Little is now known to the general public of the history of the attempt to remove President Andrew Johnson in 1868, on his impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial by the Senate for alleged high crimes and misdemeanors in office, or of the causes that led to it. Yet it was one of the most important and critical events, involving possibly the gravest consequences, in the entire history of the country. The constitutional power to impeach and remove the President had lain dormant since

The close of the War of the Rebellion, in 1865, found the country confronted by a civil problem quite as grave as the contest of arms that had been composed. It was that of reconstruction, or the restoration of the States lately in revolt, to their constitutional relations to the Union. The country had just emerged from a gigantic struggle of physical force of four years duration between the two great Northern and Southern sections. That struggle had been from its inception to its close, a conti

Mr. Lincoln had been elected President in 1860, distinctively as a Republican. In 1864, however, the conditions had changed. The war had been in progress some three years, during which the insurgents had illustrated a measure of courage, endurance, and a command of the engineries of successful warfare that had not been anticipated by the people of the North. It was seen that to insure the success of the Union cause it was imperative that there should be thorough unity and cooperation of the loya

Mr. Johnson succeeded to the Presidential office on the death of Mr. Lincoln, April 15th, 1865. The conditions of the time were extraordinary. The war, so far as operations in the field were concerned, was at an end. The armies of the rebellion had been vanquished and practically disbanded. The States lately in revolt were prostrate at the feet of the conqueror, powerless for further resistance. But the general rejoicing over the happy termination of the strife had been inexpressibly saddened by

The initiation of formal proceedings for the impeachment and removal of President Johnson occurred in the House of Representatives on January 7th, 1867, in the introduction of three separate resolutions for his impeachment, by Messrs. Loan and Kelso, of Missouri, and Mr. Ashley of Ohio. As Mr. Ashley's Resolution was the only one acted on by the House, only the proceedings had thereon are here given, as follows: Mr. Speaker:—I rise to perform a painful but, nevertheless, to me, an imperative dut

Mr. Johnson's alleged violation of the act of Congress known as the Tenure-of-Office Act, constituted the ostensible basis of his impeachment in 1868. As stated, it had been passed for the purpose of restricting the power of the President over Executive appointments. That Act, therefore, becomes a very important and conspicuous incident in the impeachment affair, as its alleged violation constituted the only material accusation, set out in various forms, in the entire list of charges. The procee

Mr. Johnson's veto of the Tenure-of-Office Bill, and the passage of that bill over his veto, of course intensified the antagonism between himself and Congress. He not unnaturally regarded that Act as an infringement of the Executive function which it was his duty to his office and to himself to resent. The culmination came upon his official notification to the Senate on February 21st, 1868, of his removal of Mr. Stanton from the office of Secretary of War, and his appointment of Gen. Lorenzo Tho

On February 25th, 1868, Messrs. Stevens and Bingham, a committee of the House, appeared at the bar of the Senate, and Mr. Stevens said: Mr. President, in obedience to the order of the House of Representatives, we appear before you, and in the name of the House of Representatives and of all the people of the United States, we do impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors in office; and we further inform the Senate that the House of Representatives will

On Thursday, March 5th, 1868, the Senate of the United States was organized for the trial of the charges brought against Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, by the House of Representatives—Honorable Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the United States, presiding. The following gentlemen appeared as managers of the prosecution on the part of the House: Hon. John A. Bingham, of Ohio; Hon. George S. Boutwell, of Massachusetts; Hon. James F. Wilson, of Iowa; Hon. John A. Logan, of Illinoi

The initial proceedings to the taking of testimony, while to a degree foreshadowing a partisan division in the trial, also demonstrated the presence of a Republican minority which could not at all times, be depended upon to register the decrees of the more radical portion of the body. The first development of this fact came in the defeat of a proposition to amend the rules in the interest of the prosecution, and again on the examination of Mr. Burleigh, a delegate from Dakota Territory in the Ho

A few days prior to the day set for taking the vote on the several Articles of Impeachment, and after the conclusion of testimony, it was proposed that there be a private session for conference of the Senate on a day named, May 11th, to give Senators an opportunity to declare themselves on the pending impeachment. Neither the precise object or the utility of a conference were then apparent, but the result was somewhat of a surprise to those who had, up to that time, been undoubtingly confident o

The defeat of the Eleventh Article was the second official set-back to the Impeachment movement—the first being the practical abandonment of the First Article by the change in the order of voting. The vote had been taken on what its friends seemed to consider its strongest proposition; the Eleventh Article having been so framed as to group the substance, practically, of all the pending ten Articles. The impeachers had staked their cause upon that Article, and lost. They seemed not to have contem

The weakest point in the entire record of the Prosecution of President Johnson, from the indictment by the House of Representatives to the finish in the Senate, except the Bill of Impeachment itself, was the refusal of the more than three-fourths Republican majority of the Senate to permit the reception of testimony in his behalf. That majority naturally gave them absolute control of the proceedings, and they should have realized from the outset that they could not afford to give it the least ti

The power conferred by the Constitution upon Congress to impeach and remove the President for cause, is unquestionably a wise provision. The natural tendency of the most patriotic of men, in the exercise of power in great public emergencies, is to overstep the line of absolute safety, in the conscientious conviction that a departure from strict constitutional or legal limitations is demanded by the public welfare. The danger in such departures, even upon apparent necessity, if condoned or permit