Эту статью мне посоветовала моя приятельница, которая приобрела http://www.atletiko.ru/catalog/velotrenajori, и теперь ее просто не узнать. Она подтянутая, она действительно похудела и похорошела – смотреть теперь на нее одна радость! Harsh words filled the Senate chamber in April 1868 when Andrew Johnson stood trial as the first president ever impeached. One senator called him an "ungrateful, despicable, besotted, traitorous man . . . a dictator . . . a genius in depravity . . . perfidy and treachery and turpitude unheard of in the history of the rulers of a free people.” 140 Andrew Johnson The country watched, riveted. Crowds packed the Senate gallery; tickets were hard to come by; some frustrated enthusiasts even beseeched Johnson himself for help in obtaining them. In the end the president remained in office, but as a weak and discredited figure. Years later, some observers blamed the impeachment fight on congressional Radicals who wanted to get Johnson at any cost. But through obstinate behavior and a desire for battle, the president contributed greatly in taking America into dangerous political waters. k Andrew Johnson was born on December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, then a small settlement with 726 whites and about 300 black slaves. He endured poverty from the beginning of his life. His father, Jacob Johnson, was landless and illiterate; his mother, Mary McDonough Johnson, was a seamstress and laundress who townspeople called "Polly the Weaver.” When Andrew was three, his father died in an accident, leaving the family in difficult straits. The town elite considered Andrew "poor white trash,” and he bore the brand deep in his soul. Looking up from the bottom, he saw a bleak picture but determined to improve his lot. At age 14 Andrew apprenticed to a tailor. He obtained no schooling but learned to read from a book of orations given him by a friend. After fleeing his harsh work, he moved to Carthage, North Carolina, then on to other towns: Laurens, South Carolina, for two years; back to Raleigh briefly; then to Tennessee, where a tailor in Columbia employed him. After another return to Raleigh, in 1826 he settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, population 500, with his mother and stepfather, whom he brought with him, also poor and landless. There in the state’s eastern mountains he again worked for a tailor, met Eliza McCardle, and in May 1827 married her. They had five children. After his marriage, Andrew Johnson opened his own shop in the front part of his house. While he mended and made clothes, Eliza encouraged him to expand his reading, which he did. Before long he was debating public issues with Greeneville’s residents. As his speaking ability improved, in 1828 he won election to the Board of Aldermen. In 1830 they chose him to serve as town mayor. Five years later he won a campaign for the state House of Representatives. Although he had earlier backed Jacksonian Democrats in their push for a new state constitution, he remained unsettled in his party allegiance and in 1836 supported a Whig candidate for president. Johnson suffered his first political setback in 1837 when he lost his bid for another term, largely because he had voted against developing railroads in eastern Tennessee. He returned to the legislature in 1839 after announcing his support for South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun’s strong states’ rights ideas and the Democratic Party. From then on he remained a Democrat, even after joining Abraham Lincoln’s Republican presidential ticket. In 1841 Johnson was elected to the state senate; he soon sold his tailor’s business in order to concentrate on politics and real estate. As senator he supported a conservative Democratic agenda, opposed government interference in business, and wanted economy in the state budget. With his poverty behind him, Johnson, like many a successful Southerner, bought slaves and eventually owned several. He never freed them and never considered slavery wrong. Whatever his later differences with secession and the southern aristocracy, Johnson firmly believed in white supremacy. In 1843 the Nashville Union, a Democratic newspaper, said of Johnson: "We consider him . . . as decidedly among the first men of the State. He is just the man for a crisis. Bold, prompt, and energetic, no responsibility can intimidate, and no obstacles discourage him.” That same year he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Andrew Johnson 141 Pugnacious and fiery, dressed plainly in black, and with dark, piercing eyes, Andrew Johnson developed a speaking style that appealed to the Tennessee frontier stump. His voice was loud, his language blunt, and encouraged by whooping crowds, he knew nothing of the refined speaking found back east or among more educated men. This was demonstrated when on the floor of the House he castigated fellow congressman Jefferson Davis for an unintended aspersion against tailors. Johnson launched into a long speech in which he asked his listeners to remember the humble backgrounds of Jesus Christ, a carpenter, and Ben Franklin, a painter, and he disparaged the elite as an "illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy, who assumed to know a good deal” but actually knew little. Johnson’s words reflected his advocacy for the lower class. He believed in land for the landless, and with an attachment to agrarian ideas he considered farmers noble, cities evil, and government dangerous. Soon after taking office he introduced a homestead bill that he would spend years fighting for. Johnson wanted lands to be given to farmers who settled and improved tracts on the public domain. His proposal stirred resistance from many Southerners, who feared it would lower revenue from land sales and pressure Congress into raising tariffs to replenish the treasury. In 1852 his bill passed the House only to languish in the Senate. Showing defiance toward party discipline, Johnson criticized Democratic president James K. Polk for denying him several patronage appointments. Bad feelings between the two men actually dated back to Johnson’s discontentment with Polk’s candidacy in 1844 and to Polk’s concurrent discomfort with Johnson’s agrarian extremism. The president now believed Johnson wanted to present himself as a victim of the administration so he could play the role of demagogue back home. Yet Johnson supported the U.S.-Mexican War and criticized those who argued that the president had started it only to expand slave territory. When the war stirred a sectional crisis over whether to allow slavery in the West, Johnson urged compromise. But as part of any deal he advocated a stronger fugitive slave law and the placement of the District of Columbia under the authority of Maryland so that state, rather than the federal government, could determine whether slavery should continue in the nation’s capital. Johnson applied himself vigorously to amending the Constitution. He wanted to require the direct election of senators and the president and to restrict judges to 12 years in office—proposals his Democratic colleagues found mystifying but that complemented his agrarian radicalism and populist roots. In 1852 Whigs in the Tennessee legislature acted against Johnson when they changed boundary lines to eliminate his First District in a ploy known as gerrymandering. "I have no political future,” the maverick congressman lamented, "my political garments have been divided and upon my vesture do they intend to cast lots.” He sought revenge in 1853, running for governor as the "Mechanic Statesman,” a slogan meaning he represented the common folk. He frustrated the Whigs by winning, and in his inaugural address he angered the state’s elite with his ringing endorsement of popular power. "Democracy is a ladder,” he said, "corresponding in politics, to the one spiritual which Jacob saw in his vision: one up which all, in proportion to their merit, may ascend.” Few of his proposals, however, passed the legislature. Johnson was reelected in 1855. Two years later his political career advanced again when the state legislature chose him to serve in the U.S. Senate. As the sectional crisis over slavery deepened out West, the Tennessean voted in favor of admitting Kansas into the Union under the proslavery Lecompton constitution. At the same time he continued to push his homestead bill and in 1860 finally convinced the Senate to pass it. The bill allowed every head of a family who settled in certain parts of the public domain to receive 160 acres, though it required them to pay 25 cents per acre. This provision met the demand by many southern senators 142 Andrew Johnson that some charge be levied. Yet all of Johnson’s efforts again proved futile when President James Buchanan vetoed the bill, and Congress failed to override him. (A similar version finally was enacted in 1862.) The Tennessean thought he stood a chance for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860, but his hopes ended when the party split into warring sectional groups. In that year’s presidential contest, he supported John Breckinridge, the candidate of the southern Democrats. With Abraham Lincoln’s election to the White House as a Republican and Southerners considering both him and his party anathema, several states in the Deep South, led by South Carolina, seceded. Johnson reacted in December 1860 by declaring his commitment to the Union: I will not give up this Government that is now called an experiment. . . . No, I intend to stand by it, and I entreat every man throughout the nation who is a patriot . . . to come forward . . . and rally around the altar of our common country . . . and swear by our God, and all that is sacred and holy, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved. For all his nationalism, Johnson classified himself a Southerner. He defended slavery, and he believed the South had been wronged. But he equated secession with treason, and in an emotional speech to the Senate in February 1861 he said that on his death he wanted "no more honorable winding sheet than that brave old flag, and no more glorious grave than to be interred in the tomb of the Union.” With the firing of the Civil War’s first shots at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, Johnson encountered hostile crowds. Shouts of "Hang the traitor!” spread through western Tennessee and echoed among the state’s central hills; they could even be heard in heavily Unionist towns such as Greeneville. On a trip back from Washington, Johnson drew his pistol when secessionists boarded his railroad car and one pulled his nose. Another mob in Bristol, Tennessee, threatened to lynch him until Confederate president Jefferson Davis ordered the train be allowed to take him home. After Tennessee voted to secede in June 1861, Johnson fled the state for his own safety, barely escaping arrest on his way to Kentucky. Early in 1862 General Ulysses S. Grant conquered Nashville and part of western Tennessee for the Union. President Lincoln thereupon appointed Johnson military governor of the state. Johnson had to wait another year, however, before Union forces could clear out enough remaining Confederate troops for him to exert substantial control. In 1863 he reversed his previous stand and supported Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves in rebel states. He may have been thinking this change would win him supporters in the North, or he may have believed victory for the Union required ending slavery to eliminate a divisive issue and hurt the Confederate economy. He once said that if either the government or slavery must go, he preferred it to be slavery. Johnson even cooperated with Lincoln in raising black troops for service in Tennessee. Yet he still considered African Americans inferior and assured people in the state they would remain that way. He hoped all blacks would one day be exiled, perhaps to Mexico. When the Republicans nominated Lincoln for a second term in 1864, they wanted to campaign under the National Union Party banner and promote themselves and the war as being above partisan differences. Consequently, they reached into the Democratic Party for a vicepresidential candidate and chose Andrew Johnson. A strong unionist and a military governor preferred by Lincoln, he met all their requirements, though one Republican congressional leader asked the president’s advisers, "Can’t you get a candidate for Vice President without going down into a damned rebel province for one?” The ticket’s victory in November brought the Tennessean into the vice presidency. Andrew Johnson 143 Had Johnson tried, he could not have done more harm to himself than he did at his inauguration on March 4, 1865. Before entering the Senate chamber to take his oath, he drank three glasses of whiskey that mixed with an illness to make him drunk. He presented an embarrassing speech, and after placing his hand on the Bible, he held it up and said loudly, "I kiss this Book in the face of my nation of the United States.” Democrats blistered him, newspapers slammed him as a sot. Johnson liked to drink, but seldom, if ever, to excess, yet he now carried a damning label into national office. Just 41 days later, and only one week after the South surrendered at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. His conspirators intended to kill Johnson, too, but failed. On the morning of April 15, Andrew Johnson—former tailor, staunch unionist, and states’ right Democrat—took the presidential oath of office at his hotel, Kirkwood House. The country still faced wounds as fresh as the graves dug for its war dead and waited to see how the Tennessean proposed to heal them and restore the Union. In the months prior to Congress convening in December, Johnson developed a reconstruction plan based on his belief that the Southern states had never seceded and should establish governments quickly with little punishment. Consequently, he offered amnesty to all rebels, except for those owning taxable property valued at more than $20,000. He also appointed governors— some Democrats, some who had been Whigs, but all who were unionists. They, in turn, held elections for the state legislatures. Many Republican congressmen pleaded for the president to call a special session of Congress. They believed that the same politicians who had once led the South to secede would regain power, that the former slaves would be abused, and that since blacks would now be counted in full to determine congressional representation, southern Democrats would gain more seats and make the Republicans a minority party. Johnson rejected the Republican pleas. In reaction to the president’s reconstruction plan, John Sherman, a Republican senator, said, "Never by my consent shall these rebels gain by this war increased political power and come back [to Congress] to wield that power in some other form against the safety and integrity of the country.” Southerners, however, hailed Johnson’s plan and called his gubernatorial appointments the best ones possible. A Tennessean wrote the president: "Our Southern brothers are beginning to know that you are their friend, their protector, and to feel that ‘in thy hands a nation’s fate lies circled.’” They praised Johnson for good reason. Although southern state conventions recognized slavery’s end, nullified the secession ordinances, and repudiated Confederate debts, the president failed to ensure that these measures were always carried out. Making matters worse, the southern states sent to Congress four Confederate generals, five colonels, and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, while conservatives and secessionists filled the legislatures. Southerners made it clear that with slavery gone, a new system would oppress African Americans—namely, black codes. Southern legislatures considered these necessary to bring order to a chaotic labor system. The black codes allowed freedmen to hold and sell property but prohibited them from serving on juries, testifying against whites in court, and, in South Carolina, from engaging in anything except farm labor, unless exempted by a special license. In Mississippi the black codes prohibited freedmen from buying farmland, and most southern states passed laws stating that blacks arrested as vagrants could be hired out to landowners. Johnson saw nothing wrong with the black codes nor with the decision by southern states to exclude freedmen from voting, and he did nothing when Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. (The state would not ratify it until 1995.) He still thought of blacks as inferior to whites. When he heard that his home in Greeneville had been used by African-American troops, he 144 Andrew Johnson exploded: "The negro soldiery . . . have even gone so far as to have taken my own house and converted it into a rendez-vous for male and female negroes . . . in fact making it a common negro brothel.” Writing in Andrew Johnson: A Biography, Hans L. Trefousse concludes that Johnson "put into operation policies that were in accordance with his deeply felt views on states’ rights. At the same time, however, he reanimated Southern resistance and fatally undermined efforts to integrate the freedmen into society.” Northern congressmen fumed about the rebels back in power, the resistance reborn, the black codes passed. When Congress met in December 1865, they determined to take charge, and as a first step they barred congressmen elected under Johnson’s plan. Historians have called 1866 the "critical year” when President Johnson could have built a bridge to Congress, then dominated by moderates, if he had only been willing to compromise. But the Tennessean refused; reconstruction would be accomplished his way. His obstinacy allowed a group of congressmen, called Radicals, to work skillfully and gain the upper hand for their agenda—namely, a more punitive reconstruction of the South, combined with asserting Republican power and advancing the rights of blacks, all directed by Congress rather than the president. Johnson first showed his inflexibility when he vetoed a bill to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau, which supervised labor contracts for the former slaves, fixed wages and terms of employment, established schools, and protected civil rights. Moderates saw the bureau as a way to help southern blacks without trampling the president’s reconstruction plan. At this time a group of African Americans led by Frederick Douglass went to see Johnson and asked him to support black suffrage. The president refused, and after the blacks left, he told his private secretary, "Those d——d sons of b——s thought they had me in a trap. I know that d——d Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.” When the president rejected the Freedmen’s bill, he said that the former slaves had enough safeguards and that the legislation would extend military authority where civil courts should properly operate. His veto caused many moderates to rally behind the Radicals. An even larger number turned against the president when he vetoed a civil rights bill, despite his entire cabinet’s advising him to sign it. Johnson said the bill violated states’ rights. His rapidly weakening status became apparent when moderates and the Radicals voted together to override his veto. Congress then sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states to be ratified. Moderates prevented the Radicals from including a proposal to guarantee black suffrage, but the amendment stipulated that "No state shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law. . . .” Johnson could not veto a constitutional amendment, but he encouraged the southern states to reject it, and when they did, the amendment stalled. Moderate and radical Northerners alike, in and outside Congress, berated this intransigence and the president’s part in it. Johnson’s attempt to portray his reconstruction plan as working smoothly received a sharp setback in July 1866 when a race riot erupted in New Orleans. After someone fired a shot outside a meeting hall where African Americans had gathered for a suffrage rally, police fired through the windows of the building and then rushed it. Once inside they again opened fire, and as the crowd fled, the police shot at them. In all, 37 blacks were killed, along with three of their white supporters; 119 blacks and 17 whites were injured. As the bloodshed in New Orleans combined with the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to create the leading issue for the 1866 congressional races, Johnson embarked on a speaking tour intended to rally support for his candidates. He thought he could replicate his success on the Tennessee stump, but crowds heckled him, and he responded with intemperate speeches that made him seem crude. The Andrew Johnson 145 Republicans carried all the Union states except Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland, and they increased their majority to more than twothirds in both the House and the Senate. A Radical-dominated Congress now seized full control of reconstruction; it determined which states could be represented and as a result set the requirements for rebuilding the Union. The Radicals divided the South into five military districts under federal commanders and stipulated that blacks be allowed to vote in choosing delegates to state constitutional conventions. Additionally, they said that any new constitution must protect the black franchise and disqualify Confederate leaders from voting and that the state legislature must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress might then allow a state to regain its representation. Johnson vetoed all the Radical bills; in each instance Congress overrode him. He was so unyielding that he even vetoed a bill to extend suffrage to African Americans in the District of Columbia—this despite Congress’s right to legislate for the capital. He argued that Congress must first consult the people in the district, much as a legislature must consult the people of a state. The president taunted Congress late in 1867 when he appointed conservative generals to head the military governments in the South and removed those who enforced radical measures. Gone were John Pope, who presided over Georgia and Alabama, and O. C. Ord, who presided over Arkansas and Mississippi; in their places were George Mead, a conservative, and Alvan C. Gillem, an archconservative. The Boston Commonwealth said about Johnson: "The work of reconstruction, at very short intervals, receives from him a staggering blow. . . . While Congress is passing acts to reconstruct the South, the President is driving a carriage and six through them.” Angered by the president’s actions, Congress decided to seek his impeachment. Although some of the Radicals eagerly sought to destroy Johnson, most congressmen approached the showdown reluctantly. As it turned out, the Tennessean provided his enemies with their fire power when he first suspended and then, in February 1868, removed Secretary of War Edward Stanton. In so doing Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act, passed months earlier, that required the president to obtain approval of the Senate before discharging a cabinet secretary (or certain other officeholders). Stanton defiantly refused to leave his post and barricaded himself in his office for two months. The Tenure of Office Act, of dubious constitutionality, had been passed by the Radicals to restrict Johnson’s power and protect Stanton, one of their sympathizers. Stanton’s firing convinced even the moderates that Johnson should be impeached and tried in the Senate. In a highly irregular procedure, the House first declared the president would be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and then subsequently decided to find something he could be charged with. Early in 1868 the House sent to the Senate 11 articles, eight of which dealt with the removal of Stanton and one of which accused the president of having brought Congress into disrepute with his various speeches. When the trial began, newspapers and magazines covered almost every word. Johnson refused to appear and left his defense to his attorneys. During the proceedings he met with several moderate senators and assured them that he would appoint a secretary of war all Americans could support and that he would confer more closely with his cabinet. He complied with a request from one senator that he accept newly written radical constitutions in two states and send them quickly to Congress. With his political neck on the line, he was finally showing some willingness to compromise. Such anti-Johnson publications as Harper’s Weekly defended the Tenure of Office Act and the charges brought under it. "It was passed in precise conformity with the Constitution,” the magazine said, "and declares that its violation shall be deemed a high misdemeanor. The President is brought, therefore, within its provision, and, when the attending circumstances are 146 Andrew Johnson considered, the violation should be treated as willful.” Others saw the president as an embattled hero, defending the Constitution against a power grab by the legislative branch. As the trial continued, some in and out of Congress worried about a presidency under Ben Wade, the Radical Senate president who would succeed Johnson if he were removed. Others grew weary of the trial, and several who at first supported Congress changed their minds. The Nation wrote: "We shall . . . hear no more of impeachment, and we are glad of it.” Johnson escaped removal by a single vote, that of Senator Edmund G. Ross, a moderate Republican from Kansas. The president, holding a cabinet meeting at the time, was reported to have "received . . . congratulations . . . with the same serenity and self possession which have characterized him throughout this terrible ordeal.” Andrew Johnson finished his term ignored and largely forgotten. When he left the White House in March 1869, Harper’s Weekly called him "a President who will be remembered for not one wise work or one truly honorable action.” Again seeking revenge, Johnson ran for the Senate from Tennessee in 1874 and won. When he returned to Washington the following March for a special session of Congress, applause greeted him as he entered the Senate chamber and found his desk covered with flowers. But his term ended quickly: While in Tennessee he died of a stroke on July 31, 1875. Despite his domestic struggles, President Johnson achieved some success in foreign policy, mostly thanks to the work of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. After invoking the Monroe Doctrine, in the spring of 1867 Johnson forced France to remove troops it had sent to Mexico. And in March of that year the Senate ratified a treaty negotiated by Seward under which Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7,200,000. As a result of Johnson’s domestic troubles, his modern biographer, Hans L. Trefousse, describes his presidency as "a disaster.” The Tennessean thought that with his lenient plan for reconstructing the South, he was continuing the work of Abraham Lincoln. But where Lincoln had showed compassion toward Southerners, Johnson showed vindictiveness toward those who opposed him. And where Lincoln could compromise and grow, even on the issue of black civil rights, Johnson could do neither. He saw himself as an outsider battling great odds, and he felt most effective under siege, an attitude that did much to bring on his impeachment. Although Andrew Johnson avoided removal from office, Trefousse’s assessment stands as the most widely accepted one and the
most accurate.