Schofield's confirmation
as Secretary of War and
his acceptance of the office.
Some of Stanton's friends have tried to make out that but for Stanton's resistance and the impeachment, and its nearness to success, Johnson would have appointed a tool of his own to the War Office and have rode rough-shod over the laws of the land, and that he was frightened out of this purpose, and frightened into an implied agreement with certain Senators and General Schofield that the Reconstruction laws should be executed as Stanton understood them, and not as the President understood them. There is little ground for any such assumptions. There is certainly none in the character of the men whom the President asked to take the War Office, Grant, Sherman and Ewing; and it must be remembered that through Mr. Stanbery, in the case of Mississippi vs. Johnson, he had long before announced to the Southerners that his opposition to the Reconstruction Acts ceased with his unsuccessful veto of them, and that he should execute them both in letter and in spirit. It was Republican Senators who suggested to the President's counsel the nomination of General Schofield, a man entirely friendly with the President and acceptable to him. Neither the President nor the President's counsel approached any Senator with the proposition. It was the Republican Senators who were frightened, rather than the President or his counsel. These Senators knew that the law and the evidence were with the President, and that the Republican party was on trial, as much so as the President; and they knew that, if the Republican Senate should, upon the showing made by the President's counsel of the law and the evidence in the case, convict the President and remove him from office, the party would stand arraigned before the people for having destroyed the constitutional balance between the executive and the legislature in order to gain a partisan end. They recognized the dilemma into which the hot-headed leaders of the party in the House of Representatives had, by their hasty impeachment procedure, brought the party, and they were very much relieved to secure any understanding with the President's counsel whereby the chance of averting the catastrophe to the party, as well as to the country, might be increased. The suspicion that Mr. Stanton was playing his part for the purpose of securing the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1868, rather than from any motives of disinterested patriotism, has about as little foundation as has the theory of salutary terror, produced by the impeachment, controlling the President's subsequent actions against his own preconceived plans and purposes. Both of these speculations are no valid parts of the history of this great transaction. What we have as certain facts are that the judgment was an acquittal, that it was rendered in accordance with law and evidence, and that it preserved the constitutional balance between the executive and the legislature in the governmental system of the country; and that for this the judgment of history coincides with the judgment of the court.
CHAPTER X
RECONSTRUCTION RESUMED
[The McCardle Case]—[The Congressional Acts Admitting the Senators- and Representatives-elect from the Reconstructed "States" to Seats in Congress]—[The Veto of these Bills by the President]—[The Vetoes Overridden]—[Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and the President's Proclamations Declaring Reconstruction Completed]—[Seward's Proclamation Declaring the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the Required Number of "States"]—[The Questions Suggested by Mr. Seward's First Proclamation]—[The Concurrent Resolution of Congress upon these Questions]—[The Correct Procedure]—[The National Conventions of 1868]—[Platform and Nominees of the Republican Party]—[Democratic Platform and Nominees]—[The Election and the Electoral Vote]—[The Conduct of the President during the Campaign]—[Congress and the President]—[The President's Last Annual Message]—[The President's Amnesty Proclamation of December 25th, 1868]—[The President's Veto of the Bill in Regard to the Colored Schools in the District of Columbia]—[The Fifteenth Amendment]—[Criticism of the Republican View]—[Johnson's Retirement from the Presidency]—[The President and the Republican Party].
During the period of the impeachment trial, a case was in progress before the Supreme Court of the United States, which in its final
The McCardle case.