Primary source president johnson impeachment
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Feb. 24, 1868: President Andrew Johnson Impeached by House
The Senate as a court of impeachment for the trial of Andrew Johnson, 1868. Source: Library of Congress
On February 24, 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to his pardons of former Confederates, his hampering of the Reconstruction Acts, and his public defiance of the Radical Republicans. After an 11-week trial in the Senate, he escaped removal from office by a single vote. Johnson would continue to veto Reconstruction and Civil Rights bills for the remainder of his term, but Congress was able to override his vetoes.
Calling for Johnson’s impeachment during the trial, Rep. William D. Kelley said:
Sir, the bloody and untilled fields of the ten unreconstructed States, the unsheeted ghosts of the two thousand murdered negroes in Texas, cry . . . for the punishment of Andrew Johnson.
Learn more at PBS and at the U.S. Senate website.
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Written by: John C. Waugh, Independent Historian
By the end of this section, you will:
- Explain the effects of government policy during Reconstruction on society from 1865 to 1877
Suggested Sequencing
Use this Decision Point alongside the Comparing Impeachments across U.S. History Lesson to introduce students to the concept of impeachment and how it has been used throughout U.S. history.
On January 15, 1868, George Templeton Strong, a New York lawyer, read the news from the nation’s capital and wrote in his diary, “Affairs at Washington look stormy. A disastrous explosion of some sort is very possible.” It “makes up,” he wrote, “a threatening prospect.”
It could be said that Strong was underestimating the situation. The House of Representatives was about to impeach a president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Everywhere, one observer complained, “the air is heavy with threats and apprehensions.”
Impeachment would be constitutional
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"The papers of vice president, senator, and representative Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), who became the seventeenth president of the Unites States in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, consist of 40,000 items (63,710 images), most of which were digitized from 55 reels of previously produced microfilm. Spanning the years 1783-1947, with the bulk dating 1865-1869, the collection contains correspondence, memoranda, diaries, messages and speeches, courts-martial and amnesty records, financial records, lists, newspaper clippings, printed matter, scrapbooks, photographs, and other papers relating chiefly to Johnson’s presidency. Subjects include the Civil War, National Union Party, Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and assassination, Reconstruction, and Johnson’s presidential administration and impeachment. The collection also documents Johnson’s service as military governor of Tennessee (1862-1865) a