- Hi. I'm Dan Horne with Discerning History. As the country goes through the impeachment of a president, it's a good time to look back at the history of impeachment and the trial of President Andrew Johnson.

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- The Constitution divides the power to remove the president from office into two phases. In the first phase, the House must pass a resolution of impeachment with a simple majority. The impeachment is like an indictment in our court system and doesn't remove the politician from office.

In the second phase, the Senate tries that impeachment with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding when a president is impeached. The Senate has the power to remove from office if a 2/3 majority agrees. The Articles of Impeachment of Andrew Johnson for high crimes and misdemeanors was passed on February 24, 1868. They passed 11 charges against him, which basically accused him of dismissing Edwin Stanton and appointing Thomas without the approval of the Senate.

To restrict the president's power over the Executive Department, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. The Constitution allows the president to appoint members of the Executive Department, and gives the Senate the power to confirm them. With this act, Congress said that the Senate also had to confirm removals.

When Congress was out of session in 1867, Johnson decided Stanton, who was working with the radical Republicans, needed to be replaced. Stanton, however, refused to resign. Johnson sent him another letter clearly removing him from office. When the Senate came back into session in January of 1868, they refused to ratify Johnson's actions.

Johnson thought that the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional and ignored the Senate and attempted to have a new Secretary of War appointed. He finally got General Lorenzo Thomas, an enemy of Stanton, to agree to serve as a temporary Secretary of War. Stanton declared that this was illegitimate and barricaded himself in his office.

He had Thomas arrested for violating the Tenure of Office Act, but then released him as he realized that it was likely that the courts would declare the act unconstitutional. Instead of prosecuting Thomas, the radicals went after Johnson himself. Three days after Johnson tried to dismiss Stanton, the House voted to impeach Johnson. This was the first presidential impeachment in the United States history.

The house appointed what are called managers who served as prosecuting attorneys. They were led by representatives Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham. Johnson was defended by a committee of leading lawyers, including Henry Stanbery who resigned as Attorney General to participate in the trial, and Benjamin Curtis, who had sat on the Supreme Court before the war, but had resigned over the Dred Scott Case.

The trial began in March of 1868 and lasted 11 weeks. It began with very long speeches from Benjamin Butler, one of the prosecutors for the House, arguing that Johnson had broken the law and violated the Constitution. The defense complicated the trial by arguing that the Tenure of Office Act didn't apply to Stanton because he was appointed before the act was passed.

The trial ended with a final vote on May 16. It came to 35 voting for guilty and 19 for innocent. They were only one vote short of securing a conviction. All the Democrats voted with Johnson and seven Republicans broke with their party to vote for him. One reason they did this was to stop Benjamin Wade from becoming president. He was president pro tempore of the Senate at the time and he was next in line for the presidency. They preferred Johnson to Wade, although they also believed the president was guilty. Johnson also promised to stop hindering Congressional Reconstruction and to appoint the more popular General John Schofield in Stanton's place.

In hearings held after the trial, evidence also came to light that seemed to show that the acquittal votes were obtained through promises of patronage. The Republicans were really prosecuting Johnson for opposing the Congress's plan for Reconstruction. The Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional to begin with. And was only passed to foil Johnson. Later presidents complained of its restraints and it was finally repealed in 1887. And a similar law was declared unconstitutional in the Supreme Court case Myers v. United States in 1926.

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