedent. In order to convict President Johnson, two-thirds of the Senate had to find him guilty, that is, at least thirty-six senators against eighteen. Well, you know the result. One senator, Edmund Ross of Nebraska, though he personally disliked Johnson, disliked even more what he had observed and heard from his fellow congressmen during the trial. He determined that the office of President should not be disgraced and degraded by an impeachment based on partisanship. And so at the last minute, after sleepless nights, he went over to Johnson. His vote, which cost him his political future, was the President’s life belt. The final tally showed thirty-five for guilty, nineteen for not guilty. The two-thirds required for conviction had fallen short by one. Andrew Johnson remained President of the United States.”

The cigar in Dilman’s hand had long gone cold. Deliberately, he flicked the gray ash into a tray and lighted the end again. He waited for the first cloud of smoke to lift, and he said, “Nat, I think I have far less chance to remain President than Andrew Johnson did.”

“Less chance? No, there’s no reason to believe-”

“Nat, in our careers as attorneys, we’ve both tried all kinds of cases before hundreds of jurors. You know as well as I do that jurors are not legal-minded, often subject to being moved to vote guilty or not guilty because of their emotions and prejudices. They will ignore or discard the logic of a case, and simply vote for or against a defendant because they like or do not like his manner, personality, nervous habits, clothes. It’s happened to us in court, and it still could happen here, despite the early judicial background of so many senators, because they’re politicians now, not level-headed jurists, and you can’t deny it.”

“Yes,” admitted Abrahams, “that occasionally has happened, and conceivably it could happen here.”

“Very well. I feel certain Andrew Johnson lost as many votes because his jurors didn’t like his crudities, bad temper, immoderate speech as because of the legal case against him. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it a last time. I suspect it will be worse for me. In my trial, the defendant is a black man, whatever else is against him, and the emotions and prejudices this may evoke among the jurors, and not Southern ones alone, is not too difficult to imagine.” Dilman shook his head sadly. “Why-dammit, why does it have to be? Why does so much judgment of me-not only me but all men like me-have to be influenced by some instinctive rejection or acceptance of so superficial a thing as my color? Why are we still darkies, shines, coons, spooks, jigs, or, at best, hanky-heads, and not people? Why are we isolated, forced into our squalid ghettos, our Niggertowns, from Atlanta’s Buttermilk Bottom to Chicago’s South Side to Los Angeles’ Central Avenue, with tin plates feeding us morsels of tokenism, concession, slight adjustment, unfulfilled promises? Why this callous and subhuman mistreatment? It-it’s bewildering, Nat. I won’t go further, no, I won’t say that the white men, not the lunatic fringe but the otherwise decent Caucasians, can’t really understand how we Negroes feel, can’t fathom what it is really like to be a Negro, because that would concede to them their argument that Negroes are inherently different, which we are not.”